Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) **/*****

It’s not long into the first post-credits scene of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that you realize you’re actually reliving the climactic events of director Zack Snyder’s previous filmic foray into the world of DC Comics, Man of Steel. This time around we’re not seeing things from the perspective of the heroic Superman (Henry Cavill) and the villainous General Zod—who are busy pounding on each other while the city of Metropolis gets destroyed around them—though, we’re seeing things from the perspective of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck), who has choppered himself into the city and is running around trying to help people on the ground. Immediately the scenario provides you with the sort of grounded drama and human stakes that it was criticized for lacking in Man of Steel, and it feels like Dawn of Justice might be a big time improvement over its predecessor.

Then you realize it makes no sense that Bruce Wayne would chopper himself into a city under attack by aliens as a civilian instead of flying there as Batman in his bat-shaped fighter jet that’s equipped with all manner of missiles and chain guns, and the wind pretty instantly goes out of the movie’s sails. The moment doesn’t make any sense from the standpoint of character motivation, or even from the standpoint of basic logic, and neither do any of the many moments that follow in this long, confusing slog of a film. Dawn of Justice isn’t the sort of movie that doesn’t make any sense if you stop to think about it, it’s the sort of movie that constantly rubs your nose in the stink of what little sense it makes, to the point where you’re more confused about what you did to deserve such treatment than you are mad about it.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) ****/*****

Eight years ago a JJ Abrams-produced, Matt Reeves-directed found footage film about a giant monster rampaging through a city called Cloverfield was released. It was pretty successful. That was the end of the story, until a couple months ago when a trailer for a movie called 10 Cloverfield Lane got released out of nowhere. What is this new movie? Is it a sequel to Cloverfield? If so, why didn’t anybody know about its existence until it was already filmed and ready for release? Now that it’s out, we finally have some answers. 10 Cloverfield Lane is an exciting new post-apocalyptic thriller from veteran producer JJ Abrams and first time feature director Dan Trachtenberg. It doesn’t have anything to do with Cloverfield, other than maybe the inclusion of an Easter egg or two for the eagle-eyed to point out, but it does seem to be the beginning of a franchise where Abrams will use the word “Cloverfield” to market mysterious new genre projects with sci-fi conceits. Think, like, The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits.

The film stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Michelle, a woman who we first meet skipping town after having a big fight with her boyfriend, and whose story we follow after she’s run off the road in the middle of the night and then wakes up injured and chained to a wall in some kind of underground bunker. The guy who built the bunker and did the chaining is Howard (John Goodman), and according to him some sort of catastrophic attack took place in the world while Michelle was out, leaving the air toxic and pretty much everyone else dead. Howard is quick to anger, and comes with a real creep vibe, so it would be easy to dismiss his story, except for the fact that there’s also a nice young chap named Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) in the bunker, and he says that not only were the attacks real, but he had to fight his way into the bunker at the last minute, right before the whole world went toxic, and Howard wasn’t exactly too happy about it. Who to believe? What to believe? How long are these three going to have to stay down in this bunker? And what’s going to happen to them while they’re in close-quarters confinement? 10 Cloverfield Lane is the sort of movie that raises a whole mess of questions.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (2016) ***/*****

Tina Fey is funny and attractive. She’s a great writer and a talented comedian. That’s why she was able to become head writer during her stint on Saturday Night Live, why the network series she created and starred in, 30 Rock, was such a big hit, why the feature film she penned, Mean Girls, was so good that it even made Lindsay Lohan likable, and why she gets rave reviews every time she’s tapped to host an awards show. There’s no real mystery behind Tina Fey’s success. What is a huge mystery, however, is why the film industry has never been able to give her a starring role in a movie that wasn’t bad to mediocre, considering Fey’s massive movie star potential. The good news on that front is that Fey is great in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and it’s by far the best movie role she’s gotten to date. The bad news is that the film is still not good enough overall to be the thing to solidify her as the type of A-list actress who regularly gets to headline exciting projects.

