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.

Short Round: The Overnight (2015) ****/*****

Gross-out comedies have had a few moments in the sun, the latest of which being in the late 90s. Movies like American Pie and There’s Something About Mary were huge with audiences, made tons of money, and spawned an avalanche of imitators who seemed to be in a body-function-fueled arms race regarding who could be bigger, crasser, and more wrong. Audiences are bound to get desensitized to gags like this eventually though. No matter how strange the thing the wiener gets stuck in, how comically large the tuft of pubic hair gets, or how inventively someone is led to unwittingly interacting with semen, if enough of these gross-out movies come out in a short enough period of time, it’s not going to be long before the target audience starts to feel like they’ve seen it all.

In recent years we’ve definitely passed this point, and filmmakers are having a tough time creating comedies that shock the mainstream enough to earn strong word of mouth. Recently, Ted 2 underperformed at the box office, and even though it contained a symphony of offensive language and a waterfall of strange semen, you don’t really hear anyone talking about how crazy any of the things they saw in it are. There’s one form of comedy similar to these cringe-inducing gross-out gags that never gets old if you do it right though—the comedy of manners—that may be the answer to filmmakers’ prayers. These movies require an establishing of social norms, a character whose purpose is to obliviously break these norms, and a character whose purpose is to be made uncomfortable every time they’re confronted by another taboo. If the rule-breaker is committed enough to get you to believe in the authenticity of their transgressions and the put-upon party is vulnerable enough to get you to squirm alongside the transgressions, then the viewer can’t help but give in to a fit of bodily contortions and nervous laughter. Comedy of manners movies are evergreen, because the laughs come from character instead of from shock, and when they’re done well enough they’re able to make audiences just as uncomfortable as any sex or poop joke ever written.

Writer/director Patrick Brice (who did similar character-based cringe with last year’s Creep, though more in the genre of horror) has gone back to the classic comedy of manners formula to make his new movie, The Overnight, and his efforts have resulted in the funniest, most outrageous movie that’s come out yet this year. The film stars Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling as a straight-laced couple who have just moved to LA and are desperate to meet new friends, and Jason Schwartzman and Judith Godrèche as a Bohemian couple who invite them over for dinner and seem friendly at first, a little bit too friendly after a couple bottles of wine, and then… dear lord, they’re trying to seduce us into some sort of swingers’ orgy, aren’t they? The hosting couples’ antics properly build from curious, to uncomfortable, to transcendently outrageous, and Schwartzman and Godrèche are so straight-faced and genuine that they’re always able to keep you questioning their motives, while Scott and Schilling are so polite and pained in their efforts to navigate the social land mines put before them that you can’t help but empathize with them the whole way through, so you’re left with a movie that starts off funny enough and then gets funnier as it goes on—and at only 80 minutes, it’s able to get in, do it’s job, and get out while still leaving you wanting more. Too few movies are able to accomplish that these days, especially comedies.

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: About Elly (2015) ****/*****

Back in 2011, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi turned heads and won awards with his tense drama A Separation, which not only featured great performances and subtle writing, but was particularly interesting to Western viewers because of the way it mined Iranian culture for dramatic moments that just wouldn’t be all that dramatic if they happened over here. Watching it felt fresh. Well, it turns out he also made another film that was first screened in 2009, About Elly, which has slowly been playing the festival circuit ever since, and which is now finally getting a regular release in the US.

How does this earlier work stand up to A Separation, which amazed everyone with how affecting it was able to make the dissolution of a marriage by exploring its conflict from each opposing point of view, while obscuring the truth of the inciting incident being squabbled over from the audience? It’s not quite as good, doesn’t feel quite as assured in its filmmaking, but it’s still really great, and it has a lot in common with the later film (e.g. awkward interactions aplenty). 

The story sees a group of young parents and their children traveling to the sea alongside one of their kids’ kindergarten teacher (Taraneh Alidoosti) and a single male friend (Shahab Hosseini), with the duel purposes of having a relaxing weekend and hooking the teacher up with the friend. The chill vibe collapses when the teacher, Elly, disappears though, and nobody is quite sure if some curious behavior led to her suddenly bolting without telling anyone, or if she drown in the sea while trying to save a young boy. Thanks to some judicious editing, we don’t know her fate either, so we’re left just as confused as the characters as they panic, try to process the situation, and eventually fall apart as their conflicts bring various lies and indiscretions to the surface. About Elly is human drama in capital letters, and well done human drama to boot. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need more of in theaters. Go see it, if for no other reason than to see the performance given by Golshifteh Farahani, who plays the story’s matchmaker, who clearly took herself to hellish emotional places to properly play the role, and who deserves the recognition.

