The Martian and Sicario

Ridley Scott's interplanetary Robinson Crusoe tale, The Martian, is a crowd-pleasing nail-bitter that borrows from Ron Howard's feel-good playbook -- maybe a little too much. Scott was once an edgy visionary (Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma & Louise, American Gangster) but this film is stylistically arresting but narratively safe, few surprises. In Scott's latest picture, Matt Damon plays a member of a six-person NASA exploration team on Mars who gets left behind by his fellow crew members because they presume he was killed in a violent storm. He indeed survived and must devise ways to keep himself alive and communicate with Earth. The film has a great deal of star power propelling it -- Jessica Chastain, Jeff Bridges, Chiwetel Ejiofor, head the cast -- but most of its bang is in the science that Damon's Mark Watney brings to bear on his otherworldly predicament. The film invests so much in the mechanics and in the international sensation the eventual rescue mission attracts that there is no doubt all will end well. Still, it's an entertaining ride. Recommended.

Denis Villeneuve's Sicario (Spanish for "hitman") is a thrill ride of another sort entirely and, in the end, a better film than The Martian, I feel. In it, Emily Blunt plays FBI agent Kate Macer, who is fighting the drug war in Arizona, with little to show for her efforts. She volunteers for a special interagency team to capture the Mexican drug kingpin whose murderous enterprise is spreading rapidly in the U.S. The mysterious crew is run by a tousled hot dog named Matt (Josh Brolin) who gets lethal assists from a dead-eyed enforcer named Alejandro (a wonderful Benicio Del Toro). Nothing about the operation feels right to Kate and when she brings in her partner (Daniel Kaluuya), he smells a rat, too. The truth is slowly revealed during agonizingly intense scenes, the staging of which are truly masterful because they suggest much more than they show. Villeneuve's Prisoners (2013) was an engrossing exploration of obsession and vengeance. Sicario contains those elements, as well, in its chilling, unblinking treatment of a war that seems to have no end -- only mounting casualties. Highly recommended but bloody.

Pawn Sacrifice and Grandma

A couple of quick hits:

Edward Zwick's entertaining but not totally satisfying Pawn Sacrifice tells the parallel stories of American grandmaster Bobby Fischer's simultaneous ascent into the stratosphere of world championship chess and his descent into stifling paranoia and how these events fed each other. It's quite a ride and Tobey Maguire is quite good as Fischer, but the film is somehow not as absorbing as Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind (2001) or this year's Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy (directed by Bill Pohlad) -- both of which examine the connection between genius and madness. Zwick's film lacks the  grace notes and elegance of the other two -- it seems to be all intensity and frustration and very little tenderness. Fischer's (in)famous rivalry with Russian champion Boris Spassky (played with humorless deliberation by Liev Schreiber) during the early '70s is the dramatic core, but it's Maguire's deepengin disconnection from reality even as he lays opponents to waste that drives the picture. Maguire is finely supported Peter Sarsgaard as a former chessmate now Catholic priest who is Fischer's second on his tour and by Michael Stuhlbarg as a lawyer / patriot who is charged with keeping Fischer in the game until he trounces the Russians for God and Country, mostly Country. Recommended.

Lily Tomlin is not a great actress. She doesn't have the range of a Judy Dench or Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren. But she IS a wonderful performer to watch because she seems to fully inhabit the roles she's given, becomes these women. Most of her work has been on television, a medium that calls for smaller, more intimate interactions and it is in these that she really shines in Paul Weitz's Grandma. Tomlin has a deadpan delivery (except when she's cursing) that rather than evoking irritation she draws out our empathy -- she's so beat down by life -- and we understand. Tomlin's retired college professor finds herself miserable and brittle one year after the death of  her life-partner, pushing away another, younger lover (a wonderful Judy Greer) and confronting unexpected news from her teenage granddaughter (Julia Garner) that she is pregnant. Tomlin's Ellie Reid is a brisk, dismissive, verbally abusive mess who, while trying to help her granddaughter find the funds for an abortion, discovers just how much of a mess she, herself, is. The film is both caustic and tender and highly recommended.

