Photo Credit: Disney/Pixar
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Note to Pixar: step away from sequels! And definitely don’t go the tired and treaded route of the Hollywood prequel, which is what Monsters University essentially is. Not to say that this isn’t a good movie – it’s highly entertaining by any usual Hollywood standard – but being that it comes from the bejeweled House of Animation and critical darling Pixar, we expect nothing but the very best. And at best, Monsters University is a B+ movie.

The story is, like the original, a buddy movie a la The Odd Couple, where one-eyed Mike (Billy Crystal) and giant furball Sulley (John Goodman) first meet at the official university where all monsters go to learn their best “scare-the-kiddies” antics. Imagine Hogwarts, only cuter and without the headless ghosts and raging teenage hormones.

When the duo teams up for their annual collegiate tournament (think The Goblet of Fire meets The Hunger Games), Mike and Sulley join forces to prove that they are the BMOC (Best Monsters On Campus). It’s often times hilarious and the vocal performances from stars Billy Crystal and John Goodman – as well as the supporting cast of Charlie Day, Dave Foley, and Sean Hayes – are pat perfect.

The movie is nowhere near as innovative as the best of the Pixar films, like Up, Ratatouille, and Toy Story, but it gets the job done and will keep everyone from ages 3 to 93 thoroughly entertained. What it won’t do is sweep up your heart in its own dreams.

Photo Credit: IFC Films
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Yikes, this one’s a total doozy. Unless you’re someone who can stomach an entire two hours of utter psychological horror intermittently interrupted by gruesome physical torture, this probably ain’t your cuppa tea. That being said, I know there are diehard fans of the original Maniac out there that will fault any critic deriding the remake as overly squeamish or altogether ‘out of touch’, so let me try to explain why this movie fails.

First, the casting. Elijah Wood is a great actor. He’s superb on Wilfred. And who doesn’t love Frodo. But he is so utterly unconvincing as a psychotic serial killer in this film that I have no choice but to deem the soundtrack the true villain of the piece. Were it not for the incessant piercing violins in the background, you might never know that he was supposed to be disturbed and menacing. Elijah Wood is many things – charming, intelligent, and totally watchable. What he isn’t is scary.

The other major failing of the film is its structure. It moves at such a snail’s pace and spends the vast majority of its running time simply addressing what we know will happen in the end that it never bothers to explain anything other than the fact that its characters are mopey, dopey, and totally loopy. A modern day Jack-the-Ripper in Los Angeles has a fetish for leggy blondes. Erm, ok. But the movie never shows why any of the victims trust him in the first place, much less why they allow him to get close enough to hurt them.

It’s just wham, bam, thank you for your skull ma’m.

Photo Credit: Arc Entertainment
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Paul Walker just reintroduced himself to the movie going public with the smash hit Fast and Furious 6. Much of that film’s credit, however, has gone to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Vin Diesel, and the movie’s shiny assortment of flashy sports cars. So why does Walker choose as his immediate follow-up the surefire B-grade flop that is Vehicle 19.

Walker plays a ne’er do well named Michael who just got out on parole. Like just got out. The first thing he ends up doing, of course, is getting caught up in yet another scheme perpetrated by the cops whose corruption he has newly unearthed. It also doesn’t help that there’s a girl in the trunk of his car that the cops are gonna try to pin on him. How does an ex-con with a kidnapped female prove he’s not just innocent but that the cops are the real criminals?

To his credit, Walker does the best he can when the script calls upon him to turn on the histrionics. Not a natural actor, he lends a rough-hewn charm to the character that makes him somewhat of a cypher which works in this story. More of an extended episode of Law & Order meets The Golden Boy than a full-fledged feature.

Photo Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
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The first (and most lasting) impression I had after viewing Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is how apocalyptic the whole thing was. If ever there was a planet that needed saving, it’s the Earth of Christopher Nolan’s ever-collapsing galaxy: imagine 9/11 and every tsunami, earthquake, and mass shooting you ever heard of combined and exponentially raised to the nth degree. It’s basically Superman and the No Good, Very Bad, Horrible, Terrible Doomsday Scenario.

That being said, the movie works, though it’s not nearly so fun as mainstream popcorn action flicks based on comic books used to be. The dark backstory that the makers give Superman is perhaps a little too ironic and (dare I say?) substantial for a movie of this kind. But Nolan seems hellbent on reinventing the superhero saga of good-vs-evil to mean more than its original makers intended. Why is everything so bleak in these movies? They’re about guys in bat suits and red cape/yellow undies ensembles!

The story begins with Clark Kent yearning at the age of 33 to discover what his purpose is in life beyond simply being “different”. He spends a lot of time brooding on an oil rig and taking his shirt off. He was raised by a sweet Midwestern couple played by Kevin Costner and Diane Lane who bake him lots of apple pies. It’s as idyllic as 1920s America could possibly have been.

