Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 (2023)

This is typically deemed the best Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to come out since Spider-Man: No Way Home. So why did I wait this long? Perhaps I wanted a break after recent underwhelming entries. Perhaps I feared that I had to watch Thor: Love and Thunder to understand enough. Thankfully, as I later learned, Thor parted ways with the gang early on.

Rocket (Bradley Cooper) has never told the other Guardians about his past, but it catches up with him when the forces of his "creator," Orgocorp, attempt to recapture him for neurological study. The Guardians fend off powerful emissary Adam Warlock (Will Poulter) for the nonce, but Rocket is left comatose and fading. Standard medical procedures won't work, thanks to Orgocorp's nasty bio-programming. The heroes' best bet is to swipe an override sequence right from the heart of Orgocorp. Hey, it matches their skillset.

The Adam Project (2022)

Having nothing to do with Adam, this brand-new release didn't tempt me until a friend and I were perusing our Netflix options. He's big on time travel stories (so I've recommended Time Bandits to him), and I hadn't seen one in more than a year. Plus, this one has several Marvel movie alumni.

Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds), son of accidental time travel inventor Louis (Mark Ruffalo), attempts to fly a time jet from 2050 to 2018, the last known time point for his wife, Laura (Zoe Saldana). The tyrannical Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener) forbids him, and a gunshot from her right-hand man (Alex Mallari, Jr.) forces Adam to stop in 2022, too injured to fly unassisted for a while. There he meets his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell), whom he reluctantly needs to reactivate his jet. Their mission becomes bigger than rescuing one woman: As the trailer reveals, they may see fit to use time travel to prevent its own invention.

Triple Feature: Smallfoot (2018), Missing Link (2019), Abominable (2019)

When I realized that I could watch all three of these dueling movies on one flight, I couldn't resist. They all came out within a year of each other and are animated adventure comedies involving humans who discover that bigfeet of some sort not only exist but are hardly monsters. Now I would know my personal preference among them.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

It's finally happened: My dad has had his fill of superhero movies, for now at least. Black Panther was only two months ago, after all. I think it's just as well that he didn't come to this one, partly because it's hard to sit through 150+ minutes without a break (I barely made it myself -- good thing the credits ran long enough to let me catch the scene afterward) and partly because he doesn't retain as much memory of prior Marvel Cinematic Universe entries as I do. This one does hark back to several.

Previously lurking in the periphery of the series was brawny alien Thanos (Josh Brolin), now all the more powerful for having acquired one of the six artifacts known as Infinity Stones. Some Guardians of the Galaxy already had the misfortune of knowing him, but only when he defeats the Asgardians at the start of this movie do any of the (ex-)Avengers learn of him. He's out for more Stones, two of them on Earth, and plans to use them to kill half the universe, not counting the many people he and his army have already killed. Thus, Earth's mightiest heroes reluctantly put aside their Civil War rift to combat him, while the Guardians respond belatedly to Asgard's distress signal. I think the only living MCU action heroes who don't play a part this time are Hawkeye and Ant-Man, off on some other business and presumably out of contact.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

I had enjoyed the first GotG but had trouble ranking it with respect to other parts of the Marvel Cinematic, er, Universe. It's just so different. First of all, very little takes place on Earth, and only one major character, Peter "Star-Lord" Quill (Chris Pratt), is even half human, tho others tend to have an implausible similarity. Second, the Guardians are antiheroes, first teaming up for a prison break. Third, they're mostly rather subtle in powers, and their equipment isn't very innovative. The movie relied almost entirely on a sense of fun via dialog, emotion, and retro references. It worked, but I had yet to see how well it could work again, apart from the perhaps overly faithful first episode of the ensuing TV series.

