Best and Worst Films of 2017

Top 10

Best Film of 2017: The Post—Steven Spielberg can make a better movie using muscle memory than most filmmakers can while exerting full effort. Every element here is quality craftsmanship, from the scene construction to a hefty cast headlined by Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. The film, based on events surrounding the Washington Post’s publication of the classified Pentagon Papers in 1971, is also a polished polemic, drawing on our contemporary zeitgeist to reiterate the importance of a free, independent press.

2. Get Out—The dynamic of interracial relationships is the fulcrum of comedian Jordan Peele’s audacious directorial debut. Beyond mere gore, two elements have long been at the heart of the horror film genre: humor (intentional and otherwise) and social commentary. Get Out is quite purposefully funny. But it’s also deadly serious. Let’s be clear: Peele equates the black experience in America with a horror movie. What begins as a wry take on the clash of cultural assimilation morphs into a funhouse mirror reflection on cultural appropriation and even slavery.

3. The Florida Project—Writer-director Sean Baker follows his award-winning Tangerine with another film about lives along the periphery, a modern-day fractured fairy tale, a parable that doesn’t tell the story of royalty residing inside a grand castle or the bourgeoisie immediately surrounding it, but instead the hoi polloi of the realm living beyond its gilded gates. The film draws it title from the early name given to Walt Disney’s Orlando theme park project, Disney World, but its scope extends to the denizens subsiding along the margins of the Magic Kingdom

4. Mother!—Writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s latest is what would happen if Luis Buñuel adapted “The Giving Tree.” It’s a trying experience, prone to pretension and bedeviling narrative detours, but the payoff lingers. A Biblical speed walk through Genesis, the Gospels, and the Book of Revelation, the film’s purpose is not principally ecclesiastic. Aronofsky, a self-described humanist, filters a pro-environmental message through a theological construct, making this film is a companion to Aronofsky’s adaptation of Noah as the story of an environmental catastrophe and an absentee God.

5. Lady Bird—As was writer-director Greta Gerwig, Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is an early-aughts high schooler growing up in Sacramento yet yearning for the bright lights of New York City. The ensemble cast, led by Ronan, is awards-worthy, and there’s complexity in how the film even-handedly treats its antagonists. This is an astute, refreshing coming-of-age dramedy, but it’s more than that—it’s a paean to home and how we are a product of our formative setting.

6. Blade Runner 2049—Set thirty years after the original science-fiction film noir classic, the protagonist is again a laconic blade runner, this time an obedient LAPD replicant named K (Ryan Gosling), who makes a startling discovery that threatens to further blur the divide between humans and their flesh-and-blood avatars. Director Denis Villeneuve amplifies on classic philosophical and religious themes, from creation and mortality, to humankind’s technological and moral trajectory. Moreover, the original’s visionary cinematography gets an eye-popping update from the incomparable Roger Deakins, producing a postmodern landscape that ranges from neon-lit, chiaroscuro urban centers to the arid ruins of Las Vegas.

7. Molly’s Game—Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin makes his directorial debut in this adaptation of the memoir by real-life “poker princess” Molly Bloom (Jessica Chastain), and the removal of that creative check allows Sorkin to mainline his already rapidfire prose. After Bloom is charged with running an illegal gambling den, she’s left with only one ally, her attorney Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba, in fine form). Any narrative deficits are filled by Sorkin’s script, which truly crackles during the byplay between Bloom and Jaffey, as well as the ongoing narration describing the ins and outs of Molly’s world of underground poker, an exclusive playground for movie stars, business tycoons, card sharks, and even shady mobsters.

8. I, Tonya—Just when you didn’t think there were more dramatic depths to plumb from the Tonya Harding story, along comes this provocative dark comedy that examines the madcap madness of Harding’s (Margot Robbie) upbringing and her tumultuous marriage and skating career. Robbie is terrific, as is Allison Janney as Harding’s mom and harridan. But the star is director Craig Gillespie, who takes Harding’s (in)famous, tragic story and fashions an emblematic American folk tale.

