Mike Schulz reunites with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra, having spent the Fourth holiday and a personal vacation away from the studio. Schulz has seen him some movies, and by gum, he’s going to talk about them.

To whit:

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• Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F (dir Mark Molloy, starr Eddie Murphy, Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon, Paul Reiser, and Bronson Pinchot). Released on Netflix, one should not approach this film with expectations beyond watching Murphy reprise the character that helped him attain superstardom back in 1984. The first and second sequels made the mistake of putting as much emphasis on the action sequences as they did Murphy. Ignore the superfluous cannonades and focus on the Murphy-shtick.
  
• Kinds of Kindness (dir Yorgos Lanthimos, starr Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schafer). Less than a year after the release of Poor Things, Lanthimos is still going four-to-the-floor with his ambitions, having made Kinds of Kindness into three distinct but loosely-connected absurdist black comedies, with the same actors portraying three different actors, each as humanly bad as the one that comes before him/her. Schulz had a grand old time, but it’s definitely not a film for everybody.
  
• MaXXXine (dir Ti West, starr Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Halsey, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, and Kevin Bacon). Schulz believes that, with MaXXXine, West has achieved the trick of making a horror trilogy in which each part is as essential, and as superb, as the other. Offhand, one cannot think of another director who’s managed that triple-play.
  
• The animated comedy Despicable Me 4 (dir Chris Renaud, featuring the voice-work of Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Pierre Coffin, Joey King, Miranda Cosgrove, Steve Coogan, Sofía Vergara, Stephen Colbert, Renaud, Madison Polan, Dana Gaier, Chloe Fineman, and Will Ferrell). Go for the minions. Your kids will undoubtedly love it.
  
• Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (dir Kevin Costner, starr KC Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt, and Jamie Campbell Bower). Released 28 June, Horizon is the first in a four-part Western saga, which runs at 181 minutes of which you can feel every single second crawling across your screen. Costner has never been the cautious sort when it comes to filmmaking (see: Dances with Wolves, The Postman, Waterworld), but it sounds like he may have seriously miscalculated here, as Chapter 1 is an introduction to the characters, where much of the action is devoted to introducing everyone. So far, Chapter 1 has made $31 million, which seems to have undersold expectations. Will it make a compelling case for itself? Will there be an audience queuing to see the other chapters? We shall see, won’t we?
  
• Longlegs (dir Osgood Perkins, starr Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Michelle Choi-Lee, and Dakota Daulby). This movie got a lot of buzz earlier in the month, and it all turns on Perkins’ decision to let audiences know exactly who Cage’s character is from the jump. This is a film where Cage goes over the top — and the battlefield on which he will live or die is Passchendaele. You know how certain films advertise their experience as “expect the unexpected”? You go into this one and Cage will still catch you unawares. That effective.
  
• Fly Me to the Moon (dir Greg Berlanti, starr Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jim Rash, Anna Garcia, Donald Elise Watkins, Noah Robbins, Colin Woodell, Christian Zuber, Nick Dillenburg, Ray Romano, and Woody Harrelson). Schulz was disappointed with the direction, insofar as each actor seemed to have a different idea of what kind of film they are in; tonally, it’s all over the place.
  

As for previews:

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• Twisters (dir Lee Isaac Chung, starr Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, and Sasha Lane). A stand-alone sequel to the 1996 Twister, this one is expected to make serious bank, on the somewhat dubious notion that fans who got hooked on to the first film nearly thirty years ago will come back for more. We’ll see, won’t we?
  
• The Irish paranormal horror film Oddity (dir Damian McCarthy, starr Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Caroline Menton, Steve Wall, Jonathan French, and Joe Rooney). Oddity won the Audience Award in the Midnighter section of this year’s South by Southwest Film Fest, and so far commands a 98% favorability index on Rotten Tomatoes, so. . . sleeper hit?
  

“Kinds of Kindness,” “MaXXXine,” “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” “Despicable Me 4”

“Longlegs” and “Fly Me to the Moon”