#2,201: The Martian

The Queen of Versailles - ★★★★☆
Wow. That's what I said aloud over and over while watching this.

Race to Nowhere - ★★½☆☆ 
I thought this was going to be about tigers and helicopters, but I was wrong. It's about how homework is too hard. I was very suspicious of this movie, doubly so now that I see how old it is. I'll believe that No Child Left Behind has caused some drastic and unfortunate changes in schools, but I'm not sure I buy these kids as the average sample.

An Honest Liar - ★★★½☆
Good on this doc for (1) being about something that interests me, (2) telling the stories I (and presumably plenty of others casually aware of Randi) already know efficiently, and then (3) hitting me with a couple of increasingly surprising stories I didn't already know. ✓

The Martian - ★★★★★
Nothing says autumn in Hollywood like a big space movie. I think it's great that this is a movie full of hope. The hope almost squelches the horror.

Really solid for also being such a faithful adaptation. Confusing though, that Sean Bean plays a character that survives. Looking forward to this being corrected in the director's cut.

#2,197: Philomena

She's the One - ★☆☆☆☆
he first few minutes tease you with hints of things that look like they might happen at the beginning of an interesting movie, but this is the setup to a practical joke that She's the One is playing on you. The payoff, revealed sooner than you might expect, is that this movie is terrible.

The poor cast struggles through a pile of awful lines while the movie rebuffs any attempts the audience might make to find the story interesting through sheer force of will. If only this had the charm and polish of a student film.

The Brothers McMullen - ½☆☆☆☆
Follows that old screenwriting adage that a script should have an Amy Fisher joke every 15 pages.

Highlight: there was a really interesting few minutes in the middle where I watched a video on my phone of Johnny Carson pulling two audience members out of the crowd and ask them to play piano on the Tonight Show because his scheduled musical guest cancelled.

The Intern - ★★★★☆
Alright, listen up Ed Burns, now THIS is how you make a movie where nothing happens. I mean, sure, every now and then, something happens in the movie, but when it does, it's only to negate an earlier scene. This is a positive review.

The easiest way to take this movie is as a spiritual sequel to The Devil Wears Prada. and in that case, I hope there'll be a third in the non-series one day, where Anne Hathaway plays an old person.

Really though, I don't know what the last movie was that left me pondering over the world it contains for such a long time. I've spent days talking over hypothetical situations, wondering about how dropped plot threads must have resolved themselves, whether the obviously missing scenes were cut from the script or in the edit, and how unsuccessful Ben would have been as a young person. 

Philomena - ★★★½☆
I kind of like when a director has ideas that haunt them, and I certainly liked this more than recent watch (and Frears' first) The Snapper. This movie is good at evoking that 'punching something' feeling that you get whenever you examine anything in the world.

#2,193: The Wrecking Crew

Trainwreck - ★★½☆☆
his movie is long, but even more than that, it's confident. It assumes it's completely killing, all the time. As far as this movie knows, audiences are rolling in the aisles while it shouts twenty alternate punchlines.

Hector and the Search for Happiness - ★★☆☆☆

House - ★½☆☆☆
What a chore.

The Wrecking Crew - ★★★☆☆
An interesting story less expertly told than 20 Feet from Stardom. There's something so appealing to me about the idea that there's really only like half a dozen bands out there, and record companies are just selling consumers on a carefully constructed ruse.

The closeness the director has to the material both gives him the obsession a documentarian needs to see a film through to completion and the lack of perspective that makes the movie feel like half a story.

#2,189: Straight Outta Compton

The Gift - ★★★☆☆
The important thing to remember about a 96% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes is that it indicates that 96% of critics gave this movie at least a 51%.

Hitman: Agent 47 - ★★½☆☆
I was a little embarrassed to tell the friendly concessions clerk what I was at the theater to see. I guess I was expecting something in the vein of Equilibrium or Ultraviolet - a dumb movie with interesting fights and gobs of workmanlike animation . And then, it mostly was! This wasn't, you know, *good*, but I didn't leave the theater with the regrets I was expecting! If I didn't have moviepass, this would have been a perfectly acceptable loud explodey thing to watch on Netflix some afternoon.

