BRAD'S STATUS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Writer-director Mike White and Ben Stiller are a match made in heaven for people who like movies that make them uncomfortable. They both specialize in uniquely awkward scenarios. In this case, Stiller plays the titular Brad, a man pushing fifty who is obsessed with comparing his own life accomplishments with those of his friends from college.

The script for Brad's Status is easily its greatest strength, and clearly a lot of people thought so: those college friends make their own brief appearances in the story, and they are played by the likes of Michael Sheen, Luke Wilson, Jemaine Clement, and Mike White himself. All these friends have gone on to far more success than Brad feels he's achieved, since he started a nonprofit and is "merely" middle-class.

Here was have what is essentially a midlife crisis movie, but a rather unusual one. Brad is taking his son Troy (Austin Abrams) on a trip to Boston to tour prospective colleges, and the curious thing about Brad's deep insecurities is how little he presses them on his son. Brad makes mild missteps with Troy, but generally they have a thoughtful, loving, healthy relationship. It's nice to see a story like this where none of the problems stem from a guy's issues with his father.

Brad's Status, in fact, avoids cliche all around -- except that at one point Brad refers to himself as a cliche. This is in the same scene where a young woman of color literally says to him, "Trust me, your life is enough." The whole of this movie could be distilled to that point, with this straight white man paralyzed by envy and an inability to see his own privilege. This alone could make Brad's Status worthy of academic analysis, given the irony in the film itself still putting all of the focus on a straight white man.

I guess it's the rare movie that could perhaps open the minds of other middle-aged straight white men, though. If there were a message here, it would be "You don't have it so bad." There doesn't seem to be any real dysfunction to Brad's family, which is nice, and allows for a more focused, if subtle, look at a man's fragile ego.

Brad marvels at the ability of his wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer), to be just satisfied with the things in her life. I am perhaps in the minority here, but Melanie was who I related to the most -- why spend time regretting untapped ambitions? I watched this movie and thought about how there are literally studies showing that wealth makes people no happier than poor people, and actually poor people are often happier. Brad is so jaded he feels he can make a bigger difference in the world by getting rich and becoming a philanthropist than by running a nonprofit. That's objectively debatable, and soon enough Brad's amusingly ridiculous fantasies about his college friends' imagined great lives give way their respective harsh realities.

Mike White is particularly skilled at nuance, and it takes a while to appreciate the quality of a movie like this. At first Brad is so disillusioned with the direction of his life, as he considers the possibilities for his son, I found myself hoping the whole movie wouldn't be this depressing. But fear not -- Brad's Status may be regularly squirm-inducing in its awkwardness, but it gets less dark as it goes on. It ends in a place surprisingly pleasant, and deeply affecting.

Austin Abrams and Ben Stiller have pretty good lives, it turns out.

Overall: B+

THE TIGER HUNTER

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Context is everything, I suppose. Would I have liked The Tiger Hunter, a pleasant diversion of a feel-good movie, any less if it didn't feel like the perfect antidote to mother! ? I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend anyone rush into theatres to see The Tiger Hunter, and I would warn everyone to stay the hell away from mother! -- yet, if you were to insist on seeing mother!, then The Tiger Hunter is the perfect palate cleanser. It's so oversimplified it's just this side of corny -- if not brainless -- but the performers are every last one of them undeniably sweet and charming.

Something tells me no one involved in the making of The Tiger Hunter expected any direct comparisons to mother!  Well, here I am! But okay I'm done with that line of thinking now. Let's just talk about The Tiger Hunter.

The title is slightly misleading. You get one fleeting glimpse of an actual tiger in the beginning, an imagined flashback to a revered father's time when he saved an Indian village by killing a local tiger. The "present day" of this movie is actually 1979, which means the tiger incident would have been some two decades before. Again with the context: anyone revering the killing of a tiger in 2017 would be met with much derision. It's a different world.

Even 1979 Chicago, to which Sami Malik travels from Indian in search of the good life through an engineering job, is a different world. Sami is played by 38-year-old Danny Pudi, who is himself actually from Chicago. This means the Indian accent he has in the film is faked -- and now I feel a little vindicated thinking his accent didn't sound quite right, especially next to all the genuinely Indian actors in the scenes set in India.

