Columbus, Indiana may be a relatively small city, but for some reason, it’s some kind of architectural oasis. It has a lot of buildings, structures, and sculptures with nontraditional designs, which is to say there is a lot of symmetry and asymmetry, things are elevated or have tall spires or lots of negative space, things are made of unusual materials, or there’s just something unusually artistic about them. Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) has lived there nearly her whole life, and she’s become fascinated with the architecture. She’s taken all the tours, attends all of the talks by guest speakers, and spends a lot of time admiring the sights. She graduated from high school over a year ago but doesn’t have any plan to go to college. She works in the local library (along with Rory Culkin) and hangs out with her mom.

Jin (John Cho) is her opposite. He doesn’t live in Columbus, and he doesn’t care about architecture. Yet he’s there because his father, a famous architect (or maybe just a famous authority on architecture) was there to give a talk when he collapsed and fell into a coma. He’s not particularly enthusiastic about staying by his father’s side, so he’s happy to meet Casey and spend time with her, even if he doesn’t share her fascination with the beauty that surrounds them.

The film progresses slowly, but it really earns the right to use that pace through the way that it reveals information to us and how we come to understand what is really going on. And in that regard, it’s certainly not guilty of offering too much information, but you eventually catch onto everything that you need. We discover that Casey and Jin have more in common than we might have suspected at first glance and that each may be harboring feelings that he other projects but that may not be as true as they believe.

For a film with such a strong focus on the visual appeal of architecture, cinematography is important, and Columbus certainly has a distinct style there as well. There are a lot of shots looking down narrow corridors, and much of the time there is information waiting to be revealed from around a corner or off to the side. The film makes heavy use of reflection, with well-placed mirrors and panes of glass allowing us to see things that would otherwise not be visible, or to see the same thing from multiple perspectives. And there’s a lot of focus on negative and wide open spaces that, when combined with the film’s deliberately slow pacing, gives you a chance to take everything in. At times, it almost feels like it’s beating you over the head with how subtle it’s being, but it works surprisingly well.

I generally don’t like films featuring either Daniel Craig or Adam Driver, but I primarily know Craig from those awful James Bond movies and Adam Driver from things in which he teams up with the agonizingly unbearable Alex Karpovsky. Even though both Craig and Driver are prominently featured in Logan Lucky, I decided to give the film a chance because it’s not a Bond movie, there’s no Alex Karpovsky, and it’s a heist movie directed by Ocean’s Eleven (and Twelve and Thirteen) director Steven Soderbergh.

The film features Channing Tatum as Jimmy Logan, a former football player with a bum knee, which also just lost him his construction job that he desperately needs to keep his ex-wife (Katie Holmes) from taking their daughter (Farrah Mackenzie) to another state. In desperation, Jimmy turns to his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a veteran amputee turned bartender, with a plot to rob a NASCAR racetrack. It would normally be an impossible job, but Jimmy’s former construction job at that track gave him inside information that some of the security measures have been temporarily disabled, and that the pneumatic tubes used to carry cash from all the vendor stations to the vault are much more exposed than they normally would be. They’ll need to enlist the help of currently incarcerated explosives expert Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), a couple of Joe’s redneck relatives (Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson) who have recently experienced a religious awakening, and Jimmy and Clyde’s hairdresser/car expert sister Mellie (Riley Keough).

Logan Lucky isn’t as good as Ocean’s Eleven, but it’s also not as bad as Ocean’s Twelve. As a heist movie, it’s definitely got some fun moments and an interesting plan. Channing Tatum’s character is fairly well developed, Daniel Craig’s is actually pretty fun, and Adam Driver’s is tolerable. On the other hand, the southern accents aren’t that great and quickly become annoying, and Seth MacFarlane (as a billionaire racing team owner) is at least as terrible in this movie as he is in everything else he’s done since the first couple of seasons of The Family Guy. But fortunately, the accents aren’t so annoying as to completely ruin the film, and MacFarlane’s screen time is mercifully short.

But the biggest problem with Logan Lucky is that it’s just not that exciting, especially in the ways that a heist movie should be exciting. It’s not really boring, but it doesn’t have any tension. All of the impossible things they have to pull off come way too easily, and even when they do get backed into a corner, you don’t really feel like they’re in any imminent danger. And on top of that, there are reveals later in the film that even further detract from any anxiety that might have been. I did still come away liking Logan Lucky, but it could have been so much better, and Soderbergh has to take the blame for that.

