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.”

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.

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.

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.  

Short Round: The Man From UNCLE (2015) ***/*****

Back in the 90s it was popular for movie studios to adapt TV shows from the 60s into big budget features. Kind of like how it’s popular to adapt comic books into big budget features now. Apparently the makers of The Man From UNCLE didn’t get the memo that the 90s are over though, because they’ve adapted one of the few untouched shows of the era, one about an American secret agent (Henry Cavill) and a Soviet secret agent (Armie Hammer) having to team up, even though it’s 2015. Usually when these things get adapted their stories are brought into modern times, but UNCLE has a concept so specific to its era that it was necessary to keep things back in the 60s and make a period piece. Given the dated nature of the source material and the late to the party release of the adaptation, is The Man From UNCLE an irrelevant property that should have been left in the past?

Not exactly. For one thing, director Guy Ritchie is able to utilize the 60s setting to make one of the most aesthetically slick, pleasant to look at action movies that’s come out in a while. Thanks to the costuming, to the affectations of the actors, and to all of the split-screen action choreography that gets put on display, UNCLE is chalk full of vintage cool. It’s hard to imagine a version of the film set in modern times being as visually dense or having nearly as much swagger—and it’s hard to imagine Cavill being so slick as the roguish American agent if he wasn’t always wearing an impeccable 60s suit, or Hammer being as affectively masculine as the steaming kettle Soviet agent if he didn’t have the era’s social cues and gender norms to lean into. The Man From UNCLE is a gorgeous movie full of great acting, and the fact that it’s swimming in the world of the 60s only accentuates that.

The problem with the film is that, even though its actors are surrounded by gorgeous things, and even though they’re all charming and gorgeous themselves, they’re never given anything to do other than typical spy movie stuff that you’ve already seen play out a million times before. Despite the fact that this thing is full of fighting and espionage and world-ending stakes, its most memorable scene is one in which Alicia Vikander’s plucky femme fatale puts on a pair of sunglasses and dances in her pajamas. That girl is endlessly charming, and the camera loves her. With The Man From UNCLE, Ritchie might have made the most breezy, attractive, completely forgettable movie in recent memory. It will enchant you while it’s around, and then it will be completely forgotten the moment it’s gone, like a whiff of designer perfume farted out into a strong breeze.

Trainwreck (2015) ***/*****

There aren’t many things that a comedy has to do in order to be considered a success. If it’s consistently funny throughout its run time and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, then pretty much it did what it needed to do. No big whoop. Trainwreck, the new romantic comedy from writer/star Amy Schumer and director Judd Apatow manages to accomplish both, which is kind of a miracle given how long and shaggy Apatow’s last few movies have gotten, but somehow it still doesn’t quite accomplish everything it needs to in order to be considered a complete success. It’s a success with an asterisk next to the word.

Before we get into the good and bad of the film, let’s talk a little bit about the story. Schumer stars as a girl named Amy, which I guess is supposed to make us believe that the role she’s written for herself is close to her heart and fairly confessional. Her character writes for a trashy men’s magazine during the day and spends her nights binge drinking and having one-night stands, which might have been cute when she was in her twenties, but is starting to look pretty depressing now that she’s getting older. All of that changes when she is assigned to write a story about a successful new sports surgeon (Bill Hader) though, because not only is there a spark between them, but he also ends up being the sort of stable, legit guy who she never goes for. Can a woman who’s lived her whole life as the titular train wreck actually settle down and have a real relationship, or have the life patterns she’s established for herself doomed her to a fate of self-sabotage?

Ant-Man (2015) ***/*****

With the most recent release that exists as part of their “Marvel Cinematic Universe”, Marvel Studios hit a snag. Just when it seemed like audiences might be getting tired of the superhero-origin-story-leads-to-a-big-fight-to-stop-a-world-ending-event-from-occurring-above-a-populated-city formula, they subverted things a bit by making movies like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, which felt more like a 70s-era political thriller and a comedy-driven space opera than they did traditional superhero movies, and are probably the best movies the studio has put out yet—but then they released Avengers: Age of Ultron, which stuck to their established superhero formula too closely, and which felt tired and played out compared to the two movies that came before it. Age of Ultron wasn’t a bad movie, per se, it just felt like more of something we’d already had enough of. 

So, given the less than unanimous praise for Age of Ultron, how does their new superhero movie, Ant-Man, fair when it comes to changing up the superhero formula and giving us a fresh enough spin on the traditional comic book tale to prove that the gigantic slate of superhero films they’ve got planned is not only going to continue to be successful, but is going to continue to be so enthusiastically welcomed by audiences that they continue to break box office records? It does a middling job. In some ways it dabbles enough in the heist genre to feel like a freshening up of the now standard superhero movie, but in others it falls enough into formula to feel like an economic inevitability rather than an adventure the audience is being invited to go on.  

