MOVIES: Coyote vs. Acme (2026, Dave Green)

Coyote vs. Acme first made news in 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they were going to shelve the finished film and take a tax writeoff instead of releasing it. There was great backlash, especially because the few people who'd seen the movie said it was good, and WBD eventually agreed to let the movie be released. Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights; the movie's now in theaters; and whaddya know? It really is good.

It's based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, and tells the story of Wile E. Coyote's lawsuit against Acme for the many, many defective products he has bought from them in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner. He hires personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who has generally been content to file petty nuisance suits against Acme, collecting a few hundred dollars at a time for his client, but his niece/intern (Lana Condor) and Wile E. force him to file a much larger suit.

(Kevin is a partner at the firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese. Those are the last names of Tex, Chuck, and Michael, three of the legendary creators of the original Looney Tunes.)

That puts him up against Acme's lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), his old law school nemesis, and against the deep pockets of the generally beloved Acme ("we're a family values company that values our family of companies").

The Looney Tunes characters exist in the live-action world, and the mix of the two is beautifully done. The focus is on the classic Looney Tunes; none of the new characters from Animaniacs, Space Jam, or other more recent projects make an appearance. Eric Bauza has been voicing these characters for years, and while it's hard not to miss Mel Blanc, Bauza's imitations are solid. Wile E. remains silent throughout, communicating only through the occasional sign.

All of the major Looney Tunes characters, and a lot of minor ones, are here. Foghorn Leghorn gets an unexpectedly large role as an Acme executive, and in the current climate, the thought of United States Senator Elmer Fudd feels less absurd than it probably should.

Forte and Cena have the bulk of the human-toon interaction scenes, and they deal with that challenge in very different ways. Forte tones way down to let the toons dominate their scenes, playing a sad sack who is just as used to constant failure in the human world as Wile E. is in the toon world. Cena, on the other world, goes bigger than life, essentially transforming his already implausible physique into just one more cartoon character. A conversation between Cena and Acme agent Tweety Bird is one of the movie's comic highlights.

The jokes are funny; in particular, kudos to writer Samy Burch for finding the perfect way to slip in a joke about Pepe le Pew, whose womanizing is significantly less charming these days than it might have seemed in the Looney Tunes' heyday. The climax of the movie, an unexpected meeting between Coyote and Road Runner, hits with an emotional punch I wasn't expecting.

I was happy to see that the movie had a strong weekend at the box office, and I hope that word of mouth will keep it in theaters for a while.

MOVIES: The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

We open in a Michigan suburb in 1982, where the Platt family is under a lot of stress. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel, obviously more autobiographical than she'll admit, about a woman trapped in an unhappy suburban marriage; Greg (Ewan McGregor) hasn't told the family that he's been fired, and that his "side job" of pizza delivery is actually his only job. The kids aren't much happier. Audrey is realizing that her dream of going to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan is financially out of reach, and Brian is a second-tier bully who's recently broken another kid's arm, and now lives in fear of that kid's big brother, the neighborhood's first-tier bully.

But the family's going to have to work together when they wake up after a strange electrical storm to find that a two-mile chunk of their neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the age of dinosaurs, and there are killer beasts everywhere. It's an inverse Jurassic Park; instead of bringing the dinosaurs to our world, the movie sends modern people back to theirs.

Mitchell does a terrific job of building suspense in the opening of the movie, hinting at the lurking monsters in clever ways before finally revealing them to us. The movie is a tight 99 minutes, and there's not a wasted minute in it. Deaths are both gory -- this one is definitely not for the smallest kids, or for the most squeamish adults -- and funny; action sequences and chase scenes are thrilling; and the characters are more rounded and better developed than you expect from this sort of movie.

We already know that Hathaway can cry on cue, and she gets plenty of chances to do so here; what is less expected is what a great scream queen she makes. She delivers perfectly calibrated terror and determination, and it is Denise who is the most practical and realistic about what it will take to survive this ordeal.

This is a excellent family adventure thriller. The jump scares work, and never feel as cheap and desperate as jump scares often do. There are enough jokes to leaven the suspense and fear. There is one narrative choice late in the movie that I thought didn't work; it cheapens the most consequential moment in the movie. But that's a small flaw in an otherwise delightful movie.

And for those who particularly worry about such things, the family dog will be just fine.

MOVIES: The Rivals of Amziah King (2025, Andrew Patterson)

Patterson's first movie, The Vast of Night, had the bad fortune to be scheduled for release in the spring of 2020, so like a lot of movies that year, it wound up with a graceless dump onto streaming and never found the audience it deserved. Not that it would have been a massive box office hit, but it was a smart take of 50s SF paranoia that did a lot on very limited resources. (Sadly, it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment.)

