Take a pokéball and fill it with nostalgia. Then shout “I CHOOSE YOU” and throw it. Depending on whether you’ve given your Nostalgia the right kind of pokéberries, it will have evolved into PURE JOY.  That’s this movie in a nutshell  pokéball.

My eighteen-year-old loved Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, while I merely enjoyed it. My pokéberries aren’t the right kind. Many scenes which I could acknowledge as being impressively immersive were an absolute wish come true for her.

She grew up watching Pokémon, and I did not.

She also solved the mystery while we were in the car on the way to the movie. I rejected her hypothesis on the grounds that it seemed like a real stretch, and would make for a weird story, so chalk another one up for her. She enjoyed the movie more than I did, AND she solved the puzzle correctly.

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu does not clear my Threshold of Awesome, but I concede the point that I am only audience-adjacent for this film. If you like Pokémon, you’re the target audience, and you’ll probably love it. If you’re making it a group activity, though, you might want to check everybody’s pokéberries before heading out.

As promised, here is my spoiler-free review.
1) I really liked it.
2) It clears my Threshold of Awesome
3) It retroactively boosted my enjoyment of Avengers: Infinity War. 

I’ll say more later. I do think you should make time to see this in theaters soon, because being part of the audience for this made it extra awesome for me. YMMV, but hey, you might like that too.

The new Hellboy film is fun, and gooey, and gross, and David Harbour does just fine taking up the horns and crown from Ron Perlman. Yes, Perlman’s chin (and entire demeanor) felt almost typecast for 2004’s Hellboy, but Harbour stepped up and delivered the goods.

The film is R-rated for graphic violence. The filmmakers chose to do cinematic renditions of the splattery enrupturing found in the Hellboy comics, and while I don’t ordinarily go in for those kinds of things, in this case I feel like it worked very well in service of the story.

Hellboy crosses my Threshold of Awesome, and I was excited to have an epilogue, a mid-credits scene, and an after-the-credits scene, because they did a convincing job of offering me more Hellboy films in the future.