Despite its name, Piranha 3DD did not include any three-breasted women. I’m pretty sure about that because most of the women in the film were topless and had their breasts exposed for all to see, and the others (naturally including all actresses you’re likely to recognize from classier movies) wore skimpy bikinis. But getting only two-thirds of the breasts we were promised is far from the biggest problem with the movie.

Chet (David Koechner) and his step-daughter Matty (Danielle Panabaker) are co-owners of a water park that is about to open for the summer. While Matty was away at college learning to be a marine biologist, Chet was busy getting the park ready for their grand opening with touches like the world’s first aquatic strip club. He didn’t really have a license to do that, but since he was already paying off the local police to overlook some building code violations, that wasn’t really a problem for him. Matty wasn’t thrilled about Chet’s contributions, but there’s no time to do anything about it.

The water park is situated right on the edge of Cross Lake, which appears to be separated from Lake Victoria (where the events of Piranha 3D went down), except that they’re connected underground. The piranha have discovered this connection, much to the dismay of those who wander into the lake. A farmer was the first to encounter the piranha, but he didn’t live long enough to warn anyone else. Neither did the kids whose sexual activities caused their van to roll into the water. But surely there’s no way that piranha can get into the water park’s swimming pools, right?

As you would expect, Piranha 3DD is simply ridiculous. The plot is stupid, which you probably knew going in, but it also fails at the elements that are supposed to make it enjoyable. There’s a lot of nudity, but most of the women on display are so skanky that the piranha that bite them are probably worse off than their victims, and not even the attempts at gross-out comedy are properly executed. The only semblance of horror comes in the form of jump scares and poorly-rendered gore, and the funniest moments come when the movie is making fun of itself or its predecessor.

I only had the option to see the film in 3D, and there I was also disappointed. While it seems to have been shot that way rather than post-converted, the 3D adds absolutely nothing to it. It’s really only noticeable when something goes wrong like when you see ghosting of the characters at certain depths, or when a lens flare provides an artificial flat plane in front of you. There aren’t any moments when you feel the need to dodge anything coming at you, nor are there breasts so large and three-dimensional that they appear to be poking out of the screen.

There are some things to enjoy from the movie. If you liked Piranha 3D (and why would you see the sequel if you didn’t like at least something about the first one?), then you’ll probably appreciate the returning characters, and even if you’re going in completely blind, there are a couple of fun new cameos. There are a couple of moments of decent comedy, and if you’re the kind of person who likes bad movies then there are things about this one that may work for you. But ultimately, unless you’re one of those weirdos that actually likes 3D, there’s no reason to see this one in the theater when it’s also already available through video on demand (and probably for quite a bit less than the price of a theater ticket, especially if you’re going to see it with multiple people).

Americans love to watch television, but there’s rarely anything worth watching. The 24-hour news channels like to say how much they love America but seem to hate most Americans. Reality TV is frequently a showcase of the worst our culture has to offer, from spoiled rich kids claiming their lives are over because their parents bought them a luxury car in the wrong color, to people falling over themselves to do repulsive acts for money, to “performers” who are either too stupid to know or too shameless to care that they have to talent. Like people who watch auto racing just for the crashes, people clamoring for the worst of our society are contributing to its destruction. And if that’s not bad enough, not only do people lap up whatever television serves up to them, but they also feel the need to talk incessantly about what they’ve seen whenever there’s no screen around.

Frank (Joel Murray) is living in this hell. He’s been having headaches that have been keeping him up at night, and watching TV to help pass the time only seems to make things worse. He rarely gets to see his daughter since his divorce, but he has enough contact with her to know that she’s turning into just the kind of spoiled brat that he has come to hate on television. He hates his neighbors and his coworkers are idiots, but this latter problem is solved for him when he finds himself out of a job. And the hits just keep coming when his doctor informs him that his headaches are being caused by a brain tumor, for which the surgery to remove it is just as likely to kill him as the tumor itself.

And with that, he can’t take it anymore. He can’t stand the world he lives in, but also can’t bring himself to commit suicide. So the only logical choice that remains is for him to kill everyone that’s making the world a miserable place. He “borrows” a neighbor’s car and drives across the country to kill a whiny bitch in the wrong car her parents bought for her. And it feels good.

