AUGUST 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

The annual trickling away at the end of summer is upon us (no Guardians of the Galaxy in the wings to explode at the last minute, I fear), which is just as well for me: it's going to be a crazy month with much less time for theater-going than I'm used to. So for me, this monthly preview is an unusual chance to actually work out my priorities, since "see everything unless I decide against it later" isn't going to be a strategy this time around. And before we leave July behind, I know I still need to catch up with Trainwreck; soon, I promise.


7.8.2015

A big weekend of smallish releases: Fox's second attempt at Fantastic Four isn't shaping up to be the world-beater we might have hoped for. I liked the early suggestions of where the tone was headed, but the too-visible woes in the film's production history have left that moot, along with the bland-ass trailers. And it's been fun watching people tie themselves in knots about Michael B. Jordan as Johnny Storm, and I personally think he's a great pick for the role, but the rest of the cast is whiffy as it gets.

Going down the line, we come to Ricki and the Flash, which unites Jonathan Demme, Meryl Streep, and Diablo Cody, and while Streep/Cody seems like a brilliant match made in Heaven, Demme/Cody is a very "things fall apart, the center cannot hold" proposition, don't you think? Is there any overlap in their respective filmographies. And also more bland-ass trailers that pretty thoroughly reveal all the important emotional beats. Next up is The Gift, the Joel Edgerton directorial debut we didn't know we apparently needed, with Jason Bateman making the weirdest bid for artistic stretching ever, turning his everyman shtick to the service of a sleazy hero in a psychological thriller.

Surely set to be last in the box office race, but first in my heart, is Shaun the Sheep Movie, whose grammatically ghoulish title cannot hide the fact that it is a new Aardman film, and Aardman films are a holiness above all else.

In limited release, and given GKIDS general release strategies, I'd bet I'll have to wait until the end of the year to even think about catching up with it, we find Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, a Salma Hayek passion project that unites a killer list of indie animation directors in a narrative/anthology hybrid. One of my most anticipated films of 2015.


14.8.2015

I confess that I was more interested in Straight Outta Compton when we didn't know that it was going to be two and a half hours long. I mean, political importance and cultural flashpoint and all, it's still a biopic, and that's a fuckton of time for a biopic. But what else is going to be worth seeing that weekend? Guy Ritchie's attempt to salvage a film that Steven Soderbergh couldn't get off the ground in the feature-length update of the old Cold War spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., with its playfulness replaced by Ritchieisms? Underdogs, a monstrously clumsy-looking Argentine animated feature with visibly awful dubbing into English? No, and no.


21.8.2015

Man, we're really starting to get into the Augusts now: they remade the 2007 video game adaptation Hitman, now calling it Hitman: Agent 47. And they're releasing it.

At least the other two wide releases for the week sound like actual movies: Sinister 2 is clearly a bad idea, given that 2012's Sinister unraveled so hard in its second half, but horror sequels are a thing that exist in their own world and always have been. And while a stoner comedy about Jesse Eisenberg as a spy who is also a pothead feels like something that should have come out in, like 2009... No, I take it back, Sinister 2 is the only film that sounds like an actual movie. But American Ultra is coming out anyway, and it has the odd fortune to be the first Kristen Stewart film of her critical renaissance.


26.8.2015

Did you know that revolutions in Southeast Asia can sometimes inconvenience expatriated Americans? If not, No Escape has you covered. I feel like I thought this was going to come out months ago.


28.8.2015

We Are Your Friends is a movie about EDM starring Zac Efron, which is great, because it means I can avoid two things I dislike at one time.

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JULY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Two months into summer, two great films, and one awe-inspiring record-setting mediocrity. The season's second, generally small half begins now, and on paper at least, it looks promising. At least, for myself, there are more films I'm looking forward to in July than there were at the start of either May or June. There's always room for a surprise - or a disappointment, of course - but I confess myself feeling uncharacteristically optimistic.


1.7.2015

And here come two sequels to crap all over that optimism, though Magic Mike XXL certainly would seem to have more on its side: it's a phantom Steven Soderbergh movie directed by his longtime first AD Gregory Jacobs, but shot and edited by Soderbergh himself. And also a sequel to a movie with no obvious reason to possess a sequel, and I suspect less of the surprising depths of character and sociology. And, most critically, no Matthew McConaughey. Its competition is Terminator Genisys, the third sequel to a pair of films with even less obvious reason to possess any, and the consensus of critical opinion seems to be that it's every bit as bad as it has any cause to be. I must say, I'm looking forward to getting drunk over the holiday weekend and heckling it, if nothing else.


10.7.2015

The question we're clearly being expected to ask: why not a film centered on the gibberish-spouting sidekicks from the Despicable Me franchise? Hence Minions, which is surely going to end up outgrossing Inside Out, because there is nothing good.

In the runner-up columns, we find the latest first-person horror picture to crap its way into the world, The Gallows (apparently about a theatrical play that kills), and Self/Less, a thoroughly generic-looking sci-fi thriller with Ryan Reynolds. But it's also directed by Tarsem Singh, and there will never come a day when I'm not excited for a new film by Tarsem Singh.


17.7.2015

So, The Look of Silence is the best film of 2015. See it when and if you can, even if you haven't gotten to its companion piece The Act of Killing yet.

Otherwise, we find Marvel's latest, the thoroughly Marvel-looking Ant-Man, and the comedy Trainwreck, which finds the wonderful Amy Schumer writing and starring under director Judd Apatow, and that holds my attention right up until the 125-minute running time, because dammit Apatow. But I still think it's probably going to be as good as any other comedy this summer.


24.7.2015

Make Pixels with the same hook - aliens send giant versions of '80s arcade game characters to destroy Earth - and absolutely any other cast than Adam Sandler, Kevin James, and Josh Gad, and you capture my interest. But that's not the one they made.

Also, you can tell summer is running out of juice when a barbarically narcissistic-seeming teen movie, Paper Towns, and the Jake Gyllenhaal boxing drama Southpaw both get wide releases at the same time.


29.7.2015

So they're reviving the Vacation franchise, because of course it would get to this point. Still, if '80s nostalgia properties have to be exhumed, they're doing it with ones that had a solid foundation in the first place.


31.7.2015

Hopefully, now that the Mission: Impossible series has finally figured itself out - back in 2011, with Ghost Protocol - they can keep making them, even without Brad Bird involved. So I am conditionally and tentatively looking forward to Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, though there are plenty of reasons for the fifth film in an action franchise to go spectacularly wrong. But the plane stunt looks cool, anyway.

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JUNE 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

The good news: this has already been the summer of Mad Max: Fury Road. The bad news: this is now going to be the summer of movies that aren't Mad Max: Fury Road. That being said, I concede that June has a couple of films that, in any other context, I'd be excited for. Not now, of course, with cinema having reached its end point and all. But some of it could still be entertaining enough.


3.6.2015

It made me so absolutely happy when Entourage, the feature adaptation of the 4-years-in-the-ground HBO program about the worst kind of American maledom, got moved up to a Wednesday release. Because that meant that it couldn't possibly win the weekend at the box office. And that meant that there was nothing that could compel me to see it.

Anybody who reads that sentence and makes this film their ACS fundraiser review request goes on my enemies list.


5.6.2015

Melissa McCarthy and her best director, Paul Feig, team up for Spy, which is, I gather, about a spy. The word that it's the first McCarthy feature that uses here comic talents beyond an ability to spout vulgarisms and be fat makes me incredibly happy, and I'll happily declare this the comedy I'm most excited about for the whole summer.

And because the universe can't say "no", there's a film called Insidious: Chapter 3, and I am so, so angry that I already used my "Inshittyous: Crapter X" joke, because I think that represents the best I can do relative to this franchise.


12.6.2015

Having been born late in 1981 and thus spending the summer of 1993 as an 11-year-old, I am precisely the audience that Jurassic World wants to hit square in the nostalgia. And boy, is it not doing that. I get that everybody wants to see this movie more than I do, but I cannot to save my life imagine why. Those are some boring, generic trailers.

I mean, of course I will see it, but I'm not looking forward to it.

