What’s left to say about Marvel? After years of aimless wandering with Hulkish consistency and Daredevil clarity, they hit a magic formula with Tony Stark and have been striking that increasingly lucrative iron ever since. Seven years and some ten films later, they might be the most bankable brand in showbusiness — and critically successful, to boot. Granted, they lack the fan-loyalty of Harry Potter and the critical transcendence of Pixar, but absent also are the total misfires: no Larry the Cable Guy, no jettisoning of great source material in favor of banal teenage love triangles, did I mention no Larry the Cable Guy? With self-deprecating whimsy and an encyclopaedic sense of their target demo, it’s hard to even /imagine/ a clunker. The films aren’t always amazing, but they’re never not fun.

Avengers: Age Of Ultron doesn’t break Marvel’s remarkable winning streak. But for the first time, I’m getting a vision of how it might end: not with any discernible misstep, but with natural exhaustion. Because everything is still very entertaining here: the easy rapport between Downey & Co., the impossibly-escalating stakes, the throwaway, PG-13 gags that pepper the mayhem. James Spader is particularly good as the gruff, Birdman-ish Ultron, embracing that sardonic brand of nihilism which makes cartoon supervillains so fun to watch. He’s going to murder your whole species, sure, but he needs you to know how terribly boring he’ll find it. Everything is done in good, just-the-right-amount-of-clean fun. It’s just exactly the sort of fun we’ve come to expect, and for some reason that feels like a letdown. Maybe it’s the somewhat bloated cast that makes every character moment feel a bit too diluted, or the knowledge that so many of these ridiculous movies are still in the works. No routine, however good, can last forever. Even if this formula hasn’t totally been tapped, I hope they shake things up soon. But what’s left for Marvel to say?

There are two questions Sci-Fi can beg of me: what did it say, and how did it feel? Being well-versed in the fields Hollywood loves to bastardize, my bar for the specifics is unreasonably high. Whether they say it with dumb sincerity (Transcendence), playfulness (Lucy), or aggravating grandeur (Interstellar), most die by over-exposition. The best of them sidestep the specifics and go for the jugular. No one wants to know how Moon’s space station was architected, or whether Samantha actually runs Linux. There’s only one question worth asking: how would it feel?

Ex Machina takes this lesson to heart: first-time director Alex Garland has far more to say about the human psyche than science, and he tells you so up front. Set in an undisclosed location in a who-cares-how-soon future, the film functions less like a story than a three-character morality play. Nathan (Oscar Isaac) is a sort of Ghost of Sergey Brin Future; a wealthy, bearded brogrammer who lives in recluse, crafting the future with giddy disregard for privacy or ethics. His latest creation is Eva (Alicia Vikander), a humanoid robot who, he believes, will pass the elusive Turing Test. Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson) is flown in to conduct that test and, like any mid-level talent, he’s initially bogged down in low-level details. But true-to-type, Nathan insists on abstraction: it’s not about “stochastic processes” or hand-wavey explanations, but how it feels to meet her. So how does it feel?

Exhilarating. And that’s why it’s the best film of the year, so far. Vikander’s Eva is the anti-Scarlett Johansson, lacking both the warmth of Her and the chill of Under The Skin. With literally unblinking focus, adolescent flirtation, eerie precision and just a hint of menace, she’s (brilliantly) never less than a machine. She’s set up camp in the Uncanny Valley, and the film dares you not to empathize. As the story unfolds with predictable shape, the texture is new and unsettling. You can feel it in every detail: gorgeous waterfalls flowing over industrial-gray concrete, nudity that defies the male-gazing camera, art and philosophy interspersed with orgiastic terror, a soundtrack whose fuzzy ambiance shouts louder than a Hans Zimmer choir. Something beautiful is happening, but it’s not yours to own. Nathan fancies himself Creator God and Caleb postures as a Savior, but the real Deus comes from elsewhere.

This one only gets better the more I think about it. Chris, Carson, and I review it at:

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, but usually it’s not: for every unbelievable true story, there are a thousand unremarkable ones that refuse to tell themselves. Great art can spring from the mundane, but rarely without a push. Be it a repackaging of the narrative, a fresh way to express it, or a uniquely empathetic vantage point, /something/ has to transpose the profundity of “living it” into “seeing it lived.” If the point-by-point truth won’t do the heavy lifting, a little finesse is necessary.

