Chris Nashawaty

It’s a film that lazily whistles past the graveyard as it brings that graveyard back to ravenous life.

The Rolling Thunder Revue was Dylan’s personal magical mystery tour — and in Scorsese’s hands, there’s no shortage of magic or mystery.

As 86-minute kids’ movies go, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is shockingly padded. It’s the same old dogs with no new tricks.

Before anyone reading this starts complaining that I just don’t get what movies like Godzilla: King of the Monsters are all about, that I’m the sort of killjoy who should just relax, let me say that it would be a lot easier to take it less seriously if the people who made the movie cared enough to take it more seriously.

Director Jesse V. Johnson sprinkles in enough cruel twists of fate and melancholy-laced flashbacks to prevent Avengement from becoming just another disposable exercise in action sadism on a budget. The real credit, though, goes to Adkins, who one of these days will hopefully get called up to the Hollywood big leagues and wind up surprising a lot of people — and grin while he’s doing it.

It delivers. The Perfection is a pure hit of twisted, absurd camp catnip.

The ever-quickening half-life of pop culture has gotten so short that we’ve now officially entered the era of diminishing returns. It’s the new normal. What’s old is new again — but not quite as good as you remembered it. Aladdin is…fine, but it has no real reason for being beyond, you know, capitalism. A whole new world, it’s not.

The movie is more or less all premise. The rest is just an occasionally suspenseful, occasionally gory sci-fi riff on any number of earthbound creepy-kid thrillers.

Even if this handsome film runs a bit snoozy and dull at times, it’s wondefully acted and clearly made with no shortage of compassion and love.

I don’t mean to give the impression that John Wick 3 is anything grander than a gorgeously choreographed, gratuitously violent action movie. But as gorgeously choreographed, gratuitously violent action movies go, it’s high art.