God Bless America certainly isn’t the first film to decry the fall of civilization and plead for change, and it has more than a little in common with other films like Network, Falling Down, and Idiocracy (although it doesn’t quite match the first two in quality or the third in comedy). However, it also feels the most authentic of them because it’s exactly a product of our times. When I saw this film at the Alamo Drafthouse, the real TV clips included in the pre-show entertainment are virtually indistinguishable from those featured in the movie itself, which helped give it a greater impact. This probably also means that God Bless America will quickly become outdated as the world progresses to ever lower forms of debauchery and stupidity, just like the kinds of things that caused women to faint at the beginning of the twentieth century are humorously tame by today’s standards.

While the film mostly takes the high road, there are a few gags that seem beneath it. For example, a late-night advertisement for a farting pig app seems more like the lowbrow fare of Idiocracy than a lot of the other TV clips that we’re shown, and the next-door neighbors exhibit a level of stupidity that’s not entirely realistic. These elements just don’t seem as funny as the more realistic scenes, and they drag the film down a little. But these are minor nits about an otherwise hilarious yet too-close-to-home movie that is another feather in Bobcat Goldthwait’s directorial cap.

In one of my favorite episodes of Pinky and the Brain, the plan to take over the world involves staging an accident involving a microwave and non-dairy creamer, because nobody really knows how they work. It’s funny because the audience is in on the gag and isn’t supposed to take it seriously. In Chernobyl Diaries, radioactivity is treated in kind of the same way, but this time it doesn’t have the same effect, in part because they’re trying to be serious but are treating us in the audience like we’re idiots.

Chris (played by Jesse McCartney) hasn’t seen his brother Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) in a couple of years, ever since Paul moved to Russia. But they’re going to remedy that with a Eurasian vacation on a trek from London to Moscow. Chris brought along his long-time girlfriend Natalie (Olivia Dudley), who in turn brought her recently-single friend Amanda (Devin Kelley). Things are going well and they’re having a great time, but when they reach Kiev, Paul learns of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make their trip even more special. He met a man named Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) who’s offering them the chance to explore the site of the Chernobyl reactor, infamous its 1986 meltdown. The area is still contaminated and isn’t exactly open to the public, but Uri can get them in, and if they only stay for a couple of hours they won’t have enough exposure to cause any damage.

Although Chris is understandably hesitant to go, the allure is too great for Paul, Amanda, and Natalie, and Uri provides stereotypically Russian overly-masculine assurances that everything will be fine, so Chris is outvoted. They meet up with Michael and Zoe (Nathan Phillips and Ingrid Berdal), a couple of other tourists lured in by Uri, and head off for Pripyat, the name of the city that housed the reactor. When the disaster struck, residents had only minutes to gather their belongings and evacuate, so Pripyat is like a ghost town. There aren’t really even any animals around during the day, so they have the whole place to themselves. But there are creatures that come out at night, and when Uri can’t get the van started when it’s time to leave, they’re going to have much more contact with those creatures than they’d like.

On the surface, Chernobyl Diaries is a lot like the horror classic The Hills Have Eyes set in Ukraine. But the differences make all the difference. In The Hills Have Eyes, we get to know and understand the creatures, we learn how they came to be, and we can even empathize with them. But in Chernobyl Diaries, we don’t really even get a good look at the creatures, much less form any kind of bond with them. We don’t know anything about them, and the film unnecessarily muddies the water about how they came to exist in the first place.

The film also fails on an artistic level. In addition to an excess of darkness, we also get a lot of annoying 360-degree shots in which a camera makes a tight circle around a character from low to the ground so we see a lot of empty sky. There are also some strange audio choices, with once scene drowning out the characters’ dialogue with music, and another featuring the faint and completely out of place sound of a heartbeat. Since we don’t really ever get to see the creatures, sound is often the only way we know they’re around, but nothing we hear is really all that ominous.

But the biggest problem with the movie is that it is not believable. The characters make too many obviously-bad choices, and the climax (if you can call it that, since there’s no anxiety or sense of urgency) relies on a mistake that I simply can’t imagine anyone making, even in the dark in an unfamiliar place and when being chased by unknown beings. The film has no respect for the intelligence of its audience, but perhaps the most intelligent ones are the people who don’t see it at all.

Once upon a time, most video games were created by individuals. Even the first console games were more likely to be written by one or two people than big groups. It’s true that not just anyone could get their game onto a cartridge that would show up on store shelves, but it was much more possible for people developing for home computers. And now that the major game consoles are connected to the Internet and can play downloaded content, anyone with the right skills and enough determination can get their games into the hands of the masses.