Over in the world of limited releases: the Sundance-feted teen cancer drama Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a film I'm looking forward almost solely to be furiously pissed-off at it. Not a healthy attitude, I know. But that title. It's like the last of the mid-'00s indie quirkfests was found frozen in the Arctic ice and has been thawed to terrorise the city before it's nuked back into oblivion.


19.6.2015

Speaking of films that Sundance kind of liked that seem just awful, awful, awful to me, Dope and Infinitely Polar Bear are both hitting simultaneously, the latter more than one whole year after its premiere. Talk about promising.

But that doesn't matter! There is a new Pixar film, after two years of nothing and five years since their last clear-cut masterwork! And if the folks at Cannes know what they're talking about, Inside Out is all kinds of perfect in every way. This was, at the start of the summer, my second most-anticipated after Mad Max; everything that's happened in the last month has only solidified that position.


26.6.2015

Having not hated Ted, to my absolute shock, I suppose I find myself not-dreading Ted 2. But boy, can I not find a single reason to be excited for it.

And I don't have any fucking clue what to make of Max, a patriotic story of a soldier dog with PTSD that appears to be at least three totally irreconcilable movies in one, based on the trailer. The unifying thesis seems to be "who doesn't like dogs?" which, while true, is a weird foundation for a wide releease in the middle of summer.

Also, that's a really fascinating double-feature, right there.

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MAY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Sumer is icumen in! A summer that is surely going to be a Much Bigger Deal than last year, and probably Not As Good, though the latter point is of course subjective. But seriously, it was terrific few months, and 2015 looks to be... franchisey. Even by normal standards.


1.5.2015

And what could be more franchisey than a new Marvel film that's pretty much earmarked to sail to some of the biggest box-office numbers ever? Here comes Avengers: Age of Ultron, Film #11 in a franchise also including five short films and three televisions series, and at a certain point I simply ran out of any ability to give a fuck. "I remember when I saw that exact thing but it was funnier and more entertaining the last time, and I barely liked it then" is not by any means the kind of headspace that one wants as one heads into a ridiculously crowded opening weekend theater crowd. But hey, you gotta pay your pop culture bills.


8.5.2015

Faced with the ugly prospect of counter-programming what will surely be an enormous second weekend, the best the studios could come up with for a wide release is Hot Pursuit, which actually makes great marketing sense: a woman-driven action comedy feels just about right for all the various needs the film must fill. But ye gods, that trailer is dire...

Not wide release, but the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Abigail Breslin's dad in the low-key indie zombie film Maggie is, at any rate, fascinating.


15.5.2015

Two sequels to cult hits! Having not seen the original, I have no real sense of what we should expect from Pitch Perfect 2, but the ads promise a lot of broad humor about how fat girls are gross, which doesn't seem to fit the "empowering!" motif I've heard. But then there is Mad Max: Fury Road, and I know exactly what I expect, based on the two-thirds of the original movies that are awesome, and the best trailers currently in circulation. I expect the best movie of the summer, is what I expect. In fact, the best popcorn movie of this year and probably next. It's going to be ugly on this blog that weekend if the film is less than perfect.


22.5.2015

So there's a new Brad Bird movie coming out. And that's the only thing that appears to be working in Tomorrowland's favor, given the almost complete lack thus far of plot specifics in the ad campaign, or even a solid sense of what the movie is even going to look like. So Brad Bird. A man who has comfortably gone four-for-four on his movies to date. Working with the notorious screenwriter Damon Lindelof, who has fucked up some very unfuckable properties in his career. I really, really wish I could be excited for this one, but it's not working.

Also, Poltergeist remake, because why not.


29.5.2015

If a gifted director can't get me onboard with a movie, a goofily entertaining star surely shouldn't be enough. And yet there's even less reason to be excited for San Andreas - not just a disaster movie, but a disaster movie in the most dubious of all disaster movie subgenres, the earthquake picture - but the mere presence of Dwayne Johnson is literally all I need to put this in my #2 slot for the month. Not a great month, sure, but a month.

Sharing space with it: Aloha, which finds Cameron Crowe doing the Cameron Crowe romcom thing, with a breathtakingly splendid cast, and hopefully that's enough to compensate for a story that can't even by synopsised in a two-minute ad without every damn beat of the plot being totally obvious.

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APRIL 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

We're meant to be warming up for summer, but the whole month feels a little bit empty, from where I stand. Not even any good-looking limited releases, really. But it has the merit of opening big with one of the popcorn movies I'm most excited about all year. And in that respect, it is a good warm-up.


3.4.2015

If you'd asked me as recently as 2009 if I thought that the day would come when a movie in the Fast & Furious franchise could possibly have been one of my most eagerly anticipated films of a year, I'd have found that a totally ridiculous question (I'd also have wondered why in the hell you thought the franchise would still be around six years later). And yet here we are at Furious 7, and after two movies that flawlessly combined Looney Tunes physics, dumbfounding practical effects, and heist movies, I'll be onboard with the further adventures Vin Diesel and family for a good while yet. The one big concern: it's only seven minutes longer than Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, but 137 minutes is a gross length for what amounts to a live-action cartoon about people punching each other with cars. At any rate, I don't see an outcome where this doesn't prove to be the best wide release of the month.


10.4.2015

The annual Nicholas Sparks adaptation, The Longest Ride, apparently makes the argument that love affairs divided by one man's addiction to rodeo riding are equally as noble as love affairs divided by World War II. Which is an argument that one can make, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Clouds of Sils Maria starts its U.S. arthouse tour, and I would not expect any of you to believe me when I call Olivier Assayas & Juliette Binoche's latest a total flub enlivened only by Kristen Stewart an more than I believed it when I was told it by others.


17.4.2015

In a month notable for its anemic release slate, all of a sudden we get no fewer than four wide releases dropping all at once. The biggest will undoubtedly be Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, because you can never exhaust the possibilities of a fat man falling down. Or being kicked by a horse and turned into a shitty visual effect, a fucking terrible gag lovingly showcased in the film's trailer, which is my current reigning "I can't wait for the film to open so I don't have to see it in front of every movie" pick. Fighting it for dominance, we find the tacky and gimmicky-sounding horror film about social media, Unfriended, and Disney's newest animal documentary, given the dubious title Monkey Kingdom. And then there's Child 44, for which I have not personally seen a shred of advertising, and the hook - chasing a serial killer in the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union - sounds a bit hacky, but Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman headline. And even if we can't always trust either of those men, surely we can trust them both?


24.4.2015

After years of lingering in development hell, the paranormal romantic melodrama The Age of Adaline finally has attained a form where it can be released, and we can all bask in its vaguely Benjamin Button-ey tale of a woman who stops aging, and then falls in love with a man and his grandson. And this is kind of the opposite of a Blart 2: Bigger and Blarter for me, since I've been seeing the trailer for this in front of everything as well, but it's one of those deals where it feels like I have to catch it, just to see what the hell. Also falling into "what the hell" territory: Little Boy, one of those faith-based movies about a little boy (imagine that!) who prays to move a mountain in order to bring his father back from World War II. Presumably, this makes sense.

It's not opening wide and I haven't the slightest intention of seeing it, but it would be remiss of me not to mention that Russell Crowe is making his directorial debut with The Water Diviner, featuring no less a movie star than Russell Crowe.

And since we live in a global world, I will observe without comment that 2015's pre-ordained Biggest Box-Office Smash (Unless That Space Picture This Christmas Beats It), The Avengers: Age of Ultron, shall be available in most of the world that isn't the United States as of this weekend.

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MARCH 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

This has been an odd winter so far: enormous hits that weren't supposed to be, movies that looked like they were going to be terrible turning out pretty decent (e.g. Kingsman, which I finally saw and will be reviewing sometime today). So it's probably smart to admit that you never can tell, and even though there's not a single wide-release film that I'm looking forward to in March, I'll bet at least one of them turns out to surprise me.


6.3.2015

I'll also bet that it's not Chappie, which finds Neil Blomkamp (whose career, ever since the last third of District 9, has been an experiment in the art of diminishing returns) cross-cutting Short Circuit with a dour post-Nolan action movie. I lack the imaginative capacity to envision this turning out well, though it's never the wrong choice to put Sigourney Weaver in your genre film. So that's at least one thing to look forward to.