Six years later, he's back with a bigger budget and a couple of actual movie stars. Matthew McConaughey is Amziah King, a widowed Oklahoma beekeeper. As the movie opens, he and some friends are jamming in the parking lot of the local fast food place when a state cop asks for his help. They've intercepted a shipment of stolen honey, and they hope Amziah can help them figure out whose honey it might rightfully be.

The first half of the movie is shaggy and rambling, never sticking to any particular plotline or moment for very long. Amziah is reconnected with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, making an impressive film debut); fifteen years ago, she was one of many children for whom he and his late wife served as foster parents. He has more jam sessions with friends; there's a good amount of music here, all of it great fun in a sort of amateur Mumford & Sons style.

But the long chain of digressions is entertaining, and a couple of them are spectacular set pieces. McConaughey has a delightful monologue (Patterson also wrote the film; he's credited under the pseudonym "James Montague") in which he introduces Kateri to her new neighborhood by explaining the backstory of every casserole at the church potluck, and a bee emergency at the local elementary school is the movie's comic highlight.

A sharp narrative turn brings the back half of the movie into tighter focus, and moves Kateri into the spotlight. It also introduces Kurt Russell (with an unnerving resemblance to Steve Bannon) as the local industrial agriculture tycoon.

This is McConaughey's first on-screen role in six years (he's done some voice work), and Patterson makes impeccable use of his laid-back charm. It's a strong enough performnce to carry us through the meandering first half of the movie, and when the turn comes, we realize just how sharply he's used those seemingly random scenes and moments to define Amziah's character. LookingGlass matches him at every turn, and as Kateri is forced to draw upon the strength that Amziah helped her to find, LookingGlass gives a performance of sly resilience and determination.

Russell isn't asked to do much more than be a hissable villain, but he does that with enthusiasm and crisp comic timing. The assorted locals to whom Amziah and Kateri turn for friendship and aid are played by a fine assortment of character actors -- Scott Shepherd, Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori.

Currently in limited release; opens wide on the 21st. Well worth the time if it's playing near you.

MOVIES: Six: The Musical Live! (2026, Liz Clare)

The musical proshot seems to be turning into more than just an occasional novelty; this is at least the third one to play in theaters in the last year (Merrily We Roll Along came out at the end of 2025, and Hadestown just a few weeks ago). It was filmed in 2022, and reunites the 2018 West End cast.

The show begins with the entrance of six women, who announce that they are the wives of Henry VIII. They wear magnificent costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade, that fuse the style of a Renaissance royal court with the sparkle and short skirts of a modern pop diva. At the back of the stage are Ladies in Waiting, their four-woman band. The wives are getting ready for a tour, and they want the audience to choose their lead singer by deciding which of them had the worst marriage.

From there, Six becomes essentially a rock concert, with each wife getting a solo number (the other women sing backup) telling her story. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have written pop songs, each loosely inspired by one or two specific divas; Catherine of Aragon (Jameia Richard-Noel) is a Beyonce/Jennifer Hudson type, Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is a mix of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, and so on. (I am mildly surprised, given the success of the show, that the producers have never put together some sort of EP in which the songs are sung by the pop stars who inspired them; it'd be a terrific charity fundraiser.)

Most of the songs are tightly tied to each character's history, which makes it difficult to imagine them having any sort of independent life outside the musical. The exception is "Heart of Stone," a ballad for Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris). Seymour tells most of her story in pre-song dialogue, and the song is an emotional response to those events.

Marlow and Moss wrote the show while they were still university students, and there's an "aren't we clever young things" attitude throughout, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That sort of winking attitude is entertaining for a while, but it can wear thin; they were probably wise to keep the show short, coming in just under 90 minutes.

The history is often framed in very contemporary terms. Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), for instance, explains that Henry sent for her from Germany after being impressed by her portrait, but he was disappointed when she arrived, as the portrait had exaggerated her beauty. In her song, "Get Down," Anna explains that "you thought that I tricked you / cause I didn't look like my profile picture." McIntosh is terrific in this number, a Nicki Minaj-inspired rap/song hybrid, and it's the highlight of the film.

By the end of the show, it's clear that Marlow and Moss are less interested in getting all of the historical details precisely right than they are in using the wives as a way to explore the broad (and limited) types into which women are sorted, both by history and by musical theater. The final moments pound the feminist message home with a little too much clunky enthusiasm, but there's a sense of humor that is strong enough to keep that message from derailing the show.

Is Six an important musical that's likely to endure for decades? No, I don't think so. But the cast is superb, the songs are skillful pastiches of modern pop styles, and it's a terrific calling card that marks Marlow and Moss as composers to watch. Not a movie you need to rush right out to theaters to see, unless you're a massive fan of the show or of musicals in general, but worth watching for when it comes to streaming.