Other than the accent, though -- which is barely noticeable -- Pudi has an irresistible screen presence, his character relentlessly upbeat. Even his smile brightens the screen, as does that of his love interest, Ruby (Karen David), the childhood friend he wants to marry and is trying to impress with a good job so her army general father (Glee's Iqbal Theba) will approve of their union.

Anyway, it sort of makes sense for director and co-writer Lena Khan to set this story in 1979, especially for one about an immigrant. Setting it in 2017 would make it feel far more tone deaf, given all the current politics. Surely 1979 wasn't so ideal either, but it's a lot easier to imagine as a simpler time for people to come to America filled with simple and idealistic dreams.

Sami discovers upon his arrival that the company that had offered him a job has been restructured, and his only opportunity is a bottom-of-the-rung position literally in the basement. This is where he befriends a coworker played by Jon Heder (of Napoleon Dynamite fame). He's also given charity from a Pakisani immigrant (Rizwan Manji) who takes pity on him and invites him to stay at his place. Although it's part of the joke that they get to this apartment and 12 other South Asian engineers with low-level jobs (plus one guy who "looks Bangladeshi, but he's just black" -- one of the odder jokes in the movie), this offer comes so quickly that The Tiger Hunter is rendered its own kind of fantasy very early on.

Everything about this story is simple, and predictable, straightforward, and unchallenging. Sometimes that's exactly what you want. Even as a comedy this story could really have used more depth -- any depth at all, really -- but it's still fine for what it is. It's unoffensive and ridiculously easy to surrender to its charms; to its credit, The Tiger Hunter never quite gets stupid. Sami is just trying to live up to the reputation of his revered "Tiger Hunter" father. Will he succeed? You know the answer to that, but you'll have a nice enough time getting your expectations met.

Danny Pudi stars in the least homoerotic movie ever to feature seven men in a single bed.

Overall: B

MOTHER!

Directing: C
Acting: B+
Writing: D+
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C-

The pretension seeping through every surface of Mother! begins with its very title. What's with that exclamation point? To me, it punctuates the contempt I feel for this movie.

From the very first frame, the reaction is What the fuck? It ends with a bit of a What now? Everything in between makes absolutely zero things about it clear. Darren Aronofsky is a truly accomplished director, but I guess in his middle age he's more interested in offering a cinematic version of a stroke. He clearly wants his audience to understand Mother! is about something. What is it about, then? Someone explain it to me. No, I take that back. I wasted two hours of my life on this movie already.

I don't even know how I could offer any spoilers. Mother! is rotten as soon as it starts. But it's a sneaky kind of rotten, like when you chew a bite of food a few times, pleasantly oblivious until you realize there are maggots in your mouth. Too disgusting for you? Well . . . spoiler alert! There's a point in Mother! where a rabid crowd of zealots eat the main character's baby. Why that happens, I couldn't tell you. Darren Aronofsky should have a chat with Cormack McCarthy. Now there's a guy who knows how to make effective use of baby eating.

I couldn't provide a logical reason behind a single one of the choices Aronofsky makes in Mother! Well, except maybe for his decision to cast Michelle Pfeiffer, in one of the countless mystifying and/or pointless supporting roles. Pfeiffer is legitimately hilarious in this movie, which is weird because of how dark and disturbing it is. For a while, anyway. Then it's just oppressively chaotic. By then, Pfeiffer has disappeared. But when she's on screen, she plays the wife of a surprise house guest (a cigarette-hacking Ed Harris) as a deliciously cold bitch. We need to see more of Michelle Pfeiffer.

The point of view is from Jennifer Lawrence's nameless protagonist. Or is it? It would sure seem so, with Matthew Libatique's cinematography incessantly following her around this gigantic house she never leaves, right behind her head. She's consistently bewildered. It's her one emotion during this story that I could relate to.