Even so, it's at least the most ambitious-looking film of a rough lot, that also finds Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco, and for some inscrutable reason Tom Wilkinson drugging and cursing and sexing their way across Europe in Unfinished Business. I am not much of a Vaughn fan in the best circumstances, and this is plainly not. Also, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is here to remind us that grandmas like to see movies too, and I need to finally stop dragging my heels on catching up with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Perhaps I will do them as a blog double feature. Because if I suffer, I will make damn sure you suffer with me.


13.3.2015

The first time Disney made a live-action version of one of their animated classics, they had Glenn Close play iconic villain Cruella De Vil. The second time, they had Angelina Jolie play iconic villain Maleficent. And now, they're having Cate Blanchett play rather less iconic villain Lady Tremaine in their new Cinderella, which is where the logic totally loses me. It's like, literally, just a re-skinning of Disney's 1950 animated feature in live-action, without songs with one of our greatest actors playing the wicked stepmother. And, I am sure, doing a kickass job of it; but why bother? Money, obviously, but why really bother? But then, Cinderella is my least favorite of all Disney's princess films, so I clearly don't fit into the target audience.

I am, though, in the target audience for a film in which Badass Liam Neeson and Badass Ed Harris square off, and yet Run All Night looks intensely boring and formulaic in every aspect that isn't those two men being in the same action movie. Especially with Joel Kinnaman in there, all mediocring the place up.

Lastly, I don't usually mention limited releases in these previews, but if you're going to be in a place to see It Follows, you should do so.


20.3.2015

Franchises that feel obligated to messily include their series name in the official title have given us the plainness of The Hunger Games: Whatever and the relative elegance of The Twilight Saga: Whatever Else. But there's something especially charming about the crass functionality of The Divergent Series: Insurgent. Given how fucking useless Divergent was, I expect it to be the solitary element of the film that I shall ever describe as "charming". Fingers crossed for more decent Chicago location porn.

Doggedly attempting to serve as counter-programming, we find this kind of action message movie thing called The Gunman, with Sean Penn as a military contractor. I don't even know. The trailer already practically put me to sleep. Also Do You Believe? is, tragically, not a biopic of late-period Cher, but one of those bleak movies that panders to Evangelical Christian audiences, rubbing their noses in how they're not allowed to enjoy actual movies with actual production value.


27.3.2015

I find myself in the peculiar position of hoping that Home, a ghastly-looking animated sci-fi comedy, manages to become a big hit, because it's sort of the case that the entire future of DreamWorks Animation rests on it turning a profit. And while DreamWorks and I have had our differences - we have, in fact, had virtually nothing but, save for the movies with the words "Dragon" or "Panda" in their title - the landscape of Hollywood studio animation is more vital with DWA alive and kicking than with them dead.

Oh, and Get Hard, your title is an erection joke. Good for you.

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FEBRUARY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

A January with some halfway decent surprises lying behind us, it's time now to plow into the real depths of the winter dumping season: after a few years where there was one surprising hit toe be found in February, 2015 looks to have nothing of the sort. A hit, yes - a big, enormous, Top 10 of the Year sort of hit - but one that looks terrible. We might always be surprised, of course, but I'm not counting on it, so let's just get this over quickly


6.2.2015

But now, having said all of that, I am going to proudly declare that I'm totally excited for Jupiter Ascending, and I don't give a shit what anybody has to say. After Cloud Atlas, a movie I just keep loving more despite/because of its faults when I re-watch it, I will follow the Wachowskis to whatever place they have it in their mind to go. Will Jupiter Ascending be bafflingly dumb? Probably. Maybe. Will it be splendid to look at? I expect so. Will it be totally its own thing and a complete outlier in the 2015 popcorn movie biosphere? Undoubtedly, and that's what matters to me most of all.

Elsewhere in very visibly-delayed effects-driven fantasies, we find Seventh Son, which manages to combine the powers of Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, and Olivia Williams into the creation of what is, by all available evidence, boring crap. Though it's exciting to think that Moore and Eddie Redmayne might both end up winning Oscars after having played the main villains in two enormous, high-profile flops that opened just 16 days earlier. Oscar joke writers: do something with this, now that I have called it to your attention.

And then we have the animation hybrid The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water, which I'd surely have any kind of opinion toward if I had any level of connection to the SpongeBob SquarePants media franchise.


13.2.2015

So here's the deal: I am indecently excited for the thought pieces to come out surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey, from all directions. It will be the great talking point of 2015. But I could not possibly be less excited to drag myself out to see the actual movie, outside of what appears to be some sleek, handsome Seamus McGarvey cinematography. I've failed multiple times to get more than a few pages into the infamous bestselling novel it's based on, which is written at a sub-literate level, and my understanding is that the whole thing is really just porn dressed up with a feeble narrative copying the main points from Twilight. And I don't mean to say "just porn" in a dismissive way; it frankly makes the whole thing seem more respectable than assuming all those middle-aged women are actually enjoying the horrible, horrible prose and what I am assured is horrible, horrible character psychology.

But it leaves us with the ungainly fact that a movie is being adapted out of a porno while not, itself, being very pornographic (R-rated in the sexophobic United States, with apparently only around 20 minutes of sex, and a confirmation that there'll be no onscreen penis). Which suggests that the horrible horribleness is all that's going to be left. And director Sam Taylor-Johnson's only other feature, Nowhere Boy, was a fucking dog.

As counter-programming, nobly muscling its way to the teenage boys confused why a major blockbuster release doesn't care about them at all, we have Kingsman: The Secret Service, a Matthew Vaughn film that sure as hell looks like a Matthew Vaughn film, and there are some people for whom that is a good thing. But some people ain't me.


20.2.2015

Now this feels like a February weekend. Disney is gamely releasing a warm and fuzzy "crusty old white dude intervenes for the better in the lives of underprivileged minorities" sports drama, McFarland, USA, and the white dude is even played by Kevin Costner. There's some hideously generic high school clique movie, with the "ooh, look at me, I'm raising all kinds of questions!" title of The DUFF, and then there's Hot Tub Time Machine 2, which has all the feeling of a project that got greenlit and financed at a particularly drunk party, and by the time everybody came to their senses, they were into it for too much financial and legal liability to safely back out.


27.2.2015

And then, blessedly, things finally sputter to a close. We've got Focus, starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie as con artists who perhaps have romantic comedy sparks between them - or perhaps that is part of the con! - and is giving me something not entirely unlike Duplicity vibes, so maybe it's got something worth looking forward to, hiding in its DNA? Anyway, there was a time when Smith made enjoyable movies for halfway intelligent adults, and I'm kind of getting that vibe, too.

The Lazarus Effect, for its own part, has an excitingly junky trailer surrounding a lazy, retread concept, with a much too classy cast for it, including Olivia Wilde as this movie's version of the Frankenstein monster. Hopefully cheesy enough to be fun, possibly actually good and just mis-marketed, but either way, it's the first horror movie in some while I've actually caught myself looking forward to.

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JANUARY 2015 MOVIE PREVIEW

Good movies here and there, as will always happen, but let us not mince words: the ending months of 2014 pretty well sucked for cinema. A new year now spreads before us, and it brings with us the promise that things will be better.

Not right away, of course. I mean, January. It's the dead zone.


2.1.2015

So speaking of death, the first movie of the year is a horror picture, as tends to be the case. The pretty much not bad at all The Woman in Black finds itself with a sequel in The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, which is, for one thing, too much damn title. For another, the film has a clever work-around to extend the narrative scope - it's 40 years later, and WWII is on - that suggests at least some effort has been made to avoid the usual sequel needlessness. But seriously, the track record for horror sequels is pretty dire, and winter horror tends to be the worst horror.


9.1.2015

We all have our blindspots, and Liam Neeson punching things is one of mine, and that, children, is why I am actually really excited for Tak3n.


16.1.2015

Okay, so apparently, despite having the actual worst trailer of the whole year, Paddington isn't a heaving piece of shit? Can anyone from the United Kingdom confirm this fact for me? Because I like the thought of children's films with Nicole Kidman as the villain, despite the available evidence.

Moving into darker territory, the Kevin Hart Movie Machine now cranks out The Wedding Ringer, where he plays Josh Gad's fake best man, and the whole thing doesn't seem to have any redeeming characteristics at all.

