Florence Foster Jenkins

Meryl Streep is a wealth arts benefactor who has so much money that everyone humors her. When she takes singing lessons, she gets the best in the business and they all fake that she is good. And then she decides to give a concert. Hugh Grant is her manager/husband how pulls all the strings. Alternately painful and funny, but generally flat. The Emperor Has No Clothes...
3 stars (out of 5)

Foxcatcher

I grew up in the Schultz brother years of the 1984 and 1988 olympics. these two were legends in the wrestling world so I was looking forward to this film. And it was extremely informative. But wow was it slow. And depressing. I got some facts here, but the benefit of presenting historical fiction is that you get to dive in and really show some character. Here all the character was surface. I feel like I would have been better served by a documentary for as much deeper connection I gleaned with either of the brothers or DuPont. And I really wanted to like this.
2 stars (out of 5)

Jason Bourne

Bourne has really become the standard by which modern spy thriller movies are compared. Is the hero as tough, or as smart, or as quick as Bourne? Is the plot smart, subtle and twisted enough? This film has its own history to live up to, with Matt Damon returning to the title role. Bourne has put his CIA life behind him and is hiding out in the underworld. He is drawn back in to the suck when new information reveals (actually just hints at) his fathers role in the Treadstone project. Tommy Lee Jones as project leader is typically myopic (it is all about him) as he makes decisions that necessarily amplify the danger and drama. Put all of this over the backdrop of a NSA/Internet Privacy conspiracy and you got yourself a real spy thriller cookin'. And yet... when you walk out with a 'meh!', something got left out. Maybe this formula for spy thriller is just too worn to possibly feel fresh. Maybe the 'current event' of internet privacy was too obviously an overlay and not integrated into the DNA of the plot. So I would guess that this will have a polar audience: fans love it (or tolerated it but say they love it because that is what fans do) and others will pan it.
3 stars (out of 5)

Welcome to Punch

Set in London, James McAvoy plays Max Lewinsky, a brash cop who ran into a career changing case a year earlier. He was chasing a notorious heist gang and ended up getting shot in the leg while they escaped. Flash forward, his knee still needs to be drained regularly and he limps around like the grizzled veteran he is. And then he finds out that his nemesis is heading back to town. What follows is a pretty interesting story of corruption and allegiance and policework amidst the self questioning that probably always follows a traumatic event. And this is gritty London, not MI-5 London. This is pure and simply and action, thriller. The characters are not deep, but are deep enough for the genre. The storyline is twisty, and maybe a bit too obviously so, but it gets the job done. And the look&feel is dark and gritty instead of slick like Bourne or Mission Impossible. I like it.
3 stars (out of 5)

Suicide Squad

I like characters, and boy do we have them here. The entire first third of this movie is character introduction (which may have been a bit much, but I understand the issue). Once all these characters have been introduced, with all of their over-the-top comics-bold style, we get them together to fight crime. It is a Dirty Dozen of the superhero world and I always did like the genre. Do you need to know the plot? The bad-guy heroes are assembled into a team to fight the non-hero bad guys. One of the bad guys on the team turns out to be an actual bad guy, so the rest of the team needs to take her down. Smatter around some jocular banter, some supernatural mojo, some hefty gun battles, some second thoughts and the motivational speeches that go with them. Bam! Live action comics. It's not literature, but it sure is fun.
4 stars (out of 5)

Mandela

Nelson Mandela starts out a local lawyer, marries Winnie, becomes a leader in the anti-apartheid movement and is sent to prison for said leadership. This film mostly tells the story of this imprisonment and how Mandela continues to resist, and continues to evolve as a leader in an ever changing political world. The evolution is itself a point of contention among his ANC colleagues and with Winnie. My own recollection of Mandela paints him as a much stronger voice for non-violence in the ever contentious discussion about how to bring about regime change as a guerrilla organization. But that was not a strong emphasis here, so I am not sure if that is my own memory bias, or whether that was just not significant for this writer/director. This film needs to be watched and then discussed. This part of global history needs to be remembered.
4 stars (out of 5)

The American President

This is good ol' nostalgia here. Aaron Sorkin pre West Wing, telling a political story of a campaign. Michael Douglas plays the sitting president who was elected as a recent widower. Entering the 2nd term campaign season, he is introduced to Annette Bening, a lobbyist for an environmental organization working on passing a bill that is important to the White House. The two begin to date, it becomes THE political issue, Douglas refuses to address the dating since it is a private life issue, until he does address it. Like I said, harkens back to the feelings in the 90's. Polyanish by today's political standards of Scandal and House of Cards.
3 stars (out of 5)