Having been on the sets of a few films, I really enjoy the behind-the-scenes aspects of the filmmaking process. For the same reason, I often enjoy commentaries, “making of” featurettes, and other kinds of DVD special features. I was intrigued by the IMDb description of Actor Martinez and hoped it would be like that.

Instead, I honestly don’t know what it is. If IMDb is to be believed, Arthur Martinez is a Denver actor who hired a couple of filmmakers (Mike Ott and Nathan Silver) to write and direct a movie with Arthur in the lead role. We occasionally see Arthur in his day job as a self-employed computer repairman and tech support guy. And then on nights and weekends, we see him doing movie-related stuff. Some of the time, especially at first, it’s just him by himself. He claims to be a promoter of local films and attends a meetup for local people who are or want to be in the film industry (perhaps one that Arthur organized?). He occasionally helps out with emergency services crews portraying a victim or finding others to play victims, for training exercises. But those are more diversions from the film starring Arthur.

And then they decide that he needs a girlfriend, so they have a casting session. There are a few applicants, some of which seem promising. They cast one, and then try to make Arthur uncomfortable with her so that he’ll want to get rid of her. Then, they say that they can get Lindsay Burdge (perhaps best known as the star of Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher) to play the part, and she agrees to come on board, with no idea what she’s getting herself into.

It’s hard to tell whether any of this movie is real or if it’s all staged. It could be some kind of performance art. Sometimes it feels like Ott and Silver might be playing a practical joke on Arthur, and a lot of the time, it feels like the joke might be on the audience. I assume that at least some of it is real because, while I do think that Burdge has the talent to act as convincingly as she appears, I just can’t buy that Arthur could fake the amount of clumsiness, cluelessness, and drivel we get from him.

But honestly, I don’t think that it matters whether it’s real or not, and what the balance might be between the two. If it’s all real, then it seems like they’re kind of making fun of Arthur’s lack of talent, and it’s awkward to watch. But if it’s staged, then they’re making it intentionally bad, which rarely works, and certainly doesn’t in this case. At any rate, it doesn’t have what I was looking for from the movie, and I didn’t really care for what it does provide.

Twenty years ago, Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner), and Begbie (Robert Carlyle) were the best of friends and the worst of heroin addicts. They managed to get their hands on a rather large stash, which they sold for £16,000, which Renton stole.

Fast forward to the present day. Spud is still a heroin addict. Sick Boy (now Simon) runs a pub with a side business of blackmailing recording and blackmailing men cheating on their wives with his accomplice/girlfriend Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova). Begbie (now Frank) has just broken out of prison. And now Mark has returned from hiding out in Amsterdam, and he wants to make good on the money that he stole. Not surprisingly, Simon and Frank harbor quite a bit of animosity toward him. Frank wants revenge, and Simon wants to use him for financial gain. Spud isn’t interested in the money since he’d just blow it on more heroin, but he’s mad at Mark for interrupting his suicide attempt. So Mark isn’t the most popular guy.

This movie has been out for a couple of months in Europe. It’s been out in limited release in America for a week, and it played last weekend in Austin as a not-so-secret screening at SxSW. And yet I’d not heard a thing about it, so I didn’t have high hopes. But it’s surprisingly okay. I wasn’t blown away by it, but it surpassed my admittedly low expectations.

I really like that they didn’t go the “more of the same” route with the film. The characters are fully developed, both consistent with what we know of them from the first film, and gaining new levels of depth from the experiences they’ve had over the last couple of decades. Their emotions and relationships are continually in flux, but in a way that seems very realistic and genuine. There is no “forgive and forget” but at least there may be some hope of “acknowledge, be made, and find a way to move past it” (at least for some of them).

If you hate the first movie, then maybe you’ll want to skip the sequel. And if you loved the first film, then maybe you’ll be a bit let down by the sequel if it’s not what you were expecting. But if you liked (or were indifferent to) the original, go in with the understanding that the sequel is a very different film, and have an open mind, then you might enjoy it.

Terrence Malick used to make good movies. Badlands is terrific. Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and The New World are all good. The Tree of Life is overindulgent and almost plotless, but at least it’s nice to look at. Then To the Wonder came out and it sucked because it was neither interesting nor pretty. Song to Song doubles down on that approach, so it’s nearly unbearable.