One of the great things about the Alamo Drafthouse is that they don’t show the kinds of ads and other mindless drivel that you see at regular theaters before the movie starts. Instead, they typically have a pre-show with various clips that pertain to the movie in some way. Unfortunately, the pre-show for Ingrid Goes West doesn’t do the film any favors because it’s full of less-than-great clips that are a little too spot-on with what’s in the movie, and scenes from other stalkery-themed movies that are much better than the one I was about to see.

Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) is a little distraught after the death of her mother. She doesn’t have a lot of friends, so she latched onto a random stranger who happened to like something on her Instagram account. This ends poorly, with Ingrid getting a restraining order and a stint in an asylum, but she’s feeling much better now. Or at least that was supposed to be the case. But when she gets home, she very quickly comes across the account of Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen), a minor Instagram celebrity. Ingrid starts liking all of her stuff, and she leaves a comment. Taylor makes the mistake of replying, and it starts all over again. Ingrid takes the inheritance she got from her mother, moves across the country, and stages a chance encounter. This works after a few attempts, and now Ingrid and Taylor are best friends, at least as far as Ingrid is concerned.

Ingrid Goes West has a decent idea: a modern take on the stalker genre that relies heavily on social media. Of course, it’s not the first film to do that, and it’s far from the best, and far from the worst. It’s funny at times, but it’s mostly just lame. It wants us to take its stance on Internet celebrity seriously and connect with the characters, but too often it feels like it’s parodying those kinds of people. On top of that, it doesn’t pay off its stalker premise with the kind of tense, exciting ending that I’d hoped for (and that most of the stalker movies featured in the pre-show do have).

The best parts of the movie are probably the supporting characters. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. (Ice Cube’s son) plays Ingrid’s landlord/neighbor, and his character is the most fun and genuine in the film. And Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn) does a good job as Elizabeth Olsen’s husband who tries to be supportive but is getting pretty tired of all her crap. And even though his character is pretty annoying, Billy Magnussen as Elizabeth Olsen’s brother does give us the only real source of tension in the movie. But the movie spends way too much time with its bland main characters, and as such feels pretty lackluster.

Since I don’t watch trailers, I often go into a movie knowing little to nothing about it, and sometimes my decision to see a movie or not is based on who is in it. The last time I saw a movie because it had Samuel L. Jackson, it was Kong: Skull Island, and that didn’t work out so well. Fortunately, The Hitman’s Bodyguard turned out better.

The film features Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) as a professional bodyguard. He’s very careful, very thorough, and very good. He’s never lost a client. And then he does, and everything falls apart. He loses his triple-A rating and suddenly finds himself with a much less desirable client list. He also loses his wife Amelia (Elodie Yung) because she’s an Interpol agent and he thinks she had something to do with the death of his scumbag client.

Meanwhile, an evil dictator (Gary Oldman) is facing charges of crimes against humanity. The only problem is that all of the witnesses against him keep dying, and the prosecution is running out of options. Their last hope might just be notorious assassin Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson), who’s locked up behind bars. Interpol makes a deal to get him to testify, but their security escort turns out to be less than effective, and it ends with only Amelia left to protect him. Suspecting a leak in Interpol, she reluctantly decides to outsource the job to Michael. He and Darius have a troubled past, but Amelia assures Michael that she’ll get him back his elite bodyguard status if he can pull off the job.

I was skeptical, but The Hitman’s Bodyguard turned out to be a pretty fun movie. It does have a lot of problems, but it’s still better than I expected. Gary Oldman gives a performance that’s not quite as over-the-top as Léon: The Professional, but it’s still the kind of hammy, over-acted role that he does very well. Ryan Reynolds plays the kind of highly sarcastic character we’ve come to expect from him, and it’s surprisingly not too annoying this time. And Samuel L. Jackson gives another clinic in the overuse of profanity, but this time, he’s actually given a reasonably well-developed character.

It’s definitely the kind of movie you can’t think about too much. There are logic problems all over the place, and there are plenty of times where the movie just doesn’t make any sense. On top of that, the evil henchmen are overwhelmingly clichéd, some of the humor is obvious and lame, and the movie has no idea how to end. And yet if you can turn off your brain for a while, you could do a lot worse.

The Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women (BLSYW, often pronounced “bliss”) is a combined middle school and high school with a predominantly African-American student body, most of whom are from lower-class or middle-class families. It launched in 2008 with just a sixth-grade class, and the 2015–2016 school year will see those girls become its first graduating class. The school has the very ambitious goal of seeing every one of those girls accepted into college.

One of the school’s most popular extracurricular activities is a step dance program, in which the girls shout, stomp, clap, and otherwise, move in a coordinated manner. The girls take it seriously, but they lost all of their competitions in the 2014–2015 school year, and now they have their sights set on winning a regional competition with students from not only Baltimore, but throughout the Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. areas. This documentary focuses on members of that team not only on the dance floor but also in class and in their lives outside of school.

It’s an interesting film, but it suffers from being either too close to the subject matter or intentionally misleading. At no point does it attempt to explain to the audience what stepping is, but that’s understandable because it doesn’t seem to be all that complicated, and because it has been portrayed in other films. But it also does an abysmal job of adequately describing the school. The documentary doesn’t explicitly state that it’s a school for African-American women from low-income families (and it’s not, according to the school’s website), but the film doesn’t make any attempt to show or imply anything else. It may well be that it’s only focused on members of the step dance team and that all of them fit that criteria, but you would think that it might find a few seconds to better describe the school where a substantial amount of the content is set.

Less understandable, though, is that the movie does a really bad job of following the team over the course of the year. We see a lot of practices, and we spend the majority of the time with a few key members of the time, but we don’t see the competitions. The documentary tells us multiple times that they didn’t win any of the competitions from the previous year and implies that there were several of them. But Step only shows us one expo and one competition from the year that it’s actually covering, and not even very much from either one of those. It’s possible that they were so bad in the previous year that they weren’t invited to anything else, or that they did so poorly at those competitions that the footage was omitted, but again, the film should at least make some effort to tell us something. Likewise, the fate of one of the most significant characters until we see it in text tacked on at the very end of the movie.

While the documentary has problems with what it doesn’t show, the things that it does show are strong. It shows many of the challenges that the girls face and it doesn’t see to pull any punches or put its best foot forward for the benefit of the camera. Some of the girls are extraordinary, and others are not. Some of the parents are highly involved, and others are not. Some of the girls make obviously bad choices, but at least they don’t give up. It’s cheesy at times, but ultimately pretty inspirational. I’m clearly not the target audience for the movie, and I don’t care at all about step dancing, but I didn’t have any problems with losing interest over the short 83-minute runtime.

There have been several movies that feature a character living in a world that is not what they think it is. Many of them, like Room, Dogtooth, Bad Boy Bubby, and The Truman Show, are surprisingly good. Brigsby Bear continues that trend.

For as long as he can remember, James (Kyle Mooney) has been living in a survival shelter with his parents, Ted and April (Mark Hamill and Jane Adams). Something has happened to the world, and it’s not safe to go out without respiratory protection. About the only form of entertainment James has is a television program called Brigsby Bear, and he’s obsessed with it. But the air is not poisoned, and Ted and April are not James’s parents, and Brigsby Bear is not a real TV show. Ted and April abducted James when he was a baby, and Ted, a former animatronics engineer, has been making the show exclusively for James.

Police finally catch up to Ted and April and James goes to live with his real parents (Mark Walsh and Michaela Watkins) and sister (Ryan Simpkins). He’s confused and culture shocked, and neither Detective Vogel (Greg Kinnear) and Dr. Emily (Claire Danes) are of much help. Then James meets one of his sister’s friends, Spencer (Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.), who is interested in filmmaking and offers to help make a movie to provide closure to his favorite character.

The “twist” that James’s life isn’t what he thought it was isn’t really a spoiler because it’s revealed early on, and because it’s pretty clear that something fishy is going on even before we actually get confirmation. The plot is engaging and important to the film, but the movie is really about James coming to terms with his new reality, and other people coming to understand him.

This movie is much less dark and much less of a downer than most other films of this type. It’s funny and sweet and thoroughly enjoyable. You don’t really care that the basic premise isn’t all that believable. You’re also not too concerned about how quickly James makes friends with teens who are much younger than he is and you think would be much more prone to avoiding or making fun of him. Minor quirks like these just add to its charm and keep it moving along so that it can focus on what’s important, and it’s just so much fun that it’s easy to overlook the flaws and let yourself be taken in by the movie.