Ted 2 (2015) ***/*****

When Seth MacFarlane jumped from making animated TV series to directing his first live action feature with Ted back in 2012, there were a lot of questions surrounding how successful he would be. His crass, pop-culture obsessed humor was divisive, had arguably been run into the ground through years of Family Guy and American Dad reruns, and nobody knew whether or not he could handle shooting live action. Ted turned out to be a really strong debut though. The hit to miss ratio of the jokes outclassed what was happening on his series at the time, and the guy proved to be adept at blocking and shooting scenes in a way that felt comfortingly like old Hollywood. One could even have argued that his visual style elevated the material. His second film, A Million Ways to Die in the West, was awful though, so now this new sequel to Ted is debuting with just as many questions surrounding its quality as the original.

Happily, Ted 2 is, in most ways, a pretty spot-on continuation of what MacFarlane was doing with the original. Its story is about Ted needing to legally prove that he’s a person so that he can get married, but that’s not what’s important here. This is a Ted movie. What’s important is if it’s funny. The strengths of the first film, which mostly lied in the chemistry between Mark Wahlberg and the CG bear and a skin-crawling villain turn from Giovanni Ribisi, are all brought back, the joke writing is nearly as strong as it was in the original, and overall the thing is funny enough consistently enough to keep you engaged throughout. So it’s got that stuff going for it.

Inside Out (2015) ***/*****

Pixar’s movies have a great reputation for putting just as much focus on character and emotion as they do comedy or adventure, which generally allows them to be a cut above the other animated features that hit the multiplexes. Their characters are deep, three-dimensional, and they develop over the course of the film. Their plots spring out of character, rather than the other way around. The newest movie to come from the studio, Inside Out, adheres to these unwritten rules. This time around, however, the focus on character is so great that a little bit of tunnel vision appears to take place, and the film suffers as a result. Here, the internal life of the protagonist is all that the filmmakers seem to be concerned with, so things like story and humor fall by the wayside to the point where you start to wonder if the studio as a whole isn’t starting to split into two extreme approaches—making either vapid sequels to their big hits like Cars 2 or Monsters University, or original works like this that are going to become increasingly dour to the point where you can’t imagine kids enjoying them at all.

Of course, that sort of defeatism is definitely a reactionary response to the fact that Pixar hit a high with the back-to-back-to-back release of Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up that they’re likely never going to be able to live up to again, and there’s a certain disappointment that always comes from the realization that any magic in the world isn’t going to be able to stay. In truth, Inside Out is a perfectly acceptable animated movie that wouldn’t be viewed as a disappointment if it came from any other studio. It tells the story of a young girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) whose young life reaches a crisis point when her very acceptable life in Minnesota is interrupted by a sudden move to San Fransisco, which isn’t a burg that gels too well with her sensibilities. Well, that’s half of the story. 

Short Round: Spy (2015) ***/*****

After stealing the show with her supporting role in Bridesmaids, Melissa McCarthy was all primed and ready to take over the comedy scene in Hollywood. Everybody seemed to want her in their movies. With the right choices, she could have rode that momentum into being a huge star. Problems arose when everything she did after Bridesmaids varied from being awful to mediocre though. In the last couple of years, it’s even felt like she’s wore out her welcome with movie fans and needs a starring role in a great movie fast. Unfortunately, her latest collaboration with her Bridesmaids director, Paul Feig, isn’t that great movie. It falls more in the mediocre section of the comedy spectrum like their other collaboration, The Heat. It’s good enough to watch, but it’s not anything that’s going to stick with you.

McCarthy is playing a CIA agent who’s really good at working on the technical side of things down in the headquarters’ basement, but who doesn’t really have any experience in the field. That all changes when the agent she supports (Jude Law) is killed by a target who has compromised the field agents’ identities though. Suddenly, management needs someone new to go out into the field, and McCarthy is their woman, giving us a fish out of water story ripe with comic potential.

The problem with that is the movie is never as funny as it could have been or needed to be in order to be a truly effective comedy. It’s got a handful of chuckles here and there, but ultimately it gets too caught up in espionage plots and the creation of action scenarios to be truly, powerfully funny. The film was never going to blow anybody’s hair back as an action flick, so it should have stuck to being more broadly comedic. Luckily, though she never produces any big belly laughs, McCarthy is always likable and relatable enough that you root for her characters, so her journey from being an unsure agent to becoming a confident ass-kicker is effective enough to keep the movie from sinking under the weight of its own ambitions. Well, McCarthy’s character work and a couple of awesome supporting performances work in tandem to keep it afloat. Jason Statham and Rose Byrne both play completely ridiculous characters and straight-face-commit to their ridiculousness so much that they become the funniest parts of the film by far. Bless those two.

