55.) Diary of a Teenager Girl [8/29/2015]

This  film, a sort of Lolita-meets-Juno exploration of the sexual awakening of a teenager from the perspective of a girl in love with her mother's boyfriend (20-year age gap notwithstanding), refreshingly opted for an honest look at all the confusion and excitement that comes at such a time for a young woman (I assume, not being a woman and all) as opposed to a preachy stance; like Lolita, the main character was a child, and there were several explicitly sexual parts in the movie that were really unsettling keeping that in mind, but I like movies that can generate an emotional response, including discomfort, and realize that this movie might not be for everyone.

54.) The Man from UNCLE [8/26/2015]

A film in which Superman and a blonde block of wood revisit the 60s Cold War spy era (while current international relations depressingly resemble the 60s Cold War) and tell the typical origin story for two seemingly mismatched people forced to work together; a passable and at times entertaining movie which most fans of Guy Ritchie won't hate.

53.) American Ultra [8/22/2015]

What seemed like it was going to be Pineapple Express meets the Bourne trilogy (and, no, I am not counting the fourth movie as a Bourne film), American Ultra just didn't commit to the stylized , quirky film it set out to be; it wasn't bad, but it could have been more like John Wick in it's commitment to a unique style.

52.) South Paw [8/20/2015]

Jake Gyllenhall surprised me with Nightcrawler, and he was surprisingly good here, as well (as was Rachel McAdams); that said, the movie was just okay on a whole (nothing new was brought to the boxing movie), and certainly not for anyone squeamish about dudes getting punched in the face.

51.) Fantastic Four [8/14/2015]

This movie could be read as an extended metaphor for itself: a self-centered but super intelligent Reed Richards (here: Fox) doesn't understand what he has (here: the Fantastic Four franchise) and he ends up hurting himself and those who love him (read: the audience); while trying to fix it they end up making things worse and inadvertently unleash Dr. Doom on the world (here: rebooting the franchise); it wasn't the little things (they sent video and audio across interdimensional space with no time lag, there was a super busy highway running along side the super secret military base, Dr Doom's world ending destruction machine was made of rocks, Reed Richards could stretch his face into a different ethnicity, etc.) which piled up and distracted from the movie, it was that the movie took all the right pieces and still managed to make something so shitty that it manages to disappoint even those with the lowest of expectations - like a child who takes all the ingredients for pancakes but instead makes some ungodly concoction so terrible that the parents question ever having had children to begin with. 

50.) Trainwreck [8/9/2015]

I've been burned by Judd Apatow films before (the decidedly unfunny Funny People and This is 40), so I went to this one nervously, to say the least; it turns out Amy Schumer can carry a film, even the trainwrecks (see what I did there) that Apatow puts together (though this had some really funny moments, most of which did not feature Lebron James).

49.) Paper Towns [8/7/2015]

This movie was built on the assumption that the female lead was exciting, alluring, and an independent free spirit, and the lead male character was a romantic for trying to piece together the clues and find her when she mysteriously (and excitingly) disappears; 16-year-old Keegan might have found her exciting, but 34-year-old Keegan found her to be tedious, petulant, narcissistic child with with an inevitably disappointing life ahead of her when her friends and family realize how terrible she is and leave her to "find herself" alone.

48.) Mission Impossible: Rouge Nation [8/6/2015 - IMAX]

On the spectrum of excellent spy-movie franchises, this sits just below the Daniel Craig Bond films and the first three Bourne movies, but it is far better than Jeremy Renner's Bourne and Pierce Brosnan as Bond; this was a fun, thrilling, summer-time action movie, and thankfully, Ethan Hunt seems to be aging in this universe, as the espionage is taking it's toll on him both physically and mentally, which, while it runs counter to everything old-man-action movies tend to stand for (see: The Expendables), suggests that the franchise is aware that the conceit is ridiculous and not tenable.