Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019) | Jon Watts

Jake Gyllenhaal gets to don the “fishbowl” as Quentin Beck, the interdimensional savior of Venice when a giant water monster surfaces to try to destroy the city.  Peter Parker (Tom Holland) happens to be there at the time, as he has traveled to Europe for a week-long class trip. Peter, of course, is gifted with superhero powers, but doesn’t have the “great responsibility of other incarnations of the character, and would rather just be a teenager and do teenage things, like trying to find a way to express his feelings to his major crush, MJ (Zendaya), doing it atop the Eiffel Tower..  With the Avengers in a sort of disarray, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) assembles Beck, dubbed in the press as Mysterio, with Spider-Man who sees the new hero as a surrogate mentor to live up to in the wake of Tony Stark’s demise,  in order to stop future scary elementals from coming out of the woodworks again to destroy a major city. Jon Watts directs this MCU release.

Men In Black: International (2019) | F. Gary Gray

For this fourth entry in the series, out are Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.  Instead, we get two new characters to follow working for the super-secret government organization to protect Earth from interdimensional threats and to keep knowledge of alien lifeforms away from human knowledge. The two are Tessa Thompson’s newly on-board Agent M and Chris Hemsworth’s roguish veteran named Agent H. The two “Men in Black” get their assignment from their boss, High T (Liam Neeson), to look after an alien of some renown and influence that is sought after by sinister forces for reasons come to learn more about through the course of the film. In the ensuing attempt at assassination, M is given a mysterious crystal object, one she knows must be important enough to make her a target, but something that serves no use to her until she can unlock its secret purpose. F. Gary Gray takes over the series from Barry Sonnefeld.

Dark Phoenix (2019) | Simon Kinberg

The plot, initially set in 1992 after a prologue with a tragic event in Jean Grey’s childhood back in 1975, continues with the First Class set of mutants and involves a presidentially sanctioned trip into space in order to rescue a space shuttle. Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) commits an act of heroism in trying to keep the space shuttle together as the crew is rounded up to safety, absorbing a massive wave of energy that should have easily taken her life. She ends up surviving the ordeal, much to everyone’s relief.  But something is a bit off with Jean, finding herself with enhanced senses, and growing even more powerful than she had ever been before.  Exhilarating at first, but now she’s becoming increasingly unstable, scared she’s beginning to lose control to her new nature, with an internal fight going on that is an even bigger match than the external one that involves her in a battle with fellow mutants who are trying to contain what is rapidly becoming the most powerful, perhaps even unstoppable, mutant of all. Simon Kinberg writes and directs.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) | Michael Dougherty

Eco-terrorist Alan Jonah (Charles Dance), who has taken as hostage a paleobiologist under the employ of the Titan-research group known as Monarch, Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), along with her teenage daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown), to utilize Orca, an experimental mind-control technology she created to try to control the Titans, the giant monsters of the Earth that he sees as protecting the planet from humanity’s continued exploitation and destruction, effectively by destroying most of human civilization as we know it. Emma’s estranged husband Mark, who is trying to get his life back together after losing his son in the wake of Godzilla’s 2014 rampage, is out to find them and save them from further efforts to destroy the world, or themselves. Mark soon hooks up with Emma’s team of scientists at Monarch, as well as members of the military, to try to find a way to thwart Jonah’s plans and to keep the escalating numbers of monsters, led by the invasive three-headed alpha Titan named King Ghidorah, from destroying everything we hold dear. Godzilla may be their last line of defense, but where is he?

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019) | Chad Stahelski

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum spins off its plot from something that happens in the second chapter, namely that John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is now “excommunicado” by the High Table that controls the world’s leading organization of assassins for killing someone inside the assassin’s “sacred ground” of the Continental Hotel in New York – a big no-no. that sees a huge bounty put on his head. John has very few places he can run, and he’ll eventually run out of safe havens, but he means to keep himself alive long enough to be able to get himself back into the High Table’s good graces somehow.  Nevertheless, the assassins after him are skilled and ruthless, especially the calculating woman known as The Adjudicator (Asia Kate Dillon), who is busy dishing out nasty revenge on anyone caught helping out their buddy in defiance of the orders.