MOVIES: One Night Only (2026, Will Gluck)

Alternate titles: The Sex Purge; After Hours: Fascism Edition.

Opening titles tell us that three years ago, the Mandate was panned, banning premarital sex. All Americans now wear implanted wrist monitors that measure vital signs and hormone levels; whenever two people are in the same place and their levels both spike in just the right technobabbly way, the sex police are alerted and sent out to make an arrest. But for one night every year, twelve glorious hours, the Mandate is suspended and all of the singles get to go wild and fuck like rabbits. This movie takes place on that night.

As the night begins, pizzeria owner Owen (Callum Turner) is planning to propose to his girlfriend (Maya Hawke, in a role so underwritten that I didn't know the character had a name until I checked IMDB), who cuts him off by announcing that this year, she thinks they should screw other people. That sets Owen off on his quest for Ms. Right Now, during which he keeps running into Allie (Monica Barbaro), a studio singer whose career is made up almost entirely of singing old pop songs that have been rewritten as pharmaceutical jingles. (That's a pretty good running joke; sadly, it's the best one you're going to get.)

Allie and Owen keep running into one another as increasingly contrived circumstances keep them from acting on their obvious mutual attraction, and we cut back and forth between the two as they have a long series of pathetic/desperate/ostensibly comic encounters with potential sexual partners.

Considered only as a rom-com, this is a B-minus at best. Barbaro is charming, and I look forward to seeing her in better movies, but as hard as she's working, she does not have the power to singlehandedly drag any personality out of Callum Turner, who has all the warmth and charisma of a used bar of soap. The supporting cast is poorly used; they're unkindly used in some cases, notably Molly Ringwald and Levar Burton, playing Owen's mother and her boyfriend, who are trotted out for a few "old people have sex? Eww, gross!" jokes.

But we can't consider this solely as a rom-com, because its premise is so preposterous, and because the movie refuses to deal with what the world would actually look like if the Mandate had been posed. Some of the questions that came to mind as I watched the movie:

• Where are the anti-Mandate protests? If the government banned premarital sex, there would be riots in the street that would make January 6 look like a Sunday school picnic. And they wouldn't stop after a week or two, either. They'd still be going on, even three years later. This movie gives us a few listless chants of "fuck the mandate," an occasional bit of graffiti, and some halfhearted "Repeal" signs in windows. (Those signs are in the exact shades of blue and pink that are now associated with the trans rights movement, which is oddly distracting.)
• This movie takes place in a future near enough to be essentially our present, so I assume that it's our current right-wingers who have passed the Mandate. And the current sexual obsession of the right wing (at least as far as heterosexuals are concerned) is decreasing birth rates; they wouldn't be imposing restrictions that are going to decrease the number of pregnancies.
• We're supposed to believe that the federal government was able to install wrist monitors in every American in only three years? The government can't do anything that efficiently. And given the massive freakouts at the thought of getting a COVID vaccine, you think everyone's going to line up peacefully to have a piece of machinery implanted?
• How many people are required to monitor everyone's monitors for signs of unlawful sex, and how many new police officers had to be hired to make those arrests? And honestly, given typical police response times, you could probably get in a quickie and be out the door for brunch before the cops get there.
• There's a scene fairly early in the movie in which characters are trying to buy a condom (Oh right, condoms are mandated, too, which raises another whole batch of questions...), and all of the stores are sold out. On free sex night? The one night when you know there's going to be a huge demand for condoms, and none of the stores have stocked up with enough condoms to get them through the night? And it's not like this scene is at 6:45 am, when the clock is about to run out; it's pre-midnight, with hours to go yet.
• What about tourists, visiting the US from other countries? Surely the government isn't installing these expensive high-tech gizmos in every visitor. Every tourist is an opportunity for unmonitored sex. They're going to be the most popular people at every singles bar in the country. (They're also likely to be the victims of a vastly increased amount of rape and sexual assault.)

But even more than its minimization of its own enormous premise, what really drags the movie down is how conservative and anti-sex it ultimately is. Every attempt that either Owen or Allie does make to have sex goes horribly wrong, usually in humiliating fashion.; we don't actually see anyone in this movie having a happy night of sex. (Ringwald and Burton are as close as we get; they do seem to be enjoying themselves, but in ways that make them the butt of the joke.) We hear more than one character suggest that the pro-Mandate folks were right, and everyone really is better off waiting until marriage. Supporting characters are depicted as crass, disgusting lechers for being eager to have sex on the one night they're allowed ot do so.

It's anti-romance and it's not very funny. By my count, that makes it a flop on both halves of rom-com. Avoid at all costs.

