Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

When mythological monsters run amok in Philadelphia and among them are angry unicorns only placated by handfuls of Skittles, things in this DC-related superhero movie start to teeter at my "switch off" point, especially given up to that point I'd already tired of a superhero movie that wants to champion a true mythological hero while also making him an annoying teen only as strong as each of his six team members, not to mention all those uncomfortable scenes showing teenaged boys holding hands and being romanced with 6000-year-old women. 

★★★☆☆

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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

Given the first and second movie told us everything we needed to know about the marauding monsters with hypersonic hearing - from their arrival on earth (via comets, I think) to their being bested by high-pitched sound - an additional entry into the series like this - this is number three, a prequel - serves no real purpose except to extrapolate, for fanboys maybe, on established themes, so we see more heel-to-toe quiet walking, more alien stampedes, more held breath and bridges taken out by fighter jets; an impossibly well-behaved service cat doesn't mix things up very much in this dutiful extra ninety minutes.

★★★☆☆

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A Quiet Place II (2020)

The start takes audiences back to "Day One" when the extremely sound-sensitive creatures first land on Earth, an arresting sequence that has debut director John Krasinski demonstrating Shyamalan-at-his-best flourishes, but long before the audience is satisfied with this backstory and before any point to it is established, the movie abruptly gives way to three concurrent story threads in the present, post-the original movie, in which three different characters simply walk heel-to-toe on three different sand tracks to three different destinations, hardly enthralling and full of directorial looseness, with the alien threat along these boring paths not much more worrying than if, say, you were hiking in an area inhabited by wild dogs (but wild dogs that, although certain to appear at each significant landmark, only turn up in ones or twos, never more, irrespective of how much noise you make).

★★☆☆☆

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