The End of the Tour

When handled properly, a film that's for all intents and purposes about two people talking can be as engaging (maybe more so) than an action-adventure flick that is about propulsion and collision. James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour is an intriguing motion picture about a unique sort of propulsion and collision -- that of two writers whose lives are nearly all about interior terrains and observation, artifice and facade. The subject of this film is the late literary phenom David Foster Wallace, whose 1996 masterwork Infinite Jest, an imposingly complex postmodern novel, won him accolades (and a few brickbats) and a grueling signing tour. For the latter part of the tour, Wallace is accompanied by Rolling Stone writer John Lipsky, whose conversations with the oddly reticent novelist is the meat of the film (though never published in Rolling Stone, the interview became the material for the book upon which the film is based). Wallace is played Jason Segel and Lipsky by Jesse Eisenberg, two of the smartest younger actors in film. Segel is probably known best for his roles in Judd Apatow films and for the television series How I Met Your Mother, and Eisenberg for playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. In this film they are hyper-literate, introspective intellectuals whose navigation of the roles of observer and observed (roles that they occasional trade) is the most fascinating element of this entertaining, and sobering, study of the fallout of fame. Wallace died in 2008, the victim of suicide. Highly recommended.

The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Guy Ritchie has written and directed a beautiful motion picture with beautiful people in the leads but a frustratingly inert story and, alas, the promise of a sequel. I was a child when the original Cold War spy series Man From U.N.C.L.E. was broadcast ('64-'68) and spawned a weak sister of a spin-off, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. ('66-'67). I ate up the intrigue, clever devices and campy guest stars; maybe I've lost my appetite for this variety of tongue-in-cheek caper films although still devour Ritchie's usual cinematic fare. The film stars three Hollywood beauties -- Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo, Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin and Alicia Vikander as Gaby Teller -- as undercover operatives in beautiful mod fashions trying to wrest a nuclear bomb away from a beautiful and murderous Italian family led by a ruthless aristocratic beauty (Elizabeth Debicki). Despite an interesting set up, the picture doesn't deliver the usual Ritchie punch, in every sense of the word; in fact, it's a Guy Ritchie production seemingly without Guy Ritchie. But, man, is it beautiful!

Straight Outta Compton

F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job) has directed a highly watchable bio-pic of the influential Los Angeles rap group N.W.A that manages to celebrate their individual and collective achievements by using the same elements that made then notorious -- violence, profanity and the objectification of women all to a killer beat. Straight Outta Compton stars a trio of outstanding young actors -- Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre and O'Shea Jackson Jr. as his father, stage name Ice Cube. Gray is peddling naturalism through his street scenes and the characters' Crenshaw argot. The young men's disaffection and cynicism, nearly all because of the horrific treatment they receive from L.A. police, rise and converge in brilliant beats and word play recorded in studios paid for with dollars earned by former dope dealer Eazy-E. Their attitude on record and on-stage swagger attracts the attention of promoter Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti), who wins the group's confidence and ushers them into the big time -- which is not entirely the same as success. Gray is a natural at staging a party scene -- and the film has a surfeit of them, IMO -- but the casual jocularity of the group members rings true and keeps the film from devolving into a succession of music videos. It is unfortunate Gray's creative team fell back on tired black dramatic tropes -- preachy, long-suffering black mothers slapping sense into their children and the near absence of responsible adult men in the lives of the lead characters. The closest thing to a "positive" male role model on the screen is Giamatti's Heller, an aging, shady Jewish pitch man who takes the boys for a ride. Recommended for fans of hip hop or of the era -- mid-80s to mid-90s.

Mr. Holmes

Ian McKellen is near perfection in Bill Condon's imperfect film about an imperfect man, Mr. Holmes. McKellen plays both an aging and aged version of Sherlock Holmes, the famous late-Victorian era detective, wholly the invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In the film, Holmes has retreated to a cottage on the English coast where his sole companions are a housekeeper (beautifully portrayed by Laura Linney) and her precocious son (a remarkable Milo Parker). Holmes, in his 90s, has set for himself the frustrating task of correcting the published account of the last of Dr. Watson's tales of his adventures, which he, Holmes, says he did not actually solve but can't remember why. The detective's deteriorating mind is enlivened by his interactions with the admiring boy, whose curiosity and persistence Holmes finds endearing. In fact, the pairing of McKellen, who is nearly 80, and young master Parker, is this lovely picture's most enduring endearment. Sadly, though, at only 100 minutes, the picture feels rushed and truncated and the child's relationship with his mother (a counterpoint to his friendship with Holmes, which she resents) and the nature of Holmes's important journey to post-World War II Japan are left as, well, mysteries. Still Highly Recommended.

