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:

Spectre

Taking on a pattern similar to that of the 1980s Star Trek films, the James Bond features starring Daniel Craig are alternating between good and bad. His debut in Casino Royale was a brilliant re-launch of the franchise. Then came the much weaker Quantum of Solace, not a bad feature, but a poor follow-up to something as good as Casino Royale.

While I wasn’t terribly impressed with certain aspects of Skyfall, it was a marked improvement over its predecessor. Now we have Spectre, an attempt to relaunch of major Bond villain while trying to tie the prior three films together into a grand scheme against Bond. One of the worst entries in the franchise, Spectre struggles against itself with predictable outcomes, cheap theatrics, meandering performances, lazy stunt sequences and ill-fitting humor.

The opening sequence featuring Bond on an admittedly thrilling chase through the streets of Mexico City couldn’t overcome the sappy, funereal title sequence with unsatisfying images and a monotonous song by Sam Smith whose shrill vocal acrobatics distracted greatly from the decent, if lengthy lyrical content. From there, the pace was set and Sam Mendes latest cinematic dirge took the audience slowly, deliberately and simplistically through a plot that tried to pretend it was complex, but was relatively banal in execution.