Jonathan Blow knows a little something about that, because he created Braid, which was the first of the truly successful “indie” games. At the time of its release, it was the top-rated game on the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA), and one of the most highly-rated Xbox games period. Even if its revenue didn’t match that of even a flop from a major game studio, it also didn’t have to be split up amongst many developers, executives, and investors, and was therefore quite a profitable endeavor for him. Since then, others have tried to recreate that success, and although most are unabashed commercial failures, others have achieved great things in their own right.

Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes hoped to be one of the success stories with their Super Meat Boy, a platform game featuring a main character with no skin who must avoid all kinds of peril while trying to save his bandage-covered girlfriend from an evil fetus in a jar. Phil Fish had similar aspirations for his game Fez, in which a 2D character must learn to navigate through a 3D world. And Jonathan Blow hopes lightning will strike twice with his next game, The Witness.

The documentary primarily follows Edmund and Tommy as they work to finish Super Meat Boy in time for a promotional launch that could give them prominent placement in the XBLA where they’ve got the best chance of attracting buyers, and also Phil as he works to get Fez ready for the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) gaming showcase and tries to make peace with a former business partner who could create legal trouble for him if he tries to release the game. For both games, the developers are anxious to see what may come of the sleep, sanity, and social lives they’ve invested over the last few years of their lives. There’s potentially a lot of money on the line if things go well, while failure could strike a blow to their reputations and psyches from which recovery may be impossible. And it probably doesn’t help much that it’s all being filmed so that their ultimate success or failure (not to mention the ups and downs along the way) will be put on display for potentially millions of people to see.

What you’re not going to see in the film is a lot of encouragement for someone looking to break into the business. Making it easier for indie game developers to make their content accessible doesn’t make it easier for them to create good games, and Indie Game does a pretty good job of showing just how much work really goes into creating even a relatively simple game. We’re long past the days of Pac Man and Donkey Kong, so unless you’ve got a truly innovative concept that’s easy to learn and doesn’t require a lot of flashy graphics and expansive levels (think Tetris), you’re not going throw together something great after only a few days of working on it in your spare time. And I think that’s a good thing, because it thins the herd while highlighting the talent. If only the indie music scene had the same kind of hurdles, the world might be a better-sounding place.

It’s been a decade since the disappointing Men in Black 2 was released, and I can’t imagine anyone was clamoring for a third installment except the people with the potential to make money from it. Hopefully not even those people will have any aspirations of making a fourth.

Boris (a role played by and making me lose respect for Jermaine Clement) is a particularly nasty alien who looks mostly human except that he has hand vaginas capable of shooting out darts. Fortunately, he’s securely locked up in a moon prison where there’s no way he can possibly escape, unless they’re stupid enough to allow his girlfriend to visit and bring him a cake with something hidden in it. Unfortunately, they’re stupid enough to allow his girlfriend to visit and bring him a cake with something hidden in it. Boris escapes and vows to kill the man who locked him up in the first place, who just happens to be MiB Agent K. But he’s not going after K in the present (as played by Tommy Lee Jones). He’s planning to go back in time to 1969, so he can kill the much younger Agent K (as played by Josh Brolin) before he had a chance to make the arrest.

Boris’ plan works, because one day Agent K is there constantly being annoyed by his partner Agent J (Will Smith), and the next it’s like he was just erased from existence and no one can remember him except for J. Only old-timer Agent O (Emma Thompson) seems to have any memory of him, but that’s only because she was around when he was killed in 1969 (when O was played by Alice Eve). But J manages to convince O that something is amiss, and she recommends that he talk to Jeff (Michael Chernus), a time travel specialist,who just happens to be the one who helped send Boris back to kill K. And J convinces Jeff to also send him back so that he can kill Boris before Boris kills K.

There are a lot of things to hate about Men in Black 3. Nearly all the scenes set in the present day verge on intolerable. The prison break is absurd, and the interactions between J and K and aliens are always annoying (way beyond anything we saw from Tony Shalhoub in either of the first two movies) and occasionally racist. J and the aliens are often pretty unlikeable in the past too, but usually not to the same degree. And a scene with Andy Warhol (played by Bill Hader) is supposed to be funny but fails miserably.