The Gift

What is most unsettling about writer/director/actor Joel Edgerton's nifty little picture The Gift is how cynical we must be that the appearance of an admiring, if needy, old high school classmate sends up red flags. But Edgerton's sad sack-loser Gordo is pitched perfectly and matched, note for note, by Jason Bateman's crass corporate climber Simon and his trusting wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall). A great opportunity has called Simon and Robyn from Chicago to California where the couple runs into Gordo while shopping. And old "friendship" is reignited but Simon, who has a really sensitive bullshit detector, feels something's not right about Gordo. Robyn thinks he's sweet and harmless. They're both right and wrong and therein lies the real beauty in Edgerton's story. Yes, it's genuinely creepy, has a couple of solid twists and offers homages to some classic thrillers -- including Rosemary's Baby. Recommended.

MIssion:Impossible -- Rogue Nation

Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie won an Oscar for The Usual Suspects nearly 20 years ago. Needless to say, he knows his way around a double-cross. As the director and writer of Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (a film title with a bit more punctuation than I'm accustomed to), McQuarrie has concocted a convoluted caper that is as thrilling and globetrotting (London, Vienna, Morocco) as the previous installments in the M:I franchise. Tom Cruise and company (Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner and Ving Rhames) are all back, even though the Impossible Mission Force has been discredited and dismantled (ostensibly) by CIA director Hunley (Alec Baldwin), who believes the body count (and general mayhem that follows M:I field work) is too high. Cruise's Ethan Hunt has been tracking the leader of a terror organization (Sean Harris) who is MI6-trained but, alas, disillusioned by the chaos that the world's superpowers have wrought. When Hunt gets word of M:I's fate, he, of course, ignores it and sticks to the trail, pulling his cohorts in with him. Harris's Lane wants to wreak a little havoc of his own and enlists the assistance of British double-agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) to steal and deliver a file that contains information on accessing billions squirreled away by MI6 for a rainy day.  It appears at first that McQuarrie has front-loaded his picture with Cruise hanging onto the side of a jet that's taxiing and then taking off but there is plenty more derring-do in this flick, and in Cruise. Whether he's battling an opponent in the fly space above the stage of the Vienna Opera House or zipping through Moroccan markets on a motorcycle, it's clear that Cruise (and his popular franchise) still has a lot of life in him. Recommended.

Southpaw

Antoine Fuqua is a reliable, if not artful, film director. He smartly chooses material with a strong, centering presence -- Denzel Washington in Training Day and The Equalizer, for example. In his latest film, Southpaw, Fuqua directs Jake Gyllenhaal, who is both reliable and artful, in the starring role of New York boxing champion Billy Hope, who knows how to take a licking and keep on ticking, if a bit more slowly of late. Gyllenhaal, famously immersive in his preparation for roles, is ripped and rocking as Hope, whose wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams), wants him to step away from the ring so that there will be something left for her and their daughter, Leila (child actress Oona Laurence). After Maureen is shot in an incident that's far too street for this picture, IMO, Billy descends into drug addiction and self-destruction. His manager (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson) dumps him for a bankable pugilist, his daughter is taken away by child protective services, he's tossed out of his mansion, his automobiles are repossessed and the poor orphan from Hell's Kitchen is out on the street. A judge orders him to clean up or risk the permanent loss of his child, and Billy goes to a boxing gym run by Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), the personification of all that Hope (no heavy symbolism there, huh?) lacks in his life -- discipline, focus, integrity. Wills takes Hope on, helps him learn how to defend himself in the ring (and out) and dispenses valuable wisdom. All of this, of course, leads to a Las Vegas showdown between Hope and his nemesis Magic Escobar (Miguel Gomez). A predictable tale, no question, but Fuqua is such a masterful storyteller -- and Gyllenhaal and Whitaker are so good -- that you won't mind you've seen this a hundred times before. Recommended.

