THE LEGO MOVIE 2 - THE SECOND PART (is Harder)

In the 5 years since The LEGO Movie, creative team Phil Lord and Chris Miller have - 

Wait. . . it's Been 5 years since the first LEGO Movie?

REALLY?

. . .I need to sit down.

The Yearly Countdown: Fantastic Films of 2018

Now that the nominees for the 2019 Academy Awards have been announced, we can get down to the business of discussing the actual Most Good, Important, Kick-ass Movies of the Year.

No, it's not just the best list because it's mine.

. . . Ok, yes, it is. But you clicked anyway, so you may as well keep going.

AQUAMAN - The Wet and the Furious

Well, the good news is that we finally have a good King Arthur movie for the first time in a very, very long time.

The bad news is NOPE, JUST KIDDING - IT'S ALL GOOD NEWS BECAUSE THIS IS A KING ARTHUR MOVIE WHERE AN OCTOPUS PLAYS THE DRUMS.

BUMBLEBEE - See, was that so hard?

Well, Merry Cussing Christmas to us - there's finally a good Transformers movie!

Took 'em long enough.

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE - Greatness Awaits

Well. . . wow.

Given my reaction to this film, I can only imagine the new part it's going to leave in the hair of viewers who are much more in need of inspirational representation than a 30-something cis/straight/white man.

Because, even to me, this feels like a wave breaking.

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.