It doesn't take long to realize time isn't quite linear. Things switch around too quickly. We learn that she helped restore this entire house, a massive house with countless rooms that evidently stands in the middle of a field with no roads to it, after it burned to the ground. "I lost everything," says her husband, played by Javier Bardem. These are two excellent actors who, in this instance, occasionally don't seem so excellent thanks to some clunky or subtly bizarre dialogue. By the end, there's an endless sequence in which reality gets so distorted that I couldn't tell if this was all an echo of a literal apocalypse (a word Jennifer Lawrence actually utters at one point), or maybe her character was nuts and having hallucinations so elaboriate that at one point the house literally turns into a war zone. I'm talking graphically shot soldiers, bullets through the face.

Weirdly -- I mean, this whole movie is weird -- Mother! startled me several times, like it was trying to be a horror movie, but each of them occurs within the first half. I even jumped when the heart that appears in the toilet squirts blood. Oh, and the toad in the basement.

I'm sure film snobs will insist this movie's "deeper meaning" is clear and anyone who can't figure out what the fuck it was about or what literally any of it means is a moron. There's a strong sense of allegory, just nothing even approaching clarity.

I found the massive marketing push over the past couple of weeks to be suspect, and I was right. Someone saw this movie and said, "Let's bombard the public with so much advertising that they give in before they knew what hit them!" I, on the other hand, put my trust in a proven director. But, even the greats typically make one or two steaming piles of shit movies.

Could this have been better if it were edited differently, maybe? Surely? Did all these great actors really read this script and say, "I have to be a part of this!" Did Darren Aronofsky roofie them all? Seriously, I don't understand. I can't remember the last movie I willingly sat through that had so few genuinely redeeming qualities. We're meant to ask, Is any of this real? By the last quarter of this movie I was just thinking, Get on with it! At least give us the detail that ties this mess together. And then the so-called twist comes in the closing scene and it's simultaneously dumb, disappointing, and more confusing the more you consider everything that preceded it. All that's left is the compulsion to warn the world not to waste their time and money on this movie.

Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are like whaaat and so is everyone in the audience all day forever.

Overall: C-

BEACH RATS

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Here is a young actor to keep an eye out for: Harris Dickinson, who is a revelation in Beach Rats, as Frankie, a sexually repressed and confused teen living in Brooklyn. Dickinson is himself all of 20 years old, and grew up in London, and yet it's impossible to imagine any other actor better conveying the fine nuances of Frankie's complex range of emotions -- his self-doubt, his inner struggles, even his internalized homophobia.

Writer-Director Eliza Hittman unpacks this story with deceptive simplicity. She also ends it with a frustrating lack of any resolution whatsoever, something at once respectable and maddening. It's the one true complaint I might have about this film, the way it feels like it ends abruptly in the middle of Frankie's story. Being ambiguous is one thing; fading quickly to black at a seemingly random moment is quite another.

Until that end, however, Beach Rats is a uniquely compelling vision, Frankie systematically making your heart break for him. He hangs out with three straight "bro" types whose behaviors he emulates. It's only after an opening scene in which Frankie is on his computer trolling for older men that we find this out. And he meets a sweet girl (Madeline Weinstein) on the boardwalk while hanging out there with said friends. She complicates things as she makes bold moves in pursuit of Frankie, who has difficulty feigning arousal.

Beach Rats is unusually frank in its depictions of sex, no doubt made easier by its lacking of an MPAA rating. Just consider it a hard-R, considering the number of (flaccid) penises that flash on the screen -- several of them on Frankie's computer as he clicks through a Chat Roulette type site evidently local to Brooklyn. But whether they are of Frankie and Simone making fumbling attempts at physical intimacy, or Frankie and several older men he takes to the beach at night, all these scenes are tastefully shot.

The cinematography, in fact, is regularly hypnotic -- even shots of Frankie and his friends blowing smoke rings at a hookah bar. Beach Rats was shot by Hélène Louvart, who has a long resume but also shot Pina, the 2011 tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch that is arguably the single documentary in history that worked stupendously in 3D. Beach Rats employs a lot of handheld camera work which is seamlessly and beautifully integrated into the story.

That story takes a darker turn near the end, and that's after learning that his father is dying of cancer. He has a younger sister with her own interest in boys, and a mother with clearly too much on her emotional plate. Then Frankie and his friends hatch a plan to get drugs off one of the guys he finds on that website -- he convinces the guys that it's all he uses the site for. Frankie does a lot of drugs, including snorting pills he snatches from his father's prescriptions and crushes into powder.

