I've taken my 6-year-old son to the movies a few times now, and he'd been asking to see Kubo for months, ever since the first commercial he saw, so we went opening weekend. It was pretty fun with a lot of inventive visuals, the stop motion animation looked incredible on the big screen. It's a little disappointing that you still get things like a movie about ancient Japan made by white people with white actors voicing most of the main characters, but as far as the cast went, it was fine, Matthew McConaughey was good as the comic relief (he has another animated movie, Sing, coming out in December, so while the McConaissance is over, the AniMcConaissance has just begun).

b) The Big Short

I'm a fan of Adam McKay's comedies, so I was kind of rooting for him to knock it out of the park with his first 'serious' movie, and I suppose you can say that he did with all those Oscar noms. But man, I really thought this movie was strained and obnoxious with all its condescending attempts to make the 'complicated' subject matter more accessible. All the breaking the fourth wall, all the goofy tangents, they just felt annoying and eager to please. Also, a person who in real life was named Jamie Mai was portrayed in the movie as Jamie Shipley, so now I'm kind of wondering if my own last name was used to white wash a role that could've gone to an Asian actor.

c) We Are Your Friends

I had so much fun tweeting about "the Zac Efron dubstep movie" last year that it seemed only fair to actually watch the thing. It was about as awkward as I expected, but kind of functionally bland, like if Magic Mike was entirely about Alex Pettyfer and Cody Horn.

d) American Ultra

This is one of those movies where the bad guys (Topher Grace, Walton Goggins, and Bill Pullman) are so much more fun to watch than the good guys (Jesse Eisenberg and Kirsten Stewart) that it just feels like you wanna see a different version of the movie where you root for the other side, or just see the boring stoner protagonists less.

e) Tangerine
This movie is so different from anything else I've ever seen, shot entirely on iPhones with transgender characters played by actual transgender women instead of Jared Leto or whatever, that it's hard not to root for it, and it's really a charmingly filthy, unruly comedy, at times it brought to mind John Waters. And letting the score kind of enhance the cinematic feel of the movie really made the way it was shot work better than I ever expected, it made me want to make a movie with a smart phone.

f) Hot Pursuit

I kind of feel bad for Reese Witherspoon that she played uptight and humorless so well in early films like Election that that's just the type of character she plays now. But this movie does well in setting her up as a foil for Sofia Vergara, it's not a great comedy but it has its moments.

g) It Follows

This was definitely one of the more memorably horror movies I've seen in a while, I'm still working out how I feel about it. I liked the way it kind of took the horror trope where whoever has sex is the next to die and made it literal and built a whole premise around that. But it was really the camera movement, and the way the entire movie was shot to build on the characters' feeling of paranoia, that I thought was the best thing about it.

h) Match

I love Patrick Stewart and I'm always looking for the offbeat non-Star Trek non-"Family Guy" things he's done, and this movie is a really good, substantial role for his talents. I could tell it was based on a play before I looked up that it was, the entire thing is basically three actors, him and Matthew Lillard and Carla Gugino, talking and arguing in two or three settings. Like many dialogue-driven movies, it kind of goes around in circles and strips everything of subtext to verbalize every character's every emotion, and the 'twist' was not a surprise at all, but I still liked the way the story unspooled, it was well done.

i) The Thaw

This was a pretty good sci-fi thriller with a bit of a global warming angle, although of course most of the middle of the movie kind of cast aside the environmental aspect to just turn into one of those movies where people stuck in a terrible situation turn on each other and one of them unexpectedly becomes the villain. It was good, though, and I liked the ending.