Bad Moms (Jon Lucas & Scott Moore, 2016)

0/10
This wasn't my choice to watch but wow this was putrid. Basically motherhood wish-fulfillment porn. Plot-wise, you know what to expect if you've ever seen an Apatow thing (this was written by The Hangover guys) - a bunch of like-minded characters, moms here, lash out at the restraints imposed upon them by society's expectations, decide to Go Wild, learn some lessons about moderation in the end, blah blah. Curiously, Bad Moms kicks off on a decidedly anti-feminist note - the central character Amy (played by Mila Kunis) has her life go completely off the rails when her husband leaves. This is even more interesting because Amy's husband, of course, is portrayed as an oblivious, do-nothing loser. So it's weird that him leaving is what sends her life spiraling into chaos.
So Amy joins up with 2 other moms who want to Go Wild - Kristen Bell playing the timid one and Kathryn Hahn playing the brassy one in roles you've seen before being played by Tina Fey and Amy Schumer - and we're treated to excruciatingly implausible scenes like Amy struggling to get laid at a bar because she doesn't know how to talk to men and can only talk about "mom stuff" like her kids' bathrooms habits. I will remind you that Amy is played by Mila Kunis, who could probably brand a swastika into her forehead and still go home with any number of men of her choosing.
The whole movie is like that, extremely tone-deaf and lacking in self-awareness. It doesn't care much beyond being obnoxious and hoping that some very deluded individuals will identify with its cartoon character protagonists.
Most of this ground was already covered well by Bridesmaids, or covered well enough by Sisters. It's cool that female ensemble comedies are an established thing and more prominent than ever but this does no favors at all to the genre.

The Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor, 2016)

6/10
I haven't read the book. The movie wasn't as bad as I expected, in fact the reviews seem a little harsh. It's a functional enough thriller, keeps you guessing reasonably well (I didn't figure out whodunnit, but I'm notoriously lousy at that) and features a really good performance by Emily Blunt, even if it's a little showy. The most annoying thing in the movie (vague spoiler talk): and this probably worked better on the page, is that it relies upon misleading its audience as the foundation for its "twist". Similar to Gone Girl, but at least it doesn't have the same pretentions of artistry that movie did. So when you show me something taking place, and then show me something later that basically says "no this is how it really happened", it just feels like a cheap trick, not clever moviemaking (or storytelling).
As a decently entertaining night at the movies, you could do worse.

The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2016)

5/10
I'll gamely defend Only God Forgives, it's not a masterpiece on the level of Drive but it's still got enough going for it that it deserves better than it got from a critical point of view. Not so for The Neon Demon. Nicholas Winding Refn's now signature style is firmly in place - mind-boggling costumes, make-up and, well, neon lighting with a great score once again by Cliff Martinez. It's a little more chatty than OGF or Drive, but not by a whole lot. What's disappointing is all this aesthetic is wasted on such a by-the-numbers plotline - the virginal blonde heading to Los Angeles to make it in the cut-throat model industry. It's a little more stimulating than Cronenberg's dive into similar predictable territory a couple years ago with Maps to the Stars, but barely. Refn wrote the movie himself, I just can't figure out what he was trying to get across that hasn't been done a bunch already before. The movie has a cool, totally over the top grand guignol finale that I enjoyed a lot, and I wish the rest of the movie was equally unchained. As it is, it's pretty forgettable aside from some nice visuals.

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World (Werner Herzog, 2016)

7/10
Werner Herzog's latest documentary is "about" the internet, in loose terms. As you might expect from a Herzog documentary it departs from a chronological telling of the history of the internet very quickly and instead focuses on the people telling the stories along the way. The film is divided into 10 chapters, although sometimes interview subjects bleed over into other segments. It focuses on pioneers of the internet, world famous hackers, people allergic to radio waves, young adults battling internet addictions, Elon Musk, MRI technicians, a family harassed in a most despicable fashion by internet trolls, and so on. Herzog narrates and asks questions on-camera with his usual mix of detached wonder and dark humor - Herzog's description of the university where the internet was born refers first and foremost to its "repulsive hallways".
There aren't too many great shakes to be had (or history lessons either) but Herzog pokes and prods his subjects in an endearing fashion, and content-wise there's certainly enough to chew on with all the questions inherent to the subject matter. But I wonder if this wouldn't have worked better not as a film but as a series of 10 episodes on a format like Netflix where each subject and topic was allowed more in-depth exploration.

The Nice Guys (Shane Black, 2016)

8/10
I wasn't expecting much but this was actually a pretty funny movie. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are both very good, the script has a lot of good gags (physical and verbal), and it really nails the late 1970's feel. At times the plot of the film feels overly scripted. Writer/director Shane Black seems to be going for something like a Coen Brothers take on Inherent Vice (without the weirdness of either the Coens or Pynchon) and doesn't quite get there, but it's a credible stab and at least manages to remain funny throughout.
As good as Gosling and Crowe are, Angourie Rice arguably steals the show as their 13-year old sidekick. It's nice to see a young female character given room to actually be funny, as opposed to the precocious, insufferably quippy types they're usually cast as in movies like this. It felt like the "buddy movie" genre was dead and buried with all of those awful buddy cop movies that were such a big trend in the early 2010's, so The Nice Guys is a welcome breath of fresh air in that field too.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (Jorma Taccone & Akiva Schaffer, 2016)