There’s not much in the way of a plot. Cook (played by Michael Fassbender) is a rich music producer and one of the biggest assholes you can imagine. He’s obsessed with showing off, having women, being miserable, and making others miserable. He’s the kind of guy who buys a Ferrari and parks it across multiple spots in a way that makes you want to key it, slash the tires, smash it with a sledgehammer, and set it on fire with him inside. He’s signed BV (Ryan Gosling) to a songwriting contract in which they’re supposedly equal partners, but Cook gets all the credit and is the only one named in the copyrights. Faye (Rooney Mara) used to be one of Cook’s receptionists before she became a musician, and he wants her because he knows that she and BV are into each other. He pressures Rhonda (Natalie Portman) to be his wife by buying her with a house for her soon-to-be-evicted mother (Holly Hunter). And he continues to hire prostitutes and sleep with women attracted to his lifestyle.

No one in this movie says anything above the volume of a whisper, and no one has even the slightest shred of enthusiasm. With the dull plot full of unbearable characters, you’d at least hope that it’d be pretty, but that’s not the case at all. It looks like it was shot almost entirely with fisheye lenses, often times with lenses that look like they fisheye vertically rather than horizontally so that everything looks shorter than it is. At least once, they switch back and forth from different levels of fisheyeness for an even greater level of absurdity. And I’d be willing to overlook some of that if the shots had at least been interesting, but that’s not the case. So many of the characters look so similar, and the shots are so distorted, that it’s often difficult to tell who you’re looking at. There’s so much swooping back and forth and twirling of the camera that you might feel a little dizzy or nauseated. The beautiful things you’re supposed to be looking at are mostly just repugnant, garish displays of excess whose primary purpose is to make it clear that they cost a lot of money. I will say that it used a good depth of focus in most scenes so you can at least scour the background for something interesting when you don’t care about what’s going on in the foreground, but that too is mostly a fruitless endeavor.

The film is shot in and around Austin, but it’s so focused on clichéd locations (the skyline, various downtown locations, SxSW, the Hill Country, Mount Bonnell, etc.) that it’s surprising there’s no “waiting in line at Franklin’s Barbecue” scene, but maybe not even Terrence Malick has that much patience. It took so long to complete the film that there are shots of things that aren’t there anymore (like the shopping center with the old Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar and Highball, which were demolished in 2012). And the film progresses at such an agonizingly slow pace, that’d have almost sworn that my watch kept stopping. It’s the kind of pretentious, meaningless garbage that you might expect of an overly ambitious film student, and I can’t imagine ever again willingly subjecting myself to another Malick film.

Woody Harrelson’s career has been all over the map, but I found his recent performance in The Edge of Seventeen to be one of the highlights of a film that’s got a lot of things going for it. It seems like he’s trying to capture some of that same vibe in Wilson, but this time it doesn’t go so well.

Harrelson plays the eponymous Wilson, a man who hates technology and modern life, and who hates people who want to be left alone. He’s the kind of guy who’ll sit right next to you in an otherwise empty train car and strike up a conversation when you’re trying to work or sleep or listen to music. We know this because he does it repeatedly in the movie. As a result, people hate him, and his quest to interact with people leaves him without any friends.

One day, he decides to try to track down his ex-wife (Laura Dern), who left him when she was pregnant, and whom he hasn’t seen in many years. He thought she’d had an abortion, but is surprised to learn that she had the baby and gave it up for adoption. He gets what little information she has about their daughter and uses that to track her down and try to get to know her.

This is a well-made film. It looks and sounds good, and the acting is fine. It’s exactly the movie they wanted to make. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a movie that I want to watch. Wilson is such an aggressively unpleasant man that that’s what the movie becomes. It does try to become funny and genuine and sweet, but it’s too little too late, and it never abandons its abrasiveness. Whenever there’s a nice moment, it always seems to find some way to sabotage itself and remind you that there’s not much about it to like.

Then there’s the problem of the whiplash-inducing changes in his character and how he’s perceived by others, without any kind of attempt at explaining why. And as it nears the end, it feels like it’s just kind of aimlessly wandering with no sense of direction, which makes this relatively short 96-minute film feel a lot longer than it actually is. Those faults probably lie at the feet of screenwriter Daniel Clowes (who also wrote the graphic novel on which it’s based, and had previously done Ghost World and Art School Confidential), but it’s entirely possible that those subtleties were in the script but got lost in the direction or editing. It’s probably a combination of all of those things, but it seems like it could’ve turned out much better than it did.

