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:

Call Me by Your Name

Luca Guadagnino’s painterly exploration of young love and coming of age in Crema, Italy is a gorgeous piece of visual and narrative poetry. A leisurely stroll through the rural Italian countrside accompanies a complex romantic relationship that develops between a young man (Timothée Chalamet) and his father’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) research assistant (Armie Hammer), staying for a short period in the summer of 1983.

Reminiscent of Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, Call Me by Your Name fills in its details with lush photography of the beautiful environs in which our protagonists struggle with societal influences, sexual urges, and the challenging task of growing up in a world of foreign beauty and differing social mores.

Chalamet delivers a wonderfully complex portrait of a conflicted young man following societal standards regarding romanticism, seeking first to connect with the young women around him and then finally realizing that perhaps his initial attraction to a same-sex paramour is a natural and central part of himself. Although Guadagnino has resisted calling this a gay love story, there is nothing in the film that doesn’t suggest that premise is indeed true.

This is a film of bristling romanticism, rich emotional complexity, and palpable sensual energy that rivals the sumptuous environment in which it’s set.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Based on a popular book, Jumanji made its first cinematic appearance in 1995 with Robin Williams, Bonnie Hunt, and an incredibly young Kirsten Dunst about a board game whose environment and perils spill into the real world. The film was popular that year, ranking seventh at the year’s box office, but no movement was made towards a sequel. Twenty-two years later, the concept is refashioned for a modern audience with Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Nick Jonas, and Bobby Cannavale in tow.

Sitting unused in the basement of a local high school, the board game Jumanji has taken a new form, that of a console video game. When four students are sentenced to detention and find themselves bored in the basement, they fire up the console and enter the world of Jumanji. Literally. The self-conscious dork (Alex Wolff) becomes the bulky team leader Dr. Smolder Bravestone (Johnson); his childhood best friend and football star (Ser’Darius Blain) becomes zoologist Franklin “Mouse” Finbar (Hart), who is also Bravestone’s weapons valet; the populist phone addict (Madison Iseman) because the cartogrpaher/cryptographer/archaeologist/paleontologist Sheldon “Shelly” Oberon (Black); and the overachiever (Morgan Turner) becomes the martial arts master Ruby Roundhouse (Gillan).

Not only must this quartet (and later quintet adding Nick Jonas as the team’s pilot) battle a sinister plot to control the Jaguar’s Eye by the big game hunter Van Pelt (Bobby Cannavale) and save the kingdom of Jumanji, but they must also combat internal strife amongst the four non-friends thrust into a game requiring trust that they don’t yet possess.

Quite possibly the funniest movie in some time, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is an incessantly ribald and coarse comedy that trades on modestly juvenile humor in unique and hilarious ways. The trailer made this film look like a folly of epic proportions, a film as different from its fun-loving original as it is similar to an R-Rated comedy without the more lewd humor and sharp language, the film is energetic, engaging, and entertaining. Gillan is the film’s MVP, but Black and Cannavale also do solid work with Johnson and Hart fine in small doses. Jonas is a bit inexperienced, but does well with what he’s given.