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.

Short Round: What We Do in the Shadows (2015) ****/*****

Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi have worked together extensively before, on the HBO series Flight of the Conchords, so if you’ve seen that show and responded well to its comic sensibilities, chances are you’re going to love this new mockumentary they’ve co-wrote and co-directed for the big screen, What We Do in the Shadows. Why the spooky and mysterious title? Because this faux-documentary is giving us a look into the lives of a group of four vampires who live together in a rundown, spooky old house in New Zealand. In traditional mockumentary fashion, this movie isn’t about the horrors of being a nocturnal, blood-sucking fiend, however, it’s more about how hilariously neurotic and self-absorbed people can get, and how amusing it is when you get a group of narcissists all living in a house together. It would seem that not even eternal life can do much to instill maturity in some people.

The main thing that a movie like this has to accomplish is being funny, and What We Do in the Shadows is. The laughs are big and they come consistently. There’s more going on in here than just the setup and delivery of gags though. Even though our protagonists are all vampires, they’re also all completely unique characters who feel like they’ve been fully thought through and fleshed out by the actors who portray them. Clement, Waititi, and Jonathan Brugh play the main three we spend time with, and you get the sense that they each love their characters so much that they could talk at length about their histories, the origins of their individual quirks and styles, and the ins and outs of how they relate to each other in different combinations. The jokes in here are great, but the most memorable thing about this movie is the personalities it puts on display.

Clement and Waititi also manage to tell a pretty effective story by the time the end credits roll. A group dynamic is established, an outside element is introduced to that dynamic that puts it into a period of crisis, and then by the time things get resolved everyone feels like they’ve experienced a good deal of growth and change. Or, at least, as much growth as man-babies like these guys are capable of. When What We Do in the Shadows starts off, it feels like it’s going to be a one-note vehicle for nihilist joke delivery, but it develops far beyond that and actually ends up becoming a fairly heart-warming and mature story about the nature of friendship and family in the end. Coming from a movie about ludicrously dressed adult men doing sexy dances in their living room, pulling pranks from The Lost Boys, and puking gallons and gallons of blood in a back alley after a night of heavy partying, that’s a pretty nice surprise.

Short Round: Road Hard (2015) **/*****

The new crowd-funded film from co-writer, co-director, and star Adam Carolla, Road Hard, sees the modern Renaissance man tapping into his own life experiences by playing a frustrated former TV star whose slagging career has forced him to make money by traveling the road as a standup act, all while growing increasingly beaten down by the red tape, empty talking heads, and soul-crushing hypocrisy of the entertainment industry. “Beat down” being the key words there, because Carolla’s character is one of the most inert, blank-faced protagonists we’ve gotten in a comedy in a long time.

Despite containing a handful of legitimate laughs, the script for 'Road Hard' is nearly as stiff and awkward as the screen presence (which could best be described as Frankensteinian) of the man who co-wrote and stars in it. This film feels like an extended version of the pilot episode of one of those sitcoms they give a standup comic—you know, where huge chunks of their stage act are still being used as clunky dialogue because a full writing team hasn't yet been assembled.

And what a dour mood this movie establishes and then wallows in, even in the scenes where the resigned-to-misery protagonist is supposedly breaking out of his shell and relocating his spark. For something that sticks so closely to classic comedic storytelling structure, 'Road Hard' sure can be a bummer to watch. Maybe Carolla and his writing partner would have had better results if they fully embraced their dark thoughts and just wrote a real tragedy instead of trying to juggle tones. You know that the man’s years of talking to troubled teens about their drug and sex abuse problems on the radio has to have provided plenty of fodder for story ideas that go in that direction. Why not leave the obligation to do comedy behind and swim around in that mess if your head is so clearly in a dark place right now? Road Hard is a big step back from the first comedy Carolla co-wrote and starred in, The Hammer, and the missing ingredients seem to be any trace of life or any sense of fun.