Short Round: Adult Beginners (2015) ***/*****

When movies tell a story that features dramatic and comedic elements pretty equally, we’ve taken to calling them dramedies. Many indie movies fall into this category, because the category itself usually lives and dies on acting and screenwriting—two things that are more dependent on talent than they are funding. The best thing we can hope for from these movies is that we care enough about the characters to find the dramatic moments affecting, that the actors are charming enough to make the comedic elements funny, and that enough tonal consistency exists in the script that the success of one element doesn’t sabotage the success of the other. Adult Beginners, the new film from co-writers Nick Kroll, Liz Flahive, Jeff Cox, and director Ross Katz, is solid enough that it accomplishes all of these essential goals, but never so successful at them that it truly excels. 

The story sees Kroll playing one of those adults in an arrested state of development who these indie dramedies love so well. He’s financially crashed and burned while trying to launch an internet startup and now he has to go back to his childhood home to stay with his sister (Rose Byrne), her husband (Bobby Cannavale), and their three-year-old son (Caleb and Matthew Paddock). While their life seems more idealistic on the surface than his, parenthood has lead to them having their own problems, and when they all start bubbling to the surface and their lifestyle starts to chafe against Kroll’s, we then have adequate enough sources for comedy and pathos alike.

As was mentioned earlier, the nuts and bolts of this movie are fine, so in general it’s fine. The characters are well drawn and played by talented, likable actors, so you care when they’re going through something rough and you laugh when they’re saying something funny, but there are still a few things holding Adult Beginners back from being a true success. While you care about the characters in general, they way they’re drawn is so archetypical for indie movies like this that watching them navigate their travails can feel quite a bit like experiencing deja vu. And while the film does feature a few really big laughs, the chuckles don’t come consistently enough for it to succeed as a straight up comedy. The biggest problem may be that the story peters out a bit in the third act though. The tension and the conflict builds well throughout, but their resolution comes in a scene that exists as a too on the nose visual metaphor—so suddenly there is clunkiness where the movie needed there to be catharsis. Adult Beginners is well-acted and entertaining enough to be a perfectly pleasant diversion, but it just misses that next level of being a truly memorable film.

Focus (2015) ***/*****

Based on its advertising, Focus looked like it was going to be just about the most commercially driven, Hollywood production that could possibly be conceived. It featured one of the industry’s most established stars, one of its hottest potential breakouts, a story about conmen collecting huge stacks of cash to appeal to the fellas, and a story about an emotional love affair to appeal to the ladies, all wrapped up in a glossy package. The thing looked so self-consciously commercial that there was almost no chance that it could end up being anything other than completely homogenized and boring. 

No chance except for the fact that it comes from writing/directing duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who also made the largely non-commercial and fairly interesting I Love You Phillip Morris. Was it possible that Focus’ advertising was hiding some interesting twists and turns that make it more than just a grab at mainstream cash? Not really, no, but it turns out that it’s not so bad anyway.

Short Round: Amira & Sam (2015) ***/*****

Writer/director Sean Mullin’s first stab at a feature, Amira & Sam, sticks pretty closely to the content and structural format of the modern romantic dramedy. It introduces two young people who chafe against each other initially but eventually fall in love, and then it introduces a moment of crisis that may or may not sabotage their blossoming relationship before it’s really started, leading to an emotional climax. It also manages to separate itself from the romantic dramedy pack in a couple of important ways though. The most obvious of which is that the two characters who are involved in the romance feel like real, three-dimensional people with actual problems and relatable faults, instead of being the affluent, insufferable, faux-hip ciphers that these movies usually tell stories about.

Amira & Sam stars Dina Shihabi as Amira, an Iraqi immigrant with a traumatic past who’s struggling to find her place in New York City, and Martin Starr as Sam, an Iraq war veteran who’s also having difficulties finding his place in the vapid cultural wasteland last was the United States somewhere presumably after the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003, but before the economic collapse of 2007. Starr is a great actor who I’ve been a fan of since his early days on Freaks & Geeks, so it was a lot of fun getting to see him play a lead role here and expand on what he’s been able to do with the supporting types of roles that he’s usually given, and while relative newcomer Shihabi is a new face to me, she’s such a lovely and live-wire presence here that I’m already confident we’ll be seeing much more of her in the very near future, so, if there are any problems with Amira & Sam, they definitely don’t come from the acting.

