Mother and Child: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

As the end credits rolled, a young woman down the row from me turned to her date and said: I thought this was a comedy. And so it is, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a thoroughly walloping one of emotional intensity. It has laughs, but they’re of the choking, scoffing, incredulous kind as a woman in crisis sees life pile on yet more stress at every opportunity. It’s a harrowing picture about how sometimes it feels like life won’t stop kicking you while you’re down. So no one showing up for lightness will get that expectation satisfied. Writer-director Mary Bronstein crafts a movie with the bitter absurdities of struggle, and keeps a tight focus on her main character. Her every silent micro-expression practically shouts through widescreen closeups and framing with shallow focus that hold her captive for our attention, our empathy, and our scrutiny. She’s played by Rose Byrne in a performance of exhaustion and honesty that sometimes feels physically painful to watch. It’s that good. She’s playing a middle-aged mother in the worst week of her life so far. Her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work for the next two months. Their young daughter has a feeding tube for a mysterious illness, and as such is in and out of a treatment center every day. And then the ceiling of their apartment caves in, leaving an eerie, cavernous hole over her bed. Mother and child are forced to live at a seedy motel down the street. And she still has to manage treatments, get to work, get to therapy sessions, contact contractors, and juggle her growing alcoholism with the role of caretaker. It’s a rolling snowball of one thing after another, each mistake feeding the next until she’s drowning in anxiety, depression, and despair. 

The movie has such literally sensational commitment to its central focus on her mental state. It keeps the camera so close to her face that it often ignores other characters in the scene. Most evocatively, the daughter is a largely unseen voice, her presence just barely off screen. She’s a stress and a focus as looming danger or endangered figure. She’s omnipresent, dominating her mother’s worries while barely interrupting as a psychic presence the woman’s downward, inward spiral. Same, the husband, who is a voice over the phone. A patiently exasperated therapist (Conan O’Brien in an impressive dramatic turn) and a doctor (Bronstein herself) get some screen time, as do various irritating or menacing figures who add to her stress. You get the sense that she might not always be seeing others clearly, and wonder if her perspective is starting to warp ours. Even provisionally nice characters, like A$AP Rocky as a low-key charming neighbor at the hotel, are clearly only glimpsed through interactions with her. And then we keep returning to moody flashbacks half-seen with muffled sound, and ominous shots of machines pumping intravenous nutrition or gaping black holes on ceilings. It’s an obvious symbol of the darkness opening up inside this poor woman, whose near constant heightened state takes responses to every inconvenience, every impoliteness, every criticism straight out of control. Even the emergencies only tighten and heighten her already vulnerable state. Because the movie is so tightly filmed and precisely performed, it has so many emotional peaks and valleys while crescendoing to electric exhaustion. It never becomes a mere wallow in misery. It’s a movie that’s profoundly human, and humanely sensitive. 

Bronstein got her start in film associated with the so-called mumblecore filmmakers. Interesting to note that, twenty years on, the most prominent currently working veterans of that indie movement turned out to be formalists. Their cheap early efforts were often recognizable by their ugly consumer-grade digital aesthetic, slapdash blocking, and, yes, mumbled improvisation passing for dialogue. But now see Greta Gerwig’s Little Women or Barbie or Josephine Decker’s Shirley or The Sky is Everywhere and you see great interest in form through beautifully constructed works with intentional choices of style and mood that are some of the glossiest and handsomest—and most literate!—studio works out there these days. Amy Taubin’s infamous (to me, anyway) 2007 Film Comment takedown of the mumblecore style said it “never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.” Probably so. But thankfully the best talents incubated there have lasted to give us such memorable and vivid cinematic expression. With this new feature, Bronstein has made a movie so detailed in style and with deep feeling and specificity to match, that the power of the experience is impossible to ignore, or to forget. 

Days of Alternate Past: X-MEN: APOCALYPSE

X-Men: Apocalypse lives up to its name, putting the entire globe in jeopardy, but also proving high stakes spectacles work if you tap into the dread of them. There’s a sequence here where an all-powerful ancient superbeing launches every nuke in the world and it’s shot with such solemn gravity, taking in the faces of regular humans looking up in awe at their imminent possible demise, that it has weight and terror many films of this ilk either skip right past or take for granted. When Bryan Singer’s X-Men was released in 2000 it was considered acceptable stakes for a sci-fi action movie to merely menace a small gathering of dignitaries in New York. But recently, with movies like Batman v. Superman and the Transformers and Avengers regularly tearing up entire cities, there’s been something of a superhero stakes race, threatening ever more danger and destruction for less and less of an effect. When everything’s the end of the world, nothing is.

Now, returning for his fourth time directing this series, Singer knows every other superhero movie somehow takes outsized cataclysms and boils down to the same punching and shooting. Apocalypse understands we really want to see psychic energy swords, teleportation, shape shifting, bolts of lightening, and two telekinetic beings fighting each other on a mental battlefield. It ends with a symphony of superpowers, creatively sent into battle against others in clever combinations. And this CGI slugfest is earned by taking time to introduce its menagerie of mutants, adroitly and organically integrating a dozen or more characters, giving them each great splash page show-off moments as well as an emotional grounding for interwoven arcs. Singer crafts compelling images interested in the visceral horror and whimsical delight of having these powers, never losing sight of either’s impact on the characters in the face of glowing effects-heavy sequences.

This is all part of Singer’s approach to the X-Men, now in its ninth iteration, counting spinoffs. He set a template for the movie world of mutants trying to find acceptance and family. Saving the world is simply an outgrowth of their interpersonal dramas, calamities brought about by their angst. As this movie begins – on a reset timeline after the time-travel loop-de-loop of Days of Future Past – Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is running his school for mutants, including new students like Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) and Scott Summers, who will become Cyclops (Tye Sheridan).  Teachers include Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Havoc (Lucas Till). Meanwhile, chameleon Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) is running an underground rescue operation for abused or captured mutants like young teleporter Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), while Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is in hiding, living a quiet small-town life in Poland. They just want to live comfortably and secretly with their powers, and Singer, with a screenplay by Simon Kinberg, finds time to seriously consider their attempts at understanding their powers.

