The High Note

 This is the epitome of pretty ok - it's a personal-assistant wants to become a producer story with a not very surprising twist (main surprise is how long it takes to reveal a very obvious secret). Tracie Ellis Ross rules as the divaish singer, ice cube and June Diane Raphael get good moments as the manager and housekeeper, Dakota Johnston is not bad at a role that kinda has her being wet and useless a lot of the time, and in general it's ok without ever being great

The Broken Hearts Gallery

 A just about good enough indie-type romantic comedy as a young Brooklyn gallery-assistant finds her collection of memorabilia from previous heartbreaks turns out to be her path to success. This is another of the "deeply neurotic behavior is romantic" school of romantic comedy but once it gets past some messy establishing material where the Brooklyn hipster quirk goes a bit overboard, it settles into a reasonable groove up until the grand-romantic-gesture ending, which again falls on the "somewhat embarrassing" side of the scale. The lead pair are more "because the movie demands it" levels of chemistry rather than something that is particularly inherent to the characters, and the various side characters do slightly sink to the level of their personal quirks rather than fully rounded characters, and it's a reminder of why romantic comedy isn't the most active cinema formula at the moment - because it's become overly predictable

An American Pickle

 Charming but inconsequential - Rogen pulls off the double role better than expected but it's mostly fuzzy satire of contemporary society through the 100 year frozen Herschel. It could use extra characters - Rogen never really gets a scene partner beyond himself to bounce off

The Translators

 A cleverly twisty-turny thriller - if the ultimate result was one I'd guessed from the trailer, it at least gives us enough bonus content to mean that there's enough discoveries along the way. Lambert Wilson is practically the only performer it's not spoilery to praise, because his sliminess permeates the film from the opening mintues as the desperate publisher at the centre of the story, but there's decent set pieces and surprises to not mind too much that this is not really doing much particularly new and it is hitting that common cinematic problem where representations of a piece of art onscreen inevitably look a bit crap.

Bill and Ted Face the Music

 This is a fairly charming throwback, not falling into the trap of replaying the same gags as the previous films or disappearing down a rabbit hole of celebrity cameos - though it has a couple here and there. It's got the same gag of huge scale as Bill and Ted resolve another threat to all time and space, put against the simple goofiness of Bill and Ted. There's some good surprises in there including one surprise for the funniest character, a general geniality even when the stakes are allegedly life and death, and a resolution that perhaps plays a little too fast to really land fully but never the less feels nice.

The Eight Hundred

 A big fat Chinese WW2 epic as the gathered Chinese forces face the Japanese in a Shanghai factory, just across the river from the internationally-conceded zone. There's an immediate visual contrast between the soldiers in the shelled-and-battered factory and the residents of the international zone, full of neon and light and music and decadence (including frequent shots of a lady casino owner hanging around with a giant bird). It does have a fair bit of frequent Chinese Political Messaging about china's position in the world, the warfighting is noticeably heavy on the gore and there is a fair bit of mythologising China's glorious destiny but it's a fascinating watch of a bit of history largely unknown to most westerners.

The New Mutants

An okay superhero jaunt suffering from a lack of compelling plot or interesting characters (only Anna Taylor-Joy's Illyana really registers) - it also plays at keeping the plot and the characters mysterious at the beginning in favour of atmospheric build up which is more frustrating than compelling - its ragingly obvious what Maisie Williams' power is at least half an hour before she gets to show it off. There's a few decent set-pieces along the way as the various characters confront individally spooky circumstances and one effective CGI monster but the final big CGI big bad is a bit of a sound-and-fury-signifying-nothing kinda thing. Still, I've missed superhero epics and even at this reduced scale (six actors, one location) it provides a couple of the right feels.