9. The Big Sick—Pakistan-born standup comedian Kumail Nanjiani plays himself, whose romantic relationship with a white woman runs afoul with both his and her families, particularly after she falls ill following their breakup. The whip-smart screenplay, co-written by Nanjiani, is both funny and heartfelt, aided by cross-cultural themes, dating in the 21st century, and outstanding supporting turns from Holly Hunter and Ray Romano.

10. Good Time—This hypnotic odyssey from directors Benny and Josh Safdie begins with a botched heist and continues through a crazed night in New York City, as one brother (Robert Pattinson) tries to break his arrested, mentally disabled brother out of a hospital. It’s invigorating cinema.

The Best of the Rest (alphabetically): Baby Driver; Brigsby Bear; Darkest Hour; Dunkirk; Logan; The Lost City of Z; Only the Brave; The Shape of Water; Wonder Woman; War for the Planet of the Apes

The Bottom Rung

Worst Film of 2017: The Space Between Us—As if the surfeit of YA weepies hadn’t proliferated enough, now it’s invading other planets, too. Men are from Mars and women are typecast in The Space Between Us, which may as well describe the void left by an absence of adequate filmmaking. A boy raised on Mars (Asa Butterfield) escapes to Earth to find his online pen pal, even though he’s unlikely to survive our atmosphere. The real fault in this star system starts with the slipshod staging from director Peter Chelsom, whose last hit was Hannah Montana: The Movie. The special effects are the shoddiest this side of Spaceballs. Meanwhile, writer Allan Loeb follows up his excruciating screenplay for Collateral Beauty with a script highlighted by such lines as, “No matter how much I want Earth, Earth doesn’t want me.”

Baywatch—Stuck between a “Rock” and a hard place, this is a parody in search of a purpose. Even Dwayne Johnson’s considerable charisma can’t save this waterlogged caper, held together by neoprene and bad CGI.

Beauty of the Beast—It’s hardly politically correct to recoil from a romance spawned by a brute holding a young girl captive, positive that if she would only get to know him better that she’d learn to love him and cure his violent impulses. Our court system and women’s shelters are full of such stories. Emma Watson wanders aimlessly through entire scenes without purpose or design, and her go-to expression is a bemused, pursed-lip smirk for a role that demands a broad mien. Together, it’s the woolly mammoth meets the woolly personality.

The Book of Henry—A glorified TV thriller-cum-blatant tearjerker, the original screenplay by crime novelist Gregg Hurwitz (Orphan X, et al.) passes the time with a diversionary subplot before arriving at a denouement that unfurls over the course of a school talent show and could have occurred at least thirty minutes of screen time earlier.

The Comedian—Robert De Niro plays a former sitcom star and comic icon spending the twilight of his life slogging through the grimy stand-up circuit. Director Taylor Hackford fashions the film like The Wrestler meets a long, dull episode of Louie.

Downsizing—Rarely have I witnessed the second half of a film spiral downward so quickly, decisively, and egregiously as this sigh-fi failure from writer-director Alexander Payne.

Fifty Shades Darker—It’s somehow fifty times worse than its irksome original. Forget the mopey characters and hamfisted dialogue; it’s the ongoing arrested emotional development of all the women in creepy Christian Grey’s orbit, the only discernible reason any of them would remain in his presence for longer than five minutes.

The Great Wall—This nod to Chinese folklore bloated into a middling, forgettable Hollywood actioner. There’s precious little authenticity, from the storyline to the excessive CGI to Matt Damon’s character as a cipher for American audiences. The entire spectacle devolves into fantasy crossed with cosplay history, trudging towards a haggard finale inside the Forbidden City that pivots on the power of magnets, for Pete’s sake.

The Mummy—The last thing you can say about Tom Cruise’s screen persona is that he lacks for confidence. But that’s precisely the sensation exuded in this batch of CGI silliness, a tonally turbulent monster mish-mash in which Cruise reads his lines like someone who first saw them five seconds before the director yells, “Action!”

The Snowman—A half-thawed, Norwegian-set thriller, with all the substance of frozen water and an abstruse story that immediately melts from your memory.

Most Pleasant Surprises

American Made

Girls Trip

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Kong: Skull Island

Only the Brave

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Thor: Ragnarok

Most Disappointing

The Beguiled

Downsizing

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

It Comes at Night

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Wonderstruck

The Film I Enjoyed Despite What Everybody Else Says
Justice League

The Best and Worst Films of 2016

Top 10 Films of 2016

Best Film of 2016: Hell or High Water—All the traditional Western movie tropes are

here: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, an aw-shucks lawman, hayseed banks, land barons, and even an armed posse. But instead of being about how the West was won, this postmodern Western is about how it was lost. Two brothers steamroll across West Texas, trying to rob enough banks to save the family ranch from foreclosure. As the savvy, crotchety Texas Ranger on their trail, Jeff Bridges conveys a melange of racial complexity and world-weariness that's part Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, part Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men. There are no white and black hats here, only moral shades of gray.

2. Manchester by the Sea—The sometimes mundane, sometimes farcical juxtaposition of life's quotidian interruptions forms the fulcrum of this layered dissection of family dysfunction and loss. Casey Affleck gives an Oscar-worthy performance as a Boston handyman summoned back to his titular hometown upon his brother's death. There, he visits a tragic past he tried to leave behind and a future he didn't expect, want, or believes he deserves. The milieu for this third directorial effort by writer Kenneth Lonergan feels lived in and mirrors the contrasts of its denizens: convivial but cold, quaint yet insular.

3. Moonlight—Color looms large in director Barry Jenkins’ tripartite story about Chiron, a gay black boy/man living in the drug-riddled inner city of Miami. Jenkins’ highly stylized filmmaking foster a milieu that feels both real and ethereal. Like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, the film tracks the life of its male lead across varying ages. The film is an episodic, intimate portrait of the urban experience, in kinship with Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. And both Moonlight and Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain examine homosexuality in traditionally masculine settings. The acting is uniformly sublime in each segment, opting for grace notes over broad strokes—expect Oscar nominations for Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris.

4. La La Land—Having been denied a Best Picture Oscar for Whiplash, writer-director Damien Chazelle turns to that most tried-and-true awards tableau: self-referential films set in Hollywood. At some point, you just give yourself over to the film’s breezy, technicolor charm its star-crossed love story between aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone, luminescent) and the jazz-loving Sebastian (Ryan Gosling). Steeped in the nostalgia of Hollywood’s Golden Age musicals, this city symphony is like a dazzling daydream with a melancholy undercurrent.

5. O.J.: Made in America—Ezra Edelman’s sweeping, nearly eight-hour documentary follows the rise and fall of O.J. Simpson, from his upbringing to his football career to the infamous murders and trial that took place against the backdrop of generations of racial unrest in Los Angeles. Using reels of historical footage and 72 interviews,this is definitive nonfiction filmmaking at its absolute finest.

6. Nocturnal Animals—A over-stylized, byzantine veneer camouflages a revenge tale that writer-director Tom Ford Ford splits the narrative into three parallel tracks. One is the sterile LA art world, another a book-within-a-move neo-noir thriller set in West Texas that’s part Deliverance, part Straw Dogs. Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are terrific as fiction informs fact. The film is thematically reductive, yet potent in its presentation, particularly Abel Korzeniowski’s intoxicating score with its obvious echoes of Bernard Herrmann. The already-infamous opening credits montage is an encapsulation of the contradictions that inform everything that follows: lurid, patriarchal, elitist, engrossing and mesmerizing.

7. Zootopia—Smart, funny and thoughtful, it’s is one of the finest Disney-proper animated feature films in many years. It’s a buddy-cop movie, an animal education primer, a movie parody, a coming-of-age flick, and a gateway into earnest discussions about racial and gender prejudice, bullying and cultural inclusiveness. While the issues are weighty, the wit remain breezy and biting in this “Animal Farm” analog.

8. The Handmaiden—This South Korean erotic psychological thriller lives up to its genre

description. Writer-director Chan-wook Park (Oldboy) presents a twisty drama worthy of Hitchcock, yet against the patrician, patriarchal backdrop of 1930s colonial Korea and Japan. Deceit and double-crosses culminate in forbidden love. It’s perverse, farcical, gorgeous and pure cinema.

