Ghosted

In a gender role reversal, or an upturn of True Lies, the badass spy is the woman and the screaming passenger/sidekick is the dude. The title and marketing of this movie was sloppy. The “ghosted” part of the story represents about  .01% of the concept. But efforts to deconstruct action movie tropes are funny and welcome, especially a bit in the middle riffing on stunt casting notorious assassins, their badass nicknames, and their unwillingness to see when they’re a target. This barnburner has the emotional weight of a dandelion leaf. But there’s plenty of action-movie eye-candy and a couple of big laughs.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

This reminded me a lot of the Gore Verbinski Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It’s a frivolous happy meal - enjoyable all the way through if not that original. Do things need to be original to be enjoyable? Monsters and magic and running and wisecracks. In the old days they used to call this a “popcorn” movie.

Tetris

Like the video game itself, this drew me in and got me hooked. It’s a deceptively simple biopic at first, but gradually and cleverly turns into a cold-war thriller. Who knows how much of this weird stuff actually happened? But according to the film, the Russians did everything they could do to make this deal as overly complicated as possible; trying to beat the capitalists at their own game. It’s a miracle we have the game at all, the way they sabotaged themselves. It’s well-acted, fast-paced, and shines a light on a weird little story that most of us never knew.