Now all they want is weed. But in this endeavor, things get increasingly uncomfortable. A feeling builds, that this is going nowhere good. Where it heads is something that could have been worse. It could also be a lot better. Such is the case with Frankie. But if you're looking for either a definitive sign of hope or confirmation of hopelessness with this poor kid, you won't find either one of them here. Will his turmoil go on for the rest of his life? You might leave this movie just overcome with the wishful thinking that one day he'll be okay. That feeling is a credit to both the film's assured direction and Harris Dickinson's unsurpassed performance.

Harris Dickinson gives a uniquely heartbreaking performance in Beach Rats.

Overall: B+

HOME AGAIN

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Home Again had a unique effect on me. I can't think of any other movie that started out inadvertently creeping me out and ended by winning me over with its objectively contrived charms. I can't even think of anyone I would recommend this movie to, at least not fairly. If I wanted to jump right into sweeping generalizations, I'd say that superficial and/or easily entertained middle-aged women would love it. Okay maybe also superficial and/or easily entertained middle-aged gay men.

Everyone else? Not so much. Smug intellectuals and anyone who fancies themselves a movie connoisseur would revel in tearing this movie apart. This movie isn't for them anyway.

Home Again has much in common with Nancy Meyers movies like Something's Gotta Give (2003) and It's Complicated (2009) -- and for good reason: it's written and directed by Meyers's own daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, practically as an homage. I'll give her this much credit: Meyers may be well-known for placing characters in lavishly decorated homes that seem far more expensive than they could possibly afford, but Meyers-Shyer actually lends the impeccable home some real plausibility. Reese Witherspoon's Alice Kinney lives in a gorgeous home left to her by her late dad who was a famous film director. And after all, Meyers-Shyer knows from having a famous film director parent.

The plausibility of the premise is another story. Alice, on her fortieth birthday, meets a blandly handsome twenty-something, Harry (Pico Alexander), at a bar, and takes both him and his two friends home. Harry sleeps in her bed after getting sick before they can consummate a would-be one-night stand, and his friends pass out on living room couches. Before she knows it, Alice's formerly famous actor mother (Candice Bergen, given not near enough to do) is suggesting she allow these "struggling artist" types who are trying to get a movie made to stay a few nights in her guest house.

Harry is a director, and his friends are writer George (Jon Rudnitsky) and actor Teddy (Nat Wolff). Together they form this one-dimensional trio of young Stepford Men whose main quality is that they all embody what every adoring old lady imagines their grandson to be, which is to say, flawlessly wholesome. These guys are always just barely off from how normal humans interact with each other, another writer could really take this into another direction and reveal them to be pod people. Honestly, I don't think Hallie Meyers-Shyer really knows what it's like to be young and trying to make it as a filmmaker in L.A. These kids get all the luck, encounter no grime or starvation, and somehow successfully move in on what in L.A. qualifies as a upper-middle-class family. Anywhere else, Alice would simply be rich.

Somehow, though, even in L.A., Alice has no entitlement complex, and neither do these three young men. That seems left up to the "socialite" played magnificently by Lake Bell, who briefly employs Alice as the fledgling interior designer she's attempting to reinvent herself as.

And that's the thing about Home Again, really: the performances. The material is far too trite for any of it to be exactly Oscar-worthy, and yet all of the seasoned players elevate the material. Meyers-Shyer's writing has serious room for improvement, but Reese Witherspoon hasn't met a single line of dialogue she can't make work. It doesn't take long to start rooting for Alice, even though her problems are so benign. Everyone in this movie is so relentlessly pleasant, not even Michael Sheen as the separated husband can manage to be unlikable. Alice has two young daughters who are, of course, both precocious and adorable.

There are no shitbags in this universe! In Los Angeles. That alone should disqualify the whole movie. But, as the story went on, I found myself won over by this objectively stupid movie, because -- well, that's what well-executed fantasies do. Home Again doesn't present itself as a fantasy, which is one of its many problems. It also has three Millennial men so "decent" they come off as anachronistic. It's like members of the Cleaver family from Leave It to Beaver time traveled to present day but somehow just didn't notice. Although, okay, Harry Cleaver does have sex with a forty-year-old woman. Leave it to someone in the Meyers family to make even that come across as wholesome.

