Sin City: A Dame to Kill For

Sin City being what it is, you’re not signing up for a lot of happy endings. The black and white milieu with little bursts of color is still visually cool, but not as trailblazing as it was when the first Sin City came out 9 years ago. The acting is top notch... for the genre, and there are a lot of cool set pieces. As usual, Eva Green steals every scene she's in. But this left me wanting more, and I’m not sure why. There’s nothing WRONG with it, but maybe it was the short running time or the lack of freshness, but this made me long for 2005, when the low-budget, green screen movie was the newest craze.

Get On Up

Efforts to make this rock and roll biopic different from the others succeed, as much as possible. Chadwick Boseman looks nothing like James Brown, but he sounds JUST like him and when he stops to talk to the camera you can feel an intimacy that differs this from Ray, et al. Performances are great here, and the pace is fast and funky. It’s important, too, that the movie doesn’t white-wash James Brown’s drug use and abuse of women. He may have been talented, but he was also sometimes an asshole.

Guardians of the Galaxy

I couldn’t really tell you what the plot is about. Something about an orb that’s the key to the universe. But this is charming and funny. I especially like Groot. Whoever decided that the goon, the muscle, should be a tree is a genius. The cast is great and the banter is light-speed. Marvel managed to make a new, un-popular comic book into a hit. It’s admirable.