When New York Times journalist Michael Finkel was tasked with covering the African slave trade, he finessed the details and wound up unemployed. Unfortunately, True Story seems to have learned from his mistake. The film consists of a series of interviews between Finkel (Jonah Hill) and Chistian Longo (James Franco), and it’s resolved to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Verily a family man and all-around stand up guy, Longo is charged with the brutal murder of his wife and three children. Volumes could be written about the gap between who he “is” and what he’s done, and Finkel is promised the exclusive scoop. It’s a thrilling setup: as if Hill’s unblinking Moneyball character were thrown into Capote’s plot with a Foxcatcher slowburn (surprisingly, Bennett Miller doesn’t seem to be involved here.)

Unfortunately, neither Longo nor the film make good on their promise. Despite solid dramatic turns from both leads and moments of genuinely artful filmmaking, we’re never granted more than fleeting access to the killer’s psyche. Nor do we have reason to care about the unsurprising consequences. Despite Felicity Jones literally shouting the film’s overarching themes at us, nothing quite ties together. It’s a well crafted film with half of an interesting story — but it’s so committed to the truth, it doesn’t say anything real.

We begin our sequel where we always begin: on the streets. Our protagonists, a ragtag group bound by fierce loyalty and a slick, colorful obsession, are back. One is struggling with the routine of new parenthood, and another is having communication issues with their spouse. Tensions are high after an unexpected bit of home redecoration, leading the gang to a swanky resort in the United Arab Emirates. When their racy behavior gets them thrown off the premises and an old flame threatens their internal stability, they jet back to the city they left behind.

Fast and the City 2 — scratch that, Furious 7 — is not supposed to be my kind of movie. I haven’t seen 1-6, can’t stand most big-budget action franchises, and I barely know how my car works, let alone care to fetishize it alongside dudes in wife-beaters and Now That’s What I Call Bro pump up jams. But I had an absolute blast with this one.

Is it stupid? I don’t know. Is a karate fight on a bus that’s about to topple off a cliff stupid? Is The Rock flexing out of an arm cast and shouting “Woman, I /am/ the Calvary [sic]” stupid? Is jumping a car out of a building and into another building so you can steal a device to locate the guy you’re currently driving away from, stupid? These are questions to be wrestled with in fear and trembling.

Reality holds little traction in the Furious universe, but what’s remarkable is how deftly it steers into the skid. Diesel and Walker (the Carrie and Charlotte of the group, respectively) routinely forego obvious weapons for quippy hand-to-hand combat, because…furious? Villains are ludicrous, Ludacris is a genius, Kurt Russell shills Belgian ale but Diesel insists on Corona. There are no laws here. Cars fall out of planes, tumble down mountains, skid under buses, and soar into helicopters. “God’s Eye” surveys the planet because Eagle Eye was trademarked. Everyone knows how to do a backflip, and sometimes the camera does one too: wanna fight about it? Josh Larsen described it best as a state of “Zen chaos”: the world is crumbling at breakneck pace, but everything feels just right.

At the end of all the mindless action is a tribute to the late Paul Walker. As with any “serious” scene, the dialogue is terribly clunky. But there’s very real emotion behind it and, like a heartfelt wedding speech from your boneheaded friend, it’s made all the more touching for its clunkiness. Subtlety is not this movie’s game, and it wasn’t mine watching it. When the car jumped out of a plane I cheered, when The Rock flexed out of a cast I laughed, and when that final Wiz Khalifa song came on I got a bit misty in spite of myself. There’s nothing more to it: Furious 7 an immensely fun ride, well worth seeing and forgetting.

I have a love/hate relationship with Noah Baumbach. Like Woody Allen, he puts “real life” on display in uncomfortable, often brutal detail. Except his “reality” is alien to me: highly articulate artists living in the Village, alternately discussing their latest novel/film/ballet and sexually-liberated exploits. The Squid And The Whale, like Manhattan, initially drove me crazy. I hated every one of those beautifully-framed, entitled brats and their droll, New York City “problems.” But something changed on second viewing: the specifics still felt opaque, but something universal glimmered through the cracks. Made more beautiful, somehow, by the fact that I could barely access it. Empathy is best when it’s fought for, and even if I don’t always get there — I loved Frances Ha for her obvious flaws, hated Greenberg for his — there’s always something interesting in the struggle.

