[Cecil Terwilliger]

I quite liked Red Sparrow. Nothing groundbreaking for a spy thriller, maybe even a little predictable but entertaining. Lawrence and Edgerton didn’t have a ton of chemistry but given they are spies and the film wants to keep you guessing if their romance was real, it didn’t bother me much.

Geostorm was a special kind of awful. Like 2012, Day After Tomorrow and Olympus has Fallen all rolled into one. What happened to you Gerard Butler? When 300 came out it seemed like he’d be a huge action star. Now his name is a sure sign the movie is crap.

Battle of the Sexes was ok. Not great but not bad. What I liked is that they did a good job of framing the match between King and Riggs. Normally it is treated (by modern media usually) as some victory for women proving they can compete with men. In reality, Riggs was washed up and out of shape and had no business winning a single game. But that’s not what’s important and the movie doesn’t focus a lot on that aspect thankfully. Instead it focuses on King’s personal life and her accomplishments for women like pay equality, establishing the WTA and proving to POS Jack Kramer that women’s tennis can be entertaining even if they aren’t as good as men. It also avoided unnecessarily painting Riggs as an evil villain. He’s more like a caricature of chauvinism than an actual misogynist. Powerful men like Jack Kramer were the real villains.