From directing team Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris, Focus), Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is an adaptation of the memoirs of wartime reporter Kim Barker, focusing on the time she spent reporting on the war in Afghanistan in the mid 2000s. Fey plays Barker, or actually, she plays a fictionalized version of her named Kim Baker—you’ve got to leave enough room for plausible deniability, after all. Over the course of her stay in Kabul, we see the dangers of being out in the field, the partying the journalists get up to at night to escape the stresses of their situation, the friction that gets generated when you plop Westerners down in an Islamic society, and the struggles the media faces when it comes to getting a fickle public to pay attention to the day-to-day realities of our seemingly endless “war on terror.”

The Witch (2016) ****/*****

Usually, even when you’re dealing with a really talented young writer/director, their debut feature film only serves as an indication of their potential—a promise of what they might achieve once they get a little more seasoning and the support of the film industry. Then there’s Robert Eggers’ first feature film, The Witch, which arrives on the scene fully-formed, fully-realized, and completely confident about what it is and what it’s trying to do. This movie is well-made, authentic to the period in which it’s set, and dark and creepy as hell.

The Witch is about a family from 1600s New England who get ejected from their community because their father questions the local church’s authority and won’t back down when he’s brought in front of the townsfolk. Given their banishment, they set up a small farm on the edge of the woods—a perfect place to live if you want to draw the attention of the devil-worshipping witch who lives in the wilderness just beyond. First their baby gets abducted and sacrificed, and then, once they all start pointing fingers at each other over that, an escalating series of creepy events take place that eventually culminate in the members of the family being at each other’s throats to the degree of murderous insanity. To make matters worse, the younger siblings have started talking to the family’s goat, Black Phillip, who may or may not be the Earthly form of Satan.

Deadpool (2016) ***/*****

During the lead up to the release of Deadpool, I started to feel left out in the cold. Everyone seemed to be really excited for it, amused by its off-kilter marketing, and I just couldn’t care less. Ryan Reynolds has never worked as a leading man. The oh-man-so-random humor that serves as Deadpool’s trademark is the sort of thing that’s only funny to cackling teenagers. Plus, action sequences that are full of characters weightlessly flying around, doing unrealistic flips, and CGI destruction that lacks any impact or danger are just about the most boring things to sit through, and its trailers were full of that sort of garbage. I went into Deadpool already convinced it was going to be the worst. A funny thing can happen when you keep an open mind though—you can be surprised—and after I gave the movie an honest chance it turned out that Deadpool wasn’t terrible at all. It’s actually pretty mediocre. 

So what is Deadpool, anyway? He’s a motor-mouthed mercenary named Wade Wilson (Reynolds) who was put through traumatic experiments that not only gave him healing powers and left his entire body severely scarred, but that also shattered his mind and left him in a state of constant hallucination and mania. This movie is an origin story, so you meet Wade before his procedure, you meet the acid-tongued hooker he falls in love with, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), and you meet the evil scientist who turns him into a monster, Ajax (Ed Skrein). What follows is a pretty typical revenge story with a little damsel in distress heroics thrown in for good measure. But, you know, colored with that trademarked Deadpool raunchy randomness.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) ***/*****

The idea behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, that of rewriting Jane Austen’s classic novel of social repression so that it takes place in a world full of flesh-eating zombies, is one that should have been clever and amusing for about a minute or two. It’s the sort of thing you hear about, chuckle at the notion of, and then dismiss. It shouldn’t have been enough to actually support an entire book, let alone a film adaptation of said book. And yet, here we are, watching a Burr Steers-directed (Igby Goes Down) film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s bastardization of Austen’s novel, and the results are pretty dang entertaining.

Nine times out of ten a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film would have ended up being some kind of bottom of the barrel exploitation farce—something that looks cheap, lacks weight, and fails to connect with the audience in any substantial way, like Grahame-Smith’s other foray into this sort of cinematic myth corruption, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This one isn’t just a one-note joke though. Not only does it maintain the bulk of what makes Austen’s story entertaining and resonant to modern audiences, and not only does it handle the horror of its zombie elements pretty well, but it’s also surprisingly well-crafted.

