The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

As someone who wasn't a huge fan of the original trilogy (lots of cool stuff going on, but the first film was all world-building and set-up with no narrative drive, and the sequels were a mess), but loved Cloud Atlas and Sense8, I was hoping that this would be a Matrix film that I could love. The first half got my hopes up, the second half dashed them.
It starts off very fun, very 'a sequel about sequels and itself' meta, and confusing in a good way. But one you figure out the general deal - Neo got resurrected and put in another Matrix where the events of the preceding films have been framed as a fiction of his own invention, but now he's created a Morpheus-Smith amalgam AI who, along with some real-world peeps, has broken him out again. It's at this point that it needed to quickly and cleanly cover the events between this and Revolutions then set up a goal and the stakes, and then throw in a bunch of trademark Matrix impressive, impeccably-framed action sequences. Unfortunately, it failed at all of this and instead switched to confusing in a bad way.
It looked lovely, had a bunch of good performances and lots of Sense8 cast members, and had fun playing with the iconography (breaking the trope of woman-trains-less-skilled-but-chosen-man by making Trinity the hero was particularly nice), and doing endless callbacks and character returns in a way that somehow never got annoying (although Smith was a bit crap) but it ended up as a muddled re-run with bafflingly lacklustre and muddy action scenes.

Rating: Disappointing.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

As someone who wasn't a big fan of any of the Maguire Spideys (3 was my favourite, with a heavy head-edit to get rid of Venom), disliked the Garfield Spideys, and only mildly enjoyed the first two Hollands, I didn't have high hopes for this. Turns out, this is by far my favourite of them all, second only to Into The Spiderverse.
It does all the good stuff from the MCU Spidey - the fun characters, comedy and crossovers, including an inventive fight with another hero that's up there with the Thor vs Cap vs Tony fight from Avengers - without the dips in energy or outstaying of welcomes, and it improves on many of the alt-verse baddies it brings back. Sandman is fine, Doc Ock and The Lizard get a little added humour, Green Goblin gets a better costume and is both much scarier and more sympathetic, and Electro is totally retooled into something decent. I'm not always the biggest fan of the MCU, but it really is impressive how they have consistently shown a better instinct for this stuff than Sony. Plus seeing the single-universe groups interact with each other lends them a little MCU persistence, and it's a really nice Days Of Future Past style touch to give everyone a happy ending.
The extra Spideys work well too - they're differentiated enough not to feel redundant, but the similarities are plumbed for thematic and emotional resonance, they work well together and they even get a small bump to their own arcs (enough for me to well up at a couple of points on Garfield's, which was bloody impressive considering how little I gave a shit about his Peter previously).
The only real weak points are some of the storytelling logic - the cause of the whole multiverse opening thing is pretty sweaty (Dr Strange decides to do an incredibly dangerous spell to fix Peter's small-fry issues then messes it up because Peter keeps asking him to add stuff on mid-cast and he just... does. Oof.) and there's no attention paid to how all these characters returning to their own universes, possibly at different points in time to each other, will work. But the action's consistently good, the music's good, it looks good, and when it threatens to hit a lull or a logic bump the sheer amount of conceptual stuff going on carries it along. 

Rating: Very Good.