The King's Man (2021)

Messy, muddled and mostly dull, this feels like a movie that wants to be an anti-war drama but could only get made if it was a Kingsman movie so occasionally has to bung in an acrobatic fight scene or some aimless alternate-history super-villainy before returning to another slow reading of Wilfred Owen poetry. Eventually it completely gives up and provides us with the happy ending of getting even more countries into the war and turning the pacifist lead into a killer. Any remaining time is spent on the usual prequel busywork. As for action, there are a couple of pretty good swordfights in there but the rest is a mix of half-arsed Kingsman-lite and Pirates Of The Caribbean-y nonsense.

Rating: Bad.

The Hunt (2020)

 A solid Dangerous Game riff, with some fun twists and decent action. The political layer is pretty mild and goofy - it barely rates as satire but then I don't think the film has any major aspirations in that regard. It pokes fun at both sides but mostly at the constant fever pitch of modern discourse, with modest success.

Rating: Fine.

Eternals (2021)

Terrible. Almost the entire runtime was taken up with exposition and flashbacks and changes to status quos that hadn't been established and twists that had zero impact because we'd only just learnt the thing being twisted. I didn't care about a single character, they weren't funny or charming or likeable and most of them had no personality, purely there to flip-flop allegiances to keep the story crawling along. One character takes up a bunch of runtime and is there purely to set up another movie or whatever (I don't know which, please consider that a spoiler for now). It looked quite nice in parts but not particularly striking, and the action was mostly bland CG flubber. Even Ramin Djawadi did a particularly forgettable sub-Howard Shore score.

Rating: Awful.

Ghostbusters Afterlife (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

An utterly joyless retread of the first film's iconography, it spends most of the film acting like a slice-of-life drama while slowly teaching the characters what ghostbusters are, and has pretty much zero jokes.
It has constant logic bumps, both with established lore (why are little Stay-Puft guys appearing? Why is a Terror Dog eating dog food?) with what characters know or don't know, believe or don't believe (do they not believe in ghosts or are they bizarrely blasé when they see one? Have they never heard of ghostbusters or do they know what full-roaming vapors are and how to work Ecto-1's RC car ramp (??)), and just the basics of conversations not really making sense.
The characters are mostly children, so it doesn't have the adult energy of the first movie, but it also doesn't feel like it's aimed at kids - this isn't a Goonies set in the GB universe.
The three living original cast members get wheeled out for what seems like a couple of hours shooting time, and do a vague approximation of their characters, and it's all a bit depressing. The CG Egon ghost isn't handled as awfully as it could have been, I guess, but it stops the climax of the film for a five-minute maudlin teary-eyed tribute.

That's now three out of three sequels/remakes that ended up a mix of slavishly copying the original and misunderstanding its charms.

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.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

Very disappointing. It starts off pretty well - okay, it's very heavy on the exposition, but then it calms down a bit, it's pretty charming, and the fight scenes are actually well choreographed and directed! But then the usual Marvel problems show up. CG immediately starts creeping in, sucking the weight and peril out of everything. The movie continues to do exposition and set-up for the first 90 minutes, not taking a moment to breathe as it crams in all of the designated Feige Masterplan elements. It takes about five minutes to try to give the lead a personality, dish out a couple of character arcs, and train everyone up to the required skill levels, then moves into the climactic battle which feels like a Bay Transformers movie - human characters getting flung around a scene as big CG things hit each other. Nothing is earned, not the victories or the reconciliations or the noble sacrifices or the character developments.

One of those movies you fan-edit in your head as you go - this should have started with Shang-Chi's regular life, had the surprise bus fight, done a very streamlined version of alllll the flashbacks, then moved forward into a lean Big Trouble In Little China style romp with Awkwafina, Terry Slattery and a lead character with a personality making their way through weird locales.

Rating: Kinda Bad.