That struggle is totally absent in While We’re Young — it’s easy to like from the get-go. The film is effectively Baumbach’s riff on This Is Forty: Cornelia (Naomi Watts) and Josh (a remarkably good Ben Stiller) are a childless married couple grappling with the stasis of middle age. Or maybe middle-middle-age: not free enough to be hipsters but too restlessly self-aware to be yuppies, they’re stranded. Their peers, Baby Bjorn-adorn and bobbing to nightmarish sing-a-longs, have sacrificed Personhood to the idol of Parenthood. Meanwhile, the new generation (hilariously played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) is lawless: they hike through subway tracks, throw “beach parties” in the street, wear post-post-post-ironic tees, and drop ayahuasca with Shamans and Spotify Radio. Baumbach mines keen observations and laughs from all sides: it’s the funniest, and most accessible, he’s ever been. Even when the jokes don’t land, you really want them to.

Tonally, it’s standard indie fare: charming leads, witty dialogue, lows played for laughs and quickly resolved. But, like plenty of comedy, there’s a certain sadness to it. Josh and Cornelia aren’t really stranded, because neither side actually exists: they’re cultivated fantasies. Everyone is stuck somewhere, and no journey towards self-acceptance can change that. Whether they numb it with smartphones they pretend to hate or vintage kitsch they pretend to love; run from it in sockless loafers or belittle it with faux-weary acceptance; fuel it with sharp-elbowed egotism or wear “selflessness” like armor — nobody nails the landing. It’s clichéd, but personal: you can just feel Baumbach tearing down his younger pretensions and grown-up sentiment, brazen and giddy. But it’s not clear he’s found anything real to replace it with…or that he was even particularly interested in looking. Confronted with the void, he shrugs and rolls credits.

While We’re Young is a good movie: it’s clever, fun, and well worth the price of admission. I just wish it’d put up more of a fight.

I hold many films close to my heart, but it rarely matters if others agree. If you don’t like Boyhood, I totally get it: I can see aspects of myself that wouldn’t like it either. If you find Wes Anderson too precious, that’s your prerogative: I have a blast indulging in his whimsy, but I have no desire to defend it. Some things, though, hit me in a deeper place. Eternal Sunshine. The Before series. Lost In Translation. If you dislike them, I certainly can respect why — in the cool, sentiment-free light of day, their flaws are evident. But it signifies a disconnect between us: a particular way of looking at the world that I treasure, which for whatever reason you don’t. It actually sort of matters.

Short Term 12 is one such film. When I saw it in theatres I was transfixed. I loved it. But somehow, my knee-jerk reaction was to write off those emotions in favor of nitpicks: it’s overly sentimental, the third act strains credulity, its conclusion is too neat. When the end of the year came and I still hadn’t gotten a chance to revisit it, I sheepishly included it in the middle of a Best Of list as an “indefensible, personal” choice — a guilty pleasure at best, hardly worth mentioning in the same breath as real, Oscar-worthy fare.

A year has gone by since I made that list, and I’ve rewatched this film embarrassingly many times: in hotel beds, on airplanes, at home with a fever, on a Vienna-bound train (yes, along with the obvious companion.) I can now safely say that Short Term 12 is my favorite film of 2013, and is on a very short list for the decade.

I love this movie in the most tender, uncool way possible. I love Larson’s lived-in authenticity. Grace is a person I’ve met many times: her struggles are real, and her quiet looks speak volumes. I love Cretton’s keen attention to detail: the game of Big Booty, Jayden’s many wristbands, the way Mason cultivates a lenient, unkempt approachability that never undercuts Grace’s authority. I love Marcus’ heartbreaking rap, and the precise amount of stunned silence we’re allotted when he finishes his refrain. I love West’s gorgeous score, where unabashedly lush melodies swell above an undercurrent of gingerly plucked strings. I love the gentle shaky cam and the empathy inherent in its gaze. I love when that gaze lingers on empty rooms: like Before Sunrise, there’s a catharsis in the morning after, of familiar settings having outlived, but not forgotten, the emotions they contained. I love that the film isn’t afraid to be as flagrantly sentimental as this review; that it asks us to laugh, mourn, and walk alongside real kids and their very adult pain, no eye-roll in sight.

Could the third act have been more restrained? Was the conclusion a bit too tidy? Maybe. I honestly can’t bring myself to care. In that maybe-too-tidy penultimate scene, as the camera zoomed and soundtrack roared, I cried very uncool tears in that theatre. And I’ve cried every time since: in hotel beds, on airplanes, at home with a fever, and yes, on that clichéd Vienna-bound train. Cretton has infinite reserves of grace for every character he brings to screen, and I’m happy to afford him the same. Short Term 12 is a lovely, heartfelt masterpiece.