Alas, peace is not to be, as the aforementioned superbeing who wants to destroy the world awakens with much fanfare. He is Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac under a pile of blue makeup), the world’s first mutant, an ancient Egyptian worshiped as a God for all his wild powers, then buried comatose under a pyramid for thousands of years. When he wakes up to be the villain of this 1983-set alt-history, he wants to destroy the world, but only because he’s lashing out from jealousy and a God complex. While a CIA agent (Rose Byrne) investigating his return warns Professor X about the looming danger, Apocalypse wanders around gathering up rogue mutants for his army, using his power to tempt them to the dark side by amplifying their gifts. He finds: Storm (Alexandra Shipp), an orphan who can control the weather; Angel (Ben Hardy), a cage-fighter with an impressive wingspan; and Psylocke (Olivia Munn), a psychic with energy blades. As he picks them up, he gives them makeovers and snazzy costumes he conjures out of thin air, a neat, convenient trick.

Apocalypse – a fairly one-note villain, but at least he’s new – gains in power, eventually convincing Magneto to join his crusade to remake the world by bringing it to an end, the better to start over with proper mutant worship again. Magneto is torn between a desire to avenge his tragic past – which adds another heart-wrenching trauma early on here – and a need to prove his power and the potential for mutant dominance. He excavates his pain in a sequence at Auschwitz that’s borderline tasteless before gaining eerie pop power as the conflicted villainous man pulls the entire concentration camp apart in a cloud of debris as exorcism. Fassbender does admirable work bringing real sorrow and grief to his portrayal of Magneto, and makes it fit seamlessly into a big Hollywood sci-fi action confection in which a team of superhero teens led by a bald man in a wheelchair must stop an ancient blue God from ending humanity. Singer maintains an engaged and gripping thriller pace slowly drawing many strands together to the inevitable climactic conflagration.

It sounds complicated, bringing so many characters together and sending them into conflict with each other in a tone that’s both gravely serious and goofy fluff. But Singer pulls off this balancing act while confidently shrugging off baggage of prior films and wearing expectations of so much muchness lightly, engaging in straight-faced comic book appeal without pandering to nerds or apologizing to everyone else. He cares about using the characters in interesting and creative ways, whether it’s sending Quicksilver (Evan Peters) through an exploding building, in a fine repeat and escalation of the last film’s show-stopping slow-mo sequence, or setting Cyclops loose at a target, reveling in the surprise force of his uncontrollable laser-vision. Apocalypse puts aside Civil Rights subtext for a gripping globetrotting adventure on its way to an electric light show spectacle shot for wonderment and dopey-cool impact. But because Singer and his team treat the whole project earnestly – cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel shooting brightly and steadily, capturing performances and effects alike in images that takes in the whole movement and expression of the actions – it has a convincing result.

In a time when superhero movies are churned out as mere content, Singer still makes movies. Apocalypse isn’t short on incident or timeline triangulation. But rather than hitting preordained marks and providing coverage with enough space for teasing future features, he shapes a narrative, building characters to care about with problems to invest in, sending them through varied crescendos and climaxes in setpieces rewarding viewers’ interest with real consequences and fine setups and payoffs contained within the borders of its runtime. (There are echoes and cameos to flatter franchise knowledge, but they aren’t integral to their effect, and add to a genuine comic sense of unashamed retconning.) He deploys polished and poised frames that stand back and handsomely photograph superpowers while understanding that having them and using them takes an emotional toll. It’s fun and involving, all of an exciting, entertaining piece. This isn’t like Captain America: Civil War where characters pop up, show off a power, and then disappear with a tease for their own offshoot. It’s one of the best X-Men movies yet, a full and satisfying ensemble spectacle unto itself.

Block Party: NEIGHBORS 2: SORORITY RISING

Like so many comedy sequels, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising is little more than a belabored reason to repeat the first movie’s basic structure and gags, with a lower joke success rate and a sparser humor density. At least in this case the “little more” is interesting. So it’s not nothing, but still quite a bit less enjoyable than the broad, bawdy, and surprisingly thoughtful sight-gag heavy original. It found a frat house (led by Zac Efron) moving in next door to a married couple (Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen) and their baby. This was, of course, an acrimonious situation, generational discomfort agitated into a prank war as the parents sad to see their youth slipping away desperately attempted to get the frat bros evicted. By the end they’d reach some understanding, the bros and the adults going to their separate ways supposedly wiser for the experience. Not so, it turns out, as a sorority moves into the now-empty frat and the cycle starts all over again.

Getting a sorority involved is the movie’s cleverest idea. It allows for an exploration of gendered double standards, explicitly asking if the wild behavior and mean-spirited pranks the girls get up to over the course of the story would be considered quite so extreme if it were done by guys. It’s also a sharp elbow in the side of campus culture, bringing up the totally true rule that sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties. This is why a group of misfit freshmen girls (Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein, funny, if somehow underused in their own movie) decide to start up their own off-campus sorority, throwing a bunch of parties with cover charges to pay for rent. It’s empowering after a fashion, a sloppy animal house for the young ladies. Girls can have a dumb raunchy college comedy, too, you know. But, alas, that’s where the movie’s inspiration ends.

That freshness is tied to a retread of its returning characters’ emotional arcs. Why not find something new for Rogen and Byrne to do instead of simply worry about the effect of the out-of-control college kids next door again? Wouldn’t it be funny if they tried a different approach? The stakes are ratcheted up from the last time. Now they’ve bought a new house, are close to closing a deal selling their current one, and are afraid the girls will sink the escrow, leaving them with no choice but to go bankrupt. That’s ominous. But their response is to engage in the exact sort of behavior that got them in over their heads last time. Once more they’re torn about their out-of-touch status and fretting about being good parents while roping in old friends (like Ike Barinholtz) to terrorize the sorority and kicking off another prank war. You’d think they’d know better by now. The new idea they try is a contortion to get Efron back in the mix, this time working with them to help combat the youngsters. This is also the point where you realize age is coming for us all, and recent teen star Efron is closer in age to Rogen than to Moretz. Time marches on and whatnot.

The screenplay cobbled together by director Nicholas Stoller, Rogen and writing partner Evan Goldberg, with co-writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien takes narrative shortcuts to get to jokes and setpieces. Then, once there, it’s not really worth the time. There’s a lengthy sequence set at a tailgate that’s just misjudged and tedious. The parties aren’t as fun or chaotic as the first film’s; nor are the relationships between the sorority sisters sketched out as clearly as the frat bros’. That’s not to say there aren’t funny developments – a handful of Minions-inspired cutaway jokes are almost reason enough to have made the movie – but the lengths to which it goes to generate less of an effect than before is a little dispiriting. So much falls flat and so little seems to be telling a focused story or expressing coherent behavior that it’s just sitting there on screen.