MOVIES: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026, Jane Schoenbrun)

As the opening credits play, Schoenbrun lays out in impressively concise fashion the history of the Camp Miasma slasher franchise: The unexpected success of the movie in the mid-80s led to cultural ubiquity – board game, video game, lunch boxes, magazine covers – and a long string of successively less successful sequels before the franchise faded into irrelevance. But recenly, film scholars and gender theorists have begun to reclaim and reevaluate the movie, despite its deeply problematic elements, and now the studio that owns it thinks it’s ripe for a reboot. A lesser filimmaker would have spent the first act laying in that 40-year history; Schoenbrun does it in a brilliantly edited sequence of about three minutes.

The studio is in talks with Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) to direct the reboot. She’s up for the job based on the strength of her first film, a Sundance smash (“it’s Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”), and all she needs to land the job is a good pitch meeting.

What they’re hoping for is a straightforward prequel, laying out the story of the franchise’s killer, Little Death (Jack Haven). Kris has something more complicated in mind, and is especially eager to confront the transphobia of the original. She’s arranged a meeting with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who played the “final girl” in the original film, in hopes of casting her in the reboot. Getting that meeting was an accomplishment in its own right. Billy turned down roles in the sequels and left acting. She now lives in seclusion at the same abandoned summer camp where the movie was filmed.

Kris and Billy are instantly drawn to one another, and as they discuss the movie – complete with a viewing of Billy’s own print, on film – a complicated psychological and sexual relationship evolves between them. The lines between reality and cinema begin to blur. As the two walk across the campground, the landscapes are occasionally replaced by obvious matte paintings, and Kris begins to get the sense that someone is watching them.

This is largely a two-hander for Einbinder and Anderson, and both are excellent. Anderson is having great fun, putting on a massive blonde wig and a broad southern drawl; it’s like a fusion of Dolly Parton and Gloria Swanson. As the women watch Camp Miasma, you can almost hear her thinking “I am big, it’s the sequels that got small.”

In the final act, as those lines separating Kris and Billy from the world of the franchise get even blurrier, the movie stumbles slightly. Its metaphors become overly broad and vague, and Schoenbrun gets carried away with the meta of it all. The movie doesn’t stick the landing as solidly as Schoenbrun’s last film, I Saw the TV Glow (a masterpiece).

But even if the ending falters a bit, this is still a very good movie. Smaller roles are smartly cast with an array of fine actors – Eva Victor, Dylan Baker, Patrick Fischler, Kevin McDonald, Sarah Sherman – largely used to provide sharp comic relief. Cinematographer Eric Yue does an expert job of recreating the look of mid-80s low-budget horror in the scenes from Camp Miasma.

If you’re averse to the gore of slasher movies, I should warn you that there is quite a lot of blood here. But I am also not a slasher guy, and I found that the gore here is so exaggerated, well past the point of plausibility, that it stops being scary. When the neck of a decapitated teen spouts a Bellagio fountain of blood 20 feet into the air, that’s not terrifying. It’s just gross and silly.

MOVIES: Drinking Buddies (Joe Swanberg, 2013)

Over the last decade, Swanberg has made about a dozen micro-budget movies, generally working with unknown actors (some of whom, most notably Greta Gerwig, have gone on to bigger things). This is his first film with a cast of recognizable actors, and it's the first of his films that I've seen. I'm left a bit baffled as to what all the fuss is about.

Jake Johnson and Olivia Wilde are Luke and Kate, co-workers at a micro-brewery who've been attracted to one another for years but have never done anything about it. Jake lives with his girlfriend, Jill (Anna Kendrick), and their relationship is at the point where they have a discussion every few months in which they reassure one another that they do want to get married some day, but they never quite get around to making concrete plans. Kate's dating Chris (Ron Livingston), who doesn't quite fit in with her circle of friends.

They're all likable enough characters, despite their annoying-hipster tendencies, but none of them held my attention, and as Swanberg follows them through a series of social encounters -- a cocktail party at the brewery, a weekend at Chris's lakeside cabin, a weekend in which Luke helps Kate move -- I kept thinking, "OK, surely now is the moment when something interesting is actually going to happen," and it never actually did. The most significant event, a breakup of one of the couples, happens off screen, and we only get one tiny scene dealing with the fallout.

Maybe it's a generational thing. Perhaps if I were a 30-ish guy, clinging desperately to youth and cool-ness, I would find the minor problems of these four more interesting. But as it is, the movie felt like 90 minutes of aimless noodling about people who don't have the self-awareness or the initiative to do any of the things that might actually make them happy.

MOVIES: Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2013)

You hear the premise for this movie, and you might understandably fear some sort of dreary exercise in sentimental manipulation: Two young 20-somethings, each carrying a significant load of emotional baggage, struggle to make their relationship work while working at a group home for teens who are waiting to be placed in a foster home. But writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton makes his characters so vivid and specific, and finds enough humor in their lives, to raise the movie far above the Afterschool Special level. It's one of the best movies of the year.