Instead, the problems that I had with the film, that other people may share, come from the writing. The script includes a handful of moments of effective comedy, and a handful of moments of affecting drama, but it’s also heavy-handed in the way it establishes the title characters as being likable and relatable, and some distracting phoniness creeps in as a consequence. This happens a bit because the greed and bigotry of many of the side characters comes off as being amplified and cartoony, which seems to have happened in order to paint our star-crossed couple as put-upon underdogs who we can root for, but the big problems stem from a subplot where Sam tries to dip his toes into the world of finance only to find that his morality doesn’t jibe with the shady dealings of Wall Street. The whole scenario could only have been written by someone who has the hindsight of watching the housing bubble burst and studying the causes of the collapse, which makes all of the dialogue we get about the bundling of mortgages and the undervaluing of the bundles some of the clunkiest and falsest-sounding I’ve heard in a movie in a while. And, even worse, none of it was necessary. Starr’s performance was already enough to get us to like and relate to the Sam character, we didn’t also need him to become a prognosticating warrior fighting for the safety of the underclass.

Everly (2015) ***/*****

Everly is a boobs and blood movie, plain and simple. Its story is paper-thin—barely existent—and the two things it focuses all of its energy on doing are putting an absurd amount of violence on the screen and proving that Salma Hayek is a leading lady who’s still got it. Fans of B-movies and cinema exploitation are very much the targeted audience here, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because all of the over-the-top deaths that director Joe Lynch and his team have conceived for this film are a lot of fun to watch be brought to splattery life, and Salma Hayek does indeed still got it. Boy, does she still got it. It’s not a sin for a movie to just want to be empty-headed and entertaining, is it?

There is a complication with tone that makes movies like this more difficult to pull off than they may seem though. Take the mayhem on display too seriously and the lack of a real story or any character complexity starts to look like a problem with the film, but wink at the audience and get too satirical with the bloodshed and you take all of the joy out of the ridiculousness. Movie cheese is less fun when it’s obvious the filmmaker is in on the joke. Fortunately, Everly is able to straddle this line by taking a comedy of errors approach to all of its endless killing.

Short Round: Predestination (2015) ***/*****

Predestination is very much one of those movies where plot is the whole point. It’s full of ins and outs, twists and turns, and it demands that you dedicate the bulk of your attention to following along with its various narrative threads and fully absorbing how they eventually tie together. Because of this, it’s hard to discuss what the movie is about. To talk about its themes, conflicts, and ideas would give away too much and rob the movie of the bulk of its magic. When Predestination opens though, it’s clear that the main character is a time traveling cop of some sort played by Ethan Hawke, and it’s clear that his current mission is to use his time traveling powers to stop a series of bombings that happened in New York City in the mid-70s. There’s also a transgendered character played by Sarah Snook who ties into his investigation in some way. There. That’s all we’re going to give away.

You see, this is a movie from twin brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, who also co-wrote and co-directed a 2003 movie called Undead, where meteorites turned the populace of a fishing village into zombies, and the 2009 movie Daybreakers, which concerned itself with a future in which a plague had turned the bulk of humanity into blood-craving vampires, so it comes as no surprise that Predestination is heavily steeped in big science fiction concepts and biological weirdness. There probably hasn’t been a movie as concerned with the logistics of time travel and all of the paradoxes and time loops that come with them since 2004’s Primer, but unlike that Shane Carruth movie, which was known for its dryness and bordering-on-homework complexity, Predestination will likely become known for how pants-pooping crazy it is and how much fun it is to predict just how far it’s going to go with all the head-slapping silliness.

Despite the surface level fun of watching all of the plot pieces converge in the third act, Predestination is ultimately too mediocre a movie to strongly recommend to everyone though. Hawke and Snook are both good in their roles, but by “good” I mostly mean that they take characters and stories that should have played as being ridiculous and they’re able to ground them enough so that you stay with the story. And that story itself—it sure asks a lot of the viewer. While it pays itself off in the end, the pacing problems that come with it setting up all of the disparate pieces that eventually prove to be related are a series of hurdles that the audience has to leap over if they don’t want to get left behind. If you’re into time travel stories, the weirder corners of the sci-fi genre, and movies where Ethan Hawke tries to pull off a mustache, then Predestination will be worth giving a look to, but if none of those things sound like they’re in your wheelhouse, there will be plenty of more pleasing ways for you to spend an evening. Maybe a nice game of canasta?