But there are three things that save the film from being a complete disaster. The first is Josh Brolin, who really does cease to be Josh Brolin and instead becomes a young Tommy Lee Jones. The voice and mannerisms are spot on, and it also doesn’t hurt that he’s playing a more upbeat and less jaded version of the character. The second is the inclusion of Griffin (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), an alien who is able to experience five-dimensional spacetime and can see all possible versions of the future. He was used just infrequently enough to avoid overexposure and evoked pleasant thoughts of the improbability drive from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And the third positive is the film’s ending, which manages to take a break from mediocrity long enough to form a truly touching moment that changes your perspective on other elements of the film.

Unfortunately, the positive elements of the film aren’t enough to excuse the negatives. There are certainly things to like about it, but there are also enough things to hate to keep from being a good movie.

Prior to The Turin Horse, I’d never before seen a film by Hungarian director Béla Tarr, but I was familiar with his reputation for dark, slow-paced films, was aware of his highly-praised film Satantango (primarily because of its 7.5 hour runtime), and knew that he’d said The Turin Horse (a mere 2.5 hours long) is to be his last feature.

The film opens with Hungarian dialogue over a black screen (save for the English subtitles) which explains that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went mad after seeing a man beating a horse, but nothing is known of the man who owned that horse. It then proceeds to depict one possible account of his life, starting shortly after his encounter with Nietzsche. The man arrives home, puts away the horse and cart, and goes inside to his daughter. Dinner that night, and every other meal depicted in the film, consists of a single boiled potato, eaten with bare hands while it’s still so scalding hot that they have to blow on their fingers while pulling off the peel. The man’s job is hindered by the fact that he’s had a stroke and is unable to use his right arm, and despite his impatience at tearing into his potato, he never seems to eat more than half of it. Entertainment is primarily limited to staring out the house’s lone window watching the constantly-raging wind blow leaves and dirt about the yard, and conversation is at a premium.

When every day is usually the same as the one before it, differences are generally welcome. But the second day of the film shows that’s not always the case. On this day, and the several that follow, the horse refuses to pull the cart. It also refuses to eat or drink. And so the man can’t do whatever it is he usually does during the day, so it’s just more staring out the window and drinking palinka while the wind howls outside.

The Turin Horse is one of the most deliberate and pensive films I’ve seen in quite a while. There are only about 30 shots in the entire movie, so there’s no fast cutting or back-and-forth exchanges like in most films. It doesn’t try to fool the audience into thinking it’s one long, seamless shot — the cuts are obvious, and often the camera lingers when the action has ceased as if forcing you to reflect on what you’ve just seen. And what you’ve seen will have been a bleak, low-budget, minimalist representation of daily life for these people that’s hard to call beautiful but is nonetheless raw and effective. The soundtrack has a similar single-minded focus to it. Most of the time, you hear the wind, but occasionally that’s replaced with a simple and repetitive cello score, and on the rarest of occasions we may hear someone speak. But none of these seems to happen at the same time, so when there is something to be said, the other sounds are diminished.

The lack of color, the scant visuals and sounds, and minimalist plot all work together to ensure that you suffer along with the man and his daughter. Further, there are elements of the story which seem to have been left intentionally vague as yet another way of torturing the audience. It may blur the line between art and boredom more than any film I’ve seen in recent years, but it also somehow manages to have a powerful lasting effect on the viewer.

In the opening song to the classic TV program All in the Family, Archie Bunker longs for a time in which “girls were girls and men were men”, and that was in the 1960s, back when only women wore earrings and used beauty creams, and when there was no overlap between the body parts that men shaved and the parts that women shaved. I can’t imagine the stream of curses and bigotry that would come out of his mouth if he were around to see modern society.

We may not have Archie Bunker, but we do have Morgan Spurlock, and he’s willing to talk to people about hard-hitting topics like facial hair and body hair and hair replacement. In fact, while the documentary is supposed to be an exploration of masculinity in the face of things like manscaping and metrosexuality, it doesn’t seem to stray all that far from hair. There’s a long discussion about moustaches, followed by an even longer discussion of beards. Many of the same people (Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, Adam Carolla, Zach Galifianakis, and Isaiah Mustafa aka the Old Spice guy) are interviewed on both topics, but we get special moustache attention from director John Waters, and beard love from Jack Passion (winner of numerous beard competitions) and members of the band ZZ Top.