Yet as far as disappointing and unnecessary sequels go, this one’s not actively harmful, just a bit of a drag. The performers have a lot of energy – more than the plot, jokes, and filmmaking know what to do with – and the whole thing has a nice low-key progressive bent. It’s not straining to be open-minded. It just is. There’s a sharp, if occasionally muddled, understanding of what it means to be a woman on a college campus and the sexist lenses with which society at large views them. (Blame the few cheaper moments – like weeping en masse to a sad movie – on the total lack of women in the writer’s room, I suppose.) And there’s something to its casual, natural acceptance. An early scene finds a gay couple’s engagement joyously celebrated by their former frat bros who jump up and down chanting “U.S.A.” That’s a patriotic image in my book. Would that all these good intentions turn the lackluster film around them into something worth the watch.

Live and Let SPY

A big, broad action comedy, Spy works by using evergreen genre elements – in this case, secret agent thriller tropes – and taking them seriously. There’s a missing nuke floating around the black market and the CIA wants to stop its sale. The process involves evil arms dealers, slimy smugglers, fancy women, and clever gadgets. At every turn we find bruising hand-to-hand combat, bloody shootouts, and fast chases involving several modes of transportation. There are surprise reversals, unexpected reveals, and double, triple, quadruple crosses from agents in too deep. It plays like a rip-roaring globetrotting adventure. That it just so happens to be hilarious is even better. It’s the rare action comedy that holds up both ends of its bargain.

By treating genre elements so plainly – squint a little and it looks like a Bond movie – writer-director Paul Feig gets comedy out of writing scenes slightly askew from the norm. This isn’t a spoof or parody of the spy picture. No Austin Powers here. This is a full-on embrace of the spy picture. Its title sure isn’t lying to you. Spy is what it is, simply and funnily. In the center is Melissa McCarthy, working with Feig for the third time after Bridesmaids and The Heat. They’re having a productive collaboration turning the expected beats of a chosen comic subgenre slightly on its head through force of offbeat screen presences and his ability to get not just laughs, but genuine, affecting performances. Here Feig writes her a starring role in a take on an oft sexist genre and uses it to refute sexist assumptions. In scene after scene, a woman male colleagues dismiss gets the job done. Anything a Bond can do, she can do.

McCarthy plays a mild-mannered desk-bound agency employee, used to compiling dossiers and feeding field agents recon through their earpieces. Over the course of the movie, she’s forced into the field and there, after initial fish-out-of-water floundering, her talents bloom. Putting her in the place of the usual strong silent spy, dry quips become filthy barrages of exasperation and determination. She, an unassuming, underestimated agent, is called into an undercover mission because a baddie (Rose Byrne) is in possession of a list identifying all known agents. An unknown is needed to track Byrne down and take her out, especially since she’s also the one selling the loose nuke and has already removed one suave agent (Jude Law) from the equation. Scenes of espionage take on fresh interest as McCarthy gets an opportunity to be every persona in her range. She’s playing a sweet professional who’s out to prove her doubters wrong, slipping effortlessly into disguises: sad cat ladies, confident whirlwinds of profanity, and glamorous international women of mystery.

Between exposition, one-liners, and dirty insults, Spy is a rush of physical comedy and exciting action. Feig finds a balance between slapstick and violence, moving from tense to jokey, exciting to funny, gory to gross-out gags. It’s a tricky dance of tone pulled off with aplomb. The characters are appealing, the plotting is crisp and clear, and the stakes are silly and high. It’s the breeziest spy picture in ages, delighting in how light it is. It works because the writing is consistently clever, the performances are terrifically calibrated to straddle the demands of serious thriller mechanics and goofy comedy while still feeling consistent in character. The entire ensemble has great fun tweaking their images, playing familiar parts in eccentric directions.

Byrne is a delightful icy villain, while Law has a good time taking the suave superspy to a goofy place of dangerous unflappability. There’s a goofy assistant back at the base (Miranda Hart, in a role calling on eager happiness incongruous to the dire stakes), a no-nonsense superior (Allison Janney), and a greasy Big Bad (Bobby Cannavale, pickling his charm). Best is dependable man-of-action Jason Statham as a macho master spy frustrated after being sidelined by McCarthy. He blusters about her inadequacies while bumbling his way through the story, making things worse for everyone. Showcasing a welcome sense of humor, he pokes fun at his usual roles. At one point he rattles off a list of exaggerated near-death experiences from prior missions – “I once drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while I was on fire” – that’s both amusingly hyperbolic and could easily be actual scenes from his filmography.

And yet McCarthy’s the clear star here. Her arc is treated respectfully without losing sight of her comic gifts. Even when she tumbles out of a scooter or vomits over a corpse, the joke's with her, not at her expense. She's in command of every scene. It’s one of her finest, funniest performances, terrific sight gags and muttered asides keeping the laughs flowing while building up real affection and sympathy for her character. She moves between slippery false identities, slowly increasing a core of self-esteem while becoming a very good spy. She shows her character’s progression filtering through layers of disguises in action. It helps that Feig is a more confident visual stylist with each film he makes. Spy looks, sounds, and moves not like a comedy, but like any big studio thriller, glossy and expensive. The surface sheen makes it all the funnier as it moves so fleetly through its exciting silliness. I was more thrilled and amused by McCarthy's espionage than many non-comic movie spies'.

Pick Up Your Chin and Grin: ANNIE

If there has to be a new Annie, this is the way to do it. Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin, and Thomas Meehan’s familiar musical about a little red-haired orphan girl in Depression-era New York has been cleverly modernized, made cheerily diverse and relentlessly upbeat. It rescues her from the cornball dustbins of community theater and John Huston’s lumbering, intermittently charming, 1982 adaptation, making her relevant and fresh. It opens in a schoolroom with a close-up of a red-haired moppet giving a report in front of the class. She eagerly takes her seat as the teacher says, “Thanks, Annie. Now, Annie B? It’s your turn.” Up pops Quvenzhané Wallis, the captivating child actor Oscar-nominated for Beasts of the Southern Wild a couple years ago. She’s beaming, ready to take the center of attention. It’s a new Annie for a new Annie, a welcome sight to start the remake.

This Annie’s an optimistic foster kid living with a group of girls with their foster mother Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz). The woman’s a bitter drunk, collecting foster parent money to help her pay the bills. The kids are miserable but upbeat, singing, cleaning, and dreaming of adoption. Annie doesn't want to be adopted. She wants to find her parents. One day she lucks – well, literally bumps – into the good graces of Will Stacks, an antisocial billionaire cell phone mogul (Jamie Foxx). He’s running a floundering mayoral race, and his team (a fussy Rose Byrne and slimy Bobby Cannavale) thinks good deeds will help raise his poll numbers. He was caught saving this poor girl from an oncoming vehicle, and the public loved it. The video went viral. So he decides to take in Annie for a while, without realizing that such a bright light is bound to melt a grump’s heart.

