Surrounded by such easily accessible excesses in our lives, it can be tough to know when to tap out—when to say “enough.” “Maybe it was a bad idea to marathon Stranger Things until 3 a.m.” “Perhaps spending my morning reading plot synopses for every film in the Saw series out of morbid curiosity wasn’t the best use of time.” “Why’d I have that third taco?” Etc.

When you’re drinking from the firehose, you end up feeling hosed—and can find your thirst replaced with a sense of drowning.
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That’s where I’ve found myself with superhero movies. Like others who grew up squandering their allowances on Toy Biz X-Men figures and Kenner Batman toys, when Iron Man came and rocket-blasted my adult-sized Superman socks off, I was thrilled with the prospect of a decades-long run of shared comic-book universe films following the colorfully costumed do-gooders of my youth. But then I realized for every Iron Man, there must be an Iron Man 2; for every Guardians of the Galaxy, I’d have to power my way through an Age of Ultron.

The biannual conveyor belt never stops, and after a years-long force-fed binge of superhero schlock, I had become numb to any sense of joy I once derived from seeing the heroes of my childhood comics and cards come to life on the big screen by the time the third Iron Man landed around in 2013.

Enter stage right, Thor: Ragnarok.

I wasn’t. No. I have become wary even of critical acclaim after too many just-OK films got labeled must-sees. “Dude... Logan,” you may have heard. “It’s actually good. Like, it might get a Best Picture nomination—and it should!” (It won’t, and it shouldn’t.) “Captain America: Civil War has a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes,” you may have read. (What? No. Why?) Heck, even the The Dark Knight, the would-be Citizen Kane of comic-book movies, only seems like such a beaut' because it’s surrounded by its plain-looking entourage of superhero film friends.

“Finally, it’s acceptable for children to be murdered in movies again!”

“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”

“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”

“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?

“Yep…”

“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”

“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”

​“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”

“Oh yeah. That was good.”

“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”

“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”

“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”

“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”

​“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”

​“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …

“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”

“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”

“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”

“It doesn’t hold up well.”

“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”

“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”

“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”

“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”

“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”

“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”

“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”

“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”

“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”

“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”

“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”

“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”

“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
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“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”

I find myself not watching so many new comedies these days — not for lack of wanting a chuckle, but for fear of schlepping through another 90-minute laugh-barren wasteland filled with tired tropes and half-baked jokes. Maybe I’m missing out by sitting it out, but when the biggest comedies of the past year include Daddy’s Home, Vacation, and Pixels, I feel fine being the crotchety old man blindly griping that they don’t make them like they used to. 

But the old boob tube is still a decent source for giggles, and the freshly ended run of sketch comedy show Key & Peele on Comedy Central leads us to Keanu — part buddy comedy, part save-the-girl, or rather, save-the-cat quest with funny guys Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. It’s John Wick meets… well, Key & Peele. (Though it’s worth noting the makers of Keanu say there’s no relation to the feline-free bipedal Keanu’s epic revenge flick. Perhaps a pairing of Keanu and baby animals was a discovery destined to happen or a classic example of multiple discovery — like calculus or Dante’s Peak and Volcano.)

No surprise for anyone who’s watched their eponymous show, Key and Peele play off each other perfectly — Key as a George Michaels-loving, minivan-driving dad and Peele as an easy-going movie-obsessed stoner. Their long-refined chemistry gives a sense of sync that seems symbiotic or hive minded. 

While the concept may grow a little stale by the final frames, the overall experience manages to feel like more than a watered down sketch thanks to the simple fact that’s this duo is funny. Bits that would barely classify as a joke work thanks to their delivery and cartoonish reactions — a high-pitched scream at the end of a car chase or a panicked, whispered aside between the pair as they get too deep in the criminal underworld on this quest for their snatched away kitty. 

Whatever faults it might have as a film, Keanu delivers loads of laughs. It’s been some time since I laughed so hard and so much in the theater. If it’s a good time you seek, this kitty’s got claws.

—Eric Pulsifer

There’s something unsettling about being alone in your empty hotel room, sterile and soulless. Perhaps it comes from knowing there are thousands just like yours — their beds tightly made up just like yours, with minibars stocked just like yours, and with occupants flipping through an unappealing selection of on-demand movies just like yours. It’s a fragment of an unseen infinite mirror world of temporary business-casual coffins equipped with inoffensive art, cheap coffee makers, faux-leather ice buckets, and tiny soaps. Maybe that feeling of existential dread is why the Gideons folks have those thousands of Bibles tucked away in those thousands of bedside table drawers.

It’s this setting where the bullk of Charlie Kaufman’s (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Anomalisa takes place. It’s a story about love and loneliness — both in solitude and in a crowd — told through the stop-motion animation of highly detailed life-like puppets. The film follows a day in the life of Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a man who at times is literally falling apart.

Watching Michael and the other puppets of the miniature world of Anomalisa move and interact so like the life-sized counterparts they perfectly mimic is reason enough to see Anomalisa. But the real puppet master is Kaufman, whose writing (paired with outstanding performances from the vocal cast) makes Anomalisa more than just an animated novelty or technical accomplishment.

We see the puppets' seams, but the real, uncomfortable beauty of Anomalisa is how clearly it sees our own seams. It takes us deep through the cracks into the dark and unseen mechanics that pull our own strings.

Besides the cerebral deep dive you'd expect from Kaufman, Anomalisa packs a surprising number of laughs per minute, many of the biggest at the expense of the city of Cincinnati.

If you’re even remotely familiar with what Anomalisa is, you’ve probably read plenty of praising pull quotes about why you should see it, but I’ll caution up front that the less you know about Anomalisa going in the better. Your spoiler barometer might be calibrated differently than my own, but still: The thing that’s not quite right in the world of Anomalisa doesn’t make itself immediately apparent (unless some jerk critic spoiled it for you ahead of time), but as it gradually does, it’s a wonderful Kaufman-esque moment that I'd have hated having revealed to me beforehand. (After you’ve seen the movie, give the name of the hotel Michael stays at a Google for insight into Michael’s mind.)

In the way that different types of art seem to be able to poke and prod at our emotions in different ways, there’s something about trading the real for the surreal with puppets that makes Anomalisa perhaps better suited to examine the human condition than flesh-and-blood thespians.

Anomalisa is an imaginative new voice that sings out from the droning rabble-rabble of the crowd of forgettable clones we typically meet from our their theater seat. It’s a small story, but one that will have a big impact on the viewer long after the credits roll.

—Eric Pulsifer

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation isn’t just a film with the audacity to use a colon AND an em-dash in its title; it’s also the fifth in a series that’s now almost old enough to drink. The latest M:I flick is another globe-trotting, mask-ripping-off, Tom-Cruise-doing-his-own-insane-stunts thriller that hops from Cuba to Vienna to Morocco in the span of 10 minutes screen time.

At this point I’m starting think that Tom Cruise is adopting an Adam Sandler-like approach to making films: just signing up to get paid to hang out with his buddies in exotic locales. But where Sandler and his unfunny band of brothers are smoking weed, sitting on the beach, and cracking fart jokes on lounge chairs made of cash, Tom’s doing inverted crunches, pounding down baked chicken breasts, and hanging on the side of a plane hundreds of feet in the air. Fortunately the results of the latter’s filmed paid vacays are more enjoyable to watch than the former’s.

Still, it’s been quite a few summers since The Bourne Identity (2002) and Casino Royale (2006) recalibrated the Hollywood spy guy as a badass sociopath well-versed in close-quarters combat, and that no-holds-barred / no-fun approach is a little tiresome. Cruise’s super-agent Ethan Hunt — a 50-something who could shred a potato into hash-browns with his sharp, weird side stomach muscle things — is still cut from that same cloth, though fortunately he’s a bit less serious than Damon or Craig (a necessity in a post-Fast and Furious summer landscape). 

In the most welcome addition to the franchise, M:I–5 cranks up the humor more than any of Ethan Hunt’s previous outings. Simon Pegg’s comic relief contributions are certainly good for a laugh, but Cruise’s charming muggings make for some of the funniest bits — thanks to director/co-writer Christopher McQuarrie, who played Cruise to a similar effect for some release from all the white-knuckle madness in Edge of Tomorrow. (An early bit has a young lady familiar with Hunt asking him, "Is it true what they say about you?" To which Cruise considers responding but then simply serves up a puckish grin. If that wasn't intended to be at least a little bit of a joke about the public's perception of Cruise, it sure of hell should have.)

The plot is typical spy-movie fare, something seemingly pulling plot points from a spy-movie word generator (prime minister, access codes, disavow, double agent) and like the rest of the series there’s a bit too much of a reliance on Ethan Hunt’s “I knew this exact situation would happen all along and planned for it.” 

Throughout the tension isn’t as high as in Rogue Nation’s predecessor, Ghost Protocol, but the film’s 15-minute centerpiece is a car-and-motorcycle chase spectacle in two parts that’s worth the price of admission alone. It’s frenetic but easy to follow. (Think: John Wick but with automobiles.) 

Rogue Nation nearly sinks with a silly underwater scene intended to serve as M:I–5’s version of the original’s Cruise dangling from the ceiling bit. It’s a scene Cruise trained to hold his breath six minutes for (and the single shot where he puts that training to the test is impressive enough). But when things go all CGI it feels like a waste of time — and a waste of talent like Cruise, someone who’s willing to throw himself off skyscrapers or into hairpin turns on a crotch-rocket for the sake of getting the shot.

Where Brad Bird’s massively entertaining joy ride Ghost Protocol was the Mission: Impossible series’ Fast and Furious 5 moment, this is it’s Fast and Furious 6. It's certainly not un-entertaining, but, still, it packs a slightly weaker punch… if only because you see it coming.

—Eric Pulsifer