Moonlight (2016)

A good movie, not a great one. Some excellent acting, especially Mahershala Ali in the first segment and André Holland in the last section, but the central character is too repressed and spends much of the film reacting to some really bad circumstances. Where are this character's hopes, dreams, internal life, ect? Also, having the adult as a (buff, good looking) repressed virgin seemed like a literary device. How is this guy not getting hit on, and if he is, how is he dealing with that? I get the asexual gay character is less threatening to mainstream audiences, but it's a weak choice and not terribly realistic. The lack of exploration of his interior life, his thoughts, his feelings means we have to project everything onto him based on what is basically a character sketch. But again, it's a solid B+, just not the A+ the hype would suggest.

Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) Silly, funny, excellent music and a gazillion cameos. It's a shame this didn't do better. Grade: A.

Approaching The Unknown (2016) For fans of the "lone astronaut survival story" this is pretty solid, but isn't quite as crowd-pleasing and slick as The Martian which seems like the closest analogue (here we have another problematic mission to Mars). Mark Strong is good in his mostly solo role. Grade: B-.

Keanu (2016) - A few good laughs, but this really felt like a rush job, like they only had a couple passes at the script and got financing so they rushed into production, figuring they could improvise the funny. Key and Peele are talented guys so it mostly works, but is very rough around the edges. Grade: B.

The Invitation (2015) Is something wrong at this dinner party? Because it sure as hell seems off... A surprisingly effective reality-based thriller. A cast of mostly unknowns (with the exception of John Carroll Lynch, who's popping up and being awesome in everything these days) deliver outstanding performances and the writing is superb - good set-ups and delivery of character motivations. Try to go into this without reading too much. Not that it's some big crazy twist that you could never see coming, but... uh.. yeah - go in fresh. Grade: A.

Tower (2016) The rotoscoped documentary about the 1966 University of Texas mass shootings was something I was really looking forward to. Let's just say I have a professional interest and this film was a big deal at work, but I found the focus too narrow. The book "A Sniper in the Tower" gives a complete moment-by-moment account of what happened, and I hoped this documentary would do the same, using the rotoscoping to re-create 1966 to create am immediacy. Instead, the first hand accounts are only from a few survivors, with much of the victim's stories (and almost all of the Charles Whitman story) omitted. Unfortunately only about half of those interviews have stories that are super relevant (with many from people who were there, but only as distant witnesses). The rotoscoping is of a very minimalist variety (perhaps due to limited budget?) to the point where characters are often silhouettes of minimally animated on blank backgrounds, which made it more impressionistic and less of the immediacy of a real event playing out. The Charles Whitman story gets omitted almost entirely. Yeah, I know, focus on the victims, but they also break from that at the end and do a "what could have motivated the killer?" and they don't even do that particularly well as they speculate on evil and not that big ass brain tumor in his head which they never mention. The Whitman story (and what happens to his wife and mother) are really sad and compelling, way more so than some witness giving their account, which often boils down to "I watched this happen from a window". There is so, so much more to this story which you never get and it's a shame since this could have been a definitive work for this event and instead is a small slice that at times gets repetitive (as all hell breaks loose, they keep returning to the same few people, limiting the scope of the tragedy and making the film seem smaller than it should). It's not terrible, just a huge missed opportunity. Grade: B+.