That’s more or less Annie like you know it, but writer-director Will Gluck, with co-writer Aline Brosh McKenna, streamlines the plot, letting the precocious long-winded period piece of yore lose some stuffiness by trimming most of the bloat. Gluck keeps the core of sentimentality, but puts a contemporary gloss on top. Now the plot is fast-paced good-natured comedy and uplift, slickness and auto-tuned cheer, trading a mansion for a luxury penthouse apartment, and updated with tweets, cell towers, and selfies. That sounds like it should be only craven and commercial, but it’s wrapped up in the sweetness inherent in the source material. It works as a brightly lit fantasy New York City for a girl’s dreams to come true just because she’s nice, smart, and deserves it. It’s all high-energy good-spirited smiles and songs. And when I think of the girls around the world who will look at this Annie and see themselves, it makes me pick up my chin and grin.

It helps that Wallis is the most adorable and sympathetic Annie I’ve ever seen. This Annie sings well, has a great smile, and has greater agency over her own narrative. She’s not just hoping. She’s taking action. She sees the angles that get her into a rich situation, and in the climax engineers her own rescue with savvy exploitation of social media. You want her to do well, and the soft edges kept on the plot’s hard edges of abandonment, plus the cultural memory of the play’s songbook, have you knowing she will be okay. It’s bright, light, cheerful, and sweet, determined to see every character redeemed if possible, even when Hannigan gets up to her scheming ways. The movie cares about its characters, and reluctantly doles out a few comeuppances in the end on its way to a happy production number finale.

Gluck, who, if you recall, included a terrific musical number for Emma Stone in his should-be-a-cult-classic teen comedy Easy A, shows a knack for feather-light family-friendly musical filmmaking. He keeps the proceedings bouncy and pleasant. Not all the comedy works – too many pop culture references and clumsy innuendos – but he has a sparkling fizz to the artificial sugar of it all. The game cast – Bryne and Foxx are especially likable, Cannavale’s Broadway-big, and Diaz tries hard – helps keep the good feelings flowing. It looks like they've having fun together. When it comes to the musical numbers, Gluck cuts around imprecise framing in rhythmic editing that matches the mood, skipping around the sequences in the usual modern style that gives off the impression of dancing instead of letting us take in the choreography. But the performers’ spirited charm sells the genial toe-tapping effort.

This remake retains the best of the original’s songs – “Maybe,” “Hard Knock Life,” “Easy Street,” and of course “Tomorrow” – spruces up a few dustier ones – “I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here” gets a new beat, “Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” gets a new style – drops some of the duller numbers and adds a few dull new ones. But it also gives Annie a new yearning number, “Opportunity,” she sings at a fundraiser she attends with her new temporary foster dad. Here she gives thanks for her bit of luck and promises to make the most of it. It reaffirms this new Annie’s focus on the girl herself, letting her do more than wait optimistically for another day. She’s smart and motivated enough to make the best of her luck to create her own tomorrow. She knows the world can be a mean place, that help doesn't always come to those in her situation, but chooses to face the day with a smile anyway. This movie, all heart, sugar, and uncomplicatedly slick music, has brought new life and new faces to an old-fashioned story, and can bring a smile if you let it.

Family Tries: THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU

A family gathers in the shadow of their patriarch’s death, four grown children living under one upstate New York roof for one week at the behest of their mourning mother. “You can cry. You can laugh. There’s no right way to grieve,” the mom (played by Jane Fonda, carrying more dignity than the plot allows) says early in This is Where I Leave You, a movie that wants you to do a little laughing and a little crying. It’s a fairly contained and awfully schmaltzy comedy-tinged drama, completely predictable in the beats that it hits. Uptight jerks learn to loosen up. Irresponsible cads mature a bit. Generational gaps are bridged, but slightly. The grown kids have a prickly, but deep down loving, reunion that involves old grievances, new secrets, and a reason to rethink their lives’ trajectories. The film’s heart is in the right place.

The ensemble is filled with welcome faces, each an interesting presence in their own right. There’s Jason Bateman as the middle son, a man who loses his job and his wife on the same afternoon and arrives for the funeral convinced he won’t share his bad news. Of course that doesn’t happen. It’s a secret-spilling free-for-all. His sister (Tina Fey) is in a marriage in the process of chilling, so much so that her husband only lingers around two or three scenes, a total non-issue the rest of the time. She has an adorable kid or two, so that’s nice, except for the scene involving potty training gone wrong. That’s gross. Also back to sit shiva is their older brother (Corey Stoll). His wife (Kathryn Hahn) wants to get pregnant, a goal that drives her a little crazy in a condescending way. There’s also a younger brother (Adam Driver) and his cougar girlfriend (Connie Britton). Talk about a full house.

The ensemble is strong, if unevenly deployed in thin subplots. Bateman and Fey have good rapport, with similar clenched braininess that feels warmly familial. Stoll gets lost in the shuffle, but is a steady, mildly neurotic, rock, and Driver seems incapable of an uninteresting line reading. Mother Fonda gets lost in the sea of subplots for most of the film, drifting through as only a punchline for her oversharing and her boob job. She deserves better. They all do, really. Jonathan Tropper’s screenplay (based on his own novel) gives each family member their own little undercooked plots, complete with their own, largely separate, set of supporting characters (Rose Byrne, Ben Schwartz, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard). None of them are all that interesting on their own, but collectively, it adds up to a passable amalgam of middle-aged concerns and family tensions.

Director Shawn Levy is an effective manipulator, able to execute material efficiently and professionally. I liked his robo-boxing movie Real Steel, and found small charms in his Cheaper by the Dozen remake, one-crazy-night comedy Date Night, and unfairly maligned flop The Internship. Those aren’t great movies, but at least they hit some good notes. With This is Where I Leave You, though, despite all the soft lighting, on-the-nose pop song choices, and sunny greeting-card encouragements, the movie never quiet achieves emotional lift it seeks.

I couldn’t help but wonder what a Robert Altman type would’ve done with this material, and not just because the family’s last name is Altman. With such a large, talented ensemble in a small location, a balanced approach with overlapping dialogue and thematic concerns might’ve worked better. Though certainly non-Altman family reunion films like August: Osage County and Dan in Real Life manage to hit similar notes with greater aplomb that Levy and Tropper’s work here. It’s bland and comfortable, but never really comes alive in any way. Still, for a superficial, sentimental, predictable little middle-of-the-road thing, it could be worse. 