Much of the credit goes to Brie Larson, who stars as Grace, the staff supervisor at the group home. She's good with the kids, and has a genuine gift for being supportive without coming across as smug or condescending. She's less good at asking for help than she is at giving it, though; in the delightful and useful phrase of TV critic Daniel Feinberg, this is a Vocational Irony Narrative.

That tendency to close herself off causes difficulty for her boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), who is a character we see far too rarely in movies; he's a genuinely decent guy without being an idiot or a wimp. He accepts her reluctance to share certain things, but isn't willing to let himself be shut out entirely.

Grace and Mason both have personal reasons for going into this line of work, and those revelations felt a bit too pat and obvious. I think it more likely, in fact, that someone with Grace's background would have chosen any career but this one. Cretton's screenplay allows those revelations to play out in reasonbly convincing fashion, though, and they are dramatically effective.

There are fine performances from the actors playing the home's resident kids, too. Making particularly strong impressions are Kaitlyn Dever as Jaden, the newest resident, whose personal struggles hit very close to home for Grace; and Keith Stanfield as Marcus, who is about to turn 18 and has very mixed feelings about leaving the foster care system.

The writing and acting create characters and a background that feel utterly real; the emotion is sincerely and honestly earned. The fact that the actors are relatively unknown -- Larson, Gallagher, and Dever are best known for TV or theater work; and this is Stanfield's first feature film -- helps, I think, to create that reality, because we're not being distracted by familiar faces and big-name stars. This is a very special movie, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

MOVIES: Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier, 2013)

Four second-tier magicians (appropriately enough, played by four second-tier movie stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco) are brought together to form "the Four Horsemen," a Vegas-caliber team who take to ending their shows with enormous thefts of money that they give away to their audience, Robin Hood style. Mark Ruffalo's the FBI agent on the case, Melanie Laurent's his Interpol partner, Michael Caine's the wealthy impresario who backs the Horsemen, and Morgan Freeman's the Amazing Randi-esque debunker.

The problem is that with today's digital trickery and effects, it's nearly impossible to make a good movie about magic; when you can do anything imaginable with movie magic, the audience has no reason to believe that it's seeing real magic, or to be impressed by what it sees.

You can get around that if magic is just the backdrop for a good story about magicians, if character outweighs flashy tricks, but that's not the case here. The characters are standard action-movie thin, and while the movie's moderately entertaining in the moment, it's entirely disposable, and the plot twists that seem clever as they're happening fall apart the second you have time to think about them.

MOVIES: Lee Daniels' The Butler (Lee Daniels, 2013)

A wildly uneven hodgepodge of a movie, with some performances and scenes that work extraordinarily well, and some that are total disasters.

The story, based loosely on the life of Eugene Allen, is that of a butler -- here named Cecil Gaines, and played by Forest Whitaker -- who works in the White House from the Eisenhower administration through the Reagan years. There is a brief prologue, in which we see Cecil as a child, living in something not too far removed from slavery, taken from the field to the house by Southern matriarch Vanessa Redgrave (because apparently there were no elderly Southern actresses available that day), whose offer to teach Cecil to be "a house nigger" is, by 1912 standards, an act of kindness.

The movie splits its time between Cecil's work at the White House and his family life. The White House half of the movie is marred by a series of celebrity cameos as Presidents and First Ladies, most of which are so badly miscast -- Robin Williams as Eisenhower, John Cusack as Nixon, Liev Schreiber as LBJ -- that they feel like an endless series of Saturday Night Live sketches. James Marsden at least makes a reasonably good attempt to get the voice right as JFK, which is more than most of the presidential actors do. (By far the best of these cameos is that of Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan.)

The central story of Cecil's home life is his estrangement from son Louis (David Oyelowo) over David's involvement in the civil rights movement. And by "involvement," I mean that Louis is the Forrest Gump of civil rights, present at every major event -- a Woolworth sit-in, the Freedom Rides, Selma, jail with MLK in Birmingham, Memphis for the MLK assassination, Oakland with the Black Panthers. (Somehow, he misses the March on Washington, but that's about it.)

As Cecil ages, Whitaker chooses to reflect that age by making Cecil's speaking voice increasingly hushed and mumbly, and for the last half-hour of the movie, it's very hard to understand much of what he says. Far better (much to my surprise) is Oprah Winfrey as his wife, Gloria. It's a role that plays into Winfrey's public persona in some ways; Gloria is the grande dame of her household, used to being the center of attention (and loving it), and knowing exactly how to play to whoever else is in the room. Her relationship with Cecil is the strongest thing in the movie, a bond that remains sexual even when the two are no longer young; even in an embarrassingly awful black-and-white disco-era jumpsuit, Winfrey is sexy.

