RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET - Disney's Unbroken Streak

It's a testament to Disney's cyclically eternal appeal that they're thought of as the mostly-unquestioned masters of feature animation, even though - from the very beginning of their forays into film - the studio has gone through fallow periods. Only a few years after Snow White, Disney released a financial flop with Fantasia. Their output during much of World War II was relegated to shorts and propaganda films. The studio floundered in the wake of Walt's Death and damn near shuttered their entire animation department for good in the '80s, got mired in direct-to-video garbage in the '90s, and they've apparently abandoned 2D animation in the wake of 2009's The Princess and the Frog.

And yet, they always follow their lean years with a run of highly successful and quality films, and Disney is currently in their longest-running streak of good-to-great animated movies. If there were an obvious choice to buck that trend, the meme-soaked sequel to 2012's Wreck-It Ralph would have been it, but it's not looking like Game Over any time soon.

CREED II - Rocky Road to Victory

2015's Creed ended up being one of my favorite films of its year. I've gone on record saying that it's a masterpiece and - in my opinion - the best overall film in the Rocky saga. So, needless to say, my apprehensions that things would go off the rails immediately with the sequel (which Creed writer/director Ryan Coogler passed on to make a small indie drama called Black Panther) were fairly high.

Luckily, while Creed II may not be the masterpiece that its direct predecessor was, it's still a damn fine entry into what has now become one of my favorite film series, and packs a couple powerful secret weapons that make it more than just a solid cover of earlier numbers.