6/10
Even if we all know that's Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island guys pretending to be pop stars and making a fake documentary, what's the point in presenting yourself as a documentary when you just cast big stars in other roles? Tim Meadows is the manager, Sarah Silverman is the publicist, Maya Rudolph is an appliance salesperson. If the movie isn't willing to make any effort to sell itself as a documentary, even if it's a comedy, why should I care? The movie doesn't stop there but even stoops to lame meta-jokes: Justin Timberlake plays the group's chef, and in one scene he's singing to himself, and the guys tell him to shut up and leave the singing to the pros! Get it? Because, in real life, in fact, Justin Timberlake is the pro!!! It's like casting Tony Iommi or Joe Perry as a guitar tech for the Spinal Tap guys and winking at the camera the entire time. Surely this is close to if not the lowest form of comedy?
As if that isn't enough, Popstar is jam-packed with more celebrities, playing themselves, giving on-camera testimonials to the group's greatness - Carrie Underwood, Nas, A$AP Rocky and Ringo Starr to name just a few of the many. In literally every scene there's a new celeb cameo designed to elicit a titter of recognition from the crowd, which smacks of laziness to me.
But that's, overall, my problem (ideologically) with this movie. Everybody is so clearly in on the joke, so obviously having fun with the notions of what it means to be a pop star in 2016, that how could the satire not be completely toothless? How can you offend anyone if you're trying so hard to include everyone?
All of that may maybe be enough to sink the movie on its own merits...but it's actually a pretty funny movie. Notwithstanding my examples above (or once you get past them). Undoubtedly, the Lonely Island guys know comedy pretty well. There are a lot of jokes and lines that are quite funny, and even if they don't land, there's another joke coming up in three seconds that might be more to your taste. So, of course, it's the old dilemma of picking the movie apart versus shutting up and just laughing along. It's easier to say Popstar works on some levels and not on others. If you give up your hopes of Popstar being a biting satire and instead just enjoy it for what it is, you may find yourself laughing more than you expected. At least I did. I'm not in a hurry to watch it again but if I turned on the TV and it was playing, I'd probably stick around till the end. For whatever that's worth.

Keanu (Peter Atencio, 2016)

7/10
Thought it was okay, not as laugh out loud funny as I would have hoped for but there are some good lines. I thought it poked good fun at the gangster movie cliches, but despite that the structure of the movie felt heavily borrowed from the 21 Jump Street remake - a comedy about two guys in a "fish out of water" scenario, one of them gets somewhat pulled into the lifestyle, they have to prove they're legit, etc. There's even scenes in both of them where they're made to ingest the drug at the center of the narrative. And the semi-ironic love for a pop star (George Michael here) reminded me of the Backstreet Boys in This is the End, and I feel like there's another example of this that's eluding me at the moment. So not terribly original I don't think, but entertaining enough.

Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016)

5/10
This was not as downright bad as I expected it to be but it's still an extremely confused, holy mess of a film. In fact that's partly why it's so frustrating, because good ideas, scenes, dialogue, etc constantly rub up against bad ones. It has weird contradictory problems - it's very long and is constantly throwing plot exposition at you but at the same time it feels underdeveloped and half-baked. There is enough about Affleck's Batman that's different from Bale's so as to make him intriguing as a character, but not enough to make his motives throughout the movie feel believable. Jesse Eisenberg did the best he could, but his Lex Luthor was a boring cliché of a character from start to finish. On one hand, I liked the idea of Luthor pitting Superman against Batman, but I don't think it was executed terribly well. We're never given much of a reason to care about why this is happening, and the idea of two of the biggest superheroes in the world being manipulated and acting like children was more lame than anything. The battle scenes are great, although the final one with Doomsday which felt very messy.
That's kind of how the whole movie went for me - anything done well was almost immediately undone or at least marred by something else done poorly. It became very evident that the starting point for this project was "let's do Batman vs. Superman - anybody have any good ideas for that?" as opposed to "I have a good idea for doing Batman vs. Superman". Zack Snyder has to take it all on the chin for this failure but it's also evident that enough things went wrong to suggest this was the fault of the many.

Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016)

7/10
This was not quite the "revolution in superhero movies" I feel like some people hyped it up to be. If you know a little about the Deadpool character going in there probably won't be anything here you wouldn't expect. Some of the jokes land (my absolute favorite being Deadpool's confusion as to whether he's being taken to see James McAvoy or Patrick Stewart when he's being hauled off to meet with Charles Xavier) and some of them, particularly the cruder ones, feel kinda high school-ish and cringey in their attempts to be "edgy".
I saw some people complaining about its obvious low budget, but that was one of its more endearing traits to me. I did find myself hoping for some cameos/crossovers from other Marvel characters just because it would have been fun to see Deadpool interact with them, but he had good enough chemistry with Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead that it wasn't a major issue.
Overall I was entertained and not insulted, and I don't demand too much more out of comic book movies these days. More than anything I felt happy for Ryan Reynolds(strangely, as I have no strong feelings towards him one way or the other) for making a passion project work and pleasing as many people as it did.

10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg, 2016)

6.5/10
This probably started out as a really cool script. The idea of a man building a huge bomb shelter and essentially kidnapping (or saving) two others to live down there with him lends itself to all sorts of interesting questions. Is he a savior, or a nutjob? Is there really something deadly aboveground, or is it all just a ruse to keep his captures from trying to escape? Unfortunately, the apparent need to shoehorn this script into a movie to kickstart "Cloverfield" as a brand name franchise gives it away up front - if there wasn't something going on aboveground, why call it a "Cloverfield movie" at all? This isn't a spoiler, just common sense that lessens the slack on an otherwise taut and extremely well-crafted first two acts.
I always get a little nervous when I can't figure out how a movie is going to end, allowing for the possibility I'm going to get blown away but fearing that I'm going to be disappointed. Unfortunately it was very much the latter here. It doesn't seem like the writers could really figure out an ending either as what we got felt goofy, unrelated to and undeserving of the solid hour and fifteen minutes that preceded it. John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were both great and there is a much better movie somewhere in here, but what we're given is ultimately a disappointment.