Vol. 2 first shows the Guardians, having earned their moniker, doing what they do when the galaxy isn't facing clear and present danger: mercenary work. And a little theft on the side by the most corrupt ones, which is why such big-time saviors still have a lot of people after their hides. But those pursuers are arguably incidental to the main plot. Peter finally meets his mysterious biological father, Ego (Kurt Russell), who's actually extremely powerful and offers to share his wonders. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) thinks it's too good to be true, especially after hints from Ego's empathic companion, Mantis (Pom Klementieff); but Peter, tired of his unrequited crush on Gamora, dismisses the suspicion as resentment. Of course, anyone familiar with stories in general should guess who's correct....

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Thankfully, I did not let Nemesis be the last Trek film I ever watched. But I did approach STB with a little trepidation. Reports of it being more like the original series than the previous two installments clashed with the trailer playing the Beastie Boys, which George Takei himself thought made it look generic apart from the fleet uniforms. And how long would the hyped new same-sex match for Sulu (John Cho) demand our attention?

The answer: about three literal seconds. More important is the touching notice that First Officer Spock's (Zachary Quinto) alternate-timeline counterpart (the late Leonard Nimoy) has passed away. It distracts the present Spock from his personally chosen mission to do his part for the few remaining Vulcans, which yielded a peaceable breakup with Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana).

But this, too, does not concern the main conflict. Before long, the heroes are attacked by unfamiliar aliens, who capture many crew members and a portion of a powerful weapon. The disabled Enterprise crashes on the enemy's mountainous planet, where Krall (the ubiquitous Idris Elba) is a Federation-hating life energy vampire out to annihilate the new space city of Yorktown. As the key crew come back together from their separate pods, they enlist the aid of badass alien woman Jaylah (Sofia Boutella), who has a bone to pick with Krall.

The Terminal (2004)

I had said not to expect many more reviews of Steven Spielberg-directed features. It's something of a surprise to myself that I took only about seven months to get to another. Now I've seen all that he's directed since The Last Crusade.

Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a present-day airline customer from a fictitious nation apparently near Russia. During his flight, his homeland experiences a coup d'etat, resulting in a most extraordinary situation for himself: The U.S. neither recognizes his passport nor can send him back any time soon, so his only legal option is to stay at this NYC airport indefinitely. (If this sounds implausible, know that a real-life Iranian had to wait 18 years in a Parisian airport after the 1979 revolution.) Note that this comes in the first few minutes, so the running theme of the whole story is waiting, but I assure you that things do happen before Viktor's freedom....

The Book of Life (2014)

No, the title has nothing to do with the biblical use of the term. In fact, it relies heavily on Mayan mythology. Since I'd forgotten that Mexico's Day of the Dead actually lasts three days, I am in no position to evaluate the authenticity of the traditions depicted herein, but that matters little in an animated comedy.

We get a story within a story as a museum tour guide (Christina Applegate) tells a group of kids -- far more rapt than their early misbehavior would portend -- one legend straight out of the allegedly comprehensive Book of Life. Set in an ambiguous post-Columbian era, it concerns two gods wagering on human love. If María (Zoe Saldana) marries Joaquin (Channing Tatum), popular son of a war hero, then Xibalba (Ron Perlman), god of the hellish Land of the Forgotten, gets to swap places with La Muerte (Kate del Castillo), goddess of the much more pleasant Land of the Remembered. If María marries Joaquin's friend Manolo (Diego Luna), an aspiring mariachi whose father pushes him to be a matador, then Xibalba has to stop intervening in the realm of the living. Both boys/men do awesome things with their divine blessings over the years, but neither has the advantage in María's heart for very long; the main change is in how they feel about each other. At no point does either god fear that she'll marry neither, though.

As you might have guessed, Xibalba is the nastier god, though not nasty enough to make an outright villain out of his champion. Due to some unfair moves on Xibalba's part, Manolo dies about halfway through the movie. But Manolo strives to return to life, not just for María's sake but to help save their hometown from the true main villain, Chakal (Dan Navarro), a bandit leader too dangerous even for Joaquin. This being the Day of the Dead, the separation between life and death is more negotiable than usual....