Short Round: The Lazarus Effect (2015) **/*****

Director David Gelb has done great work in the world of documentaries before (Jiro Dreams of Sushi), so while it seemed a little curious that his latest project, The Lazarus Effect, was a dramatic film that fits in the horror genre, it was at least encouraging to know that the man had talent. Even more encouraging was the cast of actors he put together. Mark Duplass, Olivia Wilde, Donald Glover—they’re all fan favorites who have done great work in interesting things before, so who wouldn’t want to see what they have to offer the latest entry in the dead-come-back-to-life horror sub-genre? Well, it turns out you wouldn’t, because despite the fact that this film was made by a talented director and features a talented cast, it’s still one of the more boring things that’s hit theaters in a while.

Even though all of the principals here are charismatic people, the script they’re working with is so inept when it comes to giving them interesting things to say or do that the talent and presence they bring to the film becomes a non-factor. You could have cast amateurs in this derivative snoozer and gotten largely the same results. The story here starts off with a group of doctors and researchers working to bring the dead back to life, which makes it firmly a descendant of the Frankenstein story, and then it takes a turn where it becomes a Carrie-esque story about a troubled girl getting brain powers, the combination of which basically makes it a take on The Dark Phoenix Saga from Marvel’s X-Men mythos; but it isn’t able to be half as interesting as any of its influences. If X-Men: The Last Stand didn’t combine a script as bad as this one with even worse execution while adapting the Dark Phoenix story, this would certainly be the worst version of it made. The people behind this thing should probably send Fox and Brett Ratner a thank you note for that.

The problem with the film, aside from the fact that its characters are anonymous blank faces, is that none of the scary stuff that follows their decision to mess with mother nature is remotely original or even presented with a new twist. This movie exists as basically a pastiche of clichéd, overused horror moments that we’ve all seen a thousand times before, and in lieu of building atmosphere, tension, or mood, it relies entirely on jump scares to get any rise out of its audience whatsoever. Seriously, entirely. Half of this movie’s run time is taken up of people either being startled by loud noises or looking for something scary one place and then having it suddenly appear behind them. If it wasn’t for the amazing canine actor who played Rocky the Sad Zombie Dog, The Lazarus Effect would have been a total dud.

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.

Short Round: The Boy Next Door (2015) **/*****

If there was one thing I thought that the entire world could agree on, it’s that there’s no such thing as a sexy teenage boy. That was before I saw The Boy Next Door, however, which is a movie that sells itself on the titillating premise of Jennifer Lopez giving into the dark urge to indulge herself in some underaged man-meat, and then suffering the consequences of her indiscretion. Of course, the problem of there being no such thing as a sexy teenage boy was mitigated by director Rob Cohen (xXx, Stealth) casting 27-year-old Ryan Guzman as a high school kid, but that premise alone should still be enough to help you understand just how ridiculous and ill-conceived a movie this is. 

From Play Misty For Me to Fatal Attraction to Single White Female to Chuck and Buck, stalker stories have long been a staple of the thriller genre. They’re great for building tension, they tell a story that’s horrific but nonetheless grounded and relatable, and they generally make for a good excuse to inject some sex into a story. Maybe they don’t usually make for great art, but they almost always make for good trash entertainment. So, seeing as the second half of The Boy Next Door moves on from the salaciousness of J-Lo having an underage love affair to the terror of having said love affair turn into a dangerous stalker situation for her, you’d think that maybe the movie would still be able to entertain, if even in a half-ironic way. Unfortunately though, it’s not even competent enough to achieve that small level of success.

The Boy Next Door is a dumb movie—not just dumb in concept, but also dumb in execution. Its characters don’t act like people so much as they act like characters in a movie. They don’t speak like human beings so much as they speak like pawns in a melodrama who were conceived simply to drive a narrative forward. The disconnect between these people and the world they live in and real people and the real world is so severe that it becomes impossible to care about anything that happens to the Lopez character, or any of the peril she’s put in—which is ample. In fact, her stalker goes so over the top crazy, and the danger elements of the film get so broad and unbelievable, that a more charismatic actor could have used the antagonist role here to really chew some scenery and produce a potentially memorable bit of movie cheese, but Guzman is not that actor. He’s committed enough that he doesn’t embarrass himself, even when delivering bad material, but that’s the best that can be said of anyone involved in this production—they’ve made something bad, but something that’s too blandly bad for anyone to remember it or hold it against them in a month’s time. It’s probably best for everyone that we never speak of this movie again.

