I had a terrific time watching Glass Onion, writer-director Rian Johnson’s sequel to his huge 2019 hit Knives Out, which is only playing in theaters for one week before it moves to Netflix on December 23. I saw it in a crowded theater full of enthusiasts yelling out their reactions and guffawing heartily at every gag. Appropriate for the holidays, it’s a movie the whole family can enjoy. Sadly, there aren’t a lot of those made anymore.

Of course, Glass Onion’s not in the same league as Knives Out. That was a uniquely wonderful film — there was no way Johnson could match it. It was an all-in-one triumph of entertainment — a crackling mystery, an effervescent comedy, a bright satire of American mores in terms of family, politics, race, and class, and a fabulous star vehicle for Daniel Craig as Detective Benoit Blanc, as well as a showcase for a breakout star (Ana de Armas) and a number of old-time stars and character actors who were given delightful roles including Christopher Plummer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, and Michael Shannon.

On top of all that, it was a remarkably smart film about the mystery genre, both a celebration drawn from Johnson’s own fandom, and a critique of traditional detective fiction based on the worship of rational knowledge that could supposedly manage the chaos of modern life. Every other way of “knowing” or cognitively making sense of the world is shown to be as good or better in Knives Out. If you ever wondered why the film begins with a beautiful slow-motion shot of the rich family’s two German shepherds out on the estate, running past the camera, it’s because the German shepherds know all along who did the murder, having sniffed him out the night of the killing. They just can’t tell anybody.