The movie jumps too broadly and too suddenly when Lois Lane (Amy Adams) shows up to uncover the secret of Kent’s background. We all know the story but the movie decides it doesn’t want to earn its emotional climax (of which there are several) and instead dives head first into major action sequence after major sequence. For those who don’t care about narrative power, it’ll be no big deal. But if you want to care about Superman and his quest, a little bit of setup would have gone a long, long way.

Those who complained that the first hour of The Dark Knight Rises was far too tedious and slow will know exactly what that methodical plotting could have done here.

Photo Credit: Sony Pictures
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I’m sure everyone is dying to know if This Is The End is actually funny or not, so I’ll spare you the suspense of having to search for my verdict in the middle of this review: it is funny – often hysterically funny – and so over-the-top in terms of how crude and raunchy it tries to be that it gets away with it only because the movie is about that most over-the-top and hyperbolic of religious phenomena: The Rapture.

Be forewarned: those who actually believe in the Rapture will likely be offended by the movie’s lackadaisical approach to the End of Times. The human beings here are concerned with their own safety and not with the return of the Prince of Peace. They also cuss, swear, and profane with such regularity that I emerged from the screening convinced that the movie contained more four-letter swear words than any other kind of dialogue. If you’re looking for civility in dialogue, this ain’t the movie for you. It’s profanity porn.

The best part of the entire proceeding, however, is its plethora of genuinely facetious performances. The cast are all playing aggrandized stereotypes of their public personas – James Franco is a self-absorbed douche, Seth Rogen is a chill, pot-happy douche, and Michael Cera is surprisingly douche – but all of them are clearly having such a blast playing to the stereotype of young, hedonistic Hollywood that you can’t help but buy it and revel in it. Expect a sequel (or two).

Photo Credit: A24 Films
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Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring is one of those movies that makes you think and despair at the same time. It’s well-made and pretty to look at, but if you really ponder the macro and microcosms that Coppola inhabits in the film, it’s hard not to feel pessimistic about the future of humanity. Especially if that humanity knows more about the contents of Paris Hilton’s closet than it does about Obamacare.

Though I would strongly advise anyone watching the film to think of it as more fiction than documentary, the movie purports itself as a “ripped from the headlines” retelling of an infamous episode in which a group of social media crazed teens wormed their way into the mansions of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and walked off with a treasure trove’s equivalent of designer clothes and accessories. Did they do it for the stuff? For the notoriety? Or simply because – as the movie strongly infers – these are the things of value in our culture today?

The young cast does well with the material its given, though Emma Watson is kind of a disappointment in her Valley Girl routine which seems a bit of a stretch for her. She’s all naughty and no nice in this story – and at time she seems to be completely exploited for the pure sake of titillation, an oddity considering this is a feature from not just a female director, but an intelligent one at that. The movie is more style than substance in the end, but it still makes for a decent show.

Photo Credit: Roadside Attractions
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When you think of Joss Whedon, chances are you don’t think of Shakespeare, especially in light of the fact that his last feature happened to be the box office bonanza that was The Avengers. But all of that gets turned on its head in his follow-up, Much Ado About Nothing, a modern, black-and-white retelling of the Shakespearean play that preserves nearly all of the original text. The stuff of mass popcorn entertainment this is not.

The story is about sparring lovers and the wackiness that ensues as they try to reconcile their fractured relationship. It is, as most will testify, much ado about something that feels in the end like nothing. And that is precisely the way the movie is played. Shot in just 12 days and with no recognizable marquee stars, Whedon plays homage to the words, walking the audience through the scenes hand-in-hand. He is able to convey not only the power of emotion, but of speech. This is admittedly better than even the Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love.

The cast is in fine form, but how could they not be when they’re reciting Shakespeare in one of his most beloved plays? Whedon has become an expert is making movies with multiple major characters, be they super heroes or medieval misfits. And that is reason to ado very, very much.

Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox
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If you’ve found yourself more than a little underwhelmed by the state of comedy in 2013’s Hollywood, you’re not alone. When the funniest movies out during the summer movie season are The Big Wedding and whatever Tyler Perry’s latest product off the assembly line is, you know comedy isn’t doing well. Even The Hangover III left many feeling like their funny bones had gone missing. What gives, Hollywood! You couldn’t even make us laugh out loud with Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in the same movie!

So in this underwhelming context, The Internship is actually quite funny. It isn’t sublimely hilarious, but it gets the job done and you will chuckle at least a dozen times. By Vince Vaughn standards, that’s pretty darn good.

Vaughn and Clive Owen play a pair of laid off salesmen who want desperately to never be unemployed again. So what’s the hottest labor market out there? IT, of course. And so they head over to Google where they compete with a horde of much smarter and much younger geniuses who got tech game. Inevitably, when the two elderly fuddy duddies are derided by their intellectually superior peers, they go a long way to prove that there’s more to life than knowing how to write java script.

If you liked Wedding Crashers, you’ll like The Internship. It basically is Wedding Crashers set in Google. It’s the Vince and Clive Show for the New Tech Age. And since Melissa McCarthy isn’t along to induce hilarity, we’ll settle in and agree to be entertained. Enough said.