Ant-Man

I don't know if the actual universe is expanding but the Marvel Cinema Universe is growing unabated. The latest Marvel star is Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, cat burglar turned super hero Scott Lang. Rudd is a beguilingly self-deprecating comic actor, whose character is enlisted by aging genius inventor Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and, reluctantly, his daughter (Evangeline Lilly) to don a miniaturizing suit and lead an army of ants against former student and present nemesis Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who wants to militarize Pym's research and score a big payday. Veteran TV director Peyton Reed crafted this film with an eye toward the natural incongruities -- hardscrabble con artist and thief working with former S.H.I.E.L.D. operative -- to impressively comedic effect. Speaking of effects, the opening set piece that introduces our hero to the wonders and dangers of an insect-size existence are, er, Marvelous, which is to say this often uproarious movie is best enjoyed in 3D.

Trainwreck

Judd Apatow's latest addition to his stable of vulgar artists is that filly named Amy Schumer, a comedian of some repute in certain quarters. I will admit to not knowing much firsthand about Ms. Schumer before seeing Trainwreck, which, as is true for most Apatow films, has its moments, despite being about half as nasty as any of his other films that had male leads -- for example, Knocked Up and 40 Year Old Virgin. That's not to say Trainwreck -- the story of a New York magazine writer with daddy issues and a fear of intimacy -- isn't filthy. It is. Wonderfully so. But it also has genuine moments of tenderness -- which kind of means we get to care about this foul-mouthed, miserable sexpot and the sports doctor she's fallen for (Bill Hader). It's a good show. Apatow's movies always score major points with supporting players, in this case with Tilda Swinton as a wickedly unfeeling magazine publisher and a surprisingly entertaining LeBron James as himself. Recommended.

Amy

British documentarian Asif Kapadia's film on singer Amy Winehouse's tragic and precipitous drug- and alcohol-induced fall from stardom is riveting and nearly unbearably depressing. Comprising mostly the personal video shot by Winehouse herself and her friends and concert footage, the film traces in unblinking detail the Grammy-winner's steady rise from obscurity as a club act to international superstardom and every false move and bad decision she made, most of which involved the parasitic men in her life. Winehouse's death in 2011 at age 27 was sudden but not entirely unexpected as much of her notoriety was rooted in her seemingly self-destructive addictions. Though she was working through a recovery at the time of her death, the damage had been done and her heart gave out. Kapadia makes it clear in his fine picture that Winehouse was genuinely loved by most people in her life but she could not manage to love herself.  Recommended but terribly grim.

Magic Mike XXL

Channing Tatum is eminently watchable even when he's acting badly, which he does often (White House Down) but not always (Foxcatcher). But Tatum is most watchable when he's dancing. He's leonine grace wrapped in B-boy swagger. He's always been pretty fly for a white guy, and he marshals his XXL amiability and athleticism as he returns to the role of Mike Lane, a former Tampa "male entertainer" named Magic Mike who reunites with his unique band of brothers (Joe Manganiello, Kevin Nash, Matt Bomer and Adam Rodriguez) for one last hurrah at the annual stripper convention in Myrtle Beach. Lane has been out of the game for a few years building a custom-made furniture business when he gets a call the boys' former leader (played by Matthew McConaughey in the first Magic Mike [2012]) has died. The call is a ruse to lure Lane back into the game. It works and off the merry band go for a July Fourth weekend of bonding, teasing and tantalizing -- with one another and assorted women along the way. As they make their way from Tampa to Jacksonville to Savannah to Charleston and finally the Grand Strand, the Kings of Tampa visit two powerful women played by Jada Pinkett Smith and Andie MacDowell, who lend the film a refreshing air of feminine affirmation that isn't rooted in motherhood or martyrdom. Smith and MacDowell are both terrific. The dancers, who seem to revel in their sexual objectification, try to heal broken women while embracing their own fractured and fragmented natures. Reid Carolin's script has its moments of zen and it's pretty gay-friendly but the final act is a little, well, limp after a pretty scorching buildup. Still, it's worth a few bucks.