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: Foxcatcher (2014) **/*****

After directing Capote and Moneyball, Bennett Miller has become fairly renowned for being a go-to guy when it comes to biopics. So you’d think that him tackling the life of John du Pont—who was an heir to a fortune, weirdly obsessed with amateur wrestling, and who suffered from issues with self esteem and mental illness that eventually led to him committing a murder and being incarcerated—would make for a pretty amazing movie. Unfortunately, this time around, it doesn’t. Miller isn’t a director who I’ve found to be too on the nose in the way he tells stories before, but for some reason his hand gets fairly heavy here (through extraneous use of flashbacks, camera work that over emphasizes what we’re supposed to be feeling about a scene, etc…), and the result is a movie that contains individual scenes that are good on their own, but that doesn’t work as a whole.

Probably the thing about Foxcatcher that’s earning it the most attention is its performances, which makes sense, because Steve Carell is really going out on a limb as du Pont, and Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum are burning an equal amount of calories playing David and Mark Schultz, a pair of Olympic gold medal earning brothers who get sucked into du Pont’s bubble of influence thanks to his obsession with wrestling, and eventually suffer negative consequences because of it. Each performer doesn’t work to the same result, however. Ruffalo is absolutely amazing here, disappearing so completely into the older brother David that you never once catch him performing. Tatum and Carrell are a different story. Tatum is so forcefully playing the younger brother Mark as a hulking, confused, lump of focus and simplicity, that to behold him on screen is like laying eyes on a cave man. But at times he goes a bit far and it feels like he’s doing a caveman impression—and poor Carrell fairs even worse. He’s really making a go of it as du Pont, but they’ve got him buried in so many stupid looking prosthetics and have dressed him in so many silly outfits that it’s never not clear that you’re watching Steve Carell play-acting a wacky character.

The main problem with Foxcatcher is that it’s boring though. Slow burns can be effective, especially when they’re building up to as big a moment as this film is, but this one goes beyond being a slow burn. This movie is barely ever smoldering. It’s so much longer than it needs to be, it spends too much time on scenes that don’t actively drive the narrative forward, and it asks us to be far too interested in the day to day existences of characters who exist as little more than blank slates with one critical personality flaw. There’s no life, no humor, no anything in this script other than a slight awkward tension in the interactions between the principals that’s just barely able to keep you from turning it off. Foxcatcher is a story that may have been worth 100 or so minutes of screen time, but at 134 minutes it gets sunk by its own weight.

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.

Short Round: Laggies (2014) ***/*****

The film industry creates no shortage of indie movies about characters who are old enough to be adults, but who nonetheless live in a state of depressed, arrested development. That doesn’t mean that these movies can’t still be good if they find a unique voice or are made especially well though. Lynn Shelton is the kind of director who likes to make loosely-scripted, improv-heavy, small-scale, realist movies, so they too need to bring a little something extra to the table in order to be good. Her Your Sister’s Sister cast found an amazing chemistry and created an amazing movie together as a result, while her more recent film, Touchy Feely, came off as more of an unfocused mess. Laggies, which is both a lost young adult movie as well as a Lynn Shelton movie, is a solid-though-unspectacular effort that puts it not only right in the middle of the pack of slacker movies, but also somewhere right in between the spontaneous joy of Your Sister’s Sister and the frustrating faults of Touchy Feely. What that means to you will probably depend on how strongly you respond to the genre and the creator.

Laggies is about a girl who’s probably somewhere in her late 20s, named Megan (Keira Knightley). After a decade or so of hanging out with the same group of friends she’s had since high school, Megan comes to realize that everyone she knows has turned into married, careered, dead-eyed yuppies, while she still feels that exploratory spark of youth and has yet to figure out what she wants her life to be. One proposal from her painfully earnest-though-lame longtime boyfriend (Mark Webber) later and Megan reaches a crisis point. Is she really ready to lock in to this kind of traditional existence? Retreating, our would-be hero ends up skipping out on her responsibilities and loved ones and holing up in the bedroom of a random high school girl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who she meets outside of a liquor store. As if this wasn’t intrigue enough, even more conflict creeps into the picture when, after running away from her own problems, Megan then finds herself deeply involved in the troubles of not only this young girl, but also the frazzled-though-charismatic single father (Sam Rockwell) who’s been raising her.