Not that it can't be, mind you. It's just that in the Meyers world, there are no truly deep character flaws -- only minor mistakes the world's exclusively good people quickly learn from. Honestly, nothing about this movie is sensible, except for the idea that a woman can date a younger man and not be judged for it. It's disconcerting to see such a ridiculous story carried by winning performances.

Reese Witherspoon and Pico Alexander make an attractive inter-generational sandwich.

Overall: B-

THE TRIP TO SPAIN

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

One has to wonder: are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon just going to keep making these movies every few years, for the rest of their lives? Honestly I wouldn't mind so much; as long as the quality stays relatively consistent, I'm likely to keep coming back. Whether I recommend it to others is another question.

The Trip in 2011 was light, breezy fun; The Trip to Italy in 2014 was more light, breezy fun. The Trip to Spain is also light, breezy fun, but there is a reason I don't change the words used to describe it: it's fundamentally still more of the same. Fun, yes -- but hardly original at this point.

The one thing that sets this installment apart, aside from the specific country of its setting (the original took place in Coogan and Brydon's native Britain), is a potentially baffling twist ending. It's widely open to interpretation, and not necessarily in keeping with the spirit of the previous two films, or even this film up to that point. It feels very much like a cliffhanger, but could it be a pointed ending to what will only ever be a trilogy?

It's difficult to imagine a fourth film picking up from here and then somehow reverting to another light jaunt through the countryside, our two heroes sampling fine restaurants at a different location every evening. But, I suppose, with the right talent, it could be pulled off. If the same pattern were to continue, we'd have another installment in 2020. Presumably it would also be directed by Michael Winterbotom, who directed all three films as well as creating the British television series of the same name that preceded them. It also starred Coogan and Brydon.

In any case, like its predecessors, The Trip to Spain features these two traveling together, driving from town to town, occasionally visiting tourist spots, but most of the time onscreen is spent with them sitting at dinner tables in restaurants. The two men verbally spar with each other, mostly through comic impressions, the majority of which are of Michael Caine or Sean Connery -- just as they were in the other films. As I said: more of the same.

That said, it's still funny. There is very little in the way of plot in these movies, and occasionally punch lines take rather long and circuitous routes to their arrival. It's relatively specific humor: if you don't get it, you'll probably be bored; if you do get it, you'll be entertained. I fell into the latter category.

There's also an added undercurrent of melancholy, with more discussions about aging and how that affects career and relationships. In a way <i>The Trip</i> series is thematically a comic version of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise series, although those movies are far more profound, and made nine years apart instead of three. These ones, to their credit, are funnier.

And a little bit self-deprecating, too. Coogan and Brydon play fictionalized versions of themselves -- for instance, in real life, Coogan has a 21-year-old daughter; in the movie, he has a 20-year-old son. He does mention in the movie that he's been nominated for two Oscars, which is true (although he doesn't mention they were for the same movie). His phone conversations with disloyal agents are likely a little to the left of reality, but he does depict himself as an actor type who could benefit from a little more self-awareness. This feeds in a bit, arguably, to that twist ending, although many audiences are going to find it more offensive than merely provocative as intended. Maybe for Winterbottom that's part of the point.

Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan tell it like it is through more celebrity impressions in The Trip to Spain.

Overall: B

INGRID GOES WEST

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

I was afraid Ingrid Goes West might be annoying, with its stalker-needy protagonist. It probably says something that instead of annoying me, Ingrid made me deeply uncomfortable. And to a degree, Taylor Sloane, the object of Ingrid's obsession, did too. She's plenty obsessed with putting up a front on social media herself.

What director and co-writer Matt Spicer shows us with this movie is there is a fine line between Ingrid and Taylor, and far too much of the time, far too many of us straddle that line. Obsession comes in all forms, as does addiction. These are characters reflecting a world of people ironically desperate to present themselves as authentic.

In the opening scene, Ingrid, played with quiet menace by Aubrey Plaza, crashes a wedding. She maces the bride and screams that it's what she gets for not inviting her. But Ingrid is the very kind of mentally unstable person who can't see that her behavior is why she wasn't invited. We later learn that she never really was close friends with this woman anyway. That's not a spoiler; it's the setup. After some time spent in a mental hospital -- Ingrid is genuinely mentally unbalanced -- she sets her sights on a new target.

