REVIEW: 'Avengers: Infinity War' puts death on pause, but not without spectacle

This is why it doesn’t make any sense to fixate on who lives and dies in Avengers: Infinity War (this review certainly won’t). The odds on who survives the titular battle have been argued over for years online, with armchair critics trying to guess the exit points of series regulars like Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) or Captain America (Chris Evans) based on vaguely defined employment contracts that every fan seems to know about without having actually read.

REVIEW: 'Pacific Rim Uprising' and how it stagnates a franchise

The story is pretty predictable after that: the drone Jaegers fail big time and the kaiju return with the biggest kaiju ever and Jake and Nate have to learn how to put aside their differences and save the world as a team. It’s a near rip-off of the plot of the first film, where two characters who start off disliking each other end up being perfect for each other, and in fact, if Pacific Rim: Uprising was a romcom it could actually work.

REVIEW: ‘Atomic Blonde’ is a neon-lit thermonuclear warhead, with a few frayed wires

A finely engineered watch figures prominently in the plot of Atomic Blonde. It’s loaded with some secret information that everyone in the movie wants to get their hands on. It’s tracked by operatives of MI6, the CIA, the KGB and the French DGSE. Whoever has the watch controls the fates of dozens, if not hundreds of spies in Cold War Europe. As the people of East and West Berlin take the final crucial steps towards reunification, a shadowy battle plays out over a single deadly timepiece.

Like the watch, the film is a collection of beautiful components. The craftsmanship behind every part is on full display: bold, fluorescent cinematography, calibrated performances, and a vicious one-take action scene for the ages. There’s an important flaw, though: Atomic Blonde puts all of this powerful material on display, but can’t seem to put it together correctly. It’s as though the pieces are grinding against each other, resetting the clock when the film should be ticking forward and building tension.

REVIEW: 'Power Rangers' morphs into a new take on an established franchise

With Power Rangers drawing better-than-expected reviews and surprising everyone with a $40 million opening weekend gross, 2017 is shaping up to be a really good year. (If you don’t believe me, check out this list compiled by a Redditor.) Despite its promising opening, I’ve found that there is a large segment of people who steadfastly refuse to give it a chance – that’s understandable, given the Power Rangers’ target demographic, but part of the fun in seeing a movie is to be taken in directions that amaze or surprise.