War Dogs, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, The People vs. Fritz Bauer, Morris from America, Imperium

War Dogs

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

 

 

 

 

 

The People vs. Fritz Bauer

Morris from America

 

 

 

 

Imperium

 

 

 

  

Quick capsules on a mixed bag of movies in another relatively light August week:

Hail Caesar!, Rams

Hail, Caesar!

Rams (Hrútar)





Capsules as we flip the calendar to February:

Lost River, True Story, Alex of Venice, Dior and I, Monkey Kingdom

Lost River

True Story



Alex of Venice

Dior and I



Monkey Kingdom (my rating)

Monkey Kingdom (Scruffies' rating)








Quick capsules on the week in film:

The Wolf of Wall Street, Grudge Match

Grudge Match

The Wolf of Wall Street

About 10% of the time, I struggle with a movie’s star rating.

This is the End

I have no problem with in-jokes, or humor about how fabulous it is to be a Hollywood celebrity and not one of the poor saps in the paying audience.

The Watch

Sometimes when a movie has a 15% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, yet 70% of the audience likes it, it’s the critics who are wrong. That’s the case with “The Watch,” a critical punching bag for 20th Century Fox that happens to have a lot of the biggest out-loud laughs of the year. The movie stars Ben Stiller as Evan, a Glenview, Ohio Costco manager and do-gooder about town who forms a neighborhood watch after a Mexican employee is mysteriously killed the night after he earns his U.S. citizenship.

21 Jump Street

I was all set to have a blast watching the movie "21 Jump Street" - a friend had told me it was beyond funny - and it kept feeling like it was about to happen, but it never did. It's a movie where nobody behaves the way a human being would in similar circumstances, so it's essentially absurdist humor, which is very hard to pull off. And it never quite finds its groove for more than a moment at a time; it's an uneasy mix of desperation, the actors flailing about and ever more profanity where the funny lines are supposed to go, and unwarranted nonchalance, as though the set-up were funny enough without worrying about the execution.

Moneyball

Bennett Miller's "Moneyball" ushers us into the fall movie season. It's time to get serious, to tell stories rich with drama and meaning and resonance. Or at least to get Brad Pitt an Oscar nomination - that's a good thing, right? It'll have to be, because "Moneyball" is thin, forgettable and dramatically inert.