Overall, Laggies is good but not great, though if there is one aspect of the film that elevates it above mediocrity and makes it worth seeking out, it’s the lead performance given by Knightley. She’s an actress who I’ve been hot and cold on in the past, but after what she accomplished here, I feel as though I’ve reached the point where I’m sold on her as a leading lady completely. Not only is she great at playing open-wound vulnerability (a refreshing change from all the repressed period picture performances of her early career) while letting every nuance of emotion that her character feels play over her naturally emotive face, but she’s also able to impress with the chemistry she’s able to conjure with her co-stars, which is just off the charts. Whether she’s lending an ear to Moretz’s confused kid or trading quips with Rockwell’s lonely adult, you absolutely believe in the onscreen relationships as they’re developed; which is essential to a movie like this whose premise is so inherently ludicrous. A movie about an adult hiding out in a teenager’s bedroom probably should have been a train wreck, but in the hands of the people involved here, it’s more like a train ride—maybe not the most exciting way to spend an afternoon, but it certainly has its charms.

Short Round: Big Hero 6 (2014) ***/*****

Disney Animation’s recent delving into video game-themed adventure, Wreck-It Ralph, proved that they’re a studio who could step outside of their princess roots and make animated movies that appeal to both boys and girls alike. And Marvel, the super hero factory who they teamed up with to make this movie, Big Hero 6, are the last people who need to have their credentials once again listed. In theory, Big Hero 6 looked like it represented the perfect marriage of content and creators—a surefire home run if there ever was one. In practice, however, it doesn’t quite manage to get there. If we’re going to stick with baseball metaphors, we’ll call it a solid double.

Big Hero 6 is a loosely adapted big screen version of an original Marvel comic that told the tale of the forming of a team of Japanese superheroes. This being mainstream Hollywood moviemaking though, we’re not getting the stories of Japanese-speaking people this time around. Instead, the film has created the city of San Fransokyo as it’s setting—an immersive metropolis that mixes San Francisco with Asian iconography and then pumps itself full of visual steroids. The story told is that of a troubled young genius named Hiro (Ryan Potter) and his loyal and lovable robot Baymax (Scott Adsit), who outfit a team of science-obsessed grad students with high tech weaponry in an effort to solve the mystery around and avenge the death of Hiro’s older brother, Tadashi (Daniel Henney), and inadvertently create the world’s newest team of superheroes in the process.

Big Hero 6 is a solid film, the kind that is likely to be enjoyed quite a bit by children, but, in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t bring anything to the table that would allow it to stand out from the rest of the animated pack. It’s frequently amusing, but never legitimately funny. It’s packed full of action, but it’s never legitimately thrilling. And, most of all, the things that it does manage to do well are things that too closely resemble aspects of other movies that already did them better. The Iron Giant did the boy and his robot story better. The Incredibles did animated superhero adventure better. Things like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs or ParaNorman told the story of the sensitive and intellectual outsider better. Big Hero 6 never makes any major missteps, but in a world that’s so inundated with great animated family films as well as great superhero adventure movies, it needed to find a more unique angle to attack these storytelling forms from in order to not feel like such an also-ran. Baymax is cuddly and cute, but not enough to support an entire feature.

Short Round: Gone Girl (2014) ***/*****

Over the years David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, The Social Network) has built up such a reputation as a master director that his name on the marquee is pretty much the only thing a movie needs to sell itself. Gone Girl has more going for it than that though. It’s also got a best-selling Gillian Flynn novel as its source material, and it’s got an intriguing ad campaign that introduces us to a couple played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, has Pike’s character mysteriously disappear, and then puts Affleck’s through the wringer as the news media turns him into the primary suspect. What happened to this man’s wife? Is he truly the good person that he projects himself as being when in the public eye, or does the handful of dark secrets he keeps behind closed doors point to the fact that he might have done something sinister? It’s a good mystery, but it only makes for about half of the story.