Alien was a tremendous sci-fi horror film when it was released in 1979, and that’s still true today. It’s obvious that the people behind Life share this sentiment because the two movies share quite a bit more than a passing resemblance. And while the latter isn’t on the same level as the former, the result is still worth a look.

The International Space Station is full of scientists (including characters played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, and Olga Dihovichnaya) who are eagerly awaiting a delivery from Mars. An unmanned craft is bringing them some soil samples that they believe might have signs of past life. After a harrowing retrieval process, they find a single-celled organism in a dormant state. But when they give it an atmosphere and some nutrients, it comes out of dormancy. And then it starts growing into a complex, unique, curious, and intelligent creature. They’ve taken precautions to keep it contained, but they’re not good enough. Soon, it’s loose on the space station and killing off the scientists in its need to feed.

The film’s connections to Alien are readily apparent, but it’s also got a lot in common with Carpenter’s The Thing in its quest to survive and grow at all costs, and in its ability to adapt to its environment. It does feel like it suffers from a lack of creativity at times, sometimes to the point of feeling clichéd (especially in a highly unoriginal “moment of realization” scene that you can see coming from a mile away). And I really wish they had gone a different route with the end because it’s not nearly as clever as they think it is and there are a few other alternatives that I would have rather explored. But it’s got a good runtime (103 minutes) that doesn’t feel too compressed or too drawn out, some good effects, and the cast works well together. Even when you’ve got a pretty good idea about what’s going to happen, it manages to be a pretty fun movie.

Expectations and buzz are usually a bad thing. If a movie is hyped too much, I’m often disappointed when I finally get the chance to watch it. Raw has been hyped a lot, including stories of people fainting and vomiting during early festival screenings, which usually is little more than a marketing gimmick. Fortunately, this is one that mostly lives up to the hype.

Justine (played by Garance Marillier) is a strict vegetarian who’s about to enter veterinary school. Her parents are vegetarian veterinarians, and her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is a vegetarian veterinary student, so she’s just following in her family’s footsteps. She’s got a reputation for being a brilliant student, and all of the faculty have very high expectations for her.

But when she arrives, she’s definitely not going to get any special treatment from her peers. This is, apparently, a school in which all new students are subjected to intense hazing. Their rooms are invaded in the middle of the night, their possessions are thrown out the window, they’re herded together in their night clothes, and that’s just the first few minutes. And then, as is inevitable for just about any kind of hazing, comes the eating of the disgusting things. Her insistence in her vegetarianism and her objections on completely normal grounds carry no weight, and she’s forced to eat raw rabbit kidneys. The next day, she starts to break out into a rash, and then she starts getting weird cravings.

Raw is a movie that really wants to gross you out. It’s got a lot of scenes whose primary purpose is shock value, and they’re effective even when you have some suspicions about what might be coming. But unlike most of these kinds of movies, it doesn’t sacrifice the story or the characters to do it. There’s at least a somewhat-plausible explanation for everything, and there’s a lot of discomfort that comes from things outside of the film’s main plot line. It may be that its female director, Julia Ducournau, is able to approach the matter from a different perspective than her male counterparts, and some of the most powerful scenes deal with Justine being forced to deal with her femininity in a way that she hasn’t before.

I do think that the movie gets a little too artsy and vague at times, particularly toward the end. Its 99-minute runtime doesn’t feel too padded out, but it could perhaps be a little tighter. It’s definitely not for everyone, and since it caters more toward serious movie fans than general audiences, it probably would’ve been even more fun to experience with the energy of a festival crowd. But if you can stomach this kind of film, it’s just about as much fun as a movie this icky can be.

I often enjoy movies in the style of Battle Royale (like The Running Man, Death Race 2000, Turkey Shoot, Hard Target, and Series 7: The Contenders). I often enjoy movies written by James Gunn (including Dawn of the Dead, Slither, Super, and Guardians of the Galaxy). I enjoyed Wolf Creek, the only Greg McLean-directed film I’d seen. The Belko Experiment combines all three of these things but leaves out the enjoyability.