And then there is the befuddling matter of Blackhat, in which we find a Michael Mann film dumped into the hinterlands without even a courtesy Oscar qualifying run. That has to be the worst possible sign, right? I mean, how disastrous does a movie by a brand-name director have to be for this kind of release pattern?


23.1.2015

Speaking of brand names, Johnny Depp's latest exercise in broad character creation, Mortdecai, is also getting the burn-off treatment. Which is, if anything, even uglier: he used to be a major star, and now he's headlining January comedies. This one is at least as ill-seeming as the Mann thing, but on the other hand, the trailer makes it look so awful that it's much less surprising.

Strange Magic finds Gary Rydstrom making his feature directorial debut with an animated movie "from the mind of George Lucas", and boy, it could not look like more of a worst-case scenario for what that phrase could possibly mean. There's also a thing called The Boy Next Door, which I'm certain I've seen an ad for, and it's like a sexy teen neighbor seducing a woman thing that might, if we're lucky, be fun sudsy junk. If we're not, it's exactly what it sounds like.


30.1.2015

Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer teach us all a lesson about race relations in Black or White. Okay, so it has to be better than it looks. Mike Binder's not the worst writer in the world. But oh, that trailer makes this look Very Special in the most condescending way.

Teens build a time machine and film themselves using it in Project Almanac, which sounds like a found footage Primer for the illiterate. And swingers investigate a murder in The Loft, so that's like, I don't know, a thing that exists in the world.

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DECEMBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

And here we are at the end of a year that began well, middled terrifically, and now... well, it's the most crowedest time of the year, with films being pitched out in the mad hope that they'll have awards glory, or make huge sums of cash over the holidays, or both. And as has been the case from just about the beginning, I've found very little to look forward to in this year's slate of awards hopefuls or wannabe blockbusters. So forgive me if I look at the enormous number of titles coming out in the next thirty days, and on virtually no counts come up with more than a sour "is that all?"


3.12.2014

A limited release to start things off: Wild, in which Reese Witherspoon plays the Emile Hirsch character from Into the Wild, from the director of Dallas Buyers Club, and there is seriously not one single proper noun in the sentence I just wrote that makes this sound even borderline tolerable. If nothing else, the awful bourgeois overtones of the whole "find yourself in nature" shtick should be more satisfying with a woman on the verge of 40 instead of a twentyish man in the lead.


5.12.2014

And now, a wide release, but only by the barest definition: The Pyramid, whose concept gives me the worst flashbacks to As Above, So Below. Oh, December horror. The month is already scary enough without your sad attempts at breaking out.


12.12.2014

Amazing to think that directors Ridley Scott and Chris Rock could be facing off and the latter would appear to have, by far, the better film coming out (also that the phrase "director Chris Rock" could be casually dropped like that). Between Rock's character-driven comedy Top Five, with its rapturous reviews, and Scott's new attempt at a big-ass ancient world epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, it's easy for me to say which one looks more appealing. Especially since the "Bible story as CG adventure" slot for the year was already filled by Noah, which seems to be coming from a more artistically rigorous place than this.

Limited: Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, and given that I'm already pretty lukewarm on his filmography, the thought of having to deal with a PTA picture getting mixed reviews is not a pretty thought, not at all.


17.12.2014

Just like that, only 800 hours after it started, Peter Jackson brings his adaptation of the slender children's book The Hobbit to a close with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Why not, I saw the first two.


19.12.2014

Just from the trailers, the metallic autotune and shrieking caricature of humanity played by Cameron Diaz were enough to make the new modern-dress version of Annie look more like punishment than entertainment, and now word comes from those what have pirated the film in the wake of what Sony badly wants to pretend is an attack by North Korea that no, it's actually worse than it looks. Sadly, word is not out yet on whether or not Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb is any worse than it looks, but I do appreciate that the race for the year's worst theatrically-released family film is coming down to the wire like this.

Meanwhile, Mike Leigh's latest, Mr. Turner, comes out, and look well, because it is the only thing coming out between now and Christmas that I'm actually looking forward to in any significant way.


24.12.2014

What says Christmas Eve like a woman desperately fighting to save her job? Nothing at all, says the Belgian Two Days, One Night, which I have already seen and loved. But a long, emotionally rough biopic of 18th Century writers is festive too, argues the German Beloved Sisters, which I've seen and liked.


25.12.2014

Six big new movies, though luckily, you only have to pick between three of them if you live anywhere but New York and Los Angeles. There's the big heaving sincerity of the obvious Oscar play Unbroken, or the smutty bro comedy of The Interview; I imagine both will be fine exemplars of genres I don't like, but the Brayton family movie for Christmas Day will likely be Into the Woods for reasons of Sondheim loyalty. And also a trailer that gives me a hope-like substance? Even though Rob Marshall is responsible? And then I remember that Chicago, which I didn't care for much at all, had a killer trailer, and I get depressed.

The little releases include Selma, which ought to be the break-out film for Ava DuVernay, and how great will it be to have a black female director in the awards season mix? Also Big Eyes, the most un-Tim Burtony looking Tim Burton movie in decades, and American Sniper, a Clint Eastwood picture that will be getting favorable reviews simply by virtue of not being Jersey Boys. I love the thought that there will be families arguing about whether to watch the movie about the prolific killer or the movie about the political protests after their Christmas dinner.


31.12.2014

In under the wire for awards consideration, a pair of films by directors I'm predisposed to like: it will be perhaps weeks later that I finally see Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan or J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year, but oh how I anticipate both: my favorite Russian filmmaker alive on the one hand, a great director of actors working with Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac on the other. Not a bad way to wrap up a year.

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NOVEMBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

Given how far I feel like I still am on October releases (no Birdman! No Whiplash! No Nightcrawler!), it seems a little goofy to already look ahead, but the calendar does not start and stop at our leisure. Anyway, it helps that the rest of 2014 is appallingly light on prestige films and/or big box office type movies that I'm looking forward to at all, and so it feels like the catch-up stage of the year has already started


7.11.2014

That being said, the first weekend of the year's endgame seems promising enough: while Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is, I am sure, problematic and overlong, the director is going out of his way to make it readily available on film, and it should be eye-blastingly gorgeous in IMAX. Which, I am happy to report, is the way I've already committed to seeing it.

Also Disney has Big Hero 6 coming out, and while I am not necessarily excited about the particulars of this project, you have perhaps heard that I am a fan of Disney.

The limited release Oscarbait for the week The Theory of Everything, the more unpleasant-looking of the year's two Biopics of British Scientists Whose Lives Are Less Interesting Than Their Work.


14.11.2014

In a sort of sleepy, post-Nolan weekend, the only big releases are Beyond the Lights, a melodrama about a singer whose trailers offer just enough roughness and Minnie Driver being evil that I think I'm excited for it, and Dumb and Dumber To, about which I am sure somebody has an opinion, but I am not that person, nor do I know any of them.

Oscarbait: Foxcatcher, which by all accounts is Unrelentingly Dour. But hey, we're all enjoying the Channing Tatum, Serious Actor ride, so that's at least something to look forward to.

Limited Release Non-Oscarbait: Kirk Cameron in a film about fucking filthy secularists trying to ruin the Christian holidays, Saving Christmas, and after my recent Left Behind experiences, nothing on this Earth could get me into that theater.


21.11.2014

A snoozy box office year finally threatens to erupt with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. Neither mine nor anyone's opinion matters an ounce, but I will suggest that the first half of the third book is, by a commanding margin, my least-favorite part of the whole series, and I'll be impressed as hell if the screenwriters can do anything to redeem it.


26.11.2014

I am a horrible man, and in that capacity, I can't convince myself not to be at least marginally excited for Penguins of Madagascar, which promotes the best characters from DreamWorks Animation's most erratic franchise up to starring roles. And there is the definite argument to be made that some characters only work as comic relief and not as protagonists, but I feel like this is the closest I'll ever get to my long dreamed-of Scrat feature, so for the next three weeks, I shall keep the faith.

Also, Horrible Bosses 2 got made for some reason and is being funneled into theaters in time to be crushed by holiday crowds.


28.11.2014

Ah, that day-after-Thanksgiving release date; one of the year's most conspicuous of all "oh no, this isn't a real release, it's just for Oscars" gambits. And this year, that honor is going to The Imitation Game, the other British scientist biopic, this one starring Benedict Cumberbatch, who I'm ready to ignore for a few years, at this point.

