ALL THE RIGHT MOVIES

Kristian House, of Oneonta, N.Y., is a former math teacher who now writes math content for textbooks and online platforms. He started constructing crosswords after watching the 2006 documentary "Wordplay." For this puzzle the first theme answer he thought of eventually became the puzzle's title instead.

This is Kristian's 18^th crossword for The Times, and his first Sunday.

This is my first published Sunday puzzle in the Times, which is exciting for me because I've had at least one puzzle appear on every other day of the week, which means I've finally "hit for the cycle."

I had a lot of fun coming up with the theme answers for this one. The first theme answer that I thought of ended up being a great hint to the puzzle's theme, so I decided not to use it in the puzzle, and I made it the title instead. The puzzle originally had the extra theme answer BULLETPROOF MONKEY in the middle of the grid, but the movie "Bulletproof Monk" was a little too obscure, so I had to remove that answer. However, that allowed me to add some nicer long down answers that hopefully improved the overall puzzle.

I tried to be as silly as possible with the cluing of the theme answers, but some were a little too "out there," so Will changed a few to tone down the silliness. Thankfully, he kept my clue for 54-Across, which is one of my absolute favorites. I hope that everyone gets a chuckle today and that they enjoy the puzzle.

We're at the movies today! Get it? MOVE Es? As in, move that long E sound into the theater? You know, like when you sneak in a full dinner of a rack of BBQ ribs, corn on the cob, and an entire sheet cake so you can have enough to last you the three movies you stay for when you're only supposed to go to the one?

Don't judge me.

Oh! ALL THE RIGHT MOVIES = all the moved Es are to the right!

Well, that doesn't quite work either, but it's close enough.

It's all too easy to add an E sound to something to create kookiness, so I appreciated Kristian's effort to tighten things up, restricting to 1.) only well-known movie titles and 2.) always adding the E sound to the right, i.e., at the end of the title.

Ah, drat. IRONY MAN and GOODY FELLAS ruins that consistency. Fuggedaboudit.

Through my solve, it felt like I was pushing through a bog of short answers. Nothing terrible, but nothing that interesting either. These shorties are generally ignorable, stuff that solvers get through to reach the truly interesting stuff — the themers and the long bonuses — but when you have this much of it, it tends to be more noticeable.

It's also noticeable when you draw too much from one specific well of crossword glue. In this case, there were so many tough names — WOPAT NEKO OMARR KIRI TOD GAMERA/YGOR READE ZAK etc. — it started to feel like a trivia contest.

Part of the excessive-short-entries problem was that Kristian went up to 142 words, past the max of 140. The themers also take up a huge amount of real estate, so there are only little cul de sacs left over.

It's a tough call. JOHN WIKI was the only themer that caught my attention because it's the only interesting spelling transformation (and unfortunately one of the themers in a puzzle I recently helped a friend put together, sigh). However, taking it and IRONY MAN out would have opened up the grid, allowing for more bonuses, fewer short words, and some cleanup in aisle OSCAN RESTE.