Ted 2

Despite the plush cuddliness of its eponymous star, Seth MacFarlane's Ted 2 is not warm and fuzzy, though occasionally it seems to want to be. Once again MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy and American Dad and perpetrator of an epic fail of a hosting job at the 2013 Oscars) visits Beantown bad boy John (Mark Wahlberg) and his boorish buddy, the animated teddy bear, Ted. Ted, unaccountably, has fallen in love and married a trash-talking bombshell named Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) and gotten a a job as a cashier at a local supermarket -- all despite having no penis or fingers. Soon Ted finds his marital bliss derailed by, er, married life, and John recommends Ted and Tami-Lynn have a baby to give them something to love while they work through their disdain. Because of the missing appendage mentioned before, Ted and Tami-Lynn must get a sperm donor or adopt. All of this leads to the discovery that Ted is not human and so he is stripped of everything that ties him to the human race -- marriage, jobs, parenthood. Outrage at the injustice of it all, John and Ted seek the services of newby lawyer Samantha Jackson (Amanda Seyfried) and they're off. Depending on your taste, the movie is either weighted down or buoyed by the flood of pop culture references, profanity and vulgarity, endless pot smoking and beer drinking and general mayhem and juvenile misbehavior. Enough of it is hilarious, though, to recommend it.

Jaws

Steven Spielberg's Jaws was released 40 years ago, back when I read books before they became movies -- Jaws, The Exorcist, The Godfather, among them. Peter Benchley wrote a bestseller about a stone-cold killer that  keeps moving and eating because if it stops it will die. Into his film, Spielberg, a television director turned to motion pictures, poured what would become staple ingredients for his movies -- threatened families, kids in peril, an amoral bureaucrat, a flawed hero who guts it out in the last reel, and, on occasion, some gore. Jaws has its share of blood but is amazingly restrained as compared to the descriptions in the book. And, of course, John Williams' ominous score crawls up and down the spine. It is not a perfect film -- though it was nominated for Best Picture. The townspeople are a tinge more cartoonish than they need to be, even for the Gerald Ford Years. And yet, the movie features three terrific performances  -- Roy Scheider as the frustrated, newly hired resort town police chief Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as cocky oceanographer Hooper and, especially, Robert Shaw as a modern day Ahab Quint, who Brody hires to deliver the man-eating Great White on a plate. The best part of the film, as one might expect, is the chase, which takes up more than half of its running time. Watching these three disparate individuals get fused by heat and danger into a semi-fuctioning unit is much of the joy in watching this picture. Recommended.

Dope

Nigerian-American writer-director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope is a fresh coming of age tale that stars a young black computer geek / garage musician Malcolm (Shameik Moore), who with his posse, 1/14th-black bassist Jib (Tony Revolori) and no-nonsense lesbian drummer Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), navigate the rocky shoals of senior year in high school while avoiding beat downs from hallway bullies, neighborhood drug dealers and warring gangs, studying for SAT's and making spiky, bouncy music (supplied by Happy hitmaker Pharrell Williams). And, yes, this is a comedy, narrated by Hollywood A-lister Forest Whitaker. After narrowly escaping a schoolyard thug, the trio peddle their bikes past the operation of drug slinger Dom (rap artist A$AP Rocky), who enlists Malcolm as message-bearer to fabulous b-girl Nakia (Zoe Kravitz). As luck or fate or Hollywood plotlines would have it, Nakia is drawn to Malcolm's handsome, unassuming charms and invites him to a nightspot where the dope (several bricks of MDMA) comes into play. Famuyiwa's cagey tale of crosses and double-crosses also explores thorny issues of race and class and their intersection with youthful aspirations. A hilarious treatment of the proper use of the n-word by non-blacks is for the ages. Like Famuyiwa's earlier films The Wood (1999) and Brown Sugar (2002), Dope probably contains more than a few autobiographical references, and if his selection of featured actresses is any indication, Famuyiwa definitely has a type. Highly Recommended.

Inside Out

Animated feature Inside Out, directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo del Carmen, is beautiful -- actually and conceptually -- and the smartest film I've seen so far this year. The film stars the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black, among others, and tells the story of the emotional upheaval a high-energy 12-year-old girl (Kaitlyn Dias) goes through after she and her parents (Diane Lane and Kyle MacLachlan) move from Minnesota to San Francisco. Most of the storyline focuses of the girl's feelings -- joy (Poehler), sadness (Smith), anger (Black), disgust (Mindy Kaling), fear (Bill Hader) -- as she negotiates her new world and her relationship with her parents. Docter and del Carmen have done something pretty amazing in putting on the screen a story that is rooted solidly in the intangible and successfully anthropomorphizing emotions (light years beyond emoticons, I must say) so brilliantly that both children and adults are captivated. While the entire film is marvelous, a trip through the world of abstract thoughts with the young girl's imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) and joy's escape from the land of forgotten memories are truly superb as visual representations of sophisticated notions. They will have you laughing and crying. Highly recommended.

