Love & Mercy

Masterfully presents the pitch perfect parallel performances of Dano and Cusack.  Integrates documentary, cinematic and surrealist styles with the flair and skill of Wilson armed with an animal army.  Banks certainly generates interest, but it’s Giamatti’s Eugene-ics that make for the most compelling and disturbing part of this Beach Boyopic.

Ted 2

McFarlane stuffs the same used plush formula with the same loveable live action Family jokes, but forgets the heartfelt story that made the first coming so accessible.  Amusing anecdotal episodes and silly celebrity cameos mesh horribly with the shoe-horned messages of the courtroom scenes and the bearly tolerable third act.

Jurassic World

Sequels find a way.  World extracts Park’s DNA and uses it to engineer a bastard movie equipped with all the technical weaponry of the past decade.  Our heroes run around the island, narrowly dodging dino-bullets and effectively ticking off all the obligatory Jurassic beats, while completely failing to evolve themselves.

Inside Out

Pixar uses emotion-capture technology to get inside the heads of their target market and the result is stimulating and sensational.  Brilliant visual renditions of mental machinations provide a perfect playground in which to run whimsically wild.  Perhaps weak on the story front, but still a great tool for teaching feeling.

What We Do in the Shadows

Poorly titled but ingeniously executed necronomedy sprays its humour everywhere like a severed Carotid.  The jokes are clever, constant, and consistently executed by cast of Kiwi comedians. Hopefully this film’s shelf life is as immortal as its protagonists, since some beast mismarked the postage and failed to market it state-side.

Enemy

Two Gyllenhalves of a Gyllenwhole circle each other while being haunted by Cronenberg’s subconscious spiders in this Kafka-esque masterpiece.  Brilliantly bleak cinematography and a melodramatic score perfectly compliment this eerie and ambiguous character study.  Previous films proved to be Villeneuve’s worst enemy as they imPrisoned his intended title: Double Darko.