Four Knaves

 

Usually by this point in the year, we’d have seen several dozen movies on the big screen. But by almost any standard, this has been a most unusual year. In January, we saw Doolittle, because we like Robert Downey Jr. and we love the Hugh Lofting books: a mistake on both counts. In February, we caught Sonic the Hedgehog (Jim Carey’s a delightful bad guy) and Call of the Wild (Harrison Ford should have passed on this one). We saw Onward and Emma in March right before the pandemic shut everything down. Since then, some of the films we’d been looking forward to have been released digitally, but most have just been postponed.  A few have trickled into the very clean, very empty cinemas; the ones the studios knew wouldn’t do well. It’s a catch-22. The good flicks won’t come back until there’s an audience for them, and there won’t be an audience until there’s something worth watching.