Southpaw– Jake Gyllenhaal gives a tremendous performance in Southpaw, but just like his turn in last year’s Nightcrawler it’s buried in a bland movie.  The grand scale and energy of Antoine Fuqua’s direction and Gyllenhaal’s ferocious intensity in the role of boxer Bobby Hope are almost enough to carry the movie past a mountain of cliches and a predictable story.  The script, by Kurt Sutter, is driven by big emotions rather than narrative logic.  It starts out with Hope in the prime of his career: he’s undefeated, has millions of dollars and a loving family.  He loses it all when his wife (Rachel McAdams) is gunned down during a brawl he’s involved in at a charity event.

Sadly, the movie can’t recover from her absence any more than Hope can.  After her death his entire fortune seems to evaporate, and he’s rushed back into the ring by a manager (Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent) who only wants more money.  Hope snaps during that rebound match, is suspended from fighting and ultimately loses custody of his daughter.  He eventually stumbles into the small, antique gym of Tick Willis (a fantastic Forest Whitaker), who just so happens to be a world-class trainer.  By the end, he’s landed back into the ring with the same man he was fighting when his wife died.  If you’re wondering how this all escalated so quickly, you’re not alone.  Southpaw is too focused on plowing through plot points to the Big Finish that it never fully connects. Grade: C-

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Jurassic World
Directed by: Colin Trevorrow
Written by: Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly (screenplay), Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (story), Michael Crichton (characters)
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio and Ty Simpkins

In the latest Jurassic film installment, not only are these fools still cloning dinosaurs and then subsequently shooting at and running terrified from them, but they are doing it all on the ruins of the place where the same damn thing happened in 1993.  Jurassic World’s meta cynicism is almost as unrelenting as the violently earnest, flat characters; sometimes the clash between the two is entertaining, and other times it’s annoying.  The dino-revival turned slaughterhouse from the first film is now a happy-go-lucky theme park, tacked-on corporate sponsorships and hordes of vacationing families included.  It’s a shinier gloss to distract from the fact that these creatures are still more than capable of getting loose and eating everyone.

Director Colin Trevorrow has made a summer spectacle that seems mad about being one.  The most memorable shot in the movie is not of velociraptors doing battle with a ferocious new hybrid dinosaur but of one of a T-Rex being obstructed by smartphones.  These people are just here to get their photos, and the grinning corporate suits working behind the scenes are making bigger and more dangerous spectacles for them to Instagram.

At first, Jurassic World is an amusing critique of corporate culture (with built in product placement, of course).  It descends into predictable madness when a big carnivorous dinosaur escapes, but what caught me off guard was just how sadistic Trevorrow’s movie actually becomes.  Obviously, the two wide-eyed young brothers who we follow from the beginning will be fine.  Chris Pratt, the movie’s overly stoic moral compass, will be fine.  Bryce Dallas Howard, who if she was allowed to take off her ridiculously high heels in the middle of the jungle might actually have been able to save everyone, will be fine.

The movie seems to go out of its way to show everyone else suffer, though.  There’s an extended sequence where the brothers’ babysitter gets picked up by a flying creature, dropped in a pool and then eaten by a gigantic sea monster.  In this same scene we see a brief shot of a tiny triceratops plucked away from a shrieking child by the airborne reptiles.  It’s off-putting and mean-spirited, and the sanitized PG-13 rating only accentuates that.

Trevorrow is not as good at sick, sinister entertainments as David Fincher, so Jurassic World feels more like an angry mash-up of blockbuster movie elements than an actual movie. Its unending sly winks at itself are amusing at first and then eye-roll inducing, and it’s hard to sympathize with terrified people running from dinosaurs when it doesn’t make you like any of them beforehand.  The velociraptors have a more sympathetic and endearing character arc than anything else in the movie, which made me wish the franchise had just done away with humans altogether for this installment.  Rise of the Planet of the Raptors, please.

Grade: C-

Aloha
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
Written by: Cameron Crowe
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams and Bill Murray

I wish I could say that I was dragged to the theater kicking and screaming to see Aloha, or that I had lost a bet or been dared by someone to sit through it.  Alas, I paid $8.50 for a matinee ticket and watched all of it it on my own free will, and I have to live with that decision.

Outside of being a cloying, uninteresting romance, Cameron Crowe’s film is so narratively fractured that it often feels incoherent.  Is Brian Gilcrest, a military contractor played by Bradley Cooper, world-weary and depressed or is he chipper and earnest?  He switches between these two extremes from scene to scene, which makes him much more exciting than any of the one-dimensional support around him.  Almost all of them are repeatedly defined by a single characteristic, like nervously moving their hands, never talking or, most offensively, being “one-quarter Hawaiian.”

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Mad Max: Fury Road
Directed by: George Miller
Written by: George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nick Lathouris
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult and Hugh Keays-Byrne

George Miller’s return to the world of Mad Max is as deranged as it is awe-inspiring. For nearly two hours, Fury Road wreaks havoc on the post-apocalyptic Australian Outback and the leftover civilization that inhabits it. Metal and sand collide and erupt endlessly, though the greatest fire may be the one burning in the eyes of the movie’s hero.

I’m not talking about Max.  The Australian policeman brought to gritty life by Mel Gibson in Miller’s earlier films is here played by Tom Hardy, whose preferred method of communication for much of the movie is grunting and pointing.  Hardy shares the action hero spotlight with Charlize Theron, whose ferocious portrayal of the Imperator Furiosa practically ignites the screen.

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What We Do in the Shadows
Directed by: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Written by: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Starring: Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, Jonathan Brugh and Cori Gonzalez-Macuer

The staying power of the “mockumentary” never ceases to amaze. Right when the genre seems to have been flogged to death, something new emerges to inject more life. What We Do in the Shadows, the new film from co-directors Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waitit, is its latest triumph. Lying close to the sweet-natured deadpan films of Christopher Guest, its innumerable successes come from, among other things, a clear love and dedication to the form. The directors, who also star in the movie, shrewdly take on everything from hokey History Channel infotainment to MTV reality shows (The Real World and True Life, especially).

There is nary a second that isn’t filled with some sort of visual gag, sharp quotable or savvy edit – and almost every decision is a success. Viago (Taika Waitit) is a modest vampire living in a New Zealand estate with his three flatmates Petyr (Ben Fransham), Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) and Vladislav (Jemaine Clement). The four have consented to a documentary crew following them around in the months leading up to the Unholy Masquerade – the big annual event for all things evil.

Viago is the kind romantic, yearning for another opportunity with a lost love; Deacon, an ex-Nazi vampire, is the “badboy” of the group; Vladislav is an ages-old pervert who used to torture innocents by, literally, poking them; and Petyr is the 8,000 year-old monster downstairs, kept locked away and out of sight (and resembling a certain Murnau creation). When not drinking the blood of humans (Viago notes, the unfortunate part of being a vampire), the guys are content on leading a relatively low-key existence. Immortality, they concede, certainly doesn’t mean one is excused from doing the dishes and sweeping the hallway. Waitit and Clement constantly play on the vampire mythos clashing against (or, rather, adapting to) modern-day banalities. In a scene near the beginning, the guys roughly sketch each other on sheets of paper to deal with the serious problem of having no reflections while getting ready to go out. Once out on the town, they must be invited in to the clubs, which results in begging the bouncers for entry. The hurdles in getting a victim back to their place seem endless, and when they actually do manage a mild success, it’s often fumbled through their clumsiness and rusty tactics.

Deacon, fortunately, has a servant named Jackie (Jackie Van Beek) that, in addition to doing upkeep work, assists them with collecting victims, in the hopes of being turned into a vampire herself. When she brings two “virgins” back to their house, the plan backfires, and one of them, Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), is turned into a bloodsucker and new member of the family. From that point on, the happy house shifts into a power struggle between the old vampires and the new – the dynamic compromised by Nick bringing in a human friend, Stu (Stuart Rutherford), and bragging about his new vampire abilities at the bar (“I’m the guy from ‘Twilight’”).

Nick resembles that disingenuous housemate all-too-familiar on reality shows; the one who gets his rocks off from heavy drama, consistently (and, sometimes, unintentionally) stirring up trouble. And this certainly isn’t the only way the film resembles reality television – it includes a re-enactment, an intervention, a montage of trying on clothes and talking-head confessionals. Divulging some of the best gags would be doing a major disservice to the film, which is best served cold, but the highlights are numerous – and many indulge a keen familiarity with the most pervasive documentary tropes.

The movie is brisk, and almost exhaustingly clever. If not all the jokes land (and a few don’t), it has more than enough to cover for the occasional lag into uninspired territory. Its charm is rooted in a script that pays loving tribute to vampire lore and cringe comedy (In an interview with The Dissolve, Clement and Wahiti cite This Is Spinal Tap as a major inspiration), and a cast of uncommonly likeable characters. Those familiar with Clement’s television show Flight of the Conchords will already be accustomed to the actor/director’s brand of Kiwi-comedy, mastered by this point, drawing laughs most often from naivety and awkward situations. What We Do In The Shadows is more of the same, but done so well it feels brand new again.

Grade: B