THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Sunny, fast-talking, and occasionally tipsy. Kenneth Branagh, who both directs and stars in this Shakespeare adaptation, seems perfectly happy to trade gravitas for good company, treating this material with the sort of light-on-its-feet affection and eagerness that a drama student might have who finally gets to play the lead.

Branagh plays Benedick—a smug, over-articulated bachelor whose allergy to love gets louder the closer it creeps toward him. Emma Thompson plays Beatrice, his love interest, who is able to slice through him with a kind of bone-dry precision that she can do better than anyone else, with lines flung at him like darts tipped in irony. Together, they make bickering look aerobic—trading barbs while inching closer to something neither wants to admit.

Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard) and Hero (Kate Beckinsale), the decorative couple, hover in the background. They’re not so much involved in a romance as they are a plot device waiting to be sabotaged, which is obliged by Keanu Reeves, who glowers his way through the film as Don John, like a goth left alone at prom. Don kicks off a smear campaign against this venerable couple, accusing Hero of sleeping around. Denzel Washington lends his usual quiet command as Don Pedro, Don John’s nobler brother. Michael Keaton shows up as a bug-eyed constable with all the grace of a man who’s been locked in a broom closet too long. No character in this film ever seems to be on quite the same page, but they all operate in tones that converge into something that holds together surprisingly well—a sunny, sincere, and frequently ridiculous conglomeration of personalities.

While Much Ado About Nothing isn’t Shakespeare’s deepest work, this adaptation is fleet and flirty—perfectly content to gallop playfully so long as the wine keeps flowing. Branagh’s trick is that he doesn’t treat the material like scripture as much as he treats it like a party that’s been going on for a little too long. And that turned out to be the right instinct.

Unlike most of Disney’s live-action remakes, Mulan didn’t start from a masterpiece. The 1998 animated film certainly had its charms, but it wasn’t exactly sacred ground. This meant that Disney had a rare opportunity. To remake a film that had quite a bit of room to improve. And for a moment, it looks like it might have gone that way. The visuals are astounding: sweeping vistas, crowds of thousands with weighty stares, dazzling backdrops with a stunning view of ancient China. But then you start to remember something: didn’t Mulan used to have a talking dragon? You could also swear it had songs, too. You know—Mulan. She was a Disney princess.

Of course, the vast majority of war epics can get by swimmingly without wisecracking anthropomorphic sidekicks or songs. But the problem comes when this movie replaces them with precisely nothing. The phenomenal visuals suggest epic depth and mythic resonance, but it’s all hollow gesturing—solemnity over substance.

The general storyline is still there—which itself is an adaptation of an old Chinese legend about a woman, Mulan (Yifei Liu), who disguises herself as a man to take her father’s place in the army as they brace against an invading Rouran force. Women, of course, aren’t supposed to serve, but Mulan has an inner power they call “chi”—an abundance of it, unlike anything the army has ever seen. When properly harnessed, it makes her a kind of wire-fu superhero. At first she wants to keep this power under wraps, blending in as an ordinary soldier. But to keep it submerged means denying who she is.

This adaptation also adds a unique character, a shape-shifting witch (Gong Li), another woman improbably functioning as a warrior—except she’s aiding the villain. This might’ve added a layer of moral complexity, but she’s given just enough screen time to hint at that before being swept aside. Jet Li plays the Emperor with all the gravitas in the world, but his lines feel like they were cribbed from motivational posters. Liu plays Mulan as reserved to the point of unreadable. The father-daughter scenes try for poignancy, and while the motions are there, the emotions never feel convincing.

It’s not a total loss—there’s a sincerity beneath the spectacle, and the film looks every bit of its $200 million budget. But you need more than dazzling backdrops to tell the story. For all the effort to make Mulan feel important, it ends up hollow: a war epic that tries to say something about honor and identity, but mostly says little more than, “Look at how serious I am.”

The Mummy is ostensibly Universal Pictures’ attempt at retooling its monster franchise, but it feels less like gothic horror and more like Spielberg pastiche. Genre purists are going to balk at it, of course. There’s no creeping dread here, and the long Karloff shadows are nowhere to be seen. In their place is pulp archaeology dressed up like a gift shop. True, it’s a bit disappointing that surface-level thrills were favored over trying to recreate the original films’ classic alchemy, but most audiences will find the trade-off well worth it. This is pure spectacle.

Brendan Fraser plays the cut-rate Indiana Jones hero—here named Rick O’Connell—a rakish explorer with a pistol in one hand and a wisecrack in the other. He finds himself roped into leading treasure hound Jonathan (John Hannah) and his bookish sister Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) to the fabled Egyptian city of Hamunaptra—the City of the Dead—where, inevitably, they stir up more than just dust. They end up awakening an ancient priest, Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo). He’s a ghoul with an eternal curse, a taste for uttering spooky incantations, and the ability to conjure gigantic sandstorms that morph into predators. These weather-bound creations can not only flatten armies and chew through landscapes, but I’d imagine they’d also leave you with annoying grit in your teeth.