The film also takes an extended look at other topics like the hair that’s supposed to be on top of your head and what you can do if your body stops putting it there, and the hair that’s not supposed to be on your back and what you can do if your body keeps putting it there. It has a brief discussion of a cream intended to address a male affliction known as bat wings (consult Urban Dictionary at your peril), a professional wrestler of middle-eastern origin who feels the need to shave his entire body before each match, and another man of middle-eastern origin who is only about halfway through his own ten-step process of fine-tuning his appearance. And throughout the entire documentary, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett mock and trivialize all of the topics being discussed while they spend the day together relaxing at a spa.

The film doesn’t really take itself very seriously (and for good reason, because none of the topics has any degree of importance), but it seems kind of cruel to some of the subjects who clearly feel differently. Despite the heavy reliance on popular comedians, nothing really makes it past the point of mild amusement, although there are a couple of moments that devolve into the disgusting. But the vast majority of the 85-minute runtime is sheer boredom. There were only two other people in the theater for the screening I attended, and while all three of us (lone men, by the way) stayed until the credits started rolling, we also all left immediately, completely apathetic toward the remaining interviews playing during the credits.

The first two words Samantha Shane (played by Brooklyn Decker) says to Alex Hopper (played by Taylor Kitsch) are “I’m hungry.” By that right, the film could have just as easily been called “Hungry Hungry Hippos”, because that gives it about as much similarity to that game as it has to the other Hasbro board game for which it is actually named.

We quickly learn that Alex is a complete screw-up. His brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) is a commander in the Navy who has come to regret forcing his brother to enlist because he creates a lot of headaches. His latest infraction, a skirmish with a Japanese sailor during a soccer game, will likely net him a dishonorable discharge (from Liam Neeson’s character Admiral Shane, the father of Alex’s girlfriend Samantha), but before that happens, he’s to participate in a set of international war games off the coast of Hawaii. And despite his detestable personality and utter incompetence, he somehow managed to get command of one of the ships.

But the war games are interrupted when actual war breaks out. But this isn’t war with another country or independent rebels, but with aliens who come from a planet very similar to Earth and are now intent on taking over our planet as well. They’ve come in vehicles that work equally well in space, in the air, and in the water, and are armed with some pretty advanced weapons and defenses. One of the ships is able to serve as a kind of force field generator, and while its force field is able to keep out most of the world’s armed forces, it just so happens that the ships piloted by Alex and his Japanese soccer rival are inside it and may be humanity’s only hope.

Battleship is basically a naval version of Independence Day, complete with a Jeff Goldblum equivalent communications nerd in the form of Hamish Linklater, a Vivica A. Fox equivalent in the form of Rihanna, impenetrable energy fields, and a black man punching an alien in the face. But they also “borrowed” liberally from other sources, like giving the aliens a stupid and implausible weakness a la Signs and getting assistance from a bunch of over-the-hill veterans like Space Cowboys. They took the appearance of the alien suits from Halo, and the appearance of the aliens inside the suits from humans. They even managed to rip off Matt Damon’s face and put it on the body of Jesse Plemons.

About the only source material that appears to be largely safe from plagiarism is Battleship the board game. I know that the artillery fired by the alien ships is supposed to resemble the pegs players stick into the game board, but unless the filmmakers had a different version of the game than the one I played as a kid, they didn’t go out of their way to make them too similar. And only a couple of the movie’s 131 minutes involve targeting alien ships with grid coordinates, but even then they chose to obscure the reference by using words like “bravo” and “echo” instead of letters like “B” and “E”. And of course the one phrase that comes to everyone’s mind when thinking of the game is nowhere to be heard.

At no point does anything in Battleship approach the vicinity of a good movie. It’s possible that it could be fun with an audience that enjoys watching bad movies, but it’s completely out of place in its attempted position as one of the summer’s flagship films.

As an outsider, it’s hard to understand how people can get caught up in a cult. And yet, people are very impressionable. Under the reign of Kim Il-sung, North Koreans believed him to be a god and were dumbfounded by his mortality when he died in 1994, but nevertheless immediately assigned the same status to his son Kim Jong-il, only to be shocked again by his death last year. And yet this kind of thing happens (albeit on a much smaller scale) even in environments where people are allowed much more freedom and in a society that generally looks down on them as kooks and weirdos.

