Toy Story 4 Manages To Be A Worthy Epilogue To The Toy Story 4 Saga

I have been beating the drum on the fact that Toy Story 4 shouldn't exist ever since the project got announced all the way back in November 2014. Toy Story 3 just wrapped up the saga of Woody, Buzz and company so well, was there any need for a fourth one? Having now seen Toy Story 4, I can't say this new entry in the saga is an essential beat, but it does work well as an epilogue to Toy Story 3's conclusion as well as a satisfying movie on its own standalone terms. Plus, instead of just serving up a bunch of nostalgic callbacks to prior films, it primary focuses turns out to be on exploring larger ideas about how to define one's self-worth as a person, a theme covered by most summertime animated kids movies.

Season Two of A Series of Unfortunate Events Excels In Production Design But Struggles With Tone

Heading into he ten-episode long season two of Series of Unfortunate Events, my big question for this TV show was how they would juggle the programs previously established heavily comedic tone with the darker books they were about to adapt. Just like Harry Potter, those Series of Unfortunate Events books got more complex and bleak as they went on and trying to merge that aesthetic with the joke-heavy Wes Anderson meets Tim Burton style of the show was gonna be a tricky proposition. Interestingly, having now seen the entire second season (which took me nearly two months to complete because I'm the worst binge watcher ever), I'm not sure if they did fully succeed in organically merging the two tones of these individual properties, but they did manage to make an entertaining second season nonetheless.

The Informant! Show Matt Damon In Top Form But Steven Soderbergh Has Done Better

SPOILER ALERT 

Director Steven Soderbergh loves movies about criminals with some of his most famous works (namely, the trilogy of Ocean's Eleven movies or Out of Sight) exploring crooks in a light-hearted manner, while one of his most acclaimed dramas (Traffic) explores various avenues of criminal activity. His 2009 effort The Informant! falls in between these two groups of movies in terms of tone, there's a wry playfulness to this specific Soderbergh meditation on criminal activity, but it's also clearly supposed to be more contemplative about specific sociopolitical issues compared to his more jaunty explorations of law-breakers.

Extravagance And Subtlety Go Hand-In-Hand In Love, Simon

Just as many movies about teenagers in the 1980's looked to John Hughes as their creative guiding light, 2010's movies about teenagers turn to John Green for inspiration. Not every single movie about teenagers is like this (The Edge of Seventeen, for instance, isn't really all that reminiscent of Green's works), but it's hard not to see how the author of books like The Fault In Our Stars has influenced modern-day media about the struggles of teenagers, especially in terms of how dialogue spoken by teenage characters is written. I wouldn't want every movie about teenagers to feel like it emerged from the shadow of John Green, but The Fault In Our Stars was an extremely well-done motion picture, so I say there are worse films that movies like Love, Simon could be emulating.

The 15:17 To Paris Goes Off The Rails In Thoroughly Lifeless Ways

On August 21, 2015, an extraordinary event happened on a train departing from Amsterdam and heading to Paris, France. As a man got his gun ready and planned to commit an act of terrorism, three ordinary Americans, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Spencer Stone leaped into action and took down the man before he could actually execute his plan.  The trio subsequently became heavily publicized heroes with their actions resulting in a book chronicling that fateful day as well as a film adaptation of that fateful day entitled The 15:17 To Paris starring the three men as themselves. While the actions of this trio were incredibly noble and admirable, tragically, the film adaptation of those actions is all around dismal.