35.) The Right Guys [6/2/2016]

I went into this wanting to love every ounce of the strange, highly-stylized crime movie. Ryan Gosling is still artistically apologizing for The Notebook, and the movie viewers have thus far been the beneficiaries of this acting purge. Russell Crowe has been decent in some movies, and this sort of tough guy act was just what he was made for. I loved Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, so another Shane Black movie seemed like an obvious win for me.

That said, the movie was not that great. It wasn't terrible, by any means, and there were some genuinely funny moments, but a lot of the plot was strained. There were two female characters whose only part to play was either the damsel in distress or the moral conscience (and the little kid as moral conscience trope is exhausted). Because of this, the motivation of the characters was also strained. Crowe's big moral shift seemed to come out of character and from nowhere.

Still, it's worth a watch. It was perfectly scored, well-acted, and some of the dialogue was hilarious. Just don't expect a sister-film to the much superior Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

34.) Money Monster [5/28/2016]

Like 99 Homes and The Big Short, this film took a look at the current financial crisis in America through a fictionalized financial show (a more cartoonishly-vapid Jim Cramer from Mad Money). Unlike the first two movies mentioned, this film ground out all the nuance, and instead used a cliched, cardboard cutout of a hedge fund manager as the bad guy, whose obvious money laundering would have seemed outlandish in a Bond film. Still, the core actors, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jack O'Connell (from Unbreakable), were entertaining to watch and the movie required less math to make sense of the mess (which was nice, considering how tired I was when I watched it). You could think of this as the poor man's The Big Short.

33.) X-Men: Apocalypse [5/27/2016 - 3D]

The previews for this film have been running for so long, I honestly thought I might have seen it already. When I did see it, I found myself missing the more coherent trailer. There have been few movies which so profoundly misunderstand the characters and the team at the core of the film. The only really enjoyable action sequence featured the a brief appearance of Wolverine. Most of the movie involved people standing around with arms raised and inanimate objects flying around, for no good reason. Magneto was a bad guy until, for no reason, he wasn't. Mystique just walked around talking the whole time, working from a credibility she never validated. Quicksilver was funny, but served no purpose except to remind the viewer of the exact same scene he was in from the last movie. The movie was full of great mutants, and none of them amounted to anything, until Jean Grey, without any struggles whatsoever, went beast-mode on Apocalypse, before returning to normal. Psyloche was under-used, Nightcrawler played only a small part, and Jubilee might as well have been a piece of furniture. Things just seemed to happen until, without much reason, they stopped.

The theater was packed, and people applauded at the end. I wept for the X-Men.

32.) Captain America: Civil War [5/21/2016]

I had tempered excitement for this movie, considering how formulaic the previous Marvel films have been. That said, I really enjoyed this film. It was slick, the writing and story were fairly tightly written, and it strayed away from drawing rigid moral lines on either side of which the characters fell. No one was right, no one made good choices, and there was not an easy answer to the complicated question at the core of the film. The action scene we were great, Robert Downey Jr was amazing, and the new characters slotted nicely into the Universe. The new Spider-Man was, by far, the best Spider-Man to date. All in all, I am not cautiously optimistic for the next film. 

31.) Keanu [5/17/2016]

Work had gotten busy, and I missed a number of films that I wanted to see. One that I did not miss, one I made sure to make time for, was Keanu. This movie was, simply put, charming. The cat was adorable, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele were great, and there were a ton of very funny cameos (Anna Ferris was one of the best). In among the jokes, it raised questions of identity and racial politics. I was really happy have seen this movie, and it's worth a look.

30.) Hardcore Henry [4/17/2016]

I am not one to look down on a hyper-violent action movie, or a movie with barely any plot to tie together a string of increasingly epic fight scenes (see: Pacific Rim and Godzilla, both of which I liked quite a bit). So, with Hardcore Henry, which promised to be a gimmicky, first-person-shooter-style movie about a voiceless robot fighting the Russian mob, I had tempered my expectations.

Oddly, this movie was exactly what I wanted it to be, and well-done to boot (which is rare for an action movie released this far from summer). Now, I fully understand and appreciate the argument some have made about the attitude the film takes towards women (which charitably could be called unenlightened). I can see why some would dislike the film for that reason. That said, it was a hell of a thing to make. Unlike Blair Witch and other "found footage" first-person narratives, the viewer was not seeing the narrative unfold through the lens of a camera, but instead experienced the film (as best as possible) as if Henry. There was a ton of action off-camera which could be detected on the periphery or when Henry (and the camera turned). The parkour scenes were fraught with tension as it felt like I was jumping from roof to roof.

Furthermore, all the actors, especially Sharlto Copley, seemed to thoroughly enjoy making the film. There were some genuinely funny, charming scenes, particularly towards the end). I found myself smiling through the whole thing. All in all, this movie (warts and all) has been the most enjoyable film experience I have had in a while.

29.) I Saw the Light [4/14/2016]

Hank Williams had an interesting life and an interesting career, shaping folk music into what we would call country music today. He lived hard, died young, and made some pretty good music along the way. Unfortunately, this movie didn't really show that. Instead, it wasted a perfectly good performance by Tom Hiddleston in which he had a series of fairly mundane conversations with different women. Then he died. The movie was short of drama and music, which is odd for a dramatic retelling of a musicians life.

To be fair, there have been some great music biopics out in the last year or so, such Get on Up, and Love and Mercy. This just didn't live up to those, either in narrative or performance.