Avengers: Endgame (2019) | Joe & Anthony Russo

Endgame starts in a world following “the snap” delivered by Thanos that extinguished half of all life within the galaxy in an instant, without a trace, in his effort to bring what he feels is a much-needed balance and tranquility caused by overcrowding interests.  After a brief intro, we fast forward five years to find a world that has had trouble moving on from the loss of their many loved ones, especially the surviving Avengers (conveniently, all the characters that comprised of the first core team are among them), who feel a particular sense of guilt for not being able to save the billions they were sworn to protect.  However, a new idea develops to find a way to reverse the situation through a risky and highly improbable gambit in which they must try to traverse time and space to re-connect all of the Infinity Stones and bring back all of those who vanished without losing the good things that have happened since that fateful day. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner, and many, many, many, MANY more appear in this massive crossover event.

Hellboy (2019) | Neil Marshall

In this Neil Marshall reboot, we already have an established the scarlet-bodied Hellboy (David Harbour) as part of the B.P.R.D. (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense), working for his adoptive father, Professor Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (Ian McShane), in corraling and eradicating malevolent supernatural menaces wherever they may arise around the world. Hellboy reunites with Alice Monaghan (Sasha Lane), a powerful medium, and a cat-beast man named Major Ben Daimio (Daniel Dae Kim), in order to prevent the Blood Queen from Arthurian times named Nimue (Milla Jovovich) from taking a mate and growing powerful enough to finally take over the world and eliminate the human presence upon it once and for all.

Shazam! (2019) | David Sandberg

In this lighthearted DCEU entry, Billy Batson is a trouble-making fourteen-year-old living in a foster home in Philadelphia, having been abandoned by a young mother he’s been searching for since she left him at a crowded carnival many years prior. One day, the sleuthing prankster gets transported after an act of bravery to another realms to meet a powerful and reclusive wizard, who has been on a long-term search for someone pure of heart to pass on his magical powers to. The wizard bestows upon Billy the power to turn into an muscle-bound, adult-bodied, costumed superhero by using his name of “Shazam!” Along with his superhero-loving best friend in the foster home, Freddy, the still adolescent-minded Billy has plenty of fun in discovering his new powers and all of the things he can do with them, from buying beer to giving the school bullies some comeuppance. However, things get serious with the emergence of Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, once past over as unworthy by the wizard and seeking to usurp them from Billy, along with the cabal of demon-like possessors within him, representing the Seven Deadly Sins who plan to come to power with Sivana as their vessel to the outside world.

Dragged Across Concrete (2018) | S. Craig Zahler

Dragged Across Concrete is writer-director S. Craig Zahler’s further exploration of the seamy underbelly of American society, particularly through the prism of how that experience causes ripple effects that throw even innocent people into the wake of the criminals.  Most of the action follows the exploits of two cops in the fictional city of Bulwark, the older burnout Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and his younger partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), who get suspended from the force after they are caught on camera going a little too far in roughing up a suspect in the current environment that frowns on the perception of racial profiling. The other major story arc in the film involves Henry Johns, just released from prison, going back to a life of crime in order to provide for his mother (a drug user who has been prostituting herself for needed cash) and disabled younger brother, who has aspirations of becoming a video game developer. The two stories converge when the cops decide they’re going to snatch money from a secretive drug dealer named Vogelmann, while Henry, working for that guy, becomes the wheel-man in a bank heist.

Triple Frontier (2019) | J.C. Chandor

After a nearly five-year hiatus from writing and directing films, J.C. Chandor re-emerges with Triple Frontier (for Netflix), in which five ex-military special ops soldiers reunite in order to stage a heist of a murderous major South American drug lord.  Oscar Isaac is the de facto leader of the quintet, playing Santiago, who decides to “get the band back together” for one last mission for reconnaissance for the government to take down the elusive drug lord he’s spent years trying to take down, Lorea, but changes the mission once he discovers that they could do the bust themselves, take out the human vermin the world is better off without, and score the millions of dollars in cash within his jungle-hidden, well-guarded mansion.  Each of the men find that their service for the country hasn’t exactly resulted in the country taking care of them financially, so they figure they should get what’s fair for their years of sacrifice, making it worth their salt to commit to. Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund and Pedro Pascal co-star in this action/adventure/thriller.