I will say though, by the criteria of the games this is based on, Agent 47 is a terrible hitman.

American Ultra - ★★☆☆☆
I guess this is the best Kristen Stewart movie I've ever seen.

Like Agent 47, this belongs deeply, firmly in B-Movie territory. The movie looks cheap, the acting is good enough for government work, and the script is kind of a bummer.

It was interesting for a minute when Phoebe murders a guy and knows what their weapons are called, but that turn is just about the moment that I went from feeling surprisingly interested and engaged with the movie to feeling like I was waiting around for the movie to end. Their coupledom was so much more interesting and cool when it was based on feeling.

Also, I disagree with the premise of the closing credits cartoon.

Straight Outta Compton - ★★★☆☆
Previously, my knowledge of NWA was limited to the sentence 'Eazy-E is a hard mutha,' which I discovered on the wall of my church.

This movie mixes cool and interesting scenes about kids navigating their sudden success with scenes that offer up hokey mini-origin stories of their lyrics. Occasionally, the movie lobs in a speed bump of a scene that polishes up the halos on members of the group that happen to be producers on the movie - no way these were in the original script.

I choose to believe this movie is a direct sequel to Love & Mercy, and that Paul Giamatti is playing the same guy. Much like that movie, I bet this would have meant more to me if I knew the source material, but I think this time I'm glad I got to go into it fresh. Made me want to go watch a documentary about (but not by) NWA.

#2,185: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Angela’s Ashes - ★★★☆☆
I guess this is a tale of almost unrelenting tragedy, but somehow it was less depressing than I'd prepared myself for. We found humor in unexpected places in this movie, and somehow that seems appropriate to Frank's outlook.

I bet the book's a fair sight better than the movie though. For instance, I think this movie is called Angela's Ashes because the book is called Angela's Ashes, but I bet the book is called Angela's Ashes for reasons that are apparent to the reader. So that's one leg up on the movie.

The Snapper - ★★☆☆☆
I liked how the family dog, Famine, liked watching television, and how he's the only character that the father talked to like a regular person at the beginning of the movie. Other than that, I didn't really care about anyone in this movie.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation - ★★★★☆
I like spy movies. This is maybe the James Bondiest Mission:Impossible yet, even though it's also both a return to and subversion of the classic M:I format, which has been absent from the franchise for ten years or so. I suspect Ghost Protocol might still be my favorite of the bunch, but Rogue Nation's got a lot going for it - for one, it's new. For another, the Jeremy Renner is a lot better this time, even if I did mostly just pretend he was still playing Hawkeye. I also think it's great that all the stuff in the ads was from the mostly-unrelated-to-the-plot opening adventure.

Ethan's getting to be an old pro at recovering from field defibrillations. Another couple movies and he'll have died on the job more often than Jack Bauer.

Mission: Impossible - ★★★☆☆
As when watching Terminators 5 and 1, watching this first Impossible Mission surprised me with how many details from the first found their way into the newest entry. This movie wasn't an origin story in its day, but it reads as a pretty weird origin tale for the Ethan of 20 years hence.

Also, Jon Voight is just 4 years older in this movie than Tom Cruise is in part 5.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. - ★★★★☆
I liked this so much that I don't understand why it's not being advertised. It seems to be a rule that the more heavily advertised a movie is in LA (ahem, Rikki and the Flash, Fant4stic,) the more horrible it's going to be, but it's just weird when a big-looking movie gets so little support from the studio that they don't even try to bolster your interest through brute force.

Guy Ritchie could use a new franchise to replace Sherlock Holmes, and I'm all for it being this, although this doesn't seem like quite as refillable a concept - the agents can't spend all next movie bristling at being forced to work together again. Henry Cavill was great in ways I had no idea were even an option. He was stylish, period cool, and funny, as was the whole movie.

Although I have to ask, who flashes back to two minutes ago?