The Boys Next Door: NEIGHBORS

An R-rated comedy can sour quickly. There’s a tendency among Hollywood’s purveyors of that subgenre to rush to the R and forget the comedy when planning their edgiest jokes or letting the actors endlessly riff on the lines until scenes grow baggy and dirty. The surprise of Nicholas Stoller’s Neighbors is that it gets the balance mostly right. You’d think a movie about a married couple and their newborn daughter who find their lovely suburban college-town lives disrupted by a rowdy fraternity moving in next door would lend itself to lazy stereotypes and general degeneracy. It does, but even though the movie is exuberantly vulgar, broad, and loud, it never loses track of the human qualities in its characters. There’s an allowance for some small nuance that avoids reducing the characters to their cheapest, ugliest selves.

We start with the married couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) trying to adjust to life as parents. Unlike Rogen’s many man-child roles, this is a movie about two adults who are mostly happy to have matured to the extent they have. With movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement, director Stoller has proven himself interested in exploring the emotional shifts the continual process of growing as an adult entails. In his films, the relationships ring true and are treated with a degree of weight. Here our leads are doting on and toting around their adorable baby, enjoying life while still wondering if having a child has to mean leaving their carefree party days behind. Just as they’re figuring out their new, more responsible, fully adult selves, an explosion of youthful id moves in next door.

At first it doesn’t seem so bad. The frat’s president (Zac Efron) promises they’ll keep the noise down. The other boys (Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Roberts) seem nice enough, cooing over the baby and saying they want to keep the neighborhood pleasant. But then the partying starts. It’s loud, long, and debauched, just as you’d expect. And soon the couple is forced to call in a noise complaint. When the responding cop (Hannibal Buress) tells the frat the source of the call, the frat takes it up a notch. They aren’t just loud and obnoxious partiers by night, litterers and loiterers by day. (That’s familiar to anyone who has lived in a college town.) They’re now actively antagonistic, pranking their neighbors in escalatingly dangerous and improbable ways. After a visit to the flighty dean (Lisa Kudrow) proves unhelpful, the couple decides to sabotage the frat and shut them down for good. The script by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien follows a clear structure, with the frat behaving boorishly and the couple plotting ways to force them out.

With such a setup, it’d be easy for the movie to fall into characterization as simple and button-pushing as its preoccupation with bodily functions, body parts, and bodily harm. A lesser comedy would make the frat boys only villains and the thirtysomethings only virtuous. Here the terrible frat boys are, between raunch and bullying, allowed moments of surprising tenderness, self-doubt, and worry about their fast-approaching post-graduation prospects. One guy goes to a job fair where he’s told flat out he’s “too dumb.” Later, one frat kid earnestly tells another, “You don’t like them [the neighbors] because they remind you of the future.” As for those neighbors, they like smoking a little weed now and then, want to keep their sex life interesting, and have real doubts about the suburban bliss they feel pressure to want. These unexpected shadings go a long way towards balancing the broader, dumber moments.

Some of the situations are unlikely. (Wouldn’t the couple at least close their curtains at night?) Slapstick – like a violent and far-fetched airbags prank – and gross-out gags – like a breastfeeding emergency or, worse, a mix-up involving a discarded, unused prophylactic – might go too far. But the film remains largely likable because it has the right balance. Cinematographer Brandon Trost (who also worked on the better-looking-than-you’d-think This is the End) shoots with a slick, loosely held style that gives weight and a degree of realism to the proceedings. Maybe that’s why the more exaggerated moments feel a bit false, but it also helps sell the truth in the solid performances. Rogen and Byrne have warm chemistry and easy repartee. I particularly liked them arguing about who gets to be the irresponsible Kevin James-type in their marriage. Around them the ensemble – from Efron and Franco on down – is well-cast and well-deployed. And the baby is adorable, ready to give cute cutaway reaction shots while being kept nice and safe, sleeping peacefully when the most dangerous moments erupt.

Too often movies about frats want to wink, nudge, and enjoy the sexism, racism, carousing, and homophobic hazing, wallowing in celebratory immaturity. It’s good, then, that Neighbors finds itself squarely on the side of growing up, saying to do so means finding the proper balance between partying and responsibility. It likes its characters, even when they make mistakes, even at their most caricatured and stereotypical. It’s not a great comedy, a little low on laughs, but it’s pleasant enough to be a decent time at the movies. Without a mean spirit and with a relatively short runtime of 90 minutes and change, it’s the rare R-rated comedy that accommodates dirty jokes, bad behavior, and even a few unfunny scenes, without going sour. 

Things Still Going Bump in the Night: INSIDIOUS: CHAPTER 2

A group of paranormal investigators have broken into the long abandoned home of a deceased serial killer. One of them slowly approaches a dusty chest latched shut in a creaky corner, arms outstretched to open the mysterious storage unit. That’s when a lady in the audience shouted, “That’s probably not a good idea!” That made me laugh, mostly because of her qualifying the statement with a “probably.” It’s most definitely a bad idea to do anything in the long abandoned home of a deceased serial killer, especially if you’re in a horror movie, most especially if you’re in a horror movie as dutifully predictable as Insidious: Chapter 2. It’s the kind of movie that, when a flutter of white fabric flits through a doorway deep in the background and Barbara Hershey nervously calls out “Renai?” you can be completely and totally sure that that’s not Renai at the end of the hall.

James Wan directs from collaborator Leigh Whannell’s screenplay, using the jumbled, thoroughly extraneous sequel to their original film as nothing more than an excuse to show us some of the inventory in his bag of horror filmmaking tricks. To be sure, Wan did that with their creepy Insidious in 2011 as well as his even scarier The Conjuring this summer. In Insidious: Chapter 2, however, we have nothing more than a rehashing and recapitulation of the previous film in ways that are theoretically interesting, but are in practice rather hollow. All the tricks in the world couldn’t have saved this movie that’s only interested in picking up where the story left off, finding ways to repeat what came before, echoing or outright restaging from different perspectives all the best scares from the first film on its way to a similar conclusion.  