Short Round: The Interview (2014) ***/ *****

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have been writing movies together for a while, and with last year’s This is The End they even branched out to becoming co-directors. If you’ve seen anything that they’ve made together so far, then you pretty much know what to expect from The Interview. It’s an irreverent comedy that’s more concerned with wiener jokes than it is in telling any kind of straight-faced story. It’s pop culturally aware and far more concerned with making references to current trends than it is in creating something that will become an evergreen classic. It’s a trifle, really. A well made and often funny trifle, but a trifle nonetheless. The biggest hurdle it’s likely to face when it comes to pleasing audiences, then, is that its subject matter has thrust it into a global spotlight and built up big expectations around what should have just been a disposable comedy.

In case you somehow missed the controversy, The Interview sees Rogen and James Franco playing an ambitious TV producer and a witless talk show host who manage to land an exclusive interview with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), and who get recruited by the CIA to use the opportunity as a chance to assassinate the young megalomaniac. Due to the potentially politically charged subject matter, cyberattacks were perpetrated, terrorist threats followed, and the film’s planned release was eventually scrapped in favor of a much smaller theatrical release and a simultaneous VOD rollout that came days later. It’s been a big deal, an international incident that even the President felt the need to comment on, and the way it’s turned watching this movie into an act of protest rather than the minor diversion it was designed to be is likely to earn it some backlash.

All we should really be discussing is whether The Interview works as a comedy though, and in a general way it does. It’s a little slow to get going, but once Rogen and Franco’s characters actually make it into North Korea, things start to pick up and then never let up. Probably the highlight of the film is Franco’s chemistry with Park, as the two play their characters like giddy school girls whenever they get together and the results can be infectious to watch. In general, it’s Franco’s dumb guy act that really keeps this movie from being a stinker, as he’s always best when he’s going big with his performances, and the clueless nature of his character not only allows him to do that here, it also imbues the film with an aggressively empty-headed and lowbrow approach to comedy that feels almost transcendentally appropriate given all of the political hand-wringing its release has caused. Relax, it seems to assure us, movies are supposed to be fun.

Short Round: The Babadook (2014) ***/*****

For a first time writer/director of a feature, Jennifer Kent did an amazing job making The Babadook. Seeing as the film doesn’t seem to be getting praised as a strong effort from a first time director though, I fear that it could generate something of a backlash. Currently there are a number of respected voices praising the movie as being an instant classic and an immediate member of the horror canon, and it seems to me that such a large amount of hype could cause audiences to come out of it feeling disappointed when they eventually get a chance to see it (currently it’s not playing on too many screens, but is available on VOD if you know to search for it). I guess what I’m saying is that the best way to watch The Babadook would be to go into it expecting to see a typical, overdone haunted house movie, and then come out of it pleasantly surprised that it’s actually got a couple of assets that help to raise it a step above the rabble.

The main thing that the film has going for it is the lead performance of Essie Davis, who’s playing a single mother whose house is plagued with supernatural happenings after she reads her son a children’s book about an insidious figure named Mr. Babadook that seems to invite demonic energy into their lives. Her character goes from sad, to terrified, to manic, to menacing over the course of the film, and she’s able to sell absolutely everything that’s asked of her. Perhaps more impressively though, even though she’s put through a traumatic amount of stressful and annoying situations, she’s able to make you identify and sympathize so much with her character that you never want the camera to cut away from her, no matter how much her ordeal is making you squirm in your seat. The other main character, her son, isn’t realized quite as well. He’s played by newcomer Noah Wiseman, a youngster who the script simply asks too much of. He has scenes where he needs to go big and broad and sell rage, panic, and screaming insanity to the audience, and it’s just more than he can muster—and perhaps more than any actor his age could muster. The scenes where he’s freaking out are supposed to have real weight to them, but when you watch them you can’t help but feel like you’re just watching a little kid being silly.

That they go so far with the kid losing control is part of the other big reason this movie is better than your typical evil spirit movie, however. The horror of this film comes not only from the usual malevolent presence, but also from the crushing responsibilities of being a parent. The typical trials and tribulations of parenthood, and how they’re able to sometimes make even the best parents resent their children, get amplified so thoroughly here that the stress they cause skyrockets off the charts, to the point where you begin to believe that the misbehaving/uncompromising child could have been the only antagonist in the film, and it still would have been just as scary. The way that being haunted by an evil spirit would interrupt your life gets woven in with the way that having a child does interrupt your life, and presenting the two situations next to each other provides the film with quite a bit of meaty thematics for the audience to chew on—which is a pretty unusual thing to say about a movie in this genre, and is probably the big reason that it’s earning so much praise.