a) Late Night
I suppose it's part of the perpetually shrinking theatrical window that Amazon now theatrically releases movies and then puts them on Amazon Prime three months later, but I guess that's a more solid model than Netflix doing the simultaneous theater/streaming releases. After "The Mindy Project" wound down underwhelmingly and "Champions" and "Four Weddings And A Funeral" were kind of a wash, I just hoped Mindy Kaling's first film as a writer/producer/star would be decent, and it's better than decent. But it didn't really feel like it conjured up late night TV that realistically. And a lot of the time it just fell victim to that Funny People/"Studio 60" vibe where you're supposed to be watching a beloved comedy veteran get their passion back and become funny again but there's really not that much of a difference between the 'bad' comedy and the 'good' comedy within the story.

b) Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant were very good in this, they and Holofcener deserved their Oscar noms. It's kind of interesting because McCarthy's performance was very much of a piece with her comedy work, she always plays someone who has a short fuse and/or is having a bad day, and she mostly did that here but with more dramatic gravity. It was weird to realize by the end of the movie, though, that this was basically a story of a talented nonfiction writer, Lee Israel, falling on hard times, abandoning her principles and defrauding people, and then writing a bestseller about it that was adapted into a major motion picture (although the movie came out after her death). I'm just kind of getting tired of scammers monetizing their confessions, I guess. And the epilogue text at the end of the movie even quoted a favorable review of the source material, which I thought was a little gauche.

c) Aquaman
A decade after "Entourage" got its best running joke out of the implausibility of a blockbuster Aquaman movie, it actually happened in real life, and just the fact of that unlikely triumph made me, I guess, assume that this movie must be pretty good. But I think it even just fell short of what I expected from the Aquaman parts of Justice League, kind of fun but too long and a bit of a mess. But I did like the drumming octopus and the weird soundtrack that veered from Pitbull to Depeche Mode to Roy Orbison in the space of a few minutes.

d) Holmes & Watson
I didn't really expect a decade of diminishing returns from Will Ferrell movies to reverse, but certainly reuniting with John C. Reilly made it at least worth watching this one to see how it went. It fell a little flat just being a bit more slapstick than it needed to be, but it could've been worse I suppose. I think the idea of an irreverent Sherlock Holmes movie starring an American probably would've had more comedic potential of this Robert Downey movies hadn't already happened not too long ago.

e) The House That Jack Built
I've worked with Matt Dillon a couple times when he spoke at events in D.C., was a nice guy, but one of the times, he seemed a little stressed out, had just flown in from Europe and didn't have a lot of patience for issues that came up from poor event planning. And I felt like that made more sense to me later after I looked up shooting dates and realized he had most likely just come back from filming The House That Jack Built, a very intense and violent movie. I've never been big on Lars von Trier's stuff and a lot of this movie reminds me why -- at some points it feels like it just keeps alternating between grisly murder scenes and driving scenes with David Bowie's "Fame" repeatedly blaring in the background. And it really feels kind of flattening to actually have a serial killer yell "I've murdered 60 people, I'm a serial killer," but aside from the unsubtle dialogue I liked Dillon's performance. The ending, both the interpretation of the movie's title and the choice of end credits music, made the whole thing feel like kind of a glib joke, though,

f) Miss Bala
I mainly associate Gina Rodriguez with cute rom coms, but I was impressed by her pretty intense performance in Annihilation. So that made me want to see her action thriller Miss Bala, where a makeup artist gets kidnapped by a gang and goes through a whole crazy ordeal, and she carries it really well, she really has that ability to kind of go through a character's transformation from a normal person in over their head to a badass who rises to the occasion.

g) Hop
My younger son has a stuffed bunny that he loves and sometimes wants to watch movies about bunnies. This one is definitely a step down from the recent Peter Rabbit movie. It's a bit weird to think now of the cultural moment already in our rearview Russell Brand was a big enough star in America to voice an animated animal in a kid's movie. I mostly felt bad for James Marsden that he had to play the human lead.

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