Mumblecore films rarely do anything for me. Landline is a mumblecore period film set in the 1990s, and that twist doesn’t do the concept any favors.

The film focuses on a family of awful 90s hipsters living in a world of their own problems that stem from their laissez faire approach to the world. Parents Alan (John Turturro) and Patricia (Edie Falco) do their best to seem unshakeable in the face of their daughters’ attempts at rebellion and shock value. The elder daughter Dana (Jenny Slate) has been engaged to Ben Jay Duplass) for a few years and their relationship has stagnated, leading her to have an affair with her friend Nate (Finn Wittrock). Younger daughter Ali (Abby Quinn) seems intent on getting drunk and high and skipping school and offending her parents, who don’t seem to do any more than try to seem unphased and let their daughters make their own mistakes, which only perpetuates their awful behavior. And then we find out that Alan has been cheating on his wife with his experimental theater acting partner Carla (Amy Carlson).

There are things that happen in this movie, but there’s not much of a coherent plot. I think that it’s supposed to be funny, and I think that the movie thinks that it’s very funny. And yet there’s nothing in the movie that actually comes anywhere near the vicinity of comedy.  It’s just 97 minutes of apathetic boredom with these terrible people making things terrible for themselves and then wallowing in the consequences. And that’s all I have to say about that.

If you want to listen to all eight books in The Dark Tower series on Audible, you’ll have to invest 145 hours and 15 minutes, which comes out to just over six days of listening. I didn’t make it more than a couple of hours before I gave up. I’ve heard it gets better, but I didn’t hear anything to make me want to give it another shot. But when I heard that Sony had condensed all 8715 minutes of the book series into a 95-minute movie, I was on board. Sure, the reviews were bad, but I can handle an hour and a half of a bad movie to get a Cliff’s Notes version of the series to see if it’s worth revisiting. After seeing the film, I don’t think I’ll be going back to the books.

There’s a big dark tower at the center of the universe, and it keeps bad things from outside the universe from getting in. It’s said that the mind of a child can destroy the tower, and Walter (Matthew McConaughey) wants to test that theory. He’s been kidnapping children with special psychic abilities (that is, kids who “shine”) and hooking them up to his contraption to shoot a beam of screams at the tower. So far, all he’s been able to do is cause minor damage to the tower, which is felt in all the worlds throughout the universe as earthquakes, but he’s going to keep trying until he finally succeeds.

Jake (Tom Taylor) is a kid who lives on Earth (or “Keystone Earth” as it’s called in the movie) and has been having the same weird dreams over and over again. They’re about some man in black who has been taking kids and using them to shoot a tower, and some other man named Roland (Idris Elba) who is a gunslinger and is the only one that has thus far been able to successfully withstand the man in black. Jake shines hard, and Walter is onto him. He’s got agents out to find him, but Jake manages to stumble across a teleporter and use information he recalls from his dreams to transport himself to another world where he meets up with the gunslinger in an attempt to save the universe.

I don’t think that Stephen King intended to write a young adult series, but that’s definitely what the filmmakers thought it was. The movie is firmly in the same vein as The Maze Runner or Divergent, and it’s about the same level of quality, which is to say not great. Without a doubt, the worst part is the character of Walter. It’s crappily written and isn’t helped by McConaughey’s performance, but at least you can’t accuse him of not committing to it. If they’d gotten someone like Nicolas Cage or Gary Busey, then it could have likely been something highly entertaining in its ridiculousness.

The movie also has a number of references to other Stephen King works. Aside from the “shine”, there are obvious tie-ins to It, Christine, and 1408. King’s name appears prominently on a billboard near the end, and there are a lot of subtler references that are probably nods to his other work but could conceivably be passed off as incidental similarities.

But not everything about the movie is bad, though. In its best moments, like the assault at the end of the film, it is pretty reminiscent of The Matrix. And most of the rest of the time, it mostly resembles a movie made from a YA novel. If you’re into that kind of thing, then maybe you’ll enjoy it. Otherwise, it’s just pretty meh. But it’s surprisingly not as awful as critical reviews might have you believe.