9. Arrival—An aliens-to-Earth film that’s less about first contact than first communication. The mere arrival of 12 black ovoids simultaneously around the planet triggers hysteria and international mistrust. It falls to linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to save the day. Director Denis Villeneuve (Sicario) marries many of the plot points to Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Day the Earth Stood Still. The narrative is a palindrome, and the alien’s non-linear language, triggers a linguistic relativity in Banks that eventually extends to the viewer’s interpretation of the story.

10. The Nice Guys—Seamy 1970s Hollywood is not just the film’s backdrop. It’s the uproarious foreground for a private dick, buddy action comedy that smartly borrows from its genre forerunners while giddily reflecting that homage using a funhouse mirror. Like the previous comedies of writer-director Shane Black (creator of the Lethal Weapon series), it’s the madcap performances of the film’s dual leads that carry the film. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe appear as unkempt as the film’s extraneous scenes. But their unabashed Abbott and Costello pastiche is laden with wisecracks and physical gags that uniformly hit their mark. With its sharp repartee, and byzantine plot, The Nice Guys is Raymond Chandler meets the Marx Brothers.

The Best of the Rest (alphabetically): The Edge of Seventeen; Elle; Fences; Hacksaw Ridge; Hidden Figures; Hunt for the Wilderpeople; I, Daniel Blake; The Jungle Book; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

The Bottom Rung

Worst Film of 2016: Swiss Army Man—Quite simply, the worst experience I’ve ever

spent in a movie theater. Chronicling this misbegotten film’s faults is in exercise in futility. Suffice it to say that between the flatulent, erectile corpse (Daniel Radcliffe, no kidding) and the fantasy love story—with its latent necrophilia—concocted by a deranged Paul Dano, it bears the wear of multiple trips through the Sundance Institute laboratory. It’s impossible to fully describe, and just as uncomfortable to watch.

Alice Through the Looking Glass—Director James Bobin strains to retain the abstract milieu of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, but anything resembling a cohesive plot or character development gets chucked down a rabbit hole.

The Boss—The tired formula of “wind up Melissa McCarthy and watch her go” is a decidedly hit-or-miss proposition. In The Boss, the audience feels like the ones handed a pink slip.

Collateral Beauty—Inscrutable, insufferable and indolent. A waste for all involved.

Criminal—A silly, self-serious bore bearing the earmarks of something around the time its cast’s house payments were due.

The Hollars—Reductive and infantile portrait of family dysfunction. A sterling cast is utterly wasted on a risible script.

Inferno—Director Ron Howard’s third adaptation of Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon book series is little more than a byzantine European holiday, where people are constantly on the run simply because they’re being chased, no matter that nobody knows by who or why. This Inferno is a dumpster fire.

Jack Reacher: Never Go Back—Saddled with a title-cum-epitaph, this Tom Cruise vehicle is a sequel nobody wanted to a movie few remember.

London Has Fallen—A cavalcade of jingoism and xenophobia varnished in terror porn, espousing a fanatical worldview fueled by eye-for-an-Old Testament style vengeance. Tack on a homily intoned by Morgan Freeman, no less, warning against American inaction in the face of international terror, and you’ve got Trump the Movie.

Mechanic: Resurrection—Unearths a film series that should have stayed dead and buried.

Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising—To the extent there's a feminist undercurrent here, it's that women can star in boorish, mindless movie comedies, too.

Most Unexpectedly Pleasant Surprises

10 Cloverfield Lane

Bridget Jones’s Baby

Deadpool

Deepwater Horizon

The Infiltrator

The Jungle Book

Moana

The Nice Guys

Sully

Most Disappointing

Allied

The BFG

The Birth of a Nation

Finding Dory
The Girl on the Train

Hail, Caesar!

Jackie

Jason Bourne

Keanu

Patriots Day

The Two Films I Enjoyed Despite What Everybody Else Says

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Suicide Squad

The Best and Worst Films of 2015

For several years running, two or three standout films have buttressed my annual Top 10 list, with a solid seven or so following as filler. Not in 2015. But a deep roster of terrific movies covering a wide range of genres graced silver screens this year, including 20 or more films that would occupy most year’s selections of superlatives.

