Does a few cool effects make a movie? Nope. But they keep trying. For one thing, any movie directed by someone named "McG" deserves to fail, and hard. But this is really just a confusing mess. It cobbles together all the elements from the old movie: John Conner trying to protect his father, Kyle Reese, who is now younger than he is, because....who got sent back in time again? Oh, well. There's a picture of Linda Hamilton, and recordings of her voice that clearly isn't her. There's unbelievably cheesy CGI of Arnold. None of it makes any sense. How are these people growing food? How are some of them on a submarine? How do they communicate via radio when nothing else works? Why is Michael Ironsides being so intractable? The best things are the motorcylces, which they could have made more of, and used way more. The worst was the cute kid. We all know cute kids go first in dusty dystopias. And if they don't, they should.

How did this win best picture again? I mean, it's interesting and uplifting and well-made. But best picture? It's also cliched and convenient and astoundingly predictable. The best part of it was the photography of the Indian countryside. Any and all of it. A certain transportive feeling of what it might be like to be an abandoned child there. The plot itself is more or less superfluous.

You either love Mumblecore, or you don't. I usuall like its slow, literate take on things. its deliberate subverting of cinema conventions. Here, though, felt like the same scratching of the same itches, but even more immaturely. An homage to Eric Rohmer that's one long improv awkwardness.

Mostly fascinating look at the rise of these two gangs, and the political and social behavior that spawned them that spends a little too much time with decreasingly informative interviews, and not enough time looking into the real motivations of the participants. The notion, and it's the most important one, that young black men since world war two have deliberately and unforgivably been given no choices in terms of alternatives to what the segregated streets of south LA has offered, is effectively hammered home.

I don't mind a movie with an unlikable main character. But there's really no one in this movie to hang any interest or empathy on. Ben Stiller is fairly loathesome and uninteresting in the title role. Which is, of course, intentional. He plays that totally un-self aware person who is furious at the world and horrible to his friends and family because of it. But Greta Gerwig is also totally unsympathetic. Rhys Ifans is the only character that comes close to a sense of humanity, and he's so disaffected and blase that he's not really believable as a character. This was a slog to get through.

Nick Cage traipses through yet another version of Leaving Las Vegas, a man run down by his vices treating the world to unpredictable asides and a goofy grin. I'm a big Herzog fan usually, but I sat through this entire film trying to think of one good reason why it was made. I whiffed. The lizard point of view shots? Sorry, not enough.

Fascinating documentary about the little-known but wildly proliferating process of hydrofracture technology being used to extract natural gas in states across the county, and how this process is poisoning community water supplies. Want to get outraged by yet another money-grab land rape? Here it is. The 'handheld" camera work made me almost as sick to my stomach as the notion of our being screwed as a country by Cheney and Halliburton once again.

All the usual Coen style and wit wrapped up in the usual Coen's confused protagonist. For some reason, although this is made very well, I found this to be less diverting than usual. Boring, in fact. Like I'd seen it all before, even if what I was seeing was more thoughtful and literate than most.

Micheal Cera plays Michael Cera doing Michael Cera. A very modest movie that hits the usual indie funny-spots in sometimes clever ways, and others that are too obvious to be swallowed any longer. Still, the script is good. Some very funny lines. Cera needs to take up sculpture. Or buy a new personality at Walmart.

The first 45 minutes were pretty good. I didn't mind the anti-purist take on Sherlock at all. Why not see him as more of a freak, badass, and flamingly gay? All those parts have always been in him, both in previous films and books. But then the film devolves into an endless fight sequence and Guy Ritchie camera tricks and loses all the flavor on looking upon the personalities anew. Reasonably entertaining, all in all.