The first Hunger Games was frustrating. After an hour preparing us for intense ethical dilemmas, Katniss had managed to avert them all, lobbing righteous arrows from a tree while well-defined baddies did all the necessary heavy lifting. As successive sequels continued to polish her shiny Action Figure halo, I found myself wishing that /just once/ they would let a little darkness in. This weekend a duo, clad in underage angst and Hot Topic pleather, summersaulted out of a train and into my life as if to say “Be careful what you wish for, stiff.” The Divergent Series had arrived.

Divergent and Insurgent take place in a shameless mashup of every other Dystopian future, which really isn’t as problematic as it sounds. After freedom inevitably led to anarchy, society salvaged itself the only way it knew how: rigid structure and cautionary-tale-tailored naivity. The world is broken into five Factions, and the Sorting Ha—no, The Exam—pairs citizen with Faction based on well-defined archetypes. Self-Sacrificing (Abnegation), Peaceful (Amity), Honest (Candor), Intelligent (Erudite), and Bro (Dauntless). Triss (Shailene Woodley) is born Abnegation and chooses Dauntless, but (like all teenagers) she, like, doesn’t fit into your labels, Dad. She’s refuses to be any one thing: she’s Divergent. And that deeply threatens Kate Winslet’s Order Of Things™. No subtlety points in that regard, but far be it from me to trash a YA series for a little on-the-nose relatability. There’s a reason this stuff gets recycled: it connects.

My problem has more to do with priorities. Unlike The Hunger Games, the series — and Insurgent in particular — isn’t afraid to bloody its protagonists’ hands. Multiple people take their own life, bad guys effectively commit genocide, and Triss and Scowly Face (“Four”, the film’s romantic variant of Christian Grey and/or a sack of potatoes) shoot to kill. Sometimes it provokes genuine guilt, giving Woodley a chance to showcase her (fantastic) dramatic chops in an otherwise miscast role. But more often it’s ignored or, worse, acknowledged in service of bland teenage melodrama: grief from suicide is resolved by a hug and “Come here”, mass-killings are stopped (not prevented) with lamely empowering quips, and a single death haunts Triss till (fifty discardable bodies later) she’s learned to love herself again.

Almost every notable aspect of the series comes with regrettable sacrifice. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, but its largely male supporting players are unbearably vapid. (Rounding out the cast with Platonic-fixer-upper “Four”: The Fault In Our Stars-ex Ansel Elgort as her pouty Vulcan brother, The Spectacular Now-ex Miles Teller her inexplicably flip-flopping frenemy, and a thousand tattooed douchebags who hang out at “The Pit” and can jump real high.) It tackles ambitious themes, but only via contrived scenarios and totally irrational egos. And it introduces genuinely heavy concepts, but its follow-through is spotty and ultimately reckless. Somewhere on the cutting room floor lie a popcorn flick, a weighty epic, a Twilight reboot, and an episode of Tool Academy. Kate Winslet was right after all: it’s dangerous to try to be too many things.

It’s hard to say much about a movie which doesn’t try to say anything at all, so I’ll keep this short and sweet: you’ve already seen Run All Night. X is a goodhearted criminal who’s been out of the game a while. Y is a powerful man with a misplaced sense of decency, and his younger henchmen are erratic douchebags. X crosses Y to save an innocent party, Y vows to come after X with “everything he’s got”, and thousands of inconsequential bullets later they’re face-to-face, destroying one another with the utmost respect and allusions to an archaic “code.“ John Wick, The Equalizer, and every other Liam Neeson movie have riffed on the aesthetic with varying degrees of success — and that’s just talking about the past year.

There will always be mindless shoot-em-ups in the name of vengeance and family. There will always be serious Common cameos, and they’ll always make me laugh. There will always be CG blood to mix with CG rain in the gutters of blue-tinted, CG Manhattan, and it will always sell popcorn. With engaging leads like Liam Neeson and Ed Harris, this particular film sold it just fine — nothing new, nothing wrong. Its trailer promised a couple hours of escape, and like any good aging mobster, it aims to keep that promise with zero surprises, tried-and-true methods, and just a whiff of weary obligation. See it or don’t, you won’t regret a thing.