If there are themes to my Top 10, it’s the bleakness of our world (The Revenant; Room; Spotlight; Sicario; It Follows), the future (The Martian; Steve Jobs) and a blend of both (Mad Max: Fury Road and Ex Machina, my top two films of the year).

Here’s my best and worst films of 2015, accompanied by comments drawn mostly from my reviews. Also included are a few of the most unexpected surprises and disappointments this year.

Top 10 Films

Best Film of 2015: Ex Machina—The plotline is an A.I. version of The Island of Dr. Moreau, as computer coder Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) spends a week with brilliant, billionaire bro Nathan (Oscar Isaac) to test his newest creation, a female replicant named Ava (Alicia Vikander). Filled with philosophical and religious subtext, writer-director Alex Garland conjures an arresting, sobering portrait of humankind’s predilection for both invention and self-destruction. And you’ll never hear Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night” the same way again.

2. Mad Max: Fury Road—Like an artist working in his medium, director George Miller paints an immersive, post-apocalyptic epoch where societal structure is upended and its most susceptible members—mainly women and children—become natural resources. The film is part super-hero flick, part Western, with Tom Hardy as a monosyllabic man-with-no-name and Charlize Theron’s Furiosa falling squarely in the lineage of action heroines like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner. But it’s mostly a rock opera divided by acts more than scenes, a symphony in which the relentless action and visual intensity builds to a kinetic crescendo.

3. The Revenant—Centered around the theme of (re)birth, director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárittu’s epic neo-Western that reimagines a film genre set amid the infancy of our nation’s early 19th century westward expansion. In the end, the survival and revenge story of trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a cinematic tour de force.

4. The Martian—Combining heart and mind, this is an ultra-modern technical achievement wrangled into a throwback cinematic experience. There’s the grand backdrop of space operas like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Right Stuff, but in service to a jarringly accessible narrative and characters. It’s Matt Damon’s best film in at least five years, maybe more. It’s director Ridley Scott’s best film in 15 years, maybe 33.

5. Steve Jobs—Essentially a three-act opera, the film doesn’t comprehend Steve Jobs—maybe no one ever did. But through this stylized marriage of Aaron Sorkin’s writing, Danny Boyle’s direction and Michael Fassbender’s terrific acting, we feel like we know the man who put a thousand songs in our pocket.

6. Room—Brie Larson deserves an Oscar for her gripping portrayal of an abducted woman forced to rear her child (a terrific Jacob Tremblay), the offspring of her kidnapper, in a small squalid shed for over five years. The first half highlights their efforts to cope with their hellish unreality. Equally arresting is their subsequent attempt to cope with freedom.

7. Inside Out—There aren’t many animated films that delve into the vagaries of abstract thought, much less parsing such subsets as “non-objective fragmentation” and “two-dimensional perception.” But Pixar Animation's best offering in years embraces rather than eschews its psychological complexities, blending them into a kid-friendly adventure that appeals as much to the adults in the theater. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you may even think. It’s a mind trip with tons of heart.

8. Spotlight—It’s not “All the Pope’s Men,” but this chronicle of The Boston Globe’s research into decades of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in Massachusetts and an ongoing cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese illuminates the steno pads and shoe leather worn for the sake of authentic investigative journalism. The film also boasts the best ensemble cast performance of the year.

9. It Follows—Writer-director David Robert Mitchell pays homage to the horror movie genre by taking its most familiar trope—sex equals death—and making it literal. But the film’s biggest impact is mirroring society’s post-9/11 paranoia, triggered by an opening scene of a young girl terrorized by unseen forces and ending with a final shot that leaves both the characters and viewers seeing supposed threats on every street corner.

10. Sicario—If No Country for Old Men and Zero Dark Thirty had a baby, it would look like Sicario. Director Denis Villeneuve’s bleak appraisal of today’s border war on drugs embeds the viewer in one bravura action set piece after another, filmed by famed cinematographer Roger Deakins. Benicio Del Toro is captivating. There’s little that informs the root causes of the drug war, only its cruel, corrosive effects. 

