Comedy
The Little Hours
The Little Hours fuses arthouse cinema with modern comedic stylings borrowed from Judd Apatow’s toybox. In other words, it’s a film with lovely cinematography and patient pacing, yet features bawdy behaviour and provocative profanity.
Austin Found
Austin Found is yet another case where the trailer sells the audience on a different kind of movie. In two-and-a-half minutes, the film is presented as a foolish dark romp featuring incompetent criminals. At 100 minutes, it’s warped southern goodness that’s tonally confused and ends in irony.
Mad Families
Crackle’s Fourth of July comedy Mad Families is a fart in the wind. While that reads as a low blow, I have a feeling the immature filmmakers will actually take that in stride.
The Big Sick
Kumail Nanjiani (played by funnyman Kumail Nanjiani) is a Pakistani-American comedian who meets and falls in love with Emily (Zoe Kazan), a graduate student. Their relationship is already threatened by Kumail’s parents’ insistence that he marry a woman from a Pakistani family, when Emily becomes seriously ill. Written by Nanjiani (usually known for his co-star work in Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, Life as we Know It, and IFC’s Portlandia) and the actor’s wife Emily V. Gordon, The…
The Colossal Failure of the Modern Relationship
Tyler Perry apologists may find pleasurable qualities in Sergio Navarretta’s The Colossal Failure of the Modern Relationship. Then again, even those movie goers have seen this sort of romantic peril too many times by now (the Why Did I Get Married? series).
Love in the Sixth
Jude Klassen’s feature film debut Love in the Sixth is a hodgepodge of “stuff”, but I kind of expected that.
Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie
Jeff Garlin is a clever and hilarious performer. You wouldn’t know that from watching Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie. Garlin directed, wrote, executive produced, and stars as Gene Handsome in this unfathomable clunker about a lonely homicide detective in LA. Yet, the film is so devoid of engagement, you would think the actor/filmmaker was tanking this project on purpose to honour a lost bet.
Baywatch
I’ve been patient and forgiving with filmmaker Seth Gordon (who began his career with 2007’s acclaimed arcade doc The King of Kong) because I can see he’s slowly amounting to be a dependable director. Despite the abysmal and mean comedy Identity Thief, he’s usually able to drum up a lot of laughs with small casts (Four Christmases, Horrible Bosses, TV’s The Goldbergs). I suppose he’s been itching to branch out, but Baywatch was the wrong way…
Win It All
Life can fluctuate, and I believe that’s the point Win It All is trying to make. Then again, filmmaker Joe Swanberg may have just set out to make a straightforward character study, in which case that works too.