Although he's taken something of a detour into large-scale blockbuster filmmaking in recent years with films like Jungle Cruise and Black Adam, Jaume Collet-Serra is primarily known for his moderately budgeted Liam Neeson thrillers from the 2010s such as Non-Stop, The Commuter, and Unknown. In that regard, his latest film, Carry-On, is a return to form for the filmmaker, giving him a high-concept thriller with a crackerjack premise.

Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) gets kidnapped by a vengeful witch (Kiernan Shipka) hellbent on punishing the naughty in Jake Kasdan's Red One, a Christmas-themed action comedy that doesn't seem to be made for anyone. Dwayne Johnson stars as Santa's stalwart bodyguard, a tough-minded soldier who's grown weary of all the naughtiness in the world, who is tasked with tracking Santa down, along with a hacker (Chris Evans) and Level 4 naughty-lister who uses the internet to track people down for a living.

It isn’t easy being transgender. For those of us who live in America, it’s about to get even harder. With the recent election of Donald Trump and the rush by Democrats to blame trans people for their loss (despite running away from our issues at every turn), the future can seem somewhat bleak. It is of some comfort, then, that our stories are still being told. But as shown by two recent Netflix releases, we’re both making strides, and taking steps back.

I often found myself thinking about Agnes Varda's Daguerreotypes and Tsai Ming Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn in the way Filho examines the power of cinema to preserve while also using it to document its own death; faded movie palaces now replaced by towering high rises, replaced by ramshackle churches, the temples of cinema swapping one religion for another.