Movie Reviews

Sleeping with Other People

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  • Title: Sleeping with Other People
  • IMDb: link

Sleeping with Other PeopleWriter/director Leslye Headland‘s indie romcom doesn’t stray far from the basic formula of the genre. After meeting, and loosing their mutual viriginity to each other one steamy night in college, Jake (Jason Sudeikis) and Lainey’s (Alison Brie) paths cross again years later. Despite their mutual attraction, the two agree to keep things platonic given Jake’s womanizing ways and Lainey’s hang-up on an old college ex (Adam Scott) who she still carries a torch for despite how awful he’s treated her over the years.

There’s little to no surprise in Headland’s script and when Sleeping with Other People works it does so on the talent and likability of its stars and supporting cast that includes Scott, Amanda Peet, Jason Mantzoukas, Andrea Savage, Natasha Lyonne, and Margarita Levieva (in an opening cameo so good she nearly steals the entire film). We know where Jake and Lainey are going, how long it will take to get there, and can guess (pretty accurately) on the stops they’ll take along the way. Thankfully the movie’s cast keeps the predictable story from becoming stale and boring. It’s far from a must-see, but if your girlfriend is determined to drag you to a romcom you could do far, far worse.

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Everest

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  • Title: Everest
  • IMDb: link

Everest

Based on a true story, Everest recounts the events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. There have been plenty of mountain climbing movies over the years and Everest does little to break from the pack. Working against the movie is the extended opening which plays like a Travel Channel infomercial attempting to sell the audience on traveling to Nepal to climb the world’s biggest mountain with the help of experts like Rob Hall‘s (Jason Clarke) Adventure Consultants.

The climbers themselves are the typical hodgepodge of one-note characters you always expect to see in movies like this with a couple of stand-outs (Clarke, John Hawkes, and Josh Brolin) while the rest (Martin Henderson, Tom Goodman-Hill, Naoko Mori, Michael Kelly, among others) quickly fade into the background. The movie picks up a bit once the climbers begin their ascent of the mountain in earnest and the disaster porn part of the plot kicks in.

The film, and the scale of the undertaking, is certainly helped in IMAX 3D. As a theatrical experience Everest does have something to offer (even if the story feels more straight-to-DVD). It’s certainly not a must-see, but it works as escapist entertainment.

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Black Mass

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  • Title: Black Mass
  • IMDb: link

Black MassBlack Mass is a semi-successful film highlighting the amazing story of Irish-American mobster Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp) and his rise to prominence in South Boston in the 70s and 80s as the head of the Winter Hill Gang in large part thanks to his role as an FBI informant for Agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). What should be a thoroughly engrossing character study becomes a by-the-book gangster movie that entertains but doesn’t due justice to the source material.

Screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth adapt the non-fictional account of events from Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s book that is highlighted by Depp’s performance under heavy make-up as the charismatic violent sociopath. There’s certainly more to the story than we get here, and I do have to wonder how much director Scott Cooper left on the cutting room floor. I expected far more about Bulger’s rise to power, which we hear the FBI talk about constantly but we don’t see evidence of over the course of the film. The filmmakers’ focus on the lives of Whitey Bulger and his closest associates leaves the larger canvas left half finished.

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The Scorch Trials

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  • Title: Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
  • IMDb: link

Maze Runner: The Scorch TrialsThe sequel to The Maze Runner swaps out a complicated maze for an equally ill-defined desert landscape full of zombies for our surviving heroes to navigate. During a brief rest in a military complex obviously run by the same organization which experimented on them in the maze, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his friends meet a group of kids from other mazes and begin to uncover the truth about why they are so important to WICKED.

While the others are content to be kept prisoner in a safe place with three square meals a day and their own cot, Thomas befriends a boy from another group (Jacob Lofland), and, after discovering the truth about the continued experimentation, helps his friends escape into the barren wastleand outside the facility known as “the Scorch.”

In the same way that The Maze Runner declined to explain how putting kids in a death maze helped make them more valuable to WICKED, screenwriter T.S. Nowlin glosses over how a zombie virus is responsible for turning a major American city into the middle of the Sahara desert.

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Mistress America

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  • Title: Mistress America
  • IMDb: link

Mistress AmericaWritten and directed by Noah Baumbach (and co-written by the movie’s star Greta Gerwig), Mistress America is an uneven comedy that has a tone and feel more befitting a stage play than even an independent theatrical release. That’s not to say it should be easily dismissed. Despite its issues, when the film gets it right it gets it just right (such as an extended sequence in a yuppie suburban home where the quick-hitting back-and-forth dialogue finally hits on every note). Taken as a whole, Mistress America is neither as good as its brightest moments or as bad as it valleys where the lack of laughs exposes just how thin a story Baumbach is working with.

Lola Kirke and Gerwig star as strangers in New York brought together by their parents’ impeding wedding. Tracy (Kirke) is struggling with both life in college and the big city, neither of which see fits in all that well. Brooke (Gerwig) is a force of nature whose outgoing personality masks her own litany of personal issues. Tracy, of course, immediately latches on to her first real friend in the city while Brooke is happy to share her knowledge and experience with a young would-be sibling who obviously adores her.

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