Not as strong an Oscar contender, but way more exciting in every regard is The Babadook, which you need to see. I don't even care if horror is you least favorite of all possible film genres. It is a masterwork, and you need to see it.

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SEPTEMBER 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

What a miserable bit of fuckery, that one of the best summers, quality-wise, in years, has officially just been declared the most financially disastrous in a generation or more. And now we get a particularly dire-looking wasteland of a September to deal with. Let's plow through it quickly.


5.9.2014

An irradiated wasteland: nothing remotely interesting coming up among the limited releases, and only one wide release, The Identical, a story about Elvis's long-lost twin brother, targeting Christian audiences. Moving along.


12.9.2014

I don't know why there was enough of an audience for Dolphin Tale 2 to exist, but it's apparently not mine to know. It's a lot easier to see why No Good Deed got made - "woman in peril" thrillers are an evergreen genre - but no less depressing. Idris Elba and Taraji P. Henson are extraordinary performers, and thinking that the best they can do is to appear in grubby little shockers is... well, let's save the rant about racial imbalance in 21st Century America for the actual review.

On the limited release front, I am excited for two movies for entirely different reasons: The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, edited together from two interweaving he said/she said stories (to be separately released in October), starring James McAvoy and the great Jessica Chastain, which should be fascinating structurally even if it's bad. Though I'm anyway leaning towards watching the constituent parts before the combined version, which means I won't be bothering till, like, November. Other movie: Atlas Shrugged, Part III: Who Is John Galt, because why wouldn't I be?


19.9.2014

Quite a few movies, all of them more or less disposable, because that's where we are: A Walk Among the Tombstones, yet another "dour, haunted Liam Neeson kills thugs" thriller; The Maze Runner, yet another "sci-fi tinged dystopian action thriller YA adaptation"; This Is Where I Leave You, with the reliably horrible director Shawn Levy working his anti-magic on a disturbingly solid cast including Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, and Jane Fonda; and Tusk, which finds Kevin Smith trying his hand at body horror. Fun times!


26.9.2014

And so the month hauls itself over the final hump with literally the only wide release I expect to find even moderately decent: The Boxtrolls, the latest from the stop-motion animation artisans at Laika. It's been receiving all-over-the-place reviews on the heels of its Venice premiere, but we already know from the trailers that it's going to look terrific, and that's enough.

Otherwise, there's the latest "Denzel Washington is a taciturn angry brute" action film, The Equalizer, which happens to be directed by Antoine Fuqua, who helped birth the genre with Training Day, 13 years ago. So that's maybe going to be a good thing?

Christ, this month.

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AUGUST 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

I think it's official, at this point: this has been a pretty solid (in some ways very surprisingly so) summer movie season. I don't believe I've ever said that in all my years of blogging. So hurrah for all the good films that have been, and let's hope that we can add one or two titles to that pile before fall comes and brings with it all the burn-off movies of September.


1.8.2014

The implacable march of Marvel Studios to dominate all popcorn cinema continues with Guardians of the Galaxy, which achieved something that not a single Marvel picture to date has managed: an ad campaign that made me want to see the thing. And admittedly, the more we've seen, the more it looks like a formula-driven "more of the same" type of thing, but it's been too long since we had a good big-scale space opera, and the Chris Pratt Moment in pop culture has been hugely enjoyable so far.

Rather adroitly noting that GotG is tailor-made for white male nerds, Universal has positioned as counter-programming Get on Up, a biopic of James Brown. Starring Chadwick Boseman, who has rather randomly established himself as the guy who plays the lead in movies about famous black people, even those who have as little in common as James Brown and Jackie Robinson.


8.8.2014

They really can't make enough awful Step Up movies for me to stop looking forward to them, after the holy majesty that was Step Up 3D. So I will, thank you, continue to look forward to Step Up All In right up until I emerge, squinting, from the auditorium, depressed about the money I just wasted.

Warner is basically remaking its 18-year-old Twister as Into the Storm, the first honest-to-God disaster movie in years. It's a film I'm going to primarily because I think it will be a nice thing to do with my mom, and I'm 100% not kidding about that. Also, because the first trailer as much as claimed "the sound design is great! the rest, not so much", and I admire the bluntness of that. For those of you with more conventional moms than my own, there's The Hundred-Foot Journey, with Helen Mirren as a sassy French chef squaring off against Indians, as directed by Lasse Hallström, modern cinema's greatest creator of pointlessly inoffensive fables. This one's giving me a Chocolat vibe, which is one of the worst things you could say about anybody.

Lastly, Michael Bay is producing a Jonathan Liebesman film that has to do with turtles. Let's not talk about it.


13.8.2014

How to tell you've aged out of pop culture: watching the trailer for Let's Be Cops, starring Damon Wayans, Jr. and Jake Johnson as two bros pretending to be policeman, and realising that not only do you not have the god-damnedest idea who either of them are, despite the trailer's clear assumption that you do, this lack of knowledge does not bother you in the tiniest degree. Fun fact: it's the only wide release of the month that I'm already entirely sure I won't be seeing.


15.8.2014

FINALLY, Stallone has decided with The Expendables 3 to bring in the action star to end all action stars in one of his big old action ensemble jobs: Kelsey Grammer. As somebody named "Bonaparte".

The cast and director of The Giver tell me that it's got bit more meat on it than most YA adaptations. Tell me in comments if I should read the much-beloved and highly regarded book that I hadn't heard about until earlier this year.


22.8.2014

Speaking of YA, Chloë Grace Moretz, who I increasingly can't stand, headlines an out-of-body teen love story called If I Stay, which whatever, but the trailer is hilariously sober. And after the campy excess of her out-of-control crack whore in Sabotage earlier this year, I will follow Mireille Enos anywhere she wants to go.

Sports movies aren't my bag at all, so if I say that "the longest winning streak in American sports history is snapped, and the high schoolers and coach involved process what that means to them" is literally one of the least-compelling ideas for a movie I've heard all year, I hope you'll take it with a grain of salt. Also, When the Game Stands Tall is a goofy title.

After nine long years in development hell, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For finally is happening, and my 23-year-old self is very confused why my 32-year-old self is so immensely dubious about that fact.


27.8.2014

Pierce Brosnan playing an old spy, as he does in The November Man, is the worst kind of obvious stunt casting. But then, The Matador and The Tailor of Panama were both better than three-quarters of his stint as James Bond, so let's wait and see.


29.8.2014

Between the extremely serious tone with which it appears to treat generic horror content, the ham-handed dialogue in the ads, and above all the catastrophically pretentious title of As Above, So Below, I am not at all too mature to confess that I'm looking forward to hate-watching this one more than anything I've seen in a long, long time.

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JULY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

By the end of the first weekend in June, it felt like we'd stumbled, quite by accident, onto one of the strongest summer movie seasons in years. Everyone's report card will be different, of course, but from where I'm standing, Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Maleficent, and Neighbors were all considerably better than I'd expected them to be going in (though they are not, of course, all equally good), and if we scan back a little bit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier joins them in that company. Godzilla was a terrific opening and closing 30 minutes sandwiched around a central hour that was pleasantly uninteresting, and if that was disappointing, it still nestles comfortably in the formula of boredom punctuated by astonishment that has been part of that franchise for ages. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sucked, but it's not like anybody cared about that one in the first place.

But then the rot starts to sneak in: 22 Jump Street was a predictably weaker sequel, How to Train Your Dragon 2 was a disappointingly weaker sequel, and Think Like a Man Too was a downright shitty sequel. In between all of that, Clint Eastwood gave us Jersey Boys, which I'm pretty sure is the worst thing he's directed since those dodgy political thrillers in the 1990s, and Transformers: Age of Extinction was made to exist.

And as we turn to the back half of summer, all I see is emptiness. July is usually a big month, but this is some desolation we're about to head into...


2.7.2014

It says a lot that the most appealing wide release is Earth to Echo, a ratty-looking Spielberg knock-off done up in found footage. At least it doesn't have Melissa McCarthy doing yet another "the fat lady curses, ha-ha" movie, the way Tammy is; and though I'm obviously going to see it, I don't even want to talk about Deliver Us from Evil, a demonic possession movie that boasted one terrific teaser and nothing since to make it look even modestly different than every other demonic possession movie.


