Enlarge / Jane (Natalie Portman) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth) are back at it in Thor: Love and Thunder . (credit: Marvel Studios)

Thirty minutes into the heartfelt silliness of Thor: Love and Thunder , a comparison dawned on me that clarified why I enjoyed this week's new film so much: In 14 years of Marvel Studios films, the company has never as successfully made an homage to Jim Henson as this.

At its most madcap, Love and Thunder giddily honors the likes of Fraggle Rock and The Muppet Show in terms of a rogue's gallery of goofballs and kiddos chewing up the film's gilded, Technicolor scenery. And at its darkest, it feels like a direct descendant of Labyrinth , as its villainy combines no-holding-back ruthlessness with some impressively staged shadow realms.

Most importantly, co-stars Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth nail the film's titular L-word in remarkable fashion. This action film knows that it's smothering a slab of rom-com peanut butter with ridiculous superhero-stakes chocolate, and the film's leads dance around this fact mostly in joking fashion while still threading the needle of building a believable, finale-clinching connection. (Comparing the results to Kermit and Miss Piggy would short-shrift their incredible work to some extent, yet the comparison also kind of makes sense, once you see the movie.)

Enlarge / Beavis and Butt-head, seen here potentially succumbing to space madness. (credit: Paramount)

The Mike Judge-iverse has long toyed with the inherent comedy of utter stupidity. But as anyone who has looked beyond the incessant "heh heh heh" of Beavis and Butt-head knows, Judge's cartoons, TV series, and films are at their best when they toy with the question of exactly who in the room is the "smart" or "dumb" one.

The great news about this week's Beavis and Butt-head Do the Universe , a straight-to-Paramount+ film debuting on Thursday, June 23, is that it finally sees Judge and co. bring a smart-kind-of-stupid approach to his most famous cartoon. This week's film achieves this far more successfully than the series' other feature-length film from 1996. Its ideas meld well with the series' bottom-of-the-toilet stupidity and feel fresh instead of like they were ripped from other Judge series.

Failing forward, all the way to space

This many years later, these dudes still love AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts. Also, nachos. Lots of nachos. (credit: Paramount)

The film opens with madcap comedy in its sights, as Beavis and Butt-head are in high school in the '90s, still oblivious to anything that doesn't resemble boobs, explosions, sticky snack foods, or phrases that sound like euphemisms. (Heh, heh. "Sticky.")

Enlarge / Jurassic World: Dominion , out this week exclusively in theaters, brings the gang back together—but that's maybe not a good thing. (credit: Universal)

How low can you set your expectations for Jurassic World: Dominion ?

If you can burrow those expectations deep into the earth, perhaps so far that researchers don't discover them for thousands of years, you may have a good time. That goes double for parents who are looking for a movie to watch with amped-up, pre-teen dinosaur aficionados. The film's ideal audience agrees with its filmmakers about what matters here: the dinosaurs, not the humans.

This is the kind of film in which a Quetzalcoatlus appears on the horizon, and a character responds by saying its name briskly yet accurately, just before the majestic flying dino emerges in terrifying and detailed fashion. This creature gets better and fuller justification for its actions than pretty much any actor in the film—which might have been fine, had Dominion 's writers not spent so much time trying, and failing, to stitch its characters' motivations together.

Enlarge / Tom Cruise, still crazy after all these years. (credit: Skydance Productions)

As I walked out of my review screening of Top Gun: Maverick , coming down from its adrenaline-filled finale, a small part of my brain began looking for dents in the film's armor. Maybe it's the critic in me, but my thoughts didn't need long to land on stuff from the original film—a plot point, a stylistic choice, a particular character—that didn't return this time.

I chewed on those thoughts for a second, but before I could lose myself in cataloging them at length, a sensation came over me. It landed like a massive G-force blast, as if I were a jet fighter pilot attempting a seemingly impossible climb: one of great satisfaction with this sequel and admiration that this film pulled off the impossible feat of adhering to the old while doing something new.

Returning to old haunts. (credit: Skydance Productions)

The series' predilection for steering military theater toward Hollywood-style silliness is arguably more tolerable, as tempered by a savvy script and cutting-edge stunt work. The character development hits important notes for both Pete "Maverick" Mitchell and the people in his high-speed orbit, and the film's focused supporting cast mostly hits the mark.

Enlarge / Unsurprisingly, things get strange in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness . (credit: Marvel Studios)

On paper, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a formulaic Marvel Studios superhero romp. Its plot beats read like sticky notes slapped onto an overpaid executive's wall: A superhero arrives, seems all-powerful, then runs into an unstoppable foe. That strife turns the world upside down, and in resolving that change, the hero mends something in themselves to ultimately save the day, all while finding equal parts comedy and heart when the film's world gets weird.

But a great film can succeed even while twisted around a formulaic plot, and it's here that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (launching tonight in the US as a theatrical exclusive) wins out. Even though it comes with the Marvel Studios pitfall of predictability, it also stands as a grand example of the company letting filmmakers be themselves—and shows how clever, visually arresting filmmaking can transform "formulaic" plot beats into a fascinating journey for multiple characters. (Plus, after so much alternate-universe wackiness in multiple Spider-Man films , this film surprises by finding refreshing uses of the concept.)

What better way to show how far the universe of Marvel films has come in the past two decades than to have Sam "is he seriously dancing " Raimi stretch out his weird filmmaking legs and regain his blockbuster-level comfort?