The problem with writing about a movie like Gone Girl is that it goes in so many unexpected places and it relies so heavily on its surprises to be a satisfying moviegoing experience that you can’t really talk about much of anything without ruining said experience. To even say anything about Pike’s performance would give away too much about her character’s fate, which is the uncertainty that everything gets built around. What should be said though is that the second half of the film, which is where all the twists start taking place, is completely different in tone than the first half, which is the material used in the advertising. Gone is a grounded story about the fate of real people and suddenly in its place is soap opera melodrama involving characters who behave far too insanely for you to maintain any real attachment to. Gone Girl’s true intentions are eventually revealed to be to stun the audience with ridiculous twists, and then to needle them with matters of gender politics that are sure to fan the flames of a good number of post-movie arguments. How one responds to all of the pulpy weirdness will likely come down to the individual and how engaged they found themselves with that first half of the film that proves to be a fake-out.

Fincher’s established aesthetic and that master craftsman’s touch that he brings to everything he makes are both on full display here, he’s gotten strong performances out of all the featured members of his cast, and he’s commissioned Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor to compose another moody score that increases the tension of everything that’s happening on the screen, but when I walked away from having seen Gone Girl, I left not astounded by the work of all of these talented artists, but instead wondering what it was about this silly story that was able to draw them all together in the first place. Taking the ride that is Gone Girl is engaging in the moment, but afterward I couldn’t help but feel like all of the dour gravity of the first act and the pedigrees of the artists involved had tricked me into watching something trashy and dumb—like if I went to a fancy restaurant and the Chef’s Special turned out to be Frito pie. I’ll eat the junk food, sure, but next time I’d appreciate a little more transparency in the menu. Expectation can be everything when it comes to how you respond to a film.

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

The Drop, which is the latest film from Bullhead director Michaël R. Roskam, works on several levels. On its surface it’s most obviously a street-level crime drama, and it tells a tale with enough twists and turns and rampant corruption to be effective as that, but it also manages to get deep enough into the personal lives and motivations of its players to work as a sort of working class character study too; plus it puts enough focus on the dramatization of the adopting of a puppy by a sad sack bartender to be a fairly effective boy-and-his-dog story as well. Mostly though, what it really succeeds at is being a showcase for a handful of really talented actors to put on a handful of really strong performances.

The film stars James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy as the manager and bartender of a local watering hole that’s owned by a ruthless gangster who uses it as a way of collecting and moving money that he acquires through various illegal gambling ventures. Gandolfini and Hardy’s characters are basically given the tasks of keeping up the bars’ legitimate appearance, protecting the money in their care, and keeping their mouths shut about everything that’s going down. What seems to be a regular routine for them gets interrupted after a late night robbery raises questions about everyone’s loyalty, however. Does the crime have anything to do with Gandolfini’s resentment over being usurped as the local tough guy by the foreign invaders who are now his bosses? Maybe it somehow involves the local hood who keeps claiming that the dog Hardy recently adopted is his own? Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that the status quo has been interrupted, and before the end credits roll, somebody is going to have to die.

Gandolfini and Hardy get the bulk of the focus here, and they prove to be really effective in their roles, both when paired together and when paired with supporting players. Gandolfini is basically using what brought him to the table—that undercurrent of aggression that’s clearly stemming from a place of insecurity thing that he used so often as Tony Soprano—so it should come as no surprise that he appears completely comfortable in his role. Hardy is showing a bit more vulnerability than we’ve seen from him before though, and he’s still really authentic, even when working out of his comfort zone. His bartender character wilts like a flower in the face of violence, he looks at the ground and shuffles his feet in the face of social interaction, often muttering to himself afterward; but, through it all, Hardy is able to keep enough of a resolve burning in his eyes that you never write him off as a cowardly or unrelatable protagonist. It’s akin to those early scenes in Rocky, where we watch Sylvester Stallone interacting with his lower-class neighborhood and working as a low-level thug, but stretched out for an entire movie, and it’s pretty dang entertaining. Throw in Noomi Rapace resonating as a live-wire abuse victim and Matthias Schoenaerts intimidating as a Randy Savage-esque street tough who seems like he could explode into violence at any minute, and The Drop is a movie that’s well worth checking out just based on its acting alone.

Short Round: The Trip to Italy (2014) ***/*****

Back in 2011, writer/director Michael Winterbottom and stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon saw success from editing down their BBC miniseries The Trip, and releasing it internationally as a feature film. The movie basically consisted of Coogan and Brydon playing exaggerated versions of themselves while traveling around the North of England and eating at fancy restaurants, under the pretense that they were taking the trip in order to write it up for a magazine. Their relationship had a competitive streak, especially surrounding who did better celebrity impressions, and Coogan’s character was dealing with some pretty serious insecurity issues regarding his stagnating career and advancing age. That was about it. The movie was pleasant enough—it included a couple moments of comedic brilliance and a couple somber moments that hinted at deeper depths—but mostly it was just a watchable diversion. The Trip to Italy is them doing the same thing, but in Italy.