Belko is a company of some sort with an office building in Bogotá, Colombia. It’s a rough neighborhood, so the building is fortified, the grounds are patrolled by armed guards, and all the employees have had GPS trackers surgically implanted so they can be located if they get kidnapped. But these things purportedly there for worker safety are used against them when the building is sealed off by unknown villains and order its occupants to start killing each other. Failure to comply will result in even greater numbers of casualties via the small bombs they’re carrying around under the guise of GPS trackers.

This movie is just awful. There isn’t nearly as much action as you’d expect, and a lot of that action is surprisingly dull. Most of the deaths are from people getting shot or having their heads blown up by the GPS bombs. Even the few exceptions to this (including one of the key kills, which is spoiled by the movie’s poster) aren’t as brutal or as exciting as they should have been. There’s a lot of arguing, but even the arguments aren’t convincing or entertaining. The characters (played by actors I usually like watching, including John C. McGinley, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry, Melonie Diaz, and Abraham Benrubi) are mostly pretty terrible people, and it’s impossible to believe they would all be as stupid as they are portrayed. I mean, why in the world would they all agree to have tracking devices surgically implanted into their heads?

The poster bills the movie as “Office Space meets Battle Royale”, but that’s only partially accurate because it has virtually nothing in common with Office Space, and it’s missing just about all of the things that make Battle Royale a great film. Clearly, the filmmakers also have a fondness for The Cabin in the Woods, since major elements are obviously lifted from it, but again, taking content doesn’t equal taking what made that content great. In this case, you’re much better off watching the films that inspired it, and the earlier, better works of the people involved.

I don’t like South by Southwest, for a variety of reasons that I don’t want to get into. But one of them is that when it comes to town, options for watching movies that aren’t part of the fest are severely limited. It’s rare that I go a day without watching at least one a movie in a theater, but it had been six long days since I’d seen anything on the big screen. I was probably primed to like just about anything they put in front of me, which means that Beauty and the Beast must be especially bad for me to have disliked it that much.

The basic story is probably very familiar. When a prince (played by Dan Stevens) scorns a witch (Hattie Morahan), she casts a spell that turns him into a beast and some of his attendance into furniture and other assorted housewares. She also gives him a magical rose, and that spell will only be broken if he can get someone to fall in love with him before all its petals drop off. And if his appearance isn’t enough of a deterrent, his castle is enshrouded in a permanent winter and hidden in a forest patrolled by wolves, so people aren’t exactly dropping by all the time.

But then someone does. Maurice (Kevin Kline) is on some unspecified annual journey when a storm forces him off his usual path and onto the beast’s estate. When he dares to pick a flower to give to his daughter Belle (Emma Watson), the beast takes him hostage and intends to hold him forever. But when Belle comes looking for Maurice, she finds him in the beast’s castle, and she takes her father’s place as his prisoner. And then the town hunk Gaston (Luke Evans), who’s smitten with her, sets off to rescue her.

Beauty and the Beast has a lot of potential. Emma Watson is a great Belle, both in appearance and in voice. Gaston’s sidekick LeFou (the gay character, played by Josh Gad, that seems to have some people in a huff) adds a lot of comic relief. Many of the set pieces are elaborate and ornate. But a film that should be gorgeous to look at is irreparably marred by horrendous cinematography. The movie is full of shallow focus that was so annoying in 2D that it must be utterly unbearable if you choose to subject yourself to the 3D version, and its abuse of pull focus could almost be classified as a crime against humanity. Most of the time, you can really only see one thing on the screen while everything else is blurry, but there are a number of occasions (especially scenes that were obviously made to have some kind of 3D effect) in which everything is out of focus. But even with all the cinematography problems, there are far too many occasions in which you can see the beast’s face clearly, and that’s unfortunate because the CGI employed for that purpose is nothing short of embarrassing.

The film’s biggest other problems are encapsulated in the real villain, Gaston. It’s such a one-dimensional, cartoonish character (far more so than anything in the animated version of the movie) that just about every second of him you have to endure is excruciating. And just in case you were hoping for some kind of relief when he participates in a musical number, the atrocious auto-tune employed for that purpose gives it that extra boost beyond any hope of salvageability.