Hail, Caesar! (2016) **/*****

Joel and Ethan Coen have made movies that people didn’t like before. Even their greatest films are far enough afield from normal sensibilities to keep them from being loved by everyone. Then there are the movies they’ve made that most people agree just aren’t very good—things like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. The Coen brothers making movies that people don’t like is nothing new. I never imagined that they’d make a movie that I didn’t like though. I’m the guy who thinks Intolerable Cruelty is oozing with way too much charm to be bad, the guy who thinks that few movies are as consistently hysterical as The Ladykillers. Unfortunately, however, the day that I didn’t like a Coen brothers movie has finally come, and the movie that made it happen is Hail, Caesar!

The film stars Josh Brolin as Eddie Mannix, a fixer of sorts for a prominent film studio in the 1950s. His job is to keep the studio’s unruly movie stars in line and to cover things up when their decadent Hollywood behavior threatens to generate bad enough publicity to hurt the company’s bottom line. Though he’s tasked with taking care of several unique problems over the course of the film, his primary concern is that one of the studio’s biggest leading men, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), has been kidnapped by Communists. You see, given his position, it’s his responsibility to negotiate Whitlock’s release. People in the know will tell you that Mannix is based on a real-life figure of the same name, a man who worked for MGM rather than the fictional Capital Pictures that exists in this film.

Jane Got a Gun (2016) **/*****

Throughout the 90s and the aughts, so few people were making Westerns and so few Westerns that got made were any good that it felt like the genre was dying. There were some rumblings of a resurgence back in 2010 when the Coen brothers made a bunch of money and got a bunch of critical acclaim with their True Grit remake though—and with the release of Slow West, Bone Tomahawk, and The Hateful Eight last year (which were all awesome to varying degrees), it started to look like we were on the verge of a full-on Western renaissance. Maybe those films raising expectations is why Jane Got a Gun feels like such a disappointment. Conversely, maybe the lowered expectations the genre came with for so long is why it also feels like Jane Got a Gun should be given a pass for being such a disappointment. Either way you cut it though, the sad truth is that, like most movies that get released in January, Jane Got a Gun has a lot of problems.

The film opens with a man (Noah Emmerich) returning home to his wife and child and their isolated ranch with a small handful of bullets in his body, dying. That’s not the worst of his situation though. The worst is that the bullets were put in him because he crossed a powerful gang of outlaws, the sort of gang who isn’t going to be happy with just seriously injuring an enemy, so now they’re on his trail, they aim on finishing the job of murdering him, and they’ll likely also take care of the wife and the kid when they get there. The wife is Jane (Natalie Portman), and given the fact that her husband has been incapacitated, it falls on her to protect her home and her family. The twist there is that the only gunslinger she knows who might help her is her ex-fiancé (Joel Edgerton). He answers her call, begrudgingly, but once he’s in the house of his former love and her new husband, bad feelings begin to bubble to the surface. Add that to the ticking clock element of the gang of outlaws on their way to wreak havoc, and this doesn’t turn out to be a good situation for anyone. 

The Boy (2016) ***/*****

There’s nothing in the world better than a horror movie that starts out simple by establishing a setting and a mood and that then spends the rest of its time slowly and deliberately building the threat of whatever’s stalking its protagonist. Horror beasties are best left lurking in the shadows, where our imaginations make them more terrifying than any bit of creature design or special effect ever could, until the tension and pressure of their increasingly overt behavior becomes so great that you have to finally release it by having them do something terrible. A satisfying build to a satisfying freak-out is the recipe that good horror is made from. It’s not so easy a thing to achieve though. There’s a razor’s edge that needs to be walked, a needle to be threaded, in order to build at the right pace and then go off the rails at the exact right moment. 