Taylor is the subject of a photo spread in a magazine, and it's still unclear to me exactly why. Just because she's gotten a ton of followers on Instagram, maybe? The headline says something to the effect of "Taylor Sloane wants to be your best friend." Ingrid takes this seriously, cashes a ton of inheritance money and moves to L.A. where Taylor lives.

There's a bit of a dichotomy in Ingrid Goes West's presentation of social media and its use. On the one hand, few movies get it so right -- the time people spend on it, and what kind of psychological effects it can have. On the other hand, although I can't remember if its brand logo is ever actually visible onscreen, the one app any of them uses is clearly Instagram, and in what world would that be the only social media anyone ever uses? Apparently in this one, the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat -- none of them exist.

That doesn't prevent this movie from being deeply cutting satire, mind you. Although it's billed as a comedy, and much of it is funny in ways that sneak up on you, it has a pervasive, lingering creepiness. Much of what these people do, in a multitude of subtle ways, hits a little close to home for anyone who spends a lot of time on social media. A minor example: early on, Ingrid is typing a comment on one of Taylor's Instagram posts. She types, and deletes, and types and deletes. Who among us has never done this?

It's worth noting, though, that Taylor herself is a perfectly drawn social media presence, all presentation and no substance -- at least not on her Instagram account. Elizabeth Olsen created a fake Taylor Sloane account on Instagram to learn and do research, but Matt Spicer could have just as easily found one of countless actors already using Instagram in the same way. Olsen was arguably a better choice, as she clearly understands that Taylor Sloane the character may not quite have the same objective look at how this story plays out.

It plays out in ways you don't quite see coming, and is all the better for it. Ingrid Goes West illustrates in painfully accurate ways how social media exacerbates our deepest insecurities. Ingrid herself may have genuine mental health issues -- which Aubrey Plaza plays with sympathy and compassion -- but she's never so many steps away from the average social media power-user that they can't see how easily it can be to end up where she spirals to.

Being set in Los Angeles, Ingrid Goes West also finds unique ways to jab at Hollywood and L.A. culture. Ingrid befriends her landlord, Dan Pinto (O'Shea Jackson Jr., giving a subtly comic performance all his own), and he is obsessed with Batman. This alone makes Ingrid Goes West a great movie for Batman fans, with its many references to the movies. Ingrid manipulates Dan by using his fandom, complete with a corny sex scene with her dressed as Catwoman that directly references famous bits from Batman Returns.

Social media has arguably transformed our world more dramatically than anything since the very invention of the Internet. Many movies have tried to capture the detailed effects of that transformation and failed spectacularly. Ingrid Goes West is one movie that for once gets it right.

Elizabeth Olsen and Aubrey Plaza's moment of peace will momentarily be replaced by the next post in your feed.

Overall: B+

GIRLS TRIP

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

It's been six years now since Bridesmaids was released, and enough time has passed to make it clear that it paved the way for many undeniably similar films that will forever be compared to it. In fact, we may even be in Peak Bridesmaids Effect: this summer has yielded not one, but two crass comedies featuring ensemble female casts. Could it be that studio executives are finally admitting to themselves that there really are audiences for these movies?

The two movies in question do have a bit of a racial disparity. The first one, Rough Night, was released in June and had a mostly white cast (with the exception of Zoë Kravitz). It was poorly reviewed and so I never bothered to see it. I was convinced to see Girls Trip, which features four middle-aged black women friends taking their first trip together in five years, because the critical consensus was far more positive.

A bit more positive than my personal review will be, to be honest -- but, to be fair, only a bit. I found Girls Trip to be disappointingly contrived and often unnecessarily hokey. As always with a movie like this, it could be argued that the only sensible response to such a statement is: so what? This movie made me laugh, and I had fun. I was occasionally embarrassed for its stars, in its many cornier moments, but the long term impact of these moments was minor.

