Melissa McCarthy Is in Her Element in Spy

The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony, McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt. But in the years since, Hollywood has continued to…

Beware the Falling Rock in San Andreas

The San Andreas fault stretches 810 miles up the Pacific coast, roughly the length of a dozen Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons lying end to end. When it rumbles, we’ll need all twelve of him to spring into action — although, as Brad Peyton’s San Andreas warns, that still won’t be…

Brad Bird Makes Caring Cool in Tomorrowland

In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is “Think smart.” It’s a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies like Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word…

Avengers: Age of Ultron Is a Movie Monolith for the Devout

Avengers: Age of Ultron is a complicated, ticking machine — a cuckoo clock under attack. Returning helmer Joss Whedon is earnestly trying to make a movie out of a bag of bolts: six stars, nine cameos, three enemies, and at least ten films to go before the climactic Avengers: Infinity…

Adult Beginners Crams Kroll Into a Played-Out Arc

I dread explaining man-child dramedies to the ghosts of the dead. “You see, Grandpa, after your time, a generation paralyzed by the economy and indecision stopped growing up, and started churning out indie movies justifying why.” In the ’40s, men fought wars at eighteen. In 1967, Benjamin Braddock faced accusations…

Ex Machina: Alex Garland’s Debut Is Clever and Fun

Ex Machina is an egghead thriller with a scary selling point: Unlike Liam Neeson shooting up half of Boston, this actually could be taking place right now. It’s a smart film about the shrinking divide between man and robot. It’s also a hoot, an anti-comedy in which all of the…

5 to 7 Doesn’t Quite Add Up

Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 is a romantic drama about a young writer in Manhattan that could be a superhero flick if its leading man wore tights. It’s as much a triumph of boyish wish fulfillment as Peter Parker swinging on skyscrapers. Brian (Anton Yelchin) is one of those suffering…

The Longest Ride Is Not Nicholas Sparks’s First Rodeo

The Longest Ride is Nicholas Sparks’s most ambitious novel. Instead of one couple, there’s two — and he’s even stretched out of his blond/Southern/Christian comfort zone to make the older pair Jewish. For balance in the film version of The Longest Ride, and for pandering to the powerful conservative audience…

Al Pacino Stares Down Stardom in Danny Collins

Some years ago, I went to see Tom Jones perform. He sang all the hits, but I was unnerved by his new walnut-brown goatee. It looked freshly trimmed and fake, like he’d ripped it off Evil Spock backstage. Superstars aren’t allowed to change. Even the fans who love them insist…

Insurgent Might Be a Synonym for “Brain-Dead”

We’re two films into the kiddie-dystopia Divergent franchise, and it’s still unclear if the sequel’s director, three screenwriters, eight producers and especially original novelist Veronica Roth have bothered to double-check a dictionary. Divergent, and now this new sequel, Insurgent, tracks the monotone mishaps of Tris (Shailene Woodley), a very special…

In Run All Night, We Get Hooked on Liam Neeson’s Misery

Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night, a shoot-’em-up about an out-to-pasture hit man desperate to keep his boss and best friend from whacking his son, is humid with testosterone. It’s the sort of film where a woman accidentally caught by the camera practically apologizes and scurries away from the lens. When…

Mike Tyson, History Buff

“Mark Twain once said that boxing is the only sport where a slave, if he’s successful, can rub shoulders with royalty,” says former heavyweight Mike Tyson, who once knocked out nineteen opponents in a row. “Can you imagine that? Just by fighting another human being, he can meet a king,…

The Script of Focus Needs to Do Just That

If Grace Kelly had been raised by coyotes, she might have stalked the screen like Focus’s Margot Robbie, a va-va-voom blonde with bite. Robbie is too beautiful to play normal, too sly to play nice. Miscast as a shy saint in Craig Zobel’s upcoming Sundance hit Z for Zachariah, she…

Meet the Comics Behind the Biting Vamp-Com What We Do in the Shadows

Ten years ago, Wellington, New Zealand, was less welcoming of vampires. When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, two unknown comedians, walked the streets in velvet frocks and ruffles for a 2005 sketch, dudes would drive by and scream homophobic slurs. Says Clement, “We were constantly abused.” Over the next decade,…

The DUFF Fights Society’s Beauty Obsessions — With Makeovers

Shove off, John Hughes. The DUFF, a high-school comedy by Ari Sandel, opens by declaring that The Breakfast Club’s social categories are, like, way passé. Explains lead Bianca (Mae Whitman), “Jocks play video games, princesses are on antidepressants, and geeks rule the world.” Today, be ye goth kid, science dweeb…

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 Is a Tepid Sequel

Five years ago, four losers passed out in a jacuzzi, boiled back to 1986, healed their past wounds, rocked out to Poison, and returned to their timeline as gods. Thusly, Hot Tub Time Machine director Steve Pink was hailed as a minor deity: He’d taken a dumber-than-huffing-hairspray premise and made…

Fifty Shades of Grey Strips the Book to Its Essentials

Even fans of Fifty Shades of Grey admit the book is a literary atrocity. Novelist E.L. James’s erotic reveries read like the rantings of a drunk yokel — less “His firm hands cupped my breasts” and more “Holy crap! He’s touching my boobs!” The story is simple: Twenty-one-year-old virgin Anastasia…