The Boy is the sort of horror movie that does almost everything right, but because it builds at slightly too slow a pace and for slightly too long, its impact isn’t felt as much as it should be when it finally makes things go nuts. Somewhere in the middle of this movie you start to get a little bored, a little restless, which makes the climax feel like it comes just a little bit too late. If you think of a horror movie as being the sort of prank where you pop a balloon next to a person’s head in order to startle them, you want to pop the balloon when it’s as full of air as possible in order to get maximum effect. What The Boy does is slowly and deliberately blow up the balloon until it reaches the point where it looks like it’s going to burst at any second, and then it just kind of lets the air out of it for a while, finally popping the thing when it’s only about half full. Sure, it’s still enough to get a jump from the victim, but if they’d only popped the balloon back when it was at its breaking point, it could have resulted in so much more pants-pooping.

Carol (2015) ***/*****

Was anyone progressive and cool enough to write about lesbian relationships in the conformity-embracing climate of the early 1950s? Yes, Patricia Highsmith (‘Strangers on a Train,’ ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’) was, which is just the sort of thing you’d imagine capturing the interest of filmmaker Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine). Carol is his adaptation of Highsmith’s 1952 novel ‘The Price of Salt,’ in which an unhappy housewife named Carol (Cate Blanchett) indulges in a lesbian dalliance with a pretty young shop girl named Therese (Rooney Mara) during the final stages of separation from her wealthy husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler). Carol is quaffed, mysterious, and enchanting, and Therese is young, spun-around, and trying to figure out what kind of woman she wants to be. This being the 50s, things aren’t going to be easy for either of them.

The reason to see Carol is that it’s ridiculously pretty to look at. The exhaustive work of costumer Sandy Powell and production designer Judy Becker teams with the work of probably about a thousand other artists to create an immersive, expansive journey into a romantic and idealized version of the early 50s. Haynes and his cinematographer Edward Lachman’s decision to shoot the film on Super 16mm rather than 35 mm or digital lends their images a fuzzy, tactile graininess that separates the film visually from any other recent release. Carol is rich and warm and layered—the kind of movie that you feel like you could reach out and touch, or even wrap yourself up in like a blanket—and when that aesthetic gets paired with the gloss and glamour of the period-set production design, the results are a viewing experience that has the emotional resonance of flipping through a cherished old photo album that belonged to your grandmother.

Anomalisa (2015) ****/*****

A surface explanation of its plot makes Anomalisa sound like a very mundane movie. It’s about a rather ordinary guy named Michael (David Thewlis) who wrote a successful book about customer service getting flown to Cincinnati to speak at a sales conference. The first part of his trip sees him feeling isolated from everyone around him, then he tries and fails to connect with an old flame, and then he meets and finds a spark with an intriguing new stranger. That’s it. Boring, right? Not so, which makes sense once you factor in that the film was written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and that Michael and all of the rest of the characters are marionettes brought to life through stop-motion animation.

Creating a world of puppetry isn’t the only stylistic trick Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson have come up with for this one either. They’ve also made the decision to have Tom Noonan voice every other character Michael encounters, in the same monotone. Well, every other character except for Lisa, the intriguing conference-goer who sports the voice of Jennifer Jason Leigh. What this does is create a great filmic shorthand for that feeling depression causes where everyone around you turns into a faceless mass of humanity who you feel completely isolated from, as well as a shorthand for that electric feeling you get when you meet someone who finally stands out from the crowd and who you feel an instant connection to. Thus, with a couple of high-minded filmmaking risks (and the help of strong vocal performances from Thewlis and Leigh), our dynamic directing duo take a story that initially sounds ordinary and ends up making a movie that’s anything but.

Sicario (2015) ****/*****

Back in 2010, director Denis Villeneuve released a movie called Incendies that was about a pair of siblings researching a family history full of rape, torture, and murder. In 2013 he released a pressure cooker of a movie about child kidnapping and pedophilia called Prisoners. So the guy has got something of a style. His newest movie, Sicario, is about the war currently being waged between US law enforcement agencies and Mexican drug cartels, so given the violent nature of that war and the unflinching style with which Villeneuve tackles everything, it’s pretty hardcore.

