There’s a scene toward the beginning of American Ultra, the new film that once again pairs Jesse Eisenberg with Kristen Stewart, when Eisenberg’s Mike Howell and Stewart’s Phoebe Larson are sitting on the hood of a car in a field, smoking pot and watching the authorities clean up an accident. Mike goes seriously deep as he compares his life with Phoebe as that of a tree stopping a car in its tracks. In essence, he feels he’s a tree, stuck forever in one place, while Phoebe’s the car, and he’s somehow kept her from ever moving on. The scene is a very quiet look into the mind of a man who feels so deeply rooted in an existence of inactivity that he has anxiety attacks when he even attempts to leave the town border. The scene is so well-acted, and incredibly written that it almost spoils the rest of the film, which can’t seem to ever live up to that one five minute clip. Read Full Review

It’s been widely accepted for a long time now — Meryl Streep can do no wrong… at least where her acting skills are concerned (as it’s quite clear there have been a few hiccups along  the road to her legitimate crowning as the Queen of Oscar). Whether she is righteously dramatic, vindictively evil, delightfully funny or surprisingly capable of belting out a tune, Streep always remains fantastically believable as a fully-realized, three-dimensional woman. There are very few actors who can pull off what she’s been able to do in her illustrious career, but unfortunately, even her grandiose talent can’t save every movie. There are limits to her powers, and they come in the form of writers and directors, neither of which Streep has any control over (aside from choosing what scripts she accepts). It’s clear that her presence raises the profile of a film like Ricki and the Flash, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a film will translate to a perfect end result. Read Full Review

Unless you’re Fast and Furious, when a franchise hits its fifth installment, it usually signifies a last ditch effort to squeeze a few more dollars out of a dead franchise. At best, franchises this long in the tooth feel a bit repetitive and lazy, mostly because there’s really no story left to tell and everyone involved is simply going through the motions. At worst, slapping a five on the end of the title (or hiding the fact it’s a five through other means) turns the effort into a boring and pathetic cash-grab that pisses all over the treasured memories of a time when everyone cared about the film and its characters. And Hollywood isn’t fooling us when they reclassify a fifth installment as a reboot (or in the case of the Amazing Spider-Man 2, a sequel to a reboot), because usually, they still don’t hold a candle to their original counterparts, leading to the boos and hisses of fans clambering for original material or death to the franchise. That’s why this week was a bit of an enigma in the cinema-verse, as two movies marking the fifth member of their respective franchises somehow found a way (on varying levels) to buck the trend of grating antipathy to deliver on the promise of entertainment. Read Full Review