Beware of Spoilers

The new Street Fighter has the characters, the tournament, the nostalgia and enough franchise mythology to fill several movies. What it doesn’t have is a clear idea of which story it actually wants to tell.

Adam breaks down the movie’s missing protagonist, rushed tournament, weak fight choreography, abandoned subplots and obsession with setting up material it may never get the chance to resolve.

There are flashes of something much better in the animated sequences. Almost everything else is fighting for space.

Vision Quest brings James Spader back as Ultron and gives the character something Age of Ultron never really had: time.

Adam looks at the first episodes of Marvel’s newest series, Vision’s ongoing identity crisis, the show’s surprisingly strong connective tissue to the larger MCU and why repeatedly insisting this is a “different Vision” could become the season’s biggest structural problem.

Avatar: Seven Havens does something immediately different from both The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra: it introduces a world that is afraid of the Avatar.

Adam looks at the first three episodes, why Pavi works as a lead, how the series avoids overexplaining the Cataclysm and why the mystery surrounding Korra's supposed destruction of the world may be far more complicated than the history everyone has accepted.

Behemoth! is not quite the movie its trailer suggests, and that's one of the reasons Adam is keeping this festival review unusually spoiler-light.

Tony Gilroy uses nonlinear storytelling, thriller-style cinematography and constantly shifting musical language to turn the story of cellist Alex into something far more tense than a conventional personal drama.

Pedro Pascal delivers one of his strongest performances, with excellent supporting work from Olivia Wilde, Eva Victor and Will Arnett.

When a catastrophe affects millions of people, who gets to decide how the person responsible is remembered?

Adam reviews Digger, examining its theatrical reconstruction of an environmental disaster, Tom Cruise's performance as an actor challenging that reconstruction and the deeper question raised when the people controlling the story are revealed to have their own connection to the history they're supposedly exposing.

Charlie is smart, well-read and completely unsure what he wants to do with his life.

That kind of drifting protagonist has been a staple of American independent film for decades; but in Charlie Harper, the archetype sometimes feels like it belongs to an earlier generation.

Adam looks at the movie's strong central performances, nonlinear memory structure and the missed opportunity to let its 2008 setting shape the relationship more deeply.

A guy meets a woman named Emily, gets the wrong phone number and finds another Emily while trying to track down the first one.

That is already a great rom-com setup.

Adam reviews Finding Emily and explains why its central chemistry works, why the supporting characters are so important and how the decision to turn Owen into the subject of Emily’s psychology research creates an ethical conflict far bigger than the movie’s romantic ending can comfortably resolve.

Lanterns Episode 3 explains why John Stewart may be one of the most naturally formidable Green Lanterns we've seen; but the answer comes with a cost.

Adam looks at John's childhood, the extreme training his parents put him through after learning he might someday be chosen by the Guardians, the meaning behind his persistent bird construct and the uncomfortable line between preparing a child for greatness and abusing them in pursuit of it.

The episode also explores how the Guardians' supposedly universal test of fear changes when applied to John as a Black man on Earth.

After years on the shelf, Coyote vs. Acme finally made it to theaters, and seeing the finished movie only makes Warner Bros.' original decision more confusing.

Adam reviews the long-delayed Looney Tunes film, its surprisingly sharp corporate satire, its deep affection for animation history and the human relationships that keep it just short of a perfect score. There's also an unavoidable irony at the center of the movie's release: a story about a corporation believing it can escape accountability was itself nearly erased by one.

HBO’s Lanterns looked like it might turn Green Lantern into a grounded prestige drama and leave the cosmic weirdness behind.

After the first two episodes, Adam is pleasantly surprised.

Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre establish a strong Hal Jordan/John Stewart dynamic, the central mystery actually makes good use of the detective format, and the series is not shying away from constructs, the Green Lantern oath, Sinestro or the mythology surrounding the Corps.

But one question remains: if John Stewart is already doing things other Lanterns seemingly cannot, has the show established enough of the rules for that to feel meaningful?