Emily Blunt stars as a hard ass FBI agent who gets recruited by a shady government task force dedicated to thwarting the business of the Mexican drug cartels, on account of how their extreme violence and disturbing level of influence has begun to creep over the border and into small town USA. Blunt’s character doesn’t know exactly what she’s going to be doing, or what the ultimate endgame of her actions are going to be, but she’s more than a little sure that what she’s involved in isn’t going to be on the up and up, and more and more it gets to looking like she’s not going to feel very good about herself, morally, when all is said and done.

Short Round: Turbo Kid (2015) ***/*****

In concept, Turbo Kid is so completely mired in the current Tumblr-generated, 80s-obsessed, throwback culture that’s been driven deeply into the ground that you’d think it would play as being tired, but in execution it’s so sincere and so concerned with celebrating the joys of everything that was fun about 80s genre cinema that you still can’t help but have a good time watching it. The story is a low budget throwback to Mad Max, with dashes of things like Star Wars and Big Trouble in Little China thrown in. The Kid (Munroe Chambers) is our hero, a young punk with a sweet BMX bike and a custom-painted helmet who lives in a fallout shelter full of every awesome toy, comic book, and bit of junk food he can salvage from the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is his surroundings. His life is every ten-year-old’s dream, which is escapist gold in itself, but it’s not all the movie has to offer.

Things pick up when he meets a very manic and very pixie dream girl friend named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), who he’s reluctant to accept at first but who eventually wins him over through the sheer force of cuteness, and they pick up even further after she’s kidnapped by the evil forces of an after society tribe leader named Zeus (Michael Ironsides). Before you know it, he’s using his turbo-powered weapon that kind of resembles an archaic video game accessory to team up with a grizzled cowboy named Frederic the Arm Wrestler (Aaron Jeffrey) in order to save the girl and bring justice to an outlawed landscape—all set to the kind of pulsing, synth score you’d expect a movie like this to have if it actually did come out in the 80s. It all sounds so cloying, doesn’t it? But it’s just so damned earnest that you can’t help but get on board anyway.

That said, the film isn’t a complete joy. In many ways its low budget nature only ads to the charm of what it’s trying to do, but in other ways it’s still limiting. Clearly there weren’t too many locations writing/directing trio François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell could afford to shoot at, so the film kind of just does the same thing over and over again in similar looking places, with diminishing results. How many battles between goofy, sporting good-equipped good guys and goofy, power tool-equipped bad guys can one sit through? Quite a few, especially given all of the delightful, over the top gore that this film provides, but not quite as many as it requires you to. Somewhere after the fifth time the heroes have suffered a devastating loss you stop caring about their plight and start looking at your watch. Turbo Kid is a lot of fun, it’s just maybe not feature film fun. Cut a half hour off this thing, throw it on Adult Swim, and it would have been legendary.

Z For Zachariah (2015) ***/*****

While the premise of setting a movie after some sort of world ending apocalypse has occurred is far from unique, Craig Zobel’s new film, Z for Zachariah, is able to separate itself from the pack a bit by telling a small story and keeping its focus squarely on character. The setting is a fertile valley on an Earth that has been otherwise ravaged by radioactivity. The setting is just the catalyst for the story though, not the focus of it. This isn’t a movie that’s all that interested in explaining why exactly the whole world went to shit, or why this particular valley was immune from the devastation, it’s just interested in putting a few characters in the middle of the situation and then exploring how the way they react to it speaks to the human condition.

The basic setup is that a farm girl named Ann (Margot Robbie) has always lived here, and she’s doing her duty as the last living member of her family to keep the farm going when she finds an explorer named Loomis (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who has wandered into her isolated little world. He’s the first person she’s seen in a really long time, and thanks to an understandable mishap he’s suffering from some pretty serious radiation poisoning when they meet, so being the trusting, down to earth farm girl she is, she takes him home and nurses him back to health, and after a period of time they predictably start to form a bond. Before they can consummate that bond in the way that adults do, however, a second figure from the outside world makes his way into the valley. His name is Caleb (Chris Pine), and while Loomis is a learned man of science who doesn’t have much room for religion or sentimentality, Caleb has a personality that seems to be much more copacetic with the way country girl Ann’s is on the surface. Perhaps predictably, tension both sexual and murderous then begins to be built.