The Gump-iness of the civil rights story works against it, and makes it hard to take seriously. There is one spectacular scene, though, in which after a few years of estrangement, Louis and his girlfriend (Yaya Alafia), who is even more radical than Louis, come to dinner with Cecil and Gloria. In the argument between Louis and Cecil, we get a real sense of why some older African-Americans were scared by the intensity and the radicalism of some activists. I would have loved to have seen that idea explored more deeply (and there's a great movie there waiting to be made).

The good stuff in The Butler is very good; the bad stuff is ghastly. The whole is uneven enough that I can't recommend it with any enthusiasm, but I wouldn't argue too strongly against it if you're interested, either.

MOVIES: Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013)

What a horrid mess this is.

It's 2154, and Earth is so badly polluted and unpleasant that the rich folks have fled to Elysium, a space station orbiting the planet. On Elysium, there are manicured lawns and swimming pools; most important, there are medical pods, high-tech gizmos capable of diagnosing and curing any illness or injury in about a minute.

Down on Earth, meanwhile, the poor live in slums and scrape out a living doing hard labor in factories. One such worker, Max (Matt Damon), gets zapped by a heavy dose of radiation that will kill him in days if he can't find a way to get to Elysium and into a med pod.

The planet is guarded by Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster), whose hard line stance on illegal immigrants -- she believes in shooting their shuttles out of the sky -- puts her in conflict with the more moderate President Patel (Faran Tahir).

So Max needs to get to Elysium, Delacourt wants to depose Patel (with the help of William Fichtner's Carlyle, a man so evil he literally orders people not to breathe in his direction), and the two are inevitably headed for conflict.

Alyssa Rosenberg has already done a fine job of tearing apart the confusion of the movie's health care dichotomy, but even if you toss that issue aside, Elysium just isn't very interesting. None of the characters have enough depth to be convincing, even by summer blockbuster standards, and Foster has chosen a bizarre accent that seems to be an indecipherable mix of French, South African, and Upper-Class Snob. The action sequences aren't exciting; Damon and the obligatory love interest (Alice Braga) have no chemistry; and the use of a sick child to generate pathos is the cheapest sort of emotional manipulation.

Entirely skippable.

MOVIES: In a World... (Lake Bell, 2013)

Writer-director Lake Bell also stars as Carol, a voice actress who ekes out a living giving accent lessons and doing the occasional commercial; her dream is to break into the world of movie trailers, where women are very rarely hired. Among her chief rivals is her father, Sam (Fred Melamed), a legend in the business.

This is an entertaining look into an obscure corner of show business, and Bell's screenplay is charming and funny. She's also a very likable and charismatic leading lady, and she's done a fine job of surrounding herself with talented actors. Chief among them is Melamed, who is (as he demonstrated in the Coens' A Serious Man) a master of using serenity and calm as a form of passive-aggression attack. There's also fine work from Ken Marino as another voice actor, Demetri Martin as the co-worker with a longstanding crush on Carol, and Michaela Watkins and Rob Corddry as Carol's sister and brother-in-law. (And Eva Longoria displays a nice sense of humor in a cameo appearance as herself.)

The romantic subplots for Bell and Martin, and Watkins and Corddry, do drag a bit, and are far less involving than the stuff set in the voice industry, but that central story is so involving and fascinating that the romance doesn't get in the way too badly.

I hesitate to say this, for fear that it will make the movie sound like a political polemic, but this is a seriously feminist movie about the importance, both literal and figurative, of women finding their voices. But rather than the angry screed that might suggest, In a World... is a lively movie that skillfully makes its political points in a delightful way.

MOVIES: The Spectacular Now (James Ponsoldt, 2013)

A surprisingly fresh take on the last-year-of-high-school romance that deftly avoids virtually all of the cliches of the genre.

Sutter (Miles Teller) is a cocky boy who lacks ambition and is well on his way to a life of dissolute alcoholism; you can already see the puffiness settling on his face. Aimee (Shailene Woodley) is a smart girl has everything going for her except for self-confidence. (And both are far more interesting and complicated than those rather reductive summaries would suggest.) The relationship between them will, of course, change them both, but not necessarily in the ways or to the degree that you expect.

Both Teller and Woodley are terrific here; it's a particular joy to watch Woodley blossom once she gets some positive attention and encouragement. There are also fine small performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kyle Chandler as Sutter's parents; Chandler gets to play a less noble father figure than we're used to from him, and he handles it nicely.

Absolutely delightful movie, and proof that there's always a new and interesting way to handle familiar material.