11.7.2014

I entered 2014 with Richard Linklaters 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood near the tip-top of my "most anticipated" list; it's officially moved into being the release for the whole rest of the year I'm most excited for, and being limited and all, I have no idea when that will happen. But the concept (tracking a boy's growth in actual time) is a flawless fit for the director of the Before movies, and early word has been ecstatic.

As for wide releases, it just so happens that the only big film I'm excited about all month is the same day: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, follow-up to the surprisingly pretty great Rise of the Planet of the Apes (and God, how I wish their titles were swapped). So, yay 11 July, I guess.


18.7.2014

There is a line in the Sex Tape trailer that goes something like "Nobody understands the cloud! It's a mystery!". Nobody Understands the Cloud would have been a far better title, and I expect was the pitch, of a film that combines weird levels of technophobia with weird levels of tech illiteracy into some kind of fluffy quiche of out-of-touch idiots throwing the word "Siri" at a script to seem vaguely topical. And I say this as someone who would rather cut my fingertips off than own a smartphone.

Elsewhere in a preposterously dire weekend: Planes: Fire & Rescue finds DisneyToon Studios continuing to give zero shits about telling stories that anybody might conceivably want to see, and Rob Reiner's death march continues on to And So It Goes, sucking Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton into the wake. But I'm easily most excited-dreading The Purge: Anarchy, a universe-building spin-off of the most frustratingly half-baked horror movie of 2013.

No, seriously, how is this not September? And like, the really bad part of September.


25.7.2014

One limited release that I'm actually excited for: A Most Wanted Man, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's final non-Hunger Games feature, and an adaptation of a John le Carré overseen by Anton Corbijn, who built up a reservoir of goodwill with me in making Control that he is unlikely to ever run out. And one limited release that I feel duty-bound to see: Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight, a period comedy that has way too many echoes of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion for comfort.

As for the wide releases, there's maybe some reason to hope for Lucy, a sci-fi thriller with Scarlett Johansson, whose last such movie was one of the year's best releases thus far. But producer Luc Besson is on a cool streak. If there's any hope for the Brett Ratner-directed Hercules, it's that it will be sufficiently fun in its badness for a good party movie; and those who know more than I about Gabriel Iglesias - which would consist of having heard of him more than five minutes ago - can tell me if there's any hope for his comedy concert film The Fluffy Movie.

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JUNE 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

At the one month mark, the summer report card is looking pretty decent, I daresay. It's already better than 2013, for damn certain, and we haven't even gotten to some of the most promising releases of the season. And June in particular has a high concentration of such movies. In my estimation, at least.


6.6.2014

Let's not start out with one of those, though. The Fault in Our Stars is based on a hugely popular YA novel that has gotten those "even as an adult reader, I loved this book" reviews that pass for literary culture in the West nowadays. I confess: I made it three chapters in, concluded that it was not a book for me, and that rather than push myself to complete something that I'd be seeing onscreen anyway (really, is there any chance of it not winning the box office race this weekend?), I'd just put it away and be glad that lots of people with different needs from my own have received pleasure from it. That being said, I couldn't possibly be looking forward to it any less, particularly given my dim view of Shailene Woodley's acting ability.

But ignore my thoughts anyway, because what I am looking forward to is Edge of Tomorrow, a Tom Cruise sci-fi picture. Like, honestly and truly, I have high hopes. High-ish. Anyway, sometimes you want to see well-designed mechas exploding, and sometimes you really want them to do so while pretty people have photogenic dirt on their faces. And with Cruise and Emily Blunt headlining, this will surely do that.

Amidst the usual numbers of arthouse releases, we find the first U.S. screenings of Borgman, a movie that I would enthusiastically and urgently push everyone to see - I caught it at the Chicago International Film Festival last year, and barring something extraordinarily surprising, you'll be seeing it on my 2014 Top 10. So please, check it out.


13.6.2014

Two sequels to two genuinely delightful originals, both of them representing very different question marks. In the case of 22 Jump Street, is it possible that it can possibly re-capture the energy of the first movie, when it cannot have the same sense of surprise to it? If it comes even close, though, that means that directors Phil Miller and Christopher Lord will be 4-for-4 making great comedies from dodgy concepts, and will officially be on my list of filmmakers that I will follow to the ends of the earth. Then we have How to Train Your Dragon 2, the sequel to DreamWorks Animation's best film to date, with one-half of its authorial team returning, and while I feel like I should be excited, I can't help but feel like the ad campaign is selling me a movie I don't want: one that's longer on vistas and epic storytelling than character and sweetly bent humor, the things that made the first one so great. Time will tell, but for right now there's nothing all summer - all year! - that I'm anticipating with such a mix of enthusiasm and ambivalence.


20.6.2014

Think Like a Man was surprisingly charming and all, but Think Like a Man Too - fuck that title, incidentally - seems like a willfully bad idea. Getting all that chemistry to work a second time, when the plot clearly involves broader, wackier comedy (pro-tip: going to Vegas is never a creatively fresh idea), seems entirely impossible, and while it will undoubtedly make a huge pile of money, I can't imagine it being half as good. But stranger things have happened.

Like Clint Eastwood making a musical. Even as "blue collar guys" a musical as the film adaptation of the quintessential jukebox musical hit Jersey Boys. I'll see it - I'll see it opening night, probably - but if it's even tolerably good, I'll be shocked.

Limited release: I wasn't able to see Norte, the End of History at all during its festival run last year, but I'm eager to catch up with it; 250 minutes is the kind of running time that zips past "dear God, that's too long" right back into "okay, I have to see what that's all about". And while I feel like Roman Polanksi's career is in its irreversible wind-down phase, his latest, Venus in Furs, is out for anyone who cares.


27.6.2014

Now the robots transform into dinosaurs. Give Michael Bay your money.

In terms of sci-fi for humans with souls, brains, or just a desire not to be pummeled into fatigue by sound design, the untampered-with version of Snowpiercer by the endlessly reliable Korean director Bong Joon-ho starts its "buried by Harvey Weinstein" micro-tour of North America this weekend. And it is unquestionably the film I am most excited for all summer, assuming it actually makes it to theaters outside of New York and Los Angeles.

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MAY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

It seems disingenuous to talk about the start of traditional blockbuster season when what's likely to end up the year's biggest superhero movie is already going strong, but that's the giddy world we live in today. So anyway, here's the kick-off to one of the more peculiarly quiet-looking summers we've had in a long while.


2.5.2014

Having already showed up in most of the world, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits the States. And if you know anybody who's excited about that fact, you're one up on me. Whatever fans The Amazing Spider-Man was able to gin up back in 2012 seem to have faded back into the woodwork, and the opening film of the new summer is, I would say, indisputably the blandest looking.


9.5.2014

The weekend where movies go to die is led by Neighbors, a dirty comedy with Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, who is just enough of a weird casting choice that I'm kind of intrigued. The rest is all silence: Jon Favreau's Chef is an obvious metaphor for the pain of being forced to receive large sums of money to direct Iron Mans, Moms' Night Out is yet another of those Christian-themed movies that have been doing such astounding business in 2014, and Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, which from the footage available so far looks like the ugliest animated movie ever made. Like, literally ever. I kind of can't wait.


16.5.2014

GODZILLAAAAAAAAAA!

(and Million Dollar Arm, some tediously sweet Disney sports movie about Indian kids being dazzled by Jon Hamm and the United States, nothing sociologically terrible about that. But it has Lake Bell, and I would cross broken glass in my bare feet for Lake Bell).


23.5.2014

I, for one, have largely abandoned hope for the X-Men franchise, but if nothing else, X-Men: Days of Future Past has Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen again. But really, at this point I feel the series has nothing left to prove one way or the other, and we all know exactly what we're getting into.

I feel the same way about the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romcom Blended, which is shaping up to be the most obnoxious movie of the summer, and without a single CGI robot to its name.


30.5.2014

The sole justification for Maleficent is obviously Angelina Jolie's presence as the title character, though it's quite a hell of a justification. Still, the "dark fairy tale that explains the villain's point of view" shtick is one of the most unbelievably tedious in the world, and as the directorial debut of the production designer of Alice in Wonderland, so I don't see room for even a sliver of optimism.