Jurassic World

Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World is amazingly unimaginative and frustratingly trite. It has producer Steven Spielberg's requisite family in crisis, children in peril, perfidious quasi-governmental baddies, a ballsy great white hunter / good guy and an ice princess in dire need of defrosting in the leads. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard star in the latter two roles. It all feels so done.

Love & Mercy

 

Bill Pohlad's Brian Wilson biopic, Love & Mercy, is unsettling and uneven but not because of Paul Dano (a keen, protean actor) and John Cusack (an often inscrutable performer). Dano owns this dark and fairly humorless recounting of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds period and a later time when Wilson (Cusack) was under the care and control of a shrink named Landy (a villainous Paul Giamatti). Elizabeth Banks also stars.

Heaven Adores You

Nicholas Dylan Rossi's indie doc about indie darling the late Elliott Smith is a loving, mysterious and not wholly satisfying film about the singer / songwriter who died from "apparently" self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest in 2003 after rocketing to fame as a prolific and insightful poet and musician. Docs about artists, particularly those who die young and tragically, frequently try to piece together the subject's past and pain by talking to family, friends and fans and examining the subject's work. Rossi tags each of these bases but the spaces between the recollections and Smith's own musings (often captured during the media interviews he deplored) do not contain answers to Smith's deep and inconsolable disconnection from life. Questions rise, are acknowledged but not always addressed. If Smith did in fact leave his Dallas home for Portland, Oregon, as a teenage what was it about his home that was so toxic? If his relationship with his father was a lingering painful part of his childhood, what made it so. Why such a rapid decline after his celebrated Oscar night appearance in 1998 when he played his nominated song Miss Misery from Good Will Hunting and after two subsequent, well-crafted and moody releases and moves first to New York and then to Los Angeles. What demon was chasing him? It's never clear. No, documentaries are not journalism and they're not history (strictly speaking). The world presented to the film goer has been filtered through the camera's lens and through the memories, passions and prejudices of those who agree to be interviewed. And these make this film wonderfully intimate. But I left it feeling that the decidedly enigmatic Smith was less so but still so. Much of this by turns joyful and disconcerting film is quite lovely and, of course, Smith's music is evocative and beautiful. Recommended.

Spy

New rules for spy comedies: Leads not only have to know how to take a punch but how to drop kick their egos into next week -- all while laying waste to propriety and skewering their opponents -- and the audience -- with deliciously delirious doses of profanity. Paul Feig's secret weapon in his latest film Spy is the irresistible Melissa McCarthy, who, as the film's poster suggests, is Hollywood gold. Feig directed McCarthy in two solid gold bonanzas -- Bridesmaids and The Heat. Spy is far better than those movies, classier and crasser and another guaranteed pay day for all involved -- Feig, McCarthy, costars Jason Statham, Rose Byrne and Jude Law and 50 Cent, who makes an odd and less-than-inspired cameo appearance near the film's end. In this dense (in all senses of the word), globetrotting movie, McCarthy plays a CIA in-office agent, the full-figured and underappreciated Susan Cooper, who is brains to Law's field agent Bradley Fine's charming brawn. When maniacal fashionista Bulgarian brat Rayna Boyanov (Rose Byrne of Neighbors) gets her hands on a nuke retrieved from her murdered arms-dealer daddy, Cooper is dispatched to track her because all of the top-tier field agents have been made. Therein lies the core of this grizzled and grisly fish out of water tale -- Cooper tries to break bad and earn the cred she needs to win the respect of her ballsy unit chief (Allison Janney) and avenge Fine's untimely off-camera death. The road leads not only to Rome but to Paris and Budapest and each stop involves a hilarious change in identity and a bloody encounter with another bungling agent. The body count is high but the corpses are overshadowed by the gags and eclipsed by McCarthy's outrageous charm. Recommended.