In the film, Peter (Christopher Denham) was all too familiar with this phenomenon. His mother had been in a cult when she got cancer, and was convinced to try to heal herself through faith rather than medicine. When she died, Peter was traumatized and developed a great hatred for cults, which only grew over the years. Now that he’s an adult, he wants to ensure that others aren’t suckered into making the same kind of mistake. When he and his girlfriend Lorna (Nicole Vicius) learned of a cult in their area, they decided to try to infiltrate it and expose it (and its leader) as a fraud.

The process of infiltrating the cult wasn’t as easy as they’d hoped, because this particular cult was very secretive and very exclusive. But their diligence paid off, and eventually they found themselves face to face with Maggie (Brit Marling). Maggie claimed to have traveled back in time from the year 2054, after war had ravaged the nation and created a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But despite Peter’s intelligence and enlightenment, it’s hard to get past her charisma, and sometimes she even seems to make a little sense.

Sound of My Voice is a beautifully haunting film. Despite going in a kind of predictable direction (and having a trailer which unfortunately gives away more than I would have liked), it somehow manages to maintain a degree of tension and uncertainty. We’re not only concerned about the cult taking an unpleasant turn (e.g., a Jonestown-style mass suicide or a Waco-like militia), but also the possibility of Peter and Lorna getting discovered or sucked in too deep. Its 85-minute runtime and chapter-based progression keep it moving quickly, but it doesn’t feel rushed or like we’re getting short-changed.

I’ve actually seen the film twice now, and was surprised to find how well it holds up to multiple viewings. Even when I knew exactly what was coming, it still had a couple of riveting moments and a high degree of emotional impact. It’s not at all heavy or overpowering, but just like a couple of great moments in Jaws that can still make me jump no matter how many times I watch it, I suspect that Sound of My Voice is something that will have an effect each time you see it.

As with most games, Tetris has a lot of casual fans. It’s believed that two out of every three Americans have played the game at some point. But few are truly experts. If you’ve never reached the maximum possible score of 999,999 points, or if you’ve never reached level 29 (by clearing at least 290 lines, where the blocks are falling so fast that it’s believed to be impossible to maneuver them into place quickly enough), then you’re just like virtually everyone else on the planet. There are only a couple of people in the world who can claim those accomplishments, and not even some of the super-elite players have achieved those milestones.

Thor Aackerlund is one of the first people to be able to legitimately claim himself to be a Tetris master. He won the 1990 Nintendo World Championship (the same competition featured in the 1989 film The Wizard) where Tetris was the featured game, and he had made some pretty impressive claims about his abilities over the years. But Thor was something of a recluse and never submitted any kind of evidence to back up his statements, so many in the Tetris community were skeptical. Robin Mihara had played against (and lost to) Thor in that tournament, and had spent much of the two subsequent decades wondering who really is the best Tetris player in the nation.

The invitees were the cream of the crop in the Tetris world, many of whom held (at least at one time) some kind of record. This included Jonas Neubauer and Harry Hong, the only players to have confirmed scores of 999,999 points. It also included Ben Mullen and Jesse Kelkar, who had reached level 29. Other top players like Dana Wilcox and Chris Tang were offered slots. And Thor, despite his reluctance to provide evidence to back up his claims of recent exploits, was invited if for no other reason than curiosity among the others.

There are a lot of similarities between Ecstasy of Order and the great Donkey Kong documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. However, there are also a lot of differences. While both films focus on people vying for greatness in video games, it’s surprising to see the degree of camaraderie among the Tetris players in contrast to the animosity between the Donkey Kong combatants. While most people likely find themselves rooting against Billy Mitchell in King of Kong, I was surprised to find I was rooting for everyone in Ecstasy of Order. The players are absolutely focused on winning, and yet there is a great deal of civility and mutual admiration between them which makes the film a joy to watch.

There is a lot of great content in the interviews with and interactions between the players, but it’s also a lot of fun to just watch them play, and there’s plenty of that to enjoy. As I learned from the mini Tetris tournament held at the Alamo Drafthouse after the film ended, it’s fun to watch even awful players try their luck. It makes the achievements of the top players even more impressive when immediately followed by “regular people” who fail to score any points or complete any lines. It’s interesting to see the differences in skills and strategies of the best players in the game, and the differences in personalities and knowledge of the game.

It’s hard to say anything bad about Ecstasy of Order, unless perhaps you find yourself frustrated by not having ready access to a quality version of Tetris. But even that’s a problem that can be overcome without too much effort or expense.