The Best of the Rest (alphabetically): 45 Years; Beasts of No Nation; Bridge of Spies; Brooklyn; Carol; Creed; Love & Mercy; Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation; Star Wars: The Force Awakens; Youth

The Bottom Rung

My roster of the worst films of 2015 comes with the typical disclaimer that I did not see every candidate being touted for this ignominious honor, such movies as Love the Coopers, San Andreas, Mortdecai, United Passions and the Adam Sandler dual submissions The Cobbler and The Ridiculous 6. Hey, I can’t see them all.

But the films that made my cut remain a worthy assemblage of awfulness. Keep this list handy so when you end up renting any of these, I can say I told you so.

Worst Film of 2015: Serena—Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence’s coronation as Gen Y’s answer to Bogie and Bacall hit a spectacular snafu in this Depression-era misfire set in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. The film’s aspirations are transparent: it’s MacBeth meets There Will Be Blood with a dash of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, all set atop Cold Mountain. Danish director Susanne Bier fashions this misbegotten mumble-bore by making every possible misstep. The dialogue is replete with two-syllable words and six-word sentences that sound as if they originated on college rule paper. Johan Soderovist’s treacly score channels backwoods musak. The characterizations are rudderless, and the jarring editing lurches from one miswritten scene to another linked only by strained narrative sinew.

The Boy Next Door—Starring Jennifer Lopez, the film is basically Swimfan with the genders reversed and a cougar (sorta) on the prowl. It’s a Lifetime movie on steroids, with B-movie gore coupled with a thorny premise and Skinemax-level titillation and dialogue.

Fifty Shades of Grey—“Don’t forget your safe words,” Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) tells Anastasia “Ana’ Steele (Dakota Johnson) before the tamest bondage montage this side of a Miley Cyrus video. Unfortunately, it’s the film’s audience who needs a safe word designed to rescue them from this film adaptation of writer E.J. James’ nightstand fixture, a flaccid affair with little plot, even less character development and kinkiness rendered into kitsch.

Hot Pursuit—The film that proves women are equally adept as men at fashioning mind-sapping buddy road flicks. The screenplay squanders star/producer Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara’s proven comedic talents and potential charismatic pairing.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2—Gone is the goofs-out-of-water historical conceit of the 1980s-set original, replaced by a profane, pointless and humorless script that goes forward in time but backward in everything else. A few farcical non sequiturs elicit mild chuckles, but the storyline largely lurches from one lazy, bodily fluid-filled set piece after another. Pack plenty of bromine.

Jupiter Ascending—Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski are still dining out on The Matrix, and the filmmakers brazenly ape their seminal sci-fi thriller for their latest bit of sci-fi silliness. It’s like a Disney World amusement ride stretched over two hours. It’s MoonQuake Lake, the fake movie briefly seen during the recent Annie remake. It’s a 5-dollar DVD bin knockoff of Star Wars.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl—Irksome and too cute by half, the film attempts to blend tragedy, comedy and coming-of-age teenage angst with not a single likeable character in sight. Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, the film shows the wear of its Sundance workshopping.

Mistress America—This screenplay by star Greta Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach is pure pastiche, written with a tin ear for the way sentient beings actually communicate with each other. But the gnawing problem is that while Baumbach and Gerwig make passing attempts at skewering millennials, this feels like a New York milieu with which they are both intimately familiar and fond. It’s self-effacement bordering on self-referential, resulting in a work so farcical that it’s insulated from offending anyone, except the audience.

Pitch Perfect 2—If the awful acting and grating caterwauling don’t ward you off this pointless sequel, the one-trick Rebel Wilson and her date-rape quips ought to do the trick.

True Story—… feels like anything but, a pedestrian procedural grasping for a good yarn.

Most Unexpectedly Pleasant Surprises

99 Homes

Ant-Man

Concussion

Creed

The Intern

Kingsman: The Secret Service

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Straight Outta Compton

Spy

Most Disappointing

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Black Mass

The Good Dinosaur

Furious 7

The Hateful Eight

Our Brand is Crisis

Southpaw

Spectre

Suffragette

Tomorrowland