Presumably all four of the principal characters are in their mid-forties; three of them -- Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah -- are played by actors ranging in age from 45 to 47. The clear breakout star of Girls Trip, Tiffany Haddish, on the other hand, is 37. Was her character a child prodigy ten years ahead of her peers when all these women were in college together? I suppose I'm nitpicking now. Technically even at 37 that's middle-aged.

They certainly all four have great chemistry together. And while Pinkett Smith, Hall and Latifah are all lovely and give their characters plenty of dimension, Haddish is funnier than the other three put together. If there is any one reason to see this movie, it's her. Her energy bursts off the screen.

These movies do seem to feel obliged to have at least one gross-out scene played for laughs. There's no shitting in the streets -- but there is peeing, from a suspended position over a French Quarter street in New Orleans, with an encore! I saw this movie by myself and kind of wished I had gone with a woman friend so I could ask: would the pee really spray that wide, if pushed through pants? Inquiring minds want to know.

It's the kind of scene about which it's easy to have mixed feelings, a set piece clearly intended to give the film some level of notoriety. It did make me laugh. The humor throughout the rest of the film, coming from a more authentic place, is far more satisfying. It's worth noting that this was directed by a man, Malcolm D. Lee, and he seems to be fully on board with celebrating black women with fully realized sexuality, while simultaneously telling a story that stresses the importance of true friendship. Girls Trip does come close to getting treacly, but it never quite crosses that line.

It's easy to believe these four women are longtime friends, who mean the world to each other but also harbor longtime and specific resentments. Any middle-aged person, regardless of gender or race, can relate. This movie's circumstances are specific, if somewhat contrived, but its themes are universal. You could do worse than spend a couple of hours hanging out with these ladies.

Regina Hall, Tiffany Haddish, Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah let loose on a Girls Trip.

Overall: B

WIND RIVER

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

When it comes to Wind River, the story is okay. What makes it worth a look is its setting, its characters and how they relate to each other. It's a rather dark and depressing reflection of the ongoing despicable American treatment of Native people. Its central character, Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), works as a tracking hunter on a reservation, for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

In a way you could call Wind River a modern take on cowboys and Indians. The long history of government neglect is unsubtly hinted at; the fact that this neglect followed outright genocide never mentioned. The fact that the tortured hero of this story is a white man is problematic at best, his ex-wife and the father of his daughter's best friend being Native the Hollywood script version of "Some of my best friends are Indians." Surely there are plenty of worthy stories to tell in which the heroes are Native?

But, okay, let's just resign ourselves to that framework, then. Wind River features multiple strong female characters, although predictably the one with the greatest focus is a white one, FBI agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen). She's brought in to investigate the killing of a teenage girl Cory has found dead in the snow, miles from any homes, while out tracking and hunting mountain lions. Local farmers hire Cory to hunt predators who are attacking their livestock.

The victim is a young Native American woman, who happened to have been best friends with Cory's daughter, who herself died under vaguely similar circumstances three years ago. Her name is Natalie (Kelsey Asbille), and she is the first character we see, in a striking image of her running for her life through the snow toward the mountains in the moonlight -- until she collapses. We later see her in flashback. We see her mother too, but only briefly, and with no lines of dialogue.

There are several Native American actors featured, at least. Natalie's father is played by longtime character actor Gil Birmingham (perhaps best known from the Twilight saga); and the ranking reservation law enforcement officer is played by Dances with Wolves's Graham Greene. Several of the supporting parts are also played by Native actors, which writer-director Taylor Sheridan was very deliberate about in casting. It does give the story an extra weight it would not otherwise have.

Whatever its imperfections -- Sheridan also wrote, but did not direct, both Sicario and Hell or High Water, each of which were among the best films of the past two years -- Wind River nicely rounds out Sheridan's trilogy of American Frontier films. Each of them examines a different, very specific intersection of American cultures, and all are worth the time. Wind River is maybe slightly less compelling in story execution, but it still has something to say that needs to be heard. How many people know that Native American women are the only demographic group for which numbers of missing persons are not tallied? That's insane.

That said, Wind River isn't exactly a good time -- although you wouldn't quite say the same of Taylor Sheridan's other films either. This is only Sheridan's second feature film as a director, and he is less assured as a director than as a writer. It makes this movie worthy, but not vital. It sticks with you, challenging its audience in respectable ways, while remaining beholden to certain Hollywood tropes in other ways. The story is well constructed, tense, and often gripping. It offers a slice of American life that gets far too little attention. If it weren't for its typical presentation through the eyes of white heroes, it could have been a great movie rather than merely a very good one.