MOVIES: the catching up concludes

And to finish getting caught up, quick thoughts on a couple of titles:

Morgan Neville's 20 Feet From Stardom is a delightful documentary about backup singers, focusing primarily on four women who have spent most of their lives in the background. Some of them have taken shots at stardom themselves, but fate and circumstance never gave them the big break they needed. I could have done without a few moments where some of the other talking heads in the movie stretch a little hard in trying to tie their fates to broader issues of racism and sexism, and the movie isn't terribly innovative in style, being mostly a series of talking-head interviews.

But the music is spectacular, and there's a scene late in the movie where Lisa Fischer, singing in 4-part harmony with herself, does a slightly popped-up version of Samuel Barber's "Sure on This Shining Night" that had my jaw on the floor.

And Despicable Me 2 is a very entertaining sequel that manages to give the popular minions more to do without letting them entirely take over the show. I might have hoped for a bit more vocal energy from Benjamin Bratt, whose villain falls a bit flat, but aside from that, I liked the movie a lot.

MOVIES: Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen, 2013)

Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), having lost everything in the downfall of her Bernie Madoff-esque husband (Alec Baldwin), arrives in San Francisco to stay with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), and put her life back together.

Among other things, this is Allen riffing on A Streetcar Named Desire -- fragile woman arrives to stay with working class sister, and clashes with her tough-guy boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale) -- but Woody Allen may be the director least suited to a study of American class differences. His attitude towards his working class characters is painfully condescending; poor Cannavale, who I normally like very much, is stuck dese-dem-dose-ing his way through the movie because the accent is a stronger character trait than anything Allen's script provides.

Mostly, though, this is a study of a woman in full-on nervous and emotional collapse. Jasmine has never had to work in life -- she dropped out of college without a degree to get married -- and is utterly at sea when left stranded in the world with no money. She and Ginger aren't close enough for her to get any real emotional support there, and Jasmine, as Allen's surrogate, looks down on Ginger from such a snooty height that it would never occur to her to seek it.

Blanchett's performance has been much praised here, and is an early contender for an Oscar nomination, but it didn't work well for me. It is, to be sure, a performance that displays great technique and precision, but in this case that's a big part of the problem. It's a performance in which you can see the acting as it happens; Blanchett's every choice and character tic are visible. Blanchett is so perfectly and visibly in control that I never found it possible to believe that Jasmine was out of control. It's a performance that desperately needs some sloppiness, some chaos, some sense of unpredictability and surprise, and never has any of those things.

As for the rest of the cast, only Baldwin comes off well, and he's working in very familiar territory for him. Hawkins, who I've always though much overrated, struggles to maintain a consistent accent, and none of those she attempts sound particularly American. Cannavale, Louis CK, and Andrew Dice Clay are buried under so many layers of Allen's contempt that they can't possibly do any decent acting; and Peter Sarsgaard, as Jasmine's potential new beau, is noticably uncomfortable with the tempo and rhythms of Allen's dialogue.

MOVIES: Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013)

A remarkably strong first film, based on the true story of Oscar Grant, who was killed by an Oakland transit cop at a train station early on New Year's Day 2009.

Coogler follows Oscar (played by Michael B. Jordan) through his final day, and it's a very ordinary day. Wake up, squabble with girlfriend (Melonie Diaz), take daughter to pre-school, shop for groceries, flirt with pretty girl at the fish counter, go to Mom's birthday party, drop kid off with her aunt so that you and girlfriend can go out for New Year's Eve. About the only thing that won't feel run-of-the-mill for most viewers is the scene in which Oscar arranges to sell some pot to a friend, and Coogler makes sure to emphasize that Oscar is trying to get out of that part of his life.

And through no fault of Coogler, the very ordinariness of that day makes the movie's first hour a little dull. There's nothing terribly interesting or dramatic to hold our attention; all we have to keep us going is a building sense of dread. (The movie begins with some of the actual cellphone footage shot by other people on the platform, so we know exactly what we're building to.)

Something that is Coogler's fault, though, is the way in which Oscar's daughter is used; her scenes with Oscar are laden with foreboding, and their dialogue often comes across as ironically prophetic. ("Daddy, I'm scared." "Don't worry, baby. I'm gonna be fine" and so on.) There are also a few too many ominous shots of trains entering and leaving stations.

Once the shooting happens, though, the final act of the movie is riveting, largely due to the performance of Octavia Spencer as Oscar's mother; Spencer's grief and pain, and her struggle to maintain her composure while her son is dying in the hospital, are searing.

Not a perfect movie, certainly, but some of the flaws are inherent to the material, and Coogler has done as much as possible to mitigate them. Certainly worth seeing for Jordan's and Spencer's performances, and as a strong debut from Coogler, whose next project will be worth looking for.