Seth MacFarlane brings his whole deal to the Wild West with A Million Ways to Die in the West, with an extraordinary cast, and based on the trailer, a grand total of one joke, repeated infinitely, till we all die.

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APRIL 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

I like to start these previews off with a theoretical bit of noodling about the nature of the month to come, but this time, it's so tightly linked to the big release on the first weekend that I'm just going to save it. Let's jump right in!


4.4.2014

So, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. A film that I should not be indifferent to, given that Captain America: The First Avenger is probably my favorite of the Marvel movies that exist so far (not the one I think is best, just my favorite), but I am far more fascinated by its position in the ecosystem than I care about it as a work of cinema. See, we've had March blockbusters for a while, and April blockbusters for a couple of years, anyway, but something about the exact position of this film, with the usual release overseas a week earlier, makes it feel like Disney isn't trying to extend summer earlier, or force a brand new blockbuster season; it feels sort of like they're trying to connect the spring and summer movie seasons, making one long stretch of popcorn blockbusters reaching from March to August; and that, honestly, is not a future that I am terribly excited to contemplate. The sameness and ubiquity of Big CGI Action Event Pictures has made it virtually impossible, for me at least, to find any of them genuinely special, and the idea of a wave of indistinguishable tentpoles covering fully half of the calendar sounds as much like the death of cinema as anything else ever has.

But then, here to make me feel better is Under the Skin in limited release, finally showing up Stateside. The third film by Jonathan Glazer, whose Sexy Beast and Birth I both love, is surely cause for celebration, all the more since it's been such a long decade since his last release.


11.4.2014

Kevin Costner is Brad Pitt in Moneyball for football, AKA Draft Day. Who'd have thought in December that this would have such an easy shot at being Costner's best movie of the year?

A pair of horror films, because Captain America notwithstanding, it is still the offseason: Oculus, which is somehow crossed with a murder mystery; and Rio 2. Now, the latter of these is not being marketed as a horror film, but surely we all know better.

Once again, the limited releases come to the rescue: I don't actually expect Only Lovers Left Alive, an art house vampire film, to be any good, but it's never wise to count out Jim Jarmusch or Tilda Swinton, and when they're collaborating? Mercy me.


16.4.2014

The unexpected glut of Christian themed films in the first third of the year continues right along to Heaven Is for Real One of these days, one of these movies will go to #1 and I'll have to see it, but it's not going to be this one.


18.4.2014

The fact that A Haunted House made enough money to generate A Haunted House 2 depresses me. Like, literally.

Meanwhile, we can all enjoy the spectacle of Disney making another documentary that shamelessly anthropomorphises animals with Bears, whose poster is confusingly and unpleasantly similar to their 2003 obscurity Brother Bear. Or we can enjoy watching Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan's cinematographer, make his directorial debut with Transcendence, which happens to exactly look like the kind of product that Nolan secretly knows himself to be too good for nowadays. But hey, anything that throws a paycheck at Rebecca Hall deserves my attention.


25.4.2014

There is a 2004 Luc Besson production, District B13, which kicked off the most ambivalent review I have ever written, wondering if its phenomenal, legitimately masterpiece-level opening act justified the tedium of the rest. I do not expect to be similarly ambivalent about its weirdly late American remake, Brick Mansions.

Other sacrificial lambs being put on the chopping block to be completely forgotten in a week, once summer proper starts: The Other Woman, a peculiarly mean-looking female-driven comedy, feeling oddly like a relic from the '90s and the days of The First Wives Club; and The Quiet Ones, the newest horror picture from the revived Hammer Films. Having thus far thought that the studio's attempt to navigate the 21st Century has been noble and intelligent if not uniformly successful, I think I can count myself excited for this one, kind of.

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MARCH 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

Golly, this one just shot right by me. Possibly because not one single North American wide release all month has me genuinely excited. Possibly because the end of February has been so punishingly busy IRL. At any rate, it's not Friday yet, so I still get to call this a preview. Though not a particularly anticipatory one.


7.3.2014

Okay, so "wide release" in the intro paragraph was a hedge: I am in fact massively excited for one film, though one unlikely to have any more than a particularly visible limited release. That being Wes Anderson's eighth feature, The Grand Budapest hotel, which somehow, and somewhat oddly, has me more excited in advance than any of the director's previous films ever have. Getting his momentum back on track has something to do with that; solid trailers as well; certainly its three aspect ratio's gimmick. Boy, do I give it up for multiple aspect ratios.

I do not, however, give it up for animated movies based on cartoons I have adored for as long as I've been alive, all the more so when those animated movies look like they're completely missing anything resembling the attitude or function of those cartoons. Which is why I'm approaching Mr. Peabody & Sherman with the enthusiasm of somebody who just found out they have to clean out the office refrigerator.

For those who care about such things, the seven-years-later sequel 300: Rise of an Empire is finally coming out, to the delight of somebody, I guess. For myself, my opinions towards the project begin and end with my conviction that it really should have been titled 302.


14.3.2014

The end of an era: The Single Moms Club is the very last film in Tyler Perry's longstanding partnership with Lionsgate, and he has at this point no more announced films in the pipeline. I've disliked more Perry films than I've liked - hell, I've hated more Perry films than I've liked, but this is still a weird and discomfiting development, like your first night without a childhood blanket. Dare I say that I'm even kind of looking forward to it now? I dare.

I am not kind of looking forward to Need for Speed, a car racing video game movie that promises to be worse than the Fast & Furious franchise at its all-time lowest. I'm probably not really looking forward to Jason Bateman's directorial debut either, the vulgar comedy Bad Words, though I'm kind of fascinated by the decision to give it a platform release over the remainder of the month.

I am kind of actually terrified of the Veronica Mars movie, though I'm sure as hell going to see it.


21.3.2014

Boy, I'm sure certain that I'm meant to be excited about Muppets Most Wanted, but neither my increasingly diminished affection for the 2011 The Muppets, not the hard-to ignore impression that this is just a remake of The Great Muppet Caper that nobody was asking for or really needs, are making it at all easy to get into that place mentally. I mean, it's the Muppets, so of course, but that only goes so far...

The YA train keeps trying to pull out of the station, with Divergent, about which I presently know nothing other than Kate Winslet plays a villain. Which I can get behind. Also, the notorious Nymphomaniac, Lars von Trier's two-part sex epic, starts to makes itself known in the United States - for myself, if I ever see it at all (and I really, really don't want to), I'll wait for the director's cut, which turns a very long movie into an absurdly long movie, but if you do something, you should do it right.


28.3.2014

Somebody decided that giving Darren Aronofsky a whole lot of money to make Noah was a terrific idea, and that is hilarious to me. But not as hilarious as the beard Russell Crowe has been saddled with. I am by no means an Aronofsky partisan, but I don't see any way at all for this to not be captivating, even if it is a weird, awful misfire.

And speaking of misfires, Arnold Schwarzenegger's dogged attempt to have his old career back continues with Sabotage.

As we started the month with a limited release I can't wait to see when it gets in my neck of the woods, so do we end with another: The Raid 2. It ist he kind of very special film where the negative reviews (there's so much violence and plot-denuded action that it's tiring) make me even more excited than the positive reviews. Which, by the way, have been giddy.

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FEBRUARY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

Golly, here we are just, blasting through February, and I totally forgot to do this. We could blame the almost unprecedented slate of outrageous shit that opened in January for ruining movies altogether, and the fact that February is never a great time for films either. But that wouldn't be true. That would be spectacularly untrue, in fact...


7.2.2014

...because this February includes The Lego Movie, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who've now gone two-for-two on movies that I wasn't expecting to like at all and ended up liking a lot, so we'll see how they can do on a movie whose ad campaign has been one terrifically appealing gag and/or concept after another. Right now, this seems primed to take the Coraline, "February animated release that keeps on being one of my favorite movies of the year no matter how much I see" slot, though at a bare minimum, I don't think that a hilarious pop culture riff with a great voice cast is too much to hope for.

Elsewhere, George Clooney's WWII buddy ensemble/caper film The Monuments Men finally opens, after having been bumped from Oscar season, which really just can't be good. And the latest attempt to kick off a teen franchise, Vampire Academy, from the not-to-be-discounted brother team of director Mark Waters and writer Daniel Waters. So I might even pay to see it. But shit, does it ever look awful.