Jeremy Renner is on the hunt for salvation in a white world.

Overall: B+

LOGAN LUCKY

Directing: A
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Any time someone says they're never doing something again, don't believe them. Every "Farewell Tour" by any singer or band inevitably winds up followed by what might as well be called "The Just Kidding Tour." And Steven Soderbergh, who insisted he was done with theatrical motion pictures, took all of four years to return triumphant with Logan Lucky, easily one of his best films, and certainly his most fun since Ocean's Eleven (2001).

And Logan Lucky has a fair amount in common with Ocean's Eleven, which it even acknowledges in its own tightly polished script -- by one Rebecca Blunt, and here's a new twist: with no other credits, her bio on iMDB.com states, in part, "As of July 2017, suspected to be a fictitious person; a pseudonym for an, as yet, unidentified person." Whoever she is, she's an excellent writer. I honestly hope it's not Soderbergh himself. Anyway, a news segment in the film has people calling the heist around which the story revolves "Ocean's Seven-Eleven." Wink-wink. They also call it "the Hillbilly Heist." Clever.

Because, you see, Logan Lucky is essentially Ocean's Eleven meets O Brother, Where Art Thou? It just has characters who are far less sophisticated than those in the former film, yet far smarter than those in the latter. Channing Tatum is Jimmy Logan, laid off of his job because he failed to disclose his limp which qualifies as a "preexisting condition." He enlists the help of his one-handed veteran bartender brother Clyde Logan (Adam Driver) and his hairdresser sister Mellie Logan (Riley Keough) to snatch a bunch of the money out of the vault underneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina during the Coca-Cola 600 race.

Soderbergh introduces us to Jimmy and Clyde in a somewhat serious way as the movie opens. If you haven't seen the trailer and go into this movie cold, the beginning would make you think it was a drama. But Soderbergh has many tricks up his sleeve, not least of which is how he expertly, and gradually, makes the story more fun -- and funny -- as it goes along. This is the rare movie that is genuinely full of surprises.

Consider this: Logan Lucky has a large ensemble cast playing exclusively Southerners, and it never judges them, or even hints at its audience judging them. Not even when Jimmy's daughter, who is parented by Jimmy as the semi-absent father and a mother played by Katie Holmes in a welcome supporting part, participates in the Miss West Virginia Pageant. She's got enough makeup on that to be almost creepy, but this movie treats it like a normal part of Southern life. And maybe there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, the choice of the song the girl opts to sing during the pageant becomes a key plot point. In any case, this is one movie Southerners can watch without feeling like their intelligence is being insulted.

Jimmy and Clyde need an explosives expert friend who is in prison to assist them in getting into the vault. This guy, Joe Bang, is played by Daniel Craig, clearly having a blast. Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson also show up as Fish Bang and Sam Bang, his smart yet unwise brothers. And I haven't even gotten yet to Hilary Swank and Macon Blair as the FBI agents who don't even show up until about the last quarter of the film, or Seth MacFarlane, totally unrecognizable as one of the NASCAR drivers. Steven Soderbergh seems to be gaining something in common with Woody Allen: a wide swath of Hollywood talent is clearly eager to be part of his ensemble casts, no matter how small the part.

And every such part here is key, and fits perfectly into a complex story told with as much skill and empathy as humor; the performances are top notch across the board. This is rare for a comedy, although this film is not strictly comedy. It's more of a crime drama that also happens to be consistently funny. There is real depth to all of the characters, even the ones that seem to exist for comic relief. They all have many dimensions, and feel genuine and real.

Perhaps most importantly, Logan Lucky will simply leave you with a huge grin on your face, its ending tying a bunch of supporting characters together in a sort of succession of callbacks that is uniquely clever. This is a story that ends both warming the heart and just making you feel happy. It's a crowd pleaser with emotional heft. The more I think about this movie the more impressed I am with it. It defies you to underestimate it.

Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig and Adam Driver hatch a plan that will surprise and delight you.

Overall: A-