Tom Hardy

For the sake of this scenario, which takes place among UC Berkeley students, let us assume these symbiotes intend to retire from swashbuckling and instead plan to live their lives out peacefully within their UC Berkeley hosts.

Somewhere between witnessing a sweaty Tom Hardy chomp on a live lobster and seeing the character of Venom soulfully tell Eddie Brock that he’d made him change his mind about humanity, I realized that “Venom” was not the version of the story that I’d grown up with.

“Venom” similarly has multiple different storylines. Rather than choosing one of these versions, Fleischer’s film is an amalgam of the character’s in-comic history that fails to be a coherent on-screen narrative.

Soon the Shelbys are faced with a harsh new primary villain, brought to life by a mustache-twirling, devious Adrien Brody.

It’s the height of summer, but theaters around the Bay Area are currently resplendent in a wide variety of amazing pictures right now, from tentpole superhero movies to quiet, meditative micro-budget films

We learn hardly any names — no backstories, no motivations. But war leaves little time for dialogue, and the wordless understanding between the soldiers, while one we may not be privy to, establishes a new way of telling war stories — one that focuses not on an “us vs. them” but on survival by any means.