12.2.2014

A PG-13 remake of RoboCop with a slicker-than-shit aesthetic nervously similar to the last Paul Verhoeven remake, Total Recall? Oh, there's no way this goes wrong.


14.2.2014

Happy Valentine's Day! Love stories for everybody! The loose remake of a loose adaptation of a B-level Mamet play, About Last Night clearly looks to be the most tolerable to watch, almost by default: the bizarrely-marketed remake of Endless Love (the trailer for which demands that you anticipate it will be a serial killer thriller) is likely to be junk, and the confusing-sounding fantasy Winter's Tale is the feature directorial debut of Akiva Goldsman, a phrase that fills me with about as much confidence and pleasure as "scrotal lacerations".


21.2.2014

The "Liam Neeson is an old man who can kick your ass" subgenre kicks off its highest-profile spin-off yet, in which Kevin Costner is old, and presumably ass-kicking, in the service of rescuing his daughter, in 3 Days to Kill, produced by LNIAOMWCKYA impresario Luc Besson. If you'd told me as recently as three weeks ago that 3 Days to Kill had an easy shot at being the better of Kevin Costner's first-quarter action films in 2014, I would have been too aghast to even laugh at you. But I would have been wrong.

If your tastes in crappy genre cash-ins runs a bit more old-school, we have here a vintage-style CGI disaster romance epic in Pompeii, continuing the year's very strange run of shit-looking sword-and-sandal pictures. And if, for whatever reason, you prefer good movies, Miyazaki Hayao's probably-but-maybe-not last movie, The Wind Rises, begins its US run. A good film aye; not a great film. But a good film, and a solid swan song, if that turns out to be the case.


28.2.2014

Unafraid of market cannibalism, a legitimate "Liam Neeson...ass" movie opens, Non-Stop, though it is not produced by Besson. It is however directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, making the "Unknown on a plane" shorthand even more likely than it appears. I'll admit, I'm still onboard with this late-career action hero phase; if we are going to have asinine action movies that pander to our lowest impulses as consumers of art, I'd rather that those action movies star actors of presence and gravity whom I'd enjoy watching doing pretty much anything. And Julianne Moore! Hell, y'all, I've followed Julianne Moore into worse places than this.

The counter-offerings, anyway, are unspeakably dire: Son of God, literally the cheapest possible way to fleece religious viewers, since the film's entire target audience has already seen last year's miniseries The Bible, from whose footage this film is entirely derived. Also Welcome to Yesterday, which isn't just a found-footage movie about teens, but a sci-fi found-footage movie about teens, despite the demonstrated fact that if the gimmick ever works, it only ever does so in horror. "Chronicle was mostly okay, other than the useless found-footage" you might counter. "Michael Bay is producing this", I respond before turning haughtily away, not even pausing to see your defeatist tears.

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JANUARY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

A new movie year stretches out before us like a virgin field of glistening, beautiful snow, untouched and full of magic and promise. Let us take a moment to enjoy it, before we start to deal with all the slush and black ice and backbreaking shoveling of the movies shortly to pockmark that snow. Because it's January, after all, where decent movies go to die.


3.1.2013

And here's a particularly icy patch of yellow snow to kick things off: Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, a Latino-themed spin-off of the little franchise that wouldn't die. It would take very little effort for it to be better than the last two in the main line of the series, but "very little effort" is the clarion call of the entire found footage horror genre, so let's say that I'm not stocking up bottles of champagne to celebrate.


10.1.2013

Your standard-issue prestige movie expansion, as Her and Lone Survivor both start widening their nets, but the only really new, really wide release is The Legend of Hercules, an old-school sword-and-sandal picture that, to judge from the advertising, doesn't realise that Greece and Rome weren't the same place. And Renny Harlin directs! Truly, this will be a fantasy epic for the ages.


17.1.2013

Almost half of the movies coming out all month are being dumped in one day, with the breakout film clearly set to be Ride Along, a cop comedy with Kevin Hart doing his Kevin Hart thing. It's even probably going to be the best movie in a generally miserable, wintry landscape, though maybe Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit will find some way to be surprising, because films getting shoved to January at the last minute is a good sign.

In the Land of No Hope, the year's first animated film is a viciously generic-looking comedy, The Nut Job, which wants to be the Rififi of sassy talking animals. And even that's still going to be better than Devil's Due, a "pregnant with Satan's baby" picture that has had the shamelessness to finally adopt the title that every film in its subgenre must have passed by with a shudder at some point.


24.1.2013

In I, Frankenstein, Aaron Eckhart plays Sexy Frankenstein's Monster fighting an army of evil angels. My vote for the "get drunk and go with your friends" release of the month.


31.1.2013

Jason Reitman's Labor Day, having been quietly smacked with an Oscar qualifying release, sneaks out to let the rest of us for Kate Winslet. Also, That Awkward Moment is probably the best way to describe the experience of sitting in the dark, watching a movie in which Zac Efron and Michael B. Jordan can't pee because of their raging Viagra erections.

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DECEMBER 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

Just like that, the year is ending, and the last-minute releases are crammed in like shipping containers on an overloaded cargo ship. And by this point, from where I stand, most of the good stuff is already behind us. But not all of it.


6.12.2013

And just like that, we start off with the Coen brothers' news movie, Inside Llewyn Davis. Along with many people, I tend to regard any new Coen film as a Major Cinema Event, and after four consecutive years with the brothers releasing new films, the three year gap has been particularly rough. Even rougher: it only opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and the rest of the country has to hang on another two weeks.

In terms of wide releases, just the one: Out of the Furnace, a film with way too many great people in the cast: Christian Bale, Casey Affleck, Forest Whitaker, Sam Shepard, Willem Dafoe, Zoe Saldana. The last of whom is the odd one out for at least two reasons, but even if it's just a well-done thriller, that's reason enough to be excited.


13.12.2013

The gulf between Oscarbait and mainstream holiday fare is especially pronounced: in limited release, we find American Hustle, David O. Russell's crime dramedy, Saving Mr. Banks, which will almost certainly be an heroic act of self-fellation by the Walt Disney Company, but oh my God, you guys, Emma Thompson! and Claude Lanzmann's glorious masterpiece of a documentary, The Last of the Unjust. In wide release, it's Tyler Perry's hugely dubious-looking A Madea Christmas and part 2 of the little trilogy that couldn't, The Hobbit: The Smaugening. It's got the most cinematic parts of the book in it, so it'll probably be the best of the films, but any enthusiasm I had died when that subtitle was announced.


18.12.2013

More of the same: the limited release of Her, a weird and fascinating-looking romantic fantasy by Spike Jonze gets swallowed up by the wide debut of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, sequel to a generationally beloved comedy that, I'm sorry, I just don't like.


20.12.2013

Clearly because nobody had any idea what else to do with it, this odd 3-D, narrative adaptation of the speculative documentary Walking with Dinosaurs is happening all over movie screens. I kind of don't even understand what this is.


25.12.2013

Ah, Christmas Day! A perfect time to go out and watch a great family-friendly movie like the three-hour, just-under-NC-17 Scorsese hedonism epic The Wolf of Wall Street! Or the prestigious theater adaption of legendarily scabrous, hate-fueled domestic drama August: Osage County! Or the bloody Afghanistan war movie Lone Survivor!

We could keep going, but the point is simple: it feels like a whole lot of counter-programming that isn't actually countering anything. The closest that anything comes to feeling like it's targeting a family audience is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and even that feels more like the kind of family outing where the youngest member of the family is home on break from college. Meanwhile, the unnecessary "Rocky vs. Raging Bull" pairing Grudge Match and the gaudy-looking fantasy 47 Ronin fill out the ranks of movies for parents to see while the tweens are busy with Justin Bieber's Believe, a title that I do not know how to diagram. Does it mean Justin Bieber Is Believe? Because I desperately hope it does.


27.12.2013

I do not quite understand why the exceedingly minor-looking British heartwarming story about following your dreams and making it in showbiz One Chance is being exported to other countries in the first place, but at least the distributors have the decency to hide it away in the most misbegotten corner of the calendar.

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