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:

The World’s End

Edgar Wright’s final film in his loosely-connected Cornetto Trilogy brings the series to an end with Simon Pegg as an adult with a stunted sense of self built out of the happy, but failed youthful attempt to complete the Golden Mile. As he and his High School friends attempt to make the circuit of bars, drinking one pint of beer at each, once more after having long given up their small town pasts. Pegg’s Gary King lies and cheats to convince his pals to join him, but as his lies catch up with him, a more nefarious plot is uncovered wherein their entire home town has been replaced by emotionless simulacrums of an alien nature.

Wright and Pegg have a strange sense of humor, but the comedy in this film is considerably less omnipresent in their prior films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Maybe they have grown up, or maybe their characters have. From the man-child of Shaun of the Dead, walking lifelessly in a life he loathes to the hyper-competent cop of Hot Fuzz whose bypassed youthfulness has stunted his emotional competence back to the man-child of The World’s End who wishes only to recapture his youthful potential, that his alcoholism has virtually destroyed. Each film deals, in its own way, deals with the refusal of Pegg’s character to grow up or grow out, which mirrors our own attempts to revive our pasts so that we can remember the halcyon times of our lives, which others may not feel so rosily inspired by.

There are other themes at play in the films, but this is the one that most connected for me and that director and co-writer Wright, writer and star Pegg, and co-star Nick Frost have managed so successfully to create enduring visions of banalities and absurdities of life through a comedic and pensive lens is quite the accomplishment. While you can watch these films simply for their laughs and bizarre situations (zombies, cults, and aliens), they have far more to say about the human condition than anyone would have thought diving into them for the first time.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Peter Parker has been re-invited for the third time. His first appearance in 2002 as the teenage webslinger was given to then-27-year-old Tobey Magurie who gave audiences their first glimpse of the popular Marvel superhero. The first Sam Raimi-directed film was solid and the second remains the pinnacle of all of the Spider-Man films, but the third was a slapdash misfire. In 2012, Spidey was given a new face with 29-year-old Andrew Garfield in the role. The first film of that short-lived series was a success, giving us the most accurately-depicted version along with a solid cast of characters and an entertaining adventure. The second film was a disaster and remains the nadir of the franchise.

Now, we have a new version. First introduced in Captain America: Civil War, 21-year-old Tom Holland is the closest in age to the 15-year-old character, and he certainly presents the kind of awe and wonder such a youngster with these talents would have, but the movie struggles in places to be more than just a bridge film between Civil War and the next Avengers film. Successful indie director Jon Watts seems an odd fit to the series, but he makes the most of his time with it. The plot is simple and the villain is solid with Michael Keaton bringing some measure of humanity to the Vulture, but not quite reaching the pinnacle of multi-dimensional villainy that was Spider-Man 2‘s Doctor Octopus thanks to the brilliant work there by Alfred Molina.

Holland is a fitting addition and with some seasoning may be a fitting replacement for Garfield. The writing team needs to focus in on what makes the character unique and jettison the constant callbacks and plot-infusions of the Disney Marvel Cinematic Universe. It needs desperately to stand on its own, which is why the film stumbles too frequently over its loosely-edited 2-hour-13-minute runtime.