It’s been a while since a film has pulled a critical U-Turn with the angular velocity of CHAPPiE. When the first trailer dropped, the internet was abuzz — and to my recollection, no more than 50% of it had to do with Hugh Jackman’s mullet. The remaining buzz among fanboys and critics was that after squandering his inheritance on Matt Damon and exploding planets, the Prodigal Son of low-fi sci-fi had returned to his roots. Granted, the journey hadn’t spanned much distance in style (post-grunge, bullet-riddled Joburg) or substance ([insert name] with a robotic component fights for autonomy). But in heart and energy, he was supposedly back on top…til the vitriolic reviews poured in.

It’s no surprise that CHAPPiE was a box office bomb. Neill Blomkamp’s “anarchic” style has mass-appeal in small doses, but unfiltered it’s downright abrasive: if District 9 was a Linkin Park show, CHAPPiE is a guy with bum wine and Nietzsche tattoo playing guitar with a rusty fork. It doesn’t care if you like it, it just wants to bleed. The trailers only made it worse: when you market your movie like an inspirational mashup of Iron Giant and How To Train Your Dragon, it’s jarring to give the audience Trainspotting-meets-Burning Man. When they ask for Dev Patel, Die Antwoord isn’t the answer.

Nor is it surprising that CHAPPiE received some critical pushback: it’s technologically ludicrous, thematically scattered, and chronically unfocused. It’s also weird, vibrant, and ambitious as hell — and that’s where I have to give it credit. The film itself fails on a few serious levels, but Chappie the character is Baymax-levels of wonderful. Whether he’s “doing heists” or having angsty philosophic conversations with his Creator, he’s a fully-realized joy to behold. And while the story surrounding him is frequently bizarre, I can’t fault Blomkamp too much for overshooting. It angers me that Lucy gets rave reviews as a “campy thrill ride” while a movie that tries (and occasionally succeeds) to execute legitimately bold concepts gets torn to shreds for stupidity. His message may be as subtle as a decapitating robot, but give me “obvious” over “pointless” any day. It’s a commercial misstep worth watching.

January and February are the cruelest months, breeding low expectations and films which somehow fail to meet them. You can watch Kevin Costner learn about race relations, or Liam Neeson go down with a franchise, or Kevin Costner learn about race relations again, or (heaven forbid) bland erotica target a different gender. While staring down these dreary options, in walks Colin Firth, double-breasted suit glimmering through the darkness, inviting you to join an inventive, refreshingly fun romp. Or so critics have raved.

Kingsman tells the story of Eggsy (Taron Egerton), a young British ruffian who is introduced to an underground world of espionage. With the help of Galahad (Firth), he learns the ropes of this new society, saving the world from a philanthropic maniac (a hilarious Samuel L. Jackson) and embracing the basic tenants of Gentlemanhood in the process. If this sounds like a spy version of My Fair Lady to you, the script already beat you to that and many other punchlines. Giddily self-aware and unabashedly exaggerated, the film was very fun — sometimes. It’s the other 2/3rds that were a problem.

The film’s centerpiece is a seriously impressive, hyper-stylized action sequence set in a thinly-veiled Westboro Baptist church. I totally get why everyone is raving about it — it comes out of nowhere, hitting absurdly violent heights that’d make Tarantino smile. But the reason it comes out of nowhere, and I suspect one of the reasons everyone was blown away, is that the film before (and, barring a few other great moments, the film after) is eye-roll-worthy, cliched fluff. The scene is a standout because the bar had already been set at “decent.” Like Seth McFarlane, Matthew Vaughn’s love for pop culture leads to both genuinely clever moments and a frustrating belief that winking imitation equates to great satire. It doesn’t. Boring exposition and seen-it-a-million-times training scenes aren’t automatically a blast to sit through just because the actors are mugging the camera, and the director being in on the joke doesn’t make shallow characterizations or [seriously off-putting] misogyny any more fresh. At its witty best, it shows hints of a wonderful film: a satire, a teenage fantasy, and a gleeful throwback. Vaughn clearly had it in him. Too often, though, it felt like a lesser version of the things it was throwing back to: style without a point of view, emotional beats without conviction. There’s still some fun to be had, for sure. But it doesn’t have the firepower to save us from this C-movie wasteland.

Chris and I disagreed on this one, but I really enjoyed the discussion surrounding it on: