Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what movies I’ve seen over the past week. Below, you will find short reviews of those movies along with a star rating. Full length reviews may come at a later date.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

No Time to Die

What did Daniel Craig bring to the role of James Bond that none before him have? Mixing in a bit of Sean Connery’s debonair and Timothy Dalton’s machismo, Craig’s bitter take on the character fits well in the darker, more agonizingly realistic era the franchise has yet had. The traditions and styles of the Bond series are still there, but they have a veneer that’s more dull and abrasive. It’s as if Bond’s producers saw what worked with The Bourne Identity series and adapted it to the Bond universe. After all, Casino Royale came out after the first two Bourne pictures.

Whether that’s been a benefit to the whole or a detriment is up to the individual viewer. It’s easy to embrace the more realistic and often morbid world because of its similarities to our own while the stylized elements of the series have been dulled and diminished. What you expect from the Craig era films is something more viscerally daunting. The joie-de-vivre, self-assured swagger of the Bond character reduced to a more relatable everyman who just happens to know how to kick ass in myriad ways.

No Time to Die is an amalgam of all that has been the Craig Bond experience. The thrills are all still there and the action segments are among the best the franchise has offered. The scene at the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. party with a newly-minted agent played by Ana de Armas is the highlight. What we often forget about the Bond character is that he’s human. He’s not just one of the world’s greatest spies. He has the heart of a human being that is sorely tested by the events around him. He, like the audience, must watch as his loved ones are harmed and his cherished institutions tarnished in pursuit of seemingly noble means.

What this film means to the future of the franchise is unknown. A return to the pulp excess of the earlier films might be in order, giving audiences a chance to see the vaunted figure in a new and more simple light. Like the stunning opening credits sequence for this film, there’s still hope that all that we once knew about this character can still return and ask the placard at the end of the film says, James Bond Will Return. But can he return unchanged?

Scream

Unlike the recent James Bond outing, Scream understands its essence and embraces it whole-heartedly. Grizzly murders have returned to Woodsboro, but can it be more of the same or a re-invigoration of a premise that had begun to fade in recent years?

Returning for another stab at the Scream franchise are series originals Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, and Skeet Ulrich. They are supporting characters whose involvement in the narrative comes fittingly. The core of this story is Melissa Barrera’s Sam Carpenter who returns to Woodsboro when her younger sister is viciously attacked in the surprisingly adroit pre-title segment. Like James Bond, audiences have come to appreciate that introduction to the killings with a familiar face being murdered. While we haven’t gotten the level of celebrity in the opening like we did before (think the unforgettable Drew Barrymore or the pretty damned intense Jada Pinkett-Smith scenes), the producers have found the best way to integrate it into the narrative as a whole.

The potential young victims include Jack Quaid, Mikey Madison, Jenna Ortega, Dylan Minnette, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Mason Gooding, and Sonia Ammar with Marley Shelton as Minnette’s mother and the new sheriff of Woodsboro and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo by Heather Matarazzo. The killings feel more gruesome than ever and the parade of hapless victims, even the self-aware ones, is part-and-parcel for the event. However, what the franchise always did well is weave a simple narrative through complex bait-and-switch mechanics, all culminating in a thrilling and insane finale.