MOVIES: White House Down (Roland Emmerich, 2013)

White House Down is a dumb popcorn movie, and there's nothing remotely surprising about it -- it is essentially Die Hard in the White House -- but as such things go, it's mostly fun. The supporting cast is better than a movie like this needs (Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Woods, Richard Jenkins, Jason Clarke), and Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx play the leads -- respectively, a would-be Secret Service agent and the US President -- with their usual charisma. The movie finds moderately creative ways to get all of the action movie cliches into a movie set almost entirely on the grounds of the White House; we even get a fairly good car chase.

I was bothered by the way the movie uses the character of Tatum's daughter; I get that we need to put someone sympathetic in jeopardy to give Tatum his motivation, but even in that context, watching a kid being beaten and manhandled by grown men yanks me out of the escapist mood. And there was no reason the character needed to be a kid; it just needed to be someone Tatum cared about enough to fight for, and whose respect he needed to earn -- a parent, a wife, a sibling. Make it, for instance, the younger college-educated brother who Tatum thinks has never respected him, and you've got the same story dynamic in a way that doesn't make you cringe when you watch.

MOVIES: Monsters University (Dan Scanlon, 2013)

In which Pixar wastes considerable effort on a remake of Revenge of the Nerds.

Mike and Sully meet as college students (a blatant contradiction of their backstory as estalished in Monsters Inc.), and wind up stuck in the nerdiest frat on campus, with whom they must win a campus competition in order to remain in school.

Monsters University is a pleasant enough movie, but it's not nearly as good as Monsters Inc., and by Pixar standards, it's a disappointment. There was one really terrific sequence, in which Mike and Sully find themselves stranded in the human world; those five minutes could have been the inspiration for a really interesting movie. The punchlines fall flat, and aside from John Goodman and Billy Crystal in the leads, there's not much of interest in the voice acting. Nathan Fillion is probably best of the supporting players, doing a variation on Captain Hammer, his arrogant blowhard from Dr. Horrible.

The short that played before the movie, "The Blue Umbrella," was a bit of goopy sentiment not nearly at the usual level of Pixar shorts. Very meh.

MOVIES: The Way, Way Back (Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, 2013)

Very well acted, albeit formulaic, coming-of-age tale.

Our hero is 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James) who is being schlepped out to spend the summer with his mom (Toni Collette) and her new boyfriend (Steve Carell) at his beach house. The would-be stopdad is an obnoxious schmuck, and Duncan is already dreading the summer. Meeting the summer neighbors doesn't much help -- there's the perpetually tipsy couple (Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet) who are there for dinner almost every night, and the loud, brassy floozy (Alison Janney) who lives next door with her pretty young daughter (AnnaSophia Robb).

And so Duncan flees to the local rundown water park, where manager Owen (Sam Rockwell), who has never quite grown up himself, takes Duncan under his wing, and the relationship between them -- surprise, surprise -- helps both to grow up a little.

Performances are excellent, and Sam Rockwell is the standout. He's been doing remarkable work for years now -- if you haven't seen Moon, go watch it, for heaven's sake -- without ever getting the recognition he deserves, in part because he's too quirky and eccentric a presence to easily fit into any of the usual leading man molds; and while the role he's given to play here is a fairly standard lovably goofy manchild, he brings more nuance and subtlety to it than the script provides.

And the rest of the cast is also strong; everyone gets a moment or two to shine. Liam James, in the lead role, more than holds his own in this group of fine actors; Toni Collette has some particularly fine moments in a campfire scene where she realizes that Carell may not be everything she'd hoped he was.

But all of that fine acting is put to the service of an awfully familiar story -- misfit kid begins to find himself when he becomes the protege of just the right misfit grownup. The movie is written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who wrote The Descendants; based on that movie and this one, they don't bring a lot of originality to the table, but they can tell a formulaic story better than most. (They also play small roles as members of the Water Wizz staff.)

Entertaining, and worth seeing for the strength of the cast, but familiar enough that you could easily wait to see it at home rather than rushing out to the theater.

MOVIES: Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2013)

Documentary from the actress-director, in which she explores her own family history.

It had long been a running joke at the Polley dinner table that Sarah looked less their father than any of her siblings, and when Sarah finally hears of the rumors that her actress mother (now deceased) may have had an affair with a co-star while out of town with a play, she decides to investigate.

And that's really all you should know about the story going in. There are surprises, unexpected revelations, delightful punchlines, complicated characters, and beautiful moments of painful honesty as the truth unfolds. It's a marvelous story, and Polley tells it in creative and entertaining style.

It will be interesting to see whether the Motion Picture Academy's Documentary branch chooses to nominate this for an Oscar; there are some storytelling choices that might have purists questioning whether this is really a documentary at all. I think that would be excessive quibbling; the movie certainly deserves a nomination.