San Andreas

Yes, Canadian director Brad Peyton's San Andreas is brainless disaster porn but it is also enormous fun when it's not trying to be meaningful. The film stars Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino as estranged spouses who find themselves on a perilous trek from Los Angeles to San Francisco to find and rescue their daughter (the nubile beauty Alexandra Daddario) during an unprecedented Pacific Coast earthquake. Johnson's Ray is a hotshot L.A. rescue copter pilot. Wife Emma has just served him divorce papers and announced that she and daughter Blake are moving in with new boyfriend, real estate tycoon Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd), whose San Francisco tower will be the tallest on the West Coast (compensate much?). It's then that Ray's world starts to fall apart, literally, as the earth begins to shift and buildings start collapsing. Paul Giamatti has a choice part as a Cal Tech seismologist whose equations and gadgetry have predicted just such an occurrence but his warnings have gone unheeded. The scenes of devastation -- the demolition of the Hoover Dam, the swallowing of L.A. and the drowning of San Francisco -- are so over-the-top that they are funnier than Peyton probably intended. Along for the joy ride are a comely British lad, played by Hugo Johnstone-Burt, and his cheeky younger brother Ollie (young Art Parkinson), who take a shining to the busty Blake and end up hiking the the even crookeder streets of San Francisco with her. If watching Mother Nature kick ass is your cup of tea, San Andreas is for you. Faults and all. Recommended.

Mad Max: Fury Road

George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road is post-apocalyptic poetry and superior to the original Road Warrior series of the early 80s, which was terrific. Miller's dystopian vision of a road-raging, fuel-starved future is familiar to many but the new film ratchets up the intensity to nearly unbearable levels.  Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron star as captives of the despotic, and despicable, Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), ruler of a kingdom of fall-out survivors and a band of chalky, shaved warrior boys who guard his rocky fortress, from whence he dispenses wisdom and water, but not in equal measures. When Theron's Imperator Furiosa makes a break for it in an 18-wheeler that is carrying some of Joe's precious breeding cargo, Joe and his boys take off in pursuit with Hardy's Max in tow as "blood bag" to one of Joe's anemic underlings (Nicholas Hoult). The opening 20-minute chase is grindhouse opera -- symphonic, grungy and grand, a sensory assault that is unrelenting and exhausting.  The whole film is. The dusty, world's end vistas (shot in Australia and Namibia), the punk / metal / S&M costuming and makeup, and the Cirque du Soleil grotesque acrobatics in the final chase are all exquisite.  Miller's dark message has not changed since the original Mad Max was released in 1979 -- man's feral nature will undoubtedly survive whatever devastation his greed and shortsightedness bring --but Miller has exceeded -- to marvelous effect -- the delivery of that message. Highly recommended but terrifically violent.

Unfriended

The cleverness of Levan Gabriadze's little creeper for the chat-room set, Unfriended, will probably be lost on those whose primary means of interaction is NOT social media. The film assumes the viewer understands the dynamic and appeal of Facebook, instant messaging and webcams and builds on that foundation an intermittently entertaining teen revenge flick that outside of social media's cyber-bubble would make no sense at all -- not that there is much sense even for cyber pros. A group of five high school friends (Shelley Hennig, Matthew Bohrer, Renee Olstead, Wil Peltz, and Jacob Wysocki) convene one evening and are joined by a mysterious, avatar-less lurker using the web address of a dead friend (Heather Sossamon). The lurker has targeted our charmingly jaded and multitasking quintet because they were responsible for posting a shaming video of their drunk, butt-hurt friend. The video was so much the talk of Fresno that the unlucky girl ended up shooting herself in the head -- on camera, of course. That too was posted online. The film delivers a bit of a primer on debugging and blocking pesky trolls -- even if these measures come to naught -- and the little nimrods are picked off one by one.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

The artistry in Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron is truly impressive even as the franchise's evolving story of interplanetary / interdimensional alien invasion gets compressed into chaotic, muscular battles joined by the ligaments of running gags and witty banter. The superior first installment (The Avengers, 2012) introduced the ragtag band of heroic misfits -- Captain America (Chris Evans), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), David Banner / The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) -- led by the one-eyed chief of S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). That story merged science and magic in the person of rogue Norse god Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who was hellbent on world domination. Age of Ultron grounds its story squarely in the digital world and introduces a new nemesis, a quipping artificial intelligence (voiced by James Spader) hellbent on creating peace on earth by exterminating human life. Ultron is joined, for a while, by a curious set of Slavic mutant twins (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olson) and a horde of flying cyborgs. Yes, it's a loud, crowded party with a multitude of your closest friends and is best enjoyed as such. If you want depth and reflection go see Ex Machina.