What makes the movie fun is that it refuses to catch its breath, barreling along like an indoor roller coaster—flashing secret tombs, flesh-eating scarabs, and ancient plagues (the fun kind: locusts, not dysentery) at you like little plastic souvenirs. The set pieces are splashy, but the trio at the center of the movie is what gives it spirit. Fraser plays the dashing-doofus archetype with unforced charm. Weisz is the sharp-tongued scholar who is much braver than she initially lets on. Hannah, while greedy, half-drunk, and the reason they all got into this trouble in the first place, is far too likable to resent. Around the periphery is a fun smattering of side characters who either punch up the comedy (Jonathan Hyde) or get eaten by the special effects (Omid Djalili, who eventually becomes scarab food). On the side of the villains, Vosloo glides through his role as Imhotep with regal menace, always one chant away from total catastrophe.

The jokes are broad and the CGI shows its age. This is surface-level action comedy and little more. Subtlety, of course, was never on the menu. While The Mummy doesn’t achieve anything in the visible realm of Indiana Jones, it crash-lands in the next field over. Call it junior-varsity pulp, CGI spectacle, a sandblast to the face, and Brendan Fraser at his action-comedy peak. With a bucket of popcorn, there’s nothing that can go wrong.

Some time has passed since the first film, but Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) haven’t lost their taste for ancient ruins—or for each other. They now have a precocious son named Alex (Freddie Boath), who naturally gets swept up in their next adventure, which looks an awful lot like their first.

Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected once more, this time by an underground cult led by museum curator Baltus Hafez (Alun Armstrong). Also along for the ride is Meela Nais (Patricia Velásquez), the reincarnation of Anck-su-namun, Imhotep’s secret lover from ancient Egypt.

Since the possessed sandstorms didn’t do the trick last time, the villains raise an even greater threat: the Scorpion King (rather disturbingly Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s head digitally morphed onto a gigantic scorpion), who commands a gnarly little army of jackal-headed warriors. The simple thrills of the first film give way to a cluttered mythology that often bogs down the pacing, but there’s still fun to be had in watching characters dash around decoding prophecies. Either you’ll keep up, or you’ll spend the runtime trying to forget that this was The Rock’s breakthrough role.

Most importantly, Fraser and Weisz remain likable leads. Their banter hasn’t lost its spark. The visual effects, while occasionally rubbery, still deliver the kind of spectacle you remember from the first film, and the sound-drenched desert vistas keep the eye engaged. But the film’s real scene-stealer might be the slow-motion hand-to-hand combat between Weisz and Velásquez. Maybe gawking at it makes me blush, as though I were flipping through the pages of Maxim, but it’s gloriously gratuitous—stylized, kinetic, and more memorable than most of the plot.

Overall, The Mummy Returns suffers from more bloat than its predecessor, but it remains a satisfying spectacle—another theme park ride full of serviceable thrills.

Whatever gave the 1999 film its zip—that uncanny balance of quippy banter, booby-trapped temples, and breezy adventure—is largely absent here. This feels less like spectacle and more like plain ol’ noise and motion. There’s still a sense of fun, but it feels manufactured. Less organic. The filmmakers seemed to assume that nonstop movement—without the accompanying wonder—would be enough to fuel the movie. But that’s not what made the first two films work. Those movies knew when to stop and breathe. Watching this second sequel feels like watching a never-ending pileup of set pieces.

At least the setting is different. The action shifts to China, where ancient tombs hide reanimated terra cotta soldiers. Also, inexplicably, Yeti are real. (We’ve moved from pop archaeology to cryptozoology. Sure, why not?)

Brendan Fraser continues to be the franchise’s best asset. Sure, he’s aged a bit, but he can still slice through the digital mayhem with his usual mix of charm and agility. What’s missing, though, is Rachel Weisz—and I mean that literally. Evelyn is recast with Maria Bello, whose interpretation of the character is cooler and more restrained. She’s not bad, but she doesn’t gel nearly as well with the pulp setting as Weisz did. It also doesn’t help that the banter isn’t as sharp as it was in the first two films. Their now-grown son Alex (Luke Ford) is positioned as a junior adventurer, but the script mostly saddles him with shouting duties.

Jet Li turns up as the main baddie, the Dragon Emperor on a bid for world domination, but he’s strangely sidelined for much of the film—either stuck as a literal stone statue (which, perhaps not coincidentally, also matches his acting style) or morphing into a parade of unconvincing CGI beasts. Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong fare a bit better as a sorceress mother and her warrior daughter. They’re woefully underused, but they bring a flicker of dignity to the chaos.

While you’ll find flashes of the old swashbuckling fun you remember from the first two films, they’re fleeting. If you’ve already watched those movies and still have popcorn left over in your bowl, you might as well hang around for the third. But mostly this feels like a sequel running on fumes. A journey that lost its map.