Seeing as Coogan and Brydon are just naturally funny together, and are both fairly strong actors to boot, The Trip to Italy manages to hover around that “watchable diversion” area that the first film fell into. It makes a couple of well-meaning decisions that keep it from being quite as strong as the original though. For starters, this time around Coogan is the character who has gotten to a more content place in his life, and Brydon is the one who’s less than thrilled with his situation and is acting out. While it’s nice that Winterbottom decided to change the dynamic up, his efforts don’t quite pan out, because Brydon is at his best when he’s playing the oblivious simpleton, and Coogan is the one whose persona naturally lends itself to angst and hidden darkness. The duo’s relationship isn’t nearly as contentious this time around either, which makes sense, because ignoring the bonding they did in the first movie in order to create drama would have felt cheap, but it robs this movie of a lot of the fun tension that the first one had nonetheless. Somehow it just doesn’t feel right to see Coogan smiling and laughing at Brydon’s motor-mouthed antics rather than being embarrassed by them.

More than anything though, The Trip to Italy is a step worse than its predecessor because it lacks that one comedy bit that’s just so impossibly hilarious that it sticks with you for months, which is what the dueling Michael Caine impressions provided the first film. They go back to the Caine well again here, and even update the bit a little in order to also make fun of the other ridiculous voices that were featured in The Dark Knight Rises, but like most comedy bits, it’s just not as funny when you hear it for a second time. There are a couple new jags the guys get on that are worth your time, and if you liked the first movie it’s likely that you’re going to enjoy this one as well, just probably not as much as the first. Which, I guess, still puts it a step above most other comedy sequels, which generally turn out being frustratingly awful. Hurray for mediocre!

Short Round: What If (2013) ***/*****

Even the good movies about young romance—the indie ones that don’t include A-list actors and that feature quirky hipster characters instead of soulless yuppies—generally manage to be at least a little bit annoying. They can be funny, and they can feature good acting, but they’re still usually a little too precious for their own good, and they’re still usually a little too pleased with how clever and above the rest of the rabble they are to really resonate. What If is that movie exactly. It’s clever enough to get some laughs out of you, and it stars Daniel Radcliffe and Zoe Kazan, who are strong enough actors to get you invested in the romantic destinies of their characters, but it’s still just your typical indie-leaning romantic comedy. It’s so precious that it will make you roll your eyes just as often as it makes you laugh, its main characters trade quips and banter so incessantly that it comes off as being slightly smug, and it still employs enough rom-com clichés that it can’t really be considered any real alternative to its mainstream counterparts. 

“Let’s go swimming.” 

“But we don’t have any bathing suits…”

The story is a step more interesting than the usual boy and girl get together, boy and girl hit a snag and break up, and then boy and girl have a reunion at the airport tale, which helps. Radcliffe plays a lad named Wallace who has recently had his heart broken, Kazan plays a girl named Chantry who he meets at a party, and Rafe Spall plays Chantry’s boyfriend Ben, whose existence puts a crimp in any plans for this movie to be a romance. Given their clear connection, is it possible for Wallace and Chantry to be platonic friends without his single status and her taken status making things weird? Clearly not, and you can probably see where this whole situation is heading, but director Michael Dowse (who also made the amazing Goon) and credited writers T.J. Dawe, Michael Rinaldi, and Elan Mastai at least give the situation a thorough and nuanced exploration. Nobody is really a villain and nobody is really a victim, valued friendship between the sexes is never treated as an impossibility due to sexual complications and it’s also never treated as the way things should be if we could just rise above trivial desires. The situation is muddy, the decisions the characters make are complicated, and there’s only once or twice where somebody acts dumb and out of character just so some drama can be injected into the story. 

That those things do happen a couple of times is a problem, but because Radcliffe and Kazan are good, and because they’re supported by actors as charming as Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis, and because the movie has the good sense to build up to a big climactic moment in the central relationship and then get out quick, it never completely derails itself. Overall, this is a decent pick for the next time you’re looking to indulge in a new cinematic romance, which, if you’re either a teenage girl or as generally weepy as me, is probably pretty often.