As the pre-credit jump scare at the end of Insidious implied, after rescuing one of their sons (Ty Simpkins) from the clutches of an evil ghost in a shadowy spirit world, Renai (Rose Byrne) suspects her husband Josh (Patrick Wilson) returned with a possessive evil clinging to him. Chapter 2 picks up shortly thereafter, as Josh tries to convince his wife that moving into his childhood home with his mother (Hershey) will help them move on. She’s not buying it, especially as ghosts appear frequently in ways she recognizes from the first time. It feels like what the second half of a far-too-overlong version of the original film would’ve entailed. If the first was in some ways a riff on Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, this is most definitely a Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Sequels mean never having to say it’ll never happen again. Here, it all happens again.

There are mysterious noises, startling apparitions, slamming doors, bleats of punctuating orchestration, portentous dreams, a return of the bumbling tech-head ghost hunters (Whannell and Angus Sampson), and loud, sudden ghostly activity. It’s all so very familiar, sometimes reusing footage of the first film in moderately clever ways. But it proceeds with a sadly draining sense of repetition. In the first film, scary things happen to frightened people. This time, frightened people happen to scary things, a small but important shift. Since the hauntings have followed the characters from the first time, they have more agency and information. Rather than using that to catch on more quickly to what’s happening and use the knowledge of the first film in sharp ways, the plot requires the main characters to blindly stumble into similar troubles while side characters set off on an investigation into a spooky boarded-up hospital and an eerie abandoned house. I suppose I don’t mind that on principle, but did they have to go in at night armed only with low-wattage flashlights and a set of woo woo spirit-communication dice? It’s like they knew that’d be the creepiest way to go about it.

After getting his first big break with the inventive, but icky for icky’s sake, 2004 feature Saw, Wan has slowly but surely become a confident horror director. He plays on fears by foregrounding what’s inside and outside of the frame, moving the camera in sometimes-masterful ways to reveal scares and withhold jolts until the tension of not getting a shock is almost unbearable. But here he’s putting his talents to use with awfully thin material, cheaply repetitive and recycled, not just from its own predecessor, but from a whole host of horror tropes. The whole thing is shivery, but never truly scary, with jump scares that can’t even make it to the level of a jolt. In its entirety, it is less frightening than any given five minute stretch of The Conjuring. It’s the kind of stale regurgitation that gives horror sequels a bad name.

Google Hangout: THE INTERNSHIP

The Internship is an amiable hangout movie. It’s little more than a chance to spend time with an appealing cast playing pleasant types. At the center of its appeal is the duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, reteaming for the first time since their successful 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers. They’re both fast talkers, but where Vaughn muscles through with nonstop bravado, Wilson has a spacier syncopation. When both motormouths get up to speed, they find a fine, easy rhythm. This new comedy finds them surrounded by a capable cast that rises ever so slightly above glorified reaction shots in a plot that’s loose to put it generously. And yet I found myself enjoying sitting with this film much more than Crashers, which I’ve always found to be a tad on the grating side. I didn’t realize until I saw this one that my biggest problem with the earlier film was all that pesky plot. Sometimes a good, agreeable hangout is just what’s needed.

As the film begins, Vaughn and Wilson lose their jobs when the company they work for closes. Desperate to find better prospects, they bluff their way into summer internships at Google, where they quickly find themselves bewildered on the wrong side of a generation gap. The interns are placed into teams and the kids – a young manager (Josh Brener), a cute collegiate nerd (Tiya Sircar), a too-cool-for-school dude (Dylan O’Brien), and a self-conscious, socially awkward computer whiz (Tobit Raphael) – who get stuck with the old guys are none to happy about it. They’re an awkward bunch, but if you suspect they just might eventually, reluctantly learn to love each other and work as a team by using each member’s best skills you’d be on the right track. The team that wins the most points in various challenges over the summer, everything from coding to Quidditch, will win jobs at Google. Nods toward typical slobs (our protagonists) versus snobs (led by Max Minghella) plotting, as well as the basic competitive drive, make up the movie’s loose throughline.

It’s not often you find a light, summery comedy about how terrible the job market is. For a while, I remained unconvinced that it would work. But a funny thing happened as I sat there and let the movie play out: it won me over. The way the script by Vaughn and Jared Stern locates the anxieties of the two leads right inside the generation gap – they’re too young to ignore technology, too old to fully “get” it – becomes a somewhat productive dialogue. They grow progressively open-minded about younger people and new ways of doing things, while their teammates grow more open-minded about the value of input from people with more of an old school skill set. It’s a soft movie, but a few of the points it dances around are more perceptive than I anticipated. There’s a nice moment where Wilson and Vaughn chastise the younger interns for being so cynical about their future careers and when the response comes – “Do you even know what it’s like to be 21 today?” with a college degree no longer guaranteeing a job, if it ever was – they’re actually taken aback and consider it.

None of this would work without the cast. Director Shawn Levy, of Cheaper by the Dozen and Date Night, keeps the scenes casual and sociable, letting the ensemble fall into comfortable grooves to fill the scripted sequences with a bit of a loose feeling. Vaughn and Wilson have a relaxed chemistry that’s very appealing. Various supporting roles filled by the likes of Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, and Josh Gad are fine bits of color around the edges. I was most taken with the work of O’Brien and Sircar, two of the college-aged interns who spar and banter with the main guys. Their winning performances are charming and feel like they’re circling some sort of generational truth, mediating their experience through smart phones and admitting to a technologically enabled imagination that’s wilder and more experienced than their real world lives to date.

This isn’t anything great, but it’s sweeter than expected. It’s refreshing to find a big studio comedy that’s just plain nice. (It’s also likely the only Hollywood comedy you’ll see in some time to purposefully allude to a Langston Hughes poem.) The movie hates jerks, lets characters feel bad about bad decisions, and angles for encouragement and hope above all else. It’s miles more humane and watchable than Ted or The Hangover Part II or any other corrosive-yet-popular comedy of the past several years. If this core decency leads the film into its biggest misstep, so be it. The approach to its setting feels miscalculated, so dewy-eyed about how great it is to work at Google – just shy of Wonka in the whimsy department, if the production design filled with pedal-powered conference tables and nap pods is to be believed – that it shoots past elaborate product placement and ends up feeling like it’s having a goof. Still, this is a movie that’s enjoyable to be around. Simply spending time together may not actually solve generation gaps, but it’s nice to think so for a couple hours.

Passed Down: THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES

If you go to see The Place Beyond the Pines, you’ll pay to see one movie and get two more at no extra charge. That’s not because the film’s overstuffed, but because of the film’s structure. It’s built out of three stories that are separate and yet flow into each other, not so much evolving as filling up with evocative resonances and echoes. Writer-director Derek Cianfrance must like this sort of thing. His last film, the great, harrowing relationship drama Blue Valentine, cut back and forth, balancing the beginning and end of a relationship, tentative young romance smashing inevitably into aged tensions. With his new film, Cianfrance has created something of an intimate epic. Running nearly two-and-a-half hours, it feels long, spanning two generations, confidently shifting the protagonist not once, not twice, but three times, leaving the structure feeling like three short stories placed back to back.

