a) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
My brother and I spent a night out over the weekend while he was in town, and we couldn't think of much to do and just went to the movies and saw this, which he'd already seen but was happy to see again. I watched the first Guardians movie at home and felt a little ambivalent toward it, but I think if I'd seen it in the theater, I would've enjoyed it a lot more like I did this one. Or maybe it was just a really good sequel, I dunno, Dave Bautista just really cracked me up every time he opened his mouth.

b) War Machine
This is a pretty well done little movie about a particularly aimless period in America's endless aimless military occupation of Afghanistan, with Brad Pitt as a particularly pompous, ill fated general. But after watching movies like this and Our Brand Is Crisis and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, I kind of feel good and sick of droll, dry satires of America's shitty treatment of the rest of the world, it kinda feels like it's a symptom of us being too easy to reduce this awful stuff to a cheap cynical laugh. Still, it was interesting to watch one of the first period pieces of the early 2010s, probably the first of many that will use the music of Lady Gaga to help set the scene.

c) Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates
All the leads in this movie are some of the most reliably funny people you can put in a movie these days (even, I say grudgingly, Zac Efron!), and this really came together pretty well as a goofy rom com that recalls Wedding Crashers and even explicitly references Wedding Crashers as a movie the characters have watched. In the second half it kinda feels like they try to hard to escalate the laughs by leaning on gross out gags but for the most part it's pretty consistent. 

d) A Bigger Splash
I kind of like how this movie is about Tilda Swinton being a huge rock star but almost the entire movie depicts her offstage and on vacation, resting her voice and barely able to speak. But beyond that, it just feels like an aimless pointless movie about rich people on vacation, and it doesn't really get any better in the last quarter when a major character dies violently and it briefly becomes something a bit different.

e) Hardcore Henry
This movie's big distinctive flourish is that the entire movie is shot from the unseen main character's first person POV. And while I respect that the movie stuck to its guns with that aesthetic, and had lots of fun with the idea and made it as fast and thrilling as possible, it's also inevitably a little wearying, and perhaps feels cheaper than it should because the look is so closely associated with 'first person shooter' video games. I quibbled about one of the music choices in the movie and the directer personally responded to me, so that was kind of fun.