If you want to see a good Beauty and the Beast film, you could certainly fall back to the animated film from 1991. It’s the same basic story and set of songs, but you can see everything clearly and everything sounds good, and it’s a full 45 minutes shorter than the new version. But as good as the animated version is, you might just get depressed when you realize that you’re getting old because that movie came out over 25 years ago. So instead I’ll recommend the definitive live-action version, the 1946 French film La belle et la bête, written and directed by Jean Cocteau.

Co-writer Max Borenstein also co-wrote the 2014 Godzilla remake, and (according to IMDb) is slated to be involved with the 2019 movie Godzilla: King of Monsters and the 2020 film Godzilla vs Kong. That makes sense because Kong: Skull Island feels much more like a Godzilla movie than one written for King Kong.

Bill Randa (played by John Goodman) is an explorer with a crackpot theory that the earth is hollow and inhabited by gigantic creatures. But so far, every attempt to find them has been futile, so he’s on the thinnest of ice with Senator Willis (Richard Jenkins). Nevertheless, Randa convinces Willis to give him a military escort to check out a newly-discovered Pacific island (out of fear that the Russians might get there first). The United States is pulling out of Vietnam, but Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) volunteers his squad for one last mission, and Randa hires British soldier James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) to serve as a tracker. And when talented anti-war photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) learns of the mission, she’s intent to come as well.

Everyone except Randa thinks that the mission is just to map the new island (which is constantly enshrouded with storms) and study its geography. But when their squadron of military helicopters arrive and start dropping seismic charges (purportedly to help study the island’s geological makeup), a gigantic ape appears and starts swatting them out of the sky. Soon, they’re all down and scattered across the island. While Packard and his soldiers are intent on killing the monster, Conrad and Weaver run into Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), a man who’s been stranded on the island since his plane went down in World War II, and he tells them that the ape, named Kong, is really a good guy who keeps the really bad creatures at bay.

All the film’s monster-on-monster and monster-as-defender themes really make it feel like the movie was written for Godzilla rather than King Kong. It also evokes thoughts of Jurassic Park (at one point, Samuel L. Jackson even proclaims, “Hold onto your butts!”, albeit without a cigarette dangling from his lips) and occasionally Congo. And I recently watched Josef von Sternberg’s Anatahan (a rather disappointing, slowly-paced film that deals with sailors stranded on an island, who encounter a couple that’s been living there for years), so that came to mind, too. But you know what it doesn’t remind me of at all? A King Kong movie.

Kong: Skull Island is a very, very dumb movie. I mean, I can go along with the premise that there are giant monsters lurking beneath the earth’s surface, and that the only thing keeping them from taking over the earth is a giant ape who lives on the secret island that serves as the passage between the two worlds. But it’s tougher to accept that combat helicopter pilots would let themselves get within arm’s reach of a giant ape who’s trying to swat them down. And that’s just the start. I’m not saying that it’s not entertaining at times, but boy is it dumb.

Stephen Merchant has two movies out this weekend in which he plays a supporting character. In Logan, he plays a deformed mutant albino who can’t tolerate the sun. And he’s more creepy in Table 19, a mediocre dramatic comedy set at a wedding reception.

Eloise (Anna Kendrick) is the oldest friend of the bride, and until recently she was to be the maid of honor. She lost that honor around the same time she broke up with Teddy (Wyatt Russell), who was the bride’s sister and the best man. But she still received an invitation to the wedding, and after agonizing over it, she decided to attend. It’s no surprise that she ended up at table 19, in the back corner with all the other unwanted guests that were still invited for some reason. There’s Jo (June Squibb), the bride’s former nanny. There’s Mr. and Mrs. Kepp (Craig Robinson and Lisa Kudrow), who are casual acquaintances of the bride’s (or maybe the groom’s?) father. Walter (Merchant) is a cousin of the bride who stole a lot of money from her father. And Renzo (Tony Revolori) is a horny kid who is there too for some unexplained reason.

They’re a band of misfits, and hilarity is supposed to ensue. But it doesn’t. As a comedy, it’s an utter failure. There’s really only one decent gag in the movie (involving Lisa Kudrow’s attire), and they make sure to run that into the ground. Everything else is either obvious far in advance or falls flat, and most of the time it’s both. As a drama, it’s also pretty lackluster. I’m sure it’s going for some kind of crude John Hughes vibe, but it definitely doesn’t achieve anything like that. I’d had higher hopes for this Duplass-brothers-written film, but it’s very ho-hum at best.