As the film starts, we’re introduced to a drifter, a handsome stunt motorcyclist played by Ryan Gosling. He travels with a carnival, breaking hearts and making a little bit of money in each town. That routine changes when an old flame (Eva Mendes) introduces him to his son. Now desperate to be a part of his child’s life, he attempts to settle down and soon resorts to making money in a less-than-legal way. That’s how we meet an ambitious young cop who becomes the film’s new focus. He’s played by Bradley Cooper as a proud, privileged man desperate to make something out of his life. He’s a man whose rich father (Harris Yulin) and worried wife (Rose Byrne) can barely understand why he’s chosen such a risky profession. I’ll save the film’s last story unspoiled except to say that it riffs on the choices these two men make and the impact they have on the next generation.

Cianfrance briskly establishes vivid detail out of casually precise production design and meticulous performances. A fairly early scene of adrenaline, suspense and daredevilry ends with Gosling vomiting on the rough wood floor in the back of an empty cube truck. I could almost feel the sweat, sawdust and stink in my nostrils. When the cut away from this scene starts up a Springsteen song on the soundtrack, it was only underlining what, by that point, was more than clear. We’re seeing a blue-collar story song of a film, a meandering tribute to the working class. Gosling and Cooper are playing characters who use what they do to define who they are and their attempts to either live up to and break away from those definitions lead them down different, yet in many ways similarly perilous, roads.

It’s thematically overreaching and narratively overdetermined and inefficient, but there’s an absorbing pleasure to the way the film plays out. It doesn’t come together as smoothly or completely as its structure suggests, but there are nonetheless satisfying echoes across three discreet plot arcs, like when an early long shot of Gosling riding a motorcycle down a wooded two-lane road is mirrored in a late long shot of a teenager riding a bike down the very same road. It’s effective. Cianfrance (with co-writers Ben Coccio and Darius Marder) has made a film of immersive plotting with the harder-than-it-looks pleasure of narrative curiosity. I cared as I wondered what would happen next for the characters and was eager for the unfolding events to tell me more. There’s a confidence to the film’s ambition and indulgence that I was willing to accept. The destination may be slightly less than the journey promises, but the sheer narrative pleasure kept me more than enough engaged.

Mad Mutants: X-MEN: FIRST CLASS

With X-Men: First Class the franchise that started in 2000, peaked with 2003’s X2 and then went on to finish off a trilogy and limp through a prequel, has looped around to a second prequel that finally gets down to showing how a group of mutants formed the X-Men in the first place. This is all expositional dialogue from earlier movies tweaked, fleshed out, and made into one mostly coherent feature, but unlike 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, First Class is still capable of surprise. Rather than dutifully double-knotting loose ends that have already been tied, this movie takes a lot of pleasure in its comic-book style mythmaking.

It strikes me that the X-Men series now cumulatively is the best page-to-screen adaptation of the feel of a comic book series with its complicated, overlapping backstories, its ever evolving retconning, and its intricate, sometimes gap-filled, puzzle of exposition spread out across five installments. This new film starts off with several sequences that feel like separate issues of a comic that slowly merge into one storyline. We see a young Erik Lensherr in a World-War-II concentration camp bending a metal gate and then brought before a devious Nazi who, in a jarring edit that crosses the 180 degree line to good effect, is revealed to be a bit of a mad scientist interested in discovering and experimenting with mutated powers. We then see a young Charles Xavier using his telepathy to discover a shape-shifting orphan that has snuck into his cold family’s cavernous mansion, bring some hope to an alienated child.

From there, the movie flits between the two boys who quickly are shown to be young men. It’s the late 50’s. Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is hunting down hidden Nazis while Xavier (James McAvoy) is working on his thesis at Oxford. They have different approaches towards using their mutations. Lensherr uses his for the power and violent revenge it allows him. Xavier, on the other hand, uses his seamlessly and secretively to give him an (unfair) advantage in social situations. One is all about making himself known; the other prefers to calmly blend in. What’s nice about these early-years portions of the film is the way it reveals their character traits through action. This helps propel the momentum ever forward without (or at least rarely) getting bogged down in the gooey nonsense of characters talking overtly about themselves in unconvincing ways.

Moving forward, into the 60’s, the film is jam-packed with plot and exposition. While good use of the period bric-a-brac allows for fashion, technology and music to flesh out the setting, the film has curiously little use for the civil rights struggle. You would think that would be the clearest allegory for mutants, much like Bryan Singer’s first two films in the series used mutants as a stand in for gay rights. This film has little time for allegory outside of a few dull stabs at social import that are mostly cringe-worthy, like the treatment of the film’s only African American. But in a movie this dense with plot, themes have a tendency to get ignored and when attention is finally, fleetingly, turned upon them, it feels awfully ham-fisted.

Aside from building (and rebuilding) characters and the universe, this is essentially a spy movie. The film busies itself with C.I.A. intrigue involving some well-intentioned agents (Rose Byrne and Oliver Platt) who want to recruit some mutants. To start with, they need a scientist who specializes in researching and theorizing about human mutations. They find one in Charles Xavier. They’re interested in using his knowledge to help in dealing with the devious Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon!) who, reconnaissance tells them, just might have a group of mutant henchmen helping to heat up the Cold War. Why else would he hang around with three surly thugs (January Jones, Alex Gonzalez, and Jason Flemyng) who can provide mysterious, otherworldly enhancements to their intimidations?

This is a large cast, but all of the key elements fall into place in a pleasing manner. Fassbender and McAvoy, fine actors both, never condescend to their roles. With great seriousness, and more than a little bit of obvious pleasure, they command the screen with their fantastic presences. Fassbender, especially, has a kind of epic glower and a muscular suaveness that, in conjunction with his turtlenecks and leather jackets, feels just about as close to a resurrection of 60’s-era Steve McQueen or Sean Connery as we’ll ever get. As for the villain, Kevin Bacon hams it up – he’s clearly having a blast – but he manages to be an awfully serious threat at the same time.

