Roger Kumble | 91 mins | streaming | 1.85:1 | USA, Canada & Germany / English | 12 / PG-13
I was aware of the existence of Just Friends in the way you’re aware of any movie with name actors that came out during the period in which you were cognisant of films that were being released — that is to say, I knew it was a film and it was a comedy, and I had paid it no heed beyond that. Until a couple of months back, when an article at the A.V. Club about a different topic referred to it as a “pop culture dud”, and the comments section got half overtaken with people defending it. Couple that with it being available free on Amazon Prime Instant Video and my curiosity was suitably piqued.
It’s the story of Chris Brander (Ryan Reynolds), a fat kid at school who was publicly ridiculed when he declared his love for his best friend and most-popular-girl Jamie Palamino (Amy Smart). Years later, he’s got fit and become a womanising record company exec who hasn’t been home since that incident. However, events conspire to strand him back home for Christmas, with crazy popstrel Samantha James (Anna Faris) in tow, where he finds Jamie stuck in a dead-end job. Can he reclaim his past love, etc, etc, etc.
For all kinds of reasons, Just Friends spends a long time feeling like a morally bankrupt movie. It’s unclear if it’s praising or condemning Chris’ frivolous lifestyle, if he needs saving by coming home, or if he deserves revenge on the people who mistreated him. We know what the standard Hollywood perspective on these things is, so kudos to some degree for dodging it (at least for a while), but it doesn’t commit to the other direction either. What the story really amounts to is wish fulfilment on an epic scale. Its message is essentially: you can go back to your past and make it better. Maybe I’m just a cynic, but that’s not something I believe.
So it was on course for 2 stars, the inconsistency and moral questionability of its worldview tempered by the fact that it was sometimes pretty funny, even hilarious once or twice, particularly when it nails some slapstick. However, at around the halfway point it seems to lose all control of its story, veering wildly around from subplot to subplot, and from conclusion to conclusion (it feels like it’s reached its final play at least three times). Normally that would make things worse, but, concurrently, it settles down in to what it’s trying to say (as much as it’s trying to say anything). It even delivers laughs more consistently, too. To a degree, from that midpoint the movie is slowly rescued.
One lesson I took from watching Just Friends (as if I didn’t know this already) was that just because a bunch of people defend something they like in a comments thread on the internet, it doesn’t mean you’ll like that thing too, even if that comments thread is on the A.V. Club. Nonetheless, while Just Friends is not any kind of “must see” film, as a 90-minute diversion — with, at this temporal distance, a splash of mid-’00s nostalgia — it’s passably entertaining.
Mia Wasikowska stars opposite a British thesp best known for playing a comic book villain and a red-headed repeat-Oscar-nominee, in a Gothic drama-thriller from an acclaimed non-Anglo director? That’s a description of 
The story actually concerns Edith Cushing (Wasikowska), a well-to-do businessman’s daughter in upstate New York who is occasionally haunted by ghosts. She falls for visiting English gent Sir Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston) and, long story short, moves with him and his haughty sister Lucille (Chastain) back to their crumbling — literally — pile in the English countryside. The house hides many secrets, and ghosts, too. Having said it’s not a horror movie, it would be unfair to class Crimson Peak as simply a tame drama — as you’d expect from writer-director Guillermo del Toro, those ghosts can be bleedin’ scary, and there are certainly a smattering of good old fashioned jumps to boot.
Whatever one’s thoughts on the story and tone of the film, it can’t be denied that its technical merits are extraordinary. Every inch of the design work is gloriously imagined, and the cinematography — the lighting in particular — is spectacular. And that gigantic house set…! And the climactic ‘limbo’ set, too — incredible work. (That’s not a spoiler, incidentally: it was the set’s nickname, not its literal location.) The ghost effects are excellent too — original, creepy, and executed in a way that blurs the lines between make-up, animatronics, and CGI. It’s a shame the film as a whole wasn’t better received, because I imagine that’s all that held it back from numerous awards-season nods.
Disney’s animated classic is re-imagined in live-action, losing the songs but expanding the story. The latter serves to find a little more realism in the setup (how Cinders became a servant to her stepmother, etc), as well as in the characters’ motivations and actions.
Doris Day and Rock Hudson star in this Oscar-winning rom-com hit.
Hugh Dancy (of 
than some of her movie choices would have you believe, and roles like this prove that. Bonus points to the writing here for Beth not just accepting everything Adam does — that’s much more realistic than him happening across an endlessly understanding saint of a woman. But boo to the critics who didn’t buy that a privileged “daddy’s girl”-type could ever possibly fall for someone with autism — how judgemental are you?
Score: 
Comedies about superheroes tend to come in the form of big-bucks mainstream-aimed effects-y pieces (
though, because the conceit is all but dropped fairly early on, and the film begins to develop in nice directions. It starts out as pure comedy, and while it doesn’t lose that aspect, it does develop a strand of endearingly genuine sweetness. That helps to see it through the predictable rom-com beats that follow, leaving you (or this viewer, at least) not minding that it’s predictable where the story’s going to go because, thanks to the characters, that’s where you want it to go.
A myth-like animated musical adventure based around Mexico’s Day of the Dead, most notable for its unique art style that presents gorgeous visuals throughout.
Once upon a time, John McTiernan was an action auteur, known for films that sat comfortably on the “mainstream modern classics” scale, like 
McTiernan’s action background comes to the fore in a pair of extended heist scenes at either end of the movie, which are surely the standout parts. The seductions and plot twists in between these bookends are certainly entertaining and may even keep you guessing, but it’s the heists that pack the most entertainment. They’re the kind of thing we don’t see so much nowadays, at least not in mainstream movies, because any sequence designed to provide excitement is a fight of some kind, and most of those are shot in the shaky-cam style. There’s none of that palaver here, just perfectly choreographed cutting between the various players in each heist, and some well-chosen music — as if being ably to do awesome stuff accompanied by the James Bond Theme wasn’t cool enough, here Brosnan gets to do the same to Nina Simone’s Sinnerman.
The Thomas Crown Affair may not be the best film on any of its principals’ CVs (well, except perhaps for Russo’s), but it’s a consistently enjoyable light thriller with a couple of particularly memorable sequences and a fun central dynamic. Apparently it’s better than the original, too. There’s long been talk of a sequel, but it seems to have gone the way of McTiernan’s career, which is a shame.
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