The Road to El Dorado (2000)

People hardly talked about this when it was new. Neither the trailer nor the excerpt I caught on TV tempted me. But a couple memes signal its sleeper cult hit status. I chose it partly to get references and partly to kill less than 90 minutes.

Sixteenth-century Spanish scoundrels Miguel (Kevin Kline) and Tulio (Kenneth Branagh) use loaded dice to win a map purporting to lead to the rumored city of gold. Being only so sneaky, they get clapped in the brig of a ship by Hernán Cortés himself (Jim Cummings) but escape in a rowboat with help from Altivo (Frank Welker), perhaps the smartest horse outside of Tangled. After weeks of mixed luck, they meet the remote El Doradans, who mistake them for prophesied divine visitors. A nice gig if you can get it, but you don't have to see or read The Man Who Would Be King to know how tenuous their status is....

Rocky II (1979)

It had been a while since my last viewing of any part of the franchise. I gained interest in the higher-rated sequels after discovering how well I could tolerate less cherished Sylvester Stallone movies. When this title came up among Netflix suggestions, I selected it right away. It's leaving soon, I might add.

Right after narrowly losing the bout at the end of the first entry, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) retires from boxing and marries Adrian (Talia Shire), who's soon expecting. Alas, he has trouble getting and keeping another job he can stand, so he's thinking of returning to the ring. His brother Paulie (Burt Young) supports the idea, but Adrian and trainer Mickey (Burgess Meredith) initially disapprove, because Rocky's right eye took permanent damage last time and he could go fully blind next.

Nightcrawler (2014)

If this were about the beloved X-Man, I would have seen it in a theater. If it were about an earthworm, I might still have seen it earlier. But for all its popularity, I must not have liked what I'd gleaned about it, or I would have put it on my Netflix list. Instead, it was the first halfway-promising result I hadn't watched when I browsed on another account.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been a sometimes violent sneak thief, but he wants a more legitimate job. At the scene of a car crash, he decides to make videos of newsworthy nighttime incidents and sell them to a struggling L.A. news station. He gets too close for the comfort of emergency personnel, but morning news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) craves such sensational footage. Lou enlists desperate intern Rick (Riz Ahmed) to help navigate to addresses mentioned on scanned police radio signals. In his business ambitions, Lou has so little regard for laws and ethics that he might have done less damage as a thief.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

I watched the 1999 remake during its theater run and had mixed feelings about it. When I saw that the original had the same IMDb rating (unlike for Ocean's Eleven), I got curious. My interest increased upon learning that a re-remake will come out next year.

There's no museum art theft this time, just a typical bank robbery in Boston. Investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) correctly intuits that aristocrat Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen), tho absent from the bank at the time, organized and funded the heist. In her search for compelling evidence that would hold up in court, she gets into an intimate relationship with him, however awkward in light of their mutually recognized rivalry.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

This is the third time I've seen a Spider-Man movie at an out-of-the-way theater at a friend's invitation. As much as I've enjoyed the Tom Holland entries, the ads didn't make me eager to watch more after nearly five years. Little did I know how much others loved the trailer and, so far, the flick itself.

Peter "Spider-Man" Parker (Holland) is certainly more of a man now, living alone, albeit with no apparent job, and making short work of most New York villains. He's also becoming more of a spider, as his fused DNA asserts itself, heightening his senses, letting him shoot webs organically like the Tobey Maguire version, and making him more brutal under stress like a lesser Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), whose alter ego he visits for advice. Amid this identity crisis, he must contend with a foe (Sadie Sink) who gives other people identity crises by temporarily possessing them. The mystery mind-hopper is intent on infiltrating U.S. Department of Damage Control headquarters, which houses so many sensitive, potentially scandalous secrets that its director (Tramell Tillman) can hardly guess which is being targeted.