Review – The Purge: Anarchy

This is what I was hoping for from the first Purge movie: more overview of how a night of unbridled violence would affect society as a whole. The premise is still ludicrous, but at least this time around the characters are a bit more interesting and the action moves around the city rather than getting bottled up in a house in the suburbs. Still not great, but at least a step in the right direction. Mildly amusing

Review – American Sniper

The parts of this movie that are actually about what snipers do for a living are actually interesting and well-assembled. Director Clint Eastwood has a gift for gritty, realistic action scenes. Not so much with the mopey redneckery that occupies the majority of the screen time in this offering. Mildly amusing

Review – Ouija

If I told you that a group of young folks use a Ouija board to summon an evil spirit, would I be telling you anything you couldn’t have inferred from the single word in the title? Sorry to have wasted your time. At least I helped spare you from wasting any more of it. See if desperate

Review – San Andreas

Dwayne Johnson action movies deserve room to be at least a little stupid, but this one goes well beyond reasonable leeway. My favorite bit of completely unnecessary dumbness was the repeated insistence that the catastrophic destruction of Los Angeles and San Francisco might somehow have been averted if only the powers-that-be had listened to a small cadre of scientists (led by the perpetually-annoying Paul Giamatti). Exactly how a device that detects major quakes a few minutes before they occur would have saved the entire West Coast … well, the whole movie was pretty much like that. Still, I saw it in the company of an old friend who enjoys watching movies about LA being demolished, so on that point at least mission accomplished. Mildly amusing

Review – Dracula Untold

The producers poured a medium-sized budget into this mix of the historical Vlad Tepes and the vampire Dracula (predictably heavy on the vampire side). The action sequences are fun, but the plot is strange and confusing, especially when it doesn’t follow its own limited logic. Mildly amusing

Review – Edge of Tomorrow

I believe this picture is actually better known by its tag line: Live. Die. Repeat. Which is also a succinct plot summary. Tom Cruise stars in this sci-fi action rework of Groundhog Day. Mildly amusing

Review – Wild

This movie is very much like the book. So much so, in fact, that I occasionally found myself wondering if I’d be able to follow it if I hadn’t already read Cheryl Strayed’s account of her trek on the Pacific Coast Trail. And like the book, the movie left me wishing the story was more about the journey and less about the pit-stops and flashbacks. Indeed, here the loss is more keenly felt because of the lost chances for spectacular landscape cinematography. There’s a good deal to be found here, but I would have preferred more. Mildly amusing