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  Kasady/Carnage vs. Brock/Venom: a comic book matchup for the ages... or so we'd hoped, up until we actually saw the film. [credit: Sony ]

My favorite parts of underwhelming films come when on-screen characters say the insulting things we, the audience, are all thinking. Out of all the modern comic book-iverse characters to hand these honors to, none relishes this duty better than Venom in his latest sequel, Let There Be Carnage .

"This guy makes zero sense," the CGI beast, voiced by Tom Hardy, blurts after one puzzling dialogue exchange. He's even harsher to his real-life co-star Woody Harrelson in a climactic kiss-off, exclaiming "Fuck this guy!" after an utterly tone-deaf confession.

That's mostly what Venom: Let There Be Carnage has going for it: a willingness to let Hardy off his leash and channel his id. Whether he's going for violence or compassion in his beast form, it's hilarious stuff. But the fun only reigns for about 30 minutes before the production loses momentum, all while failing to make up its mind on whether to deliver an overwrought plot or throw logic out the window.

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  Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Anthony McCoy, a visual artist who moves into the gentrified Cabrini-Green neighborhood in Chicago. [credit: YouTube/Universal Pictures ]

With thought-provoking films like Get Out and Us , writer/director Jordan Peele has already cemented his status as a master of smart, socially relevant modern horror. His influence is even broader as a producer, bringing fresh voices, directorial visions, and diverse perspectives to a genre badly in need of all three. His latest production is Candyman , director Nia DaCosta 's imaginative sequel (of sorts) to the 1992 horror classic, Candyman . This is only DaCosta's second feature film, yet she handles the material with deft assurance, transforming the singular slasher known as Candyman into an ageless malevolence whose curse reverberates through time.

(Spoilers for the 1992 film below; mostly mild spoilers for the new film.)

As I've written previously , the original 1992 Candyman was based on the Clive Barker short story " The Forbidden ." The film starred Virginia Madsen as a Chicago graduate student in sociology/semiotics whose thesis deals with urban legends. She hears about a series of brutal murders in the Cabrini-Green public housing project. The killer is rumored to be the ghost of a late 19th-century artist named Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) who was lynched because he fathered an illegitimate child with a white woman. The mob cut off his right hand and smeared him with honey to attract bees to sting him to death before burning his corpse and scattering his ashes over what is now the project's grounds.

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  A flashback to Themyscira. [credit: YouTube/Warner Bros. ]

Count me among the many millions who likely logged onto HBO Max on Christmas Day to watch Wonder Woman 1984 , Director Patty Jenkins' hotly anticipated, oft-delayed stand-alone follow-up to her 2017 global blockbuster, Wonder Woman . I'm a major fan of the latter, which gave us our super-powered Amazonian's origin story, and had high hopes for the follow-up.

Those hopes weren't completely dashed, but they weren't really fulfilled either. While Wonder Woman 1984 still has a bit of the old magic, and its leads all turn in terrific performances, the film is hampered by a frequently nonsensical plot, extraneous showy action sequences, and it's way too heavy-handed with the moralizing. But it still delivers quite a lot of slick, 1980s-infused fun if you turn your brain off and just go with it—and you'll definitely want to stick around for a post-credits scene.

(Some spoilers below, with a couple of major spoilers below the second gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there.)