Quentin Tarantino. The Hateful Eight.

Would be an excellent parlor detective in the spirit of Agatha Christie and John Priestley, if Quentin Tarantino did not put his corny social context (a House United after the Civil War, military valor of the Confederate bandit and a black major transcending their differences, Lincoln letter etc. etc.) ahead of his cinematic mastery. Acting ensemble is superb.

Big Short

A training movie for a business school staffed by A-list actors (R. Gosling, S. Carell, C. Bale, M. Tomei) and celebs. Why? There is no human story. Also, the Wall Streeters are shown as social misfits, Xanax and Zoloft babies, etc. If you are on a Wall Street, you are fitting in very well, thank you.

Sisters.

The movie is late about 20 years. In 2015, divorced medical nurse (Amy Poehler) is not a middle class living in a nice suburbia of Atlanta.  A real estate agent (Maya Rudolf) is an office drone, not an accomplished career woman with a Mercedes. Hollywood (see my reviews of Yellow and Gone Girl) still has a strange idea of the lives of ordinary Americans.

Bridge of Spies.

 

Patriotic, feel-good movie by Spielberg. All characters except Col. Rudolf Abel (W. Fisher) wonderfully played by Mark Rylance of the "Wolf Hall" fame and, to a lesser extent, Wolfgang Vogel, are cutout puppets. Shame on you, Br. Coen! Despite a brilliant cast (Tom Hanks, Alan Alda, etc.) they all play formulaic versions of what is expected of them. Especially cheesy is the scene when Amy Ryan, recognizing that her husband--not having an affair, G-d forbid, but wasting his time on a fishery in Ireland--weeps at his prostrate, sleeping and drunk body when he is revealed to be on an important Government mission.

P.S. Spielberg decided that the Cold War somehow moved East Berlin to Siberia. It is shown in deep snow when orchards bloom in New York City. Equally bizarre are the scenes of Abel-Fisher's fake family in the Soviet Embassy. His wife was a concert harpist and definitely would dress in a gown rather than babushkas. East Berlin in 1963 looks like a WWII ruin. Did Spielberg or Coens ever looked at the photos of the DDR? Probably not, otherwise our Ministry of Truth Commissariat (Samantha Power, Vicky Nuland, Cristiana Amanpour, etc.) would make a cheese sauce out of person even with Spielberg's stature.

Ridley Scott, The Martian

The creators, unlike Interstellar and Gravity, carefully avoided illogical twists. All the stretching of technical/physical/biological facts has been performed accurately, without obvious violence done to the plot or elementary logic.

Yet, the author(s) forgot that all movies (or novels, for that matter) is about human conflict. It takes an enormous talent and ingenuity to infuse one-man show with the conflict sufficient to drive complex narrative, such as in the "Life of Pi." A few well-designed jokes as in "Martian" are not enough. While Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain are forever wed to sci-fi, another master actors such as Jeff Daniels, Sean Bean and, especially, Kirsten Wiig are being lost as the screen savers with little characterization. In these stock roles it would work better to cast relatively unknown, aspiring starlets such as McKenzie Davis ("Mindy Park").

P.S. Compare descriptions at http://mars2044.blogspot.com/

Black Mass

Johnny Depp got his acting grove back. Yet, with all his wealth he does not choose more deep roles with top directors preferring stock roles, which he plays excellently but which will not be remembered. Supporting cast is terrific, especially enigmatic Benedict Cumberbatch, playing his university president brother but the movie is just another well-made crime thriller.

Ricky and the Flash

It is easy to dismiss this movie just as a vehicle for Meryl Streep and her daughter.

The movie is subtly subversive with its overthrowing of the stereotypes and could not be made 20 years ago. That is, an indie rocker from California is a Tea Party-style conservative. She is shunned by her gay son. Her former husband, a corporate shill from Indiana masterfully played by Kevin Kline is a liberal and lives in a multiracial family. 

Ricki's lover, a much younger Latino man, is a sensitive and supportive guy. On the contrary, her son's future bride comes from visibly upper middle class, culturally conservative Hispanics disapproving of their future mother-in-law and rock in general. 

Too bad, that the rest is just a vehicle to showcase Meryl's fantastic capabilities.