The rest of the cast, while often less noteworthy, tend to be well equipped for what they’re asked to do. The “First Class” itself doesn’t even show up until not too long before the climactic action. But as the team assembles throughout the movie, despite the new characters receiving far less characterization that the main men, it’s fun more often than not to see both young versions of established characters like Mystique (now Jennifer Lawrence) and Beast (now Nicholas Hoult) as well as new-to-the-screen characters like the howling Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones) and the energy-beam-shooting Havoc (Lucas Till). (Shortchanged is Zoe Kravitz as the flying and fireball-spitting Angel who is given the least heroics to do). True to the series pattern of creating eccentric ensembles with powers of varying believability, the group is a fine mix of sci-fi powers that end up working together in fun combinations in the final blast of action.

Despite the heavy amount of plot placed upon the film, it still manages to deliver the summer-movie goods at a rapid-fire pace. Director Matthew Vaughn (who directed last year’s superhero semi-satire Kick-Ass, a movie I enjoyed but slowly slightly soured on) concocts with his five co-writers a pleasing succession of smashing action beats that crash forward with a reassuring regularity. This is a big budget effects-heavy film that features some fine acting and some pleasing action. It’s also the rare franchise film that’s light on its feet despite the weight of accrued details.

It manages a brisk pace and can be quite funny at times, even finding ways to have some small fun with its occasional comic-book corniness (a telepath-blocking helmet is very cool, somewhat menacing, and fairly silly, all in the same instant). The vibrant, saturated colors and a smidgeon of self-conscious winking in the production design (including brief nods to Dr. Strangelove and Basic Instinct of all things) and small cameos do much to further the sense of both continuity and originality. It’s a prequel that’s most satisfying precisely because it finds a good balance between paying homage to all that’s come before and striking out on its own. There are enjoyable nods towards the franchise’s past while laying great groundwork for its potential future.

Things That Go Bump in the Night: INSIDIOUS

Insidious is like a rickety old carnival ride where half the fun is knowing exactly how the ride will try to startle you but then getting startled anyway. Here every jump-scare with a blast of sound is every bit as surprising and painful as getting your chest slammed into a rusty safety bar with a quick scrape of the ride’s gears. Director James Wan and his screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who made a big splash with the original Saw, have made a simply effective piece of horror. I didn’t much care for their debut and haven’t seen any of Wan’s other films, but this film works on a primal genre level.

As in most any haunted house movie, this one begins with a likable young family moving into a house with creaky floorboards and dark shadows. The husband (Patrick Wilson) heads off to work and the sons (Ty Simpkins and Andrew Astor) go to school, leaving the wife (Rose Byrne) and their infant to first encounter the strange goings-on. Things begin casually creepy. First, misplaced objects. Then, strange sounds, floorboards creak with no one stepping on them. Then, is that a voice I hear, whispering ever so softly? Then, what is that figure flashing through my peripheral vision?

So far, these are all standard elements for this type of film, but the real horror starts with a scene that’s chilling in its matter-of-fact normalcy, in an everyday event just enough wrong to feel hopelessly horrifying. One morning Wilson heads upstairs to wake up one son who is sleeping in particularly late. He does the usual fatherly calls to “Get up!” accompanied by turning on the light. Then he puts a hand on the corner of the mattress and shakes it, calling louder. Then he puts his hand on the boy’s arm and moves it. But this small, helpless child simply won’t wake up.

We quickly learn that he’s in a coma. This is an all too plausible occurrence that anchors the escalating horror to come. Wan builds the tension with expert freak-out jolts like when, in the middle of the night, the front door is mysteriously open. Or when a dark figure can be glimpsed in the corner of a bedroom. Or when a mother rounds the corner to see a ghostly man standing next to her baby’s crib. That moment in particular reveals the knowingness with which Wan deploys these shocks. I saw the ghost before the characters and beat the soundtrack’s blast, which occurs only after the characters have had a scare. By that point, my stomach had already twisted into a knot.

By the time the third act arrives, we find typical haunted house material (paranormal investigators, a psychic, and a séance) played with a bit of a twist. Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that the investigators (Angus Sampson and the film’s writer Leigh Whannell) are nerdy guys who are trying to one-up each other with their unwieldy homemade paranormal sensors. The psychic (Lin Shaye) is ominously warm and grandmotherly, until she starts dictating dark visions and insists on wearing a gas mask during the séance, which punctuates the already creepy scene with thick raspy breaths.

Insidious is scary but not frightening, surprising but not scarring. It’s not a great movie but it’s great, rickety genre fun. It’s not as great as Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, my personal favorite of this subgenre, but it’s still an effective effort. Wan plays with tropes and clichés and finds new ways (and some old dependable ways) to make an audience, at least the one with which I saw this, flinch, gasp and squirm at all the right moments.

Quick Look: GET HIM TO THE GREEK

In 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, director Nicholas Stoller’s debut film, one of the most memorable characters was Russell Brand as rocker Aldous Snow, a coarse and drug-addled delight who stole every scene he was in. For Stoller’s sophomore effort, Get Him to the Greek, Brand’s Snow gets a starring role in a film all his own. Of course, he shares it with Jonah Hill, who plays an employee of a record label. Boss Sean Combs sends Hill to London with the task of getting Snow to the Greek theater in Los Angeles in time to perform an anniversary concert in hopes of rebooting his career. The movie gets off to a hilarious start with a music video for Snow’s most recent album African Child, an album that is proclaimed to be “the worst thing to happen to Africa since Apartheid.” Spiraling out of control after the double setback of the failing album and a horribly public split with pop tart Jackie Q (a hilariously game Rose Byrne), Snow is a mess. Jonah Hill and Russell Brand have great chemistry, and the movie gets plenty of mileage out of the standard road-trip style looseness and goofiness. We’ve seen road trips before, but never with these characters. Eventually, the movie becomes a disconnected series of debauched episodes. The sense of a rush to get him to the Greek is almost entirely missing. This should be a madcap dash, but it’s too slack for that. It's often funny, but tinged with a colossal sense of disappointment. It could – it should – be so much funnier. Funny jokes are repeated until they aren’t and the one’s that weren’t funny to begin with are used even more often. Aldous Snow’s hilarious music is pushed to the side and attempts to deepen his character fall flat. The movie grows mushy, falling prey to the need for emotional growth. But the thing is, Hill and Brand are better antagonists than friends and I never bought that they grew close throughout their adventures. The romantic subplots are abused and mistreated, ultimately failing to create any sentimentality precisely because the female roles (not just Byrne’s, but also a small role for Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss as Hill’s girlfriend) are severely underwritten. This is a sloppy, aimless comedy that sometimes made me laugh, but ultimately left me feeling sour.