A few years ago, I spent a lot of time watching the Science Channel, and they frequently ran programs that investigated airplane crashes to figure out what caused them. There was never just one reason. The disaster was always triggered by a series of failures that compounded things into a bad day for those involved. That’s Detroit.

In July of 1967, racial tension was high all across the country. Detroit, in particular, had a large, densely-packed African-American population and a predominantly white police force that didn’t have a high opinion of the black community. One night, things came to a head when the police raided a private club and found their actions much more visible to the general public than they would have liked. A crowd gathered, people got angry, and a riot broke out. Buildings were trashed, looted, and burned, and the National Guard was called in to try to keep order.

At the Algiers Motel, things were calm until a jeep full of National Guardsmen pulled up nearby. One of the morons in the hotel had a starter pistol and thought it would be fun to fool the soldiers into thinking they were under fire. They didn’t find it funny and stormed into the hotel with a few local police officers. One of the cops, Krauss (Will Poulter), soon took charge and made it clear that they weren’t going to leave until the sniper had been found or everyone was dead. Krauss wasn’t the most level-headed or racially sensitive guy, and things didn’t go so well for anyone.

The movie is mostly well done, but it’s not a particularly enjoyable experience. The subject matter is bleak for most of its runtime, and that runtime is quite a bit longer than it needs to be. The meat of the film is mostly well paced, but the lead-in and follow-up both seem to go on a bit too long.

Perhaps the most baffling thing about the film is John Boyega’s role as a security guard at a liquor store that is across the street from where the Guardsmen pulled up and found themselves under “fire”. Boyega is the top-billed actor in the film, and we spend a substantial amount of time following his character, except that he’s completely unnecessary and totally incidental to the plot in every way. He’s just a spectator, and all of the time spent following him is a complete waste of the audience’s time. Yes, the film is based on a true story, and yes, the character he was playing was there when it happened, but there is no reason whatsoever to focus on that character.

On the other hand, the acting is good, and the film consistently achieves its goal of stirring emotion. It’s certainly not a bad movie, but it could have been so much better if it had been tighter and stayed more focused on the important aspects of the story.

Hell or High Water was one of the best new films to come out last year. I didn’t care for Sicario as much, but it was very well received by a lot of people. Both were written by Taylor Sheridan, who also wrote Wind River. And this time he directed it as well.

The film features Jeremy Renner as fish and wildlife agent Cory Lambert. He’s an expert hunter and animal tracker, and he’s often called to go after wild animals who are bothering people or livestock in the frigid, snowy Wyoming mountains near the Wind River Native American reservation. On one such excursion, he comes across the body of a dead girl who looks like she had been running for her life after being raped. It’s his daughter’s best friend, and she died in a manner that wasn’t all that different from the way that Cory’s daughter died.

Because it happened on the reservation, the FBI was called in to investigate. And in this case, the FBI is agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). While she’s clearly passionate about the case, she’s also clearly out of her league, not to mention unequipped for the brutal weather conditions. The tribal police, led by chief Ben (Graham Greene), is a tiny force with a lot of ground to cover, so Banner enlists Lambert’s help to try to figure out what went wrong.

Wind River is a very good film, even if it falls a little short of the standard set by Hell or High Water. There are clear similarities between the two crime thrillers, particularly in their rugged settings and deliberate pacing. Renner plays his character very well, but it does seem like Lambert comes off a little too infallibly superheroic in every way except dealing with his feelings about his dead daughter, and he even handles that pretty well. That’s in stark contrast to Olsen’s character, who isn’t quite bumbling, but still finds herself in constant need of bailing out. I would have liked to see more depth and more development for both characters.

The film’s cinematography is also worth mentioning. It makes heavy use of handheld camera but surprisingly doesn’t suffer from the shakycam syndrome that seems to plague many other films with big action sequences. On the other hand, there is a lot more camera movement in the slower sequences, always staying close to cover almost like the camera is some kind of predator that is stalking Lambert. Although I generally like the effect, it does seem a little misleading at times because it almost feels like someone’s about to jump out and attack.

Ultimately, while the movie has problems, it’s just so engaging that its shortcomings are easy to forgive. Renner and Olsen work very well together, and its 107-minute runtime feels just right to ensure that it keeps moving along even while many of its scenes play out very slowly. I’m sure that it’s one that I’ll see again, and I’m interested to see whether it fares as well as Hell or High Water on a repeat viewing.