Super straight forward movie review for me on this one: I loved Silver Linings Playbook. The story of two completely messed up, completely lost and lonely people who come together at their recovery phase.

Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence are simply brilliant as Pat and Tiffany. The dialog is perfect, honest and so well delivered that they feel and act like believably broken people. Their chemistry together is remarkable and I even liked Robert De Niro as Pat’s father (whenever I see De Niro in a recent movie, I usually can’t shake the ‘there’s De Niro!’ reminder. Same with Al Pacino.) They even got Chris Tucker to come out of hiding for a fun little role!

It’s a touching movie that looks at mental illness and relationships that left me feeling like I watched on of the best movies of the year. I thought there were a few odd camera shot choices (really abrupt and dramatic zooms) that distracted me, but SLP deserved all the attention it got for the 2012 awards season.

Elysium is writer/director Neil Blomkamp’s second movie. That name alone meant I was going to see it. District 9 is arguably the best sci-fi movie released in the last decade, so I had high hopes for Blomkamp’s follow up. What I got was a good, but not great movie.

District 9 was a real breath of fresh air. It was really original, it came out of nowhere, had fantastic no name actors and looked insane for having a small ($30 million) budget. District 9 is just awesome. I can’t fault much of anything on a technical level for Elysium. Many of those high standards carried over from D9. In fact, Sharlto Copley is in this film and he’s done a huge character shift. In D9 he was the nobody turned reluctant hero through horrific circumstances. In Elysium he is a fantastic villain, the rabid merc Kruger, chasing down the hero Max (Matt Damon). Damon is great in this too, he’s proven he can pull off action the Bourne series and he makes for a likable hero.

Story wise, I found Elysium to be too predictable and heavy handed. In 130 years, Elysium is a space station that holds the incredibly wealthy. Earth is more or less dying out. Pollution is choking it out, the human population is way too high to be sustained by what’s left. Elysium is Eden, a floating utopia with amazing healthcare. It’s kinda silly how awesome it is. The people in charge of Elysium do all they can to keep the undesirables out. Back on Earth, Max gets seriously sick from work and has 5 days to get to Elysium for a cure.

Now my problems. You can see every step of where this movie goes before it happens. There’s not much finesse going on here. The message that all humans are equal is made early and made often. It wisely avoids going for a “us vs them” wealth inequality or immigration and focuses on healthcare. People don’t need to die in the streets for any reason when a solution is there. But the movie never let’s that sit and keeps reminding you every 20 minutes. Plus, the healthcare McGuffin Machine is a real Messiah like device. The thing can do anything with just a few sweeps of a laser. Lay down in this thing and it can heal anything as long as you aren’t brain dead or your heart is missing from your body. The movie shows us a world in 130 years that we’ve completely mastered our biology and it feels too sci-fi perfect because the machine is so simple. No matter what it is, blood disorders, genetic diseases, broken bones, body reconstruction, it just takes a wave of a wand to cure.

While I was hoping for more, I still liked Elysium quite a bit. Definitely one of the better movies released this summer, it stands as a really good sci-fi movie. The future tech is really well visualized, it looks and sounds great and the action is really striking. Held down by a capable cast, Elysium is a movie to see.

The Man with the Iron Fists is RZA’s love letter to kung fu movies. It’s a hell of an achievement too! He fell in love with kung fu movies when he was 9, infused the culture into his rap group The Wu Tang Clan and made it all the way to China to direct a major motion picture he co-wrote.

The story goes that a shipment of gold is heading through the Jungle Village. Rival gangs, assassins and the government clash over the gold where the local black smith is caught in the middle. His only goal was to make enough money to escape the area with his girlfriend, but the new leader of the Lion gang puts an end to that. A classic tale of revenge and justice mixed with flying fists and feet.

RZA touches on all the classic step stones of the old kung fu flicks, monks, meditation, cool weapons, wire work, fights a plenty, elaborate and gorgeous costumes, super powerful villains and characters with awesome names (Jack Knife, Poison Dagger, Madam Blossom, Lady Silk).

If you like kung fu movies, check this out lickity split. There’s some solid action, if a bit too quick cut, but there’s a lot of great ideas and love on display here. Congrats to RZA on making his boyhood dream come true.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Huntersis a spin on the Grimm’s fairytale. Hansel and Gretel are woken up by their mother and father in the middle of the night. Their father takes them out to the woods for a unknown reason where they are separated. They kids stumble upon a house made of candy where they get trapped by a witch with some serious ill intent. But the kids fight back and kill the witch, which starts their career as which bounty hunters!

Jump forward many years and the brother and sister are really good at what they do. They have custom weapons, they’ve become knows as the go to people for village witch problems. The next hour or so of the movie is a romp to stop a devious witch plan to sacrifice 12 children so that they can become immune to fire, making these witches even more dangerous.

It’s a cool monster movie. These are some vicious witches, they each have their own unique design and are dispatched in different ways, The weapons Hansel and Gretel have a really cool, the fights are creative and mostly well done (a lot of fast editing), the effects are very good too (the emphasis on making explosions extra shrapnel-y for the 3D is tiresome and gross though). Edward the Troll is one of my favorite movie creatures now. It’s actually like the witch version of Blade; comic book fantasy.

Good cast and story that’s set up nicely for a sequel. It’s rated R for violence and language, both of which seemed to be in there to try and make it edgy. The gore fits considering what’s going on and there are good moments in there (decapitations, quartering, full body explosions) the cursing always felt out of place to me. Great rental for a rainy day.

The To Do Listis in the high school coming of age genre. Here, it’s 1993 and Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) is the class valedictorian and feels pressure to become more sexually experienced before college starts. She takes it on like it’s an AP course. She writes a To Do list with different colored markers, looking up terms that she doesn’t know. It seems like everyone she knows is more experienced than her, so she turns to her two friends, her older sister and even her mother to get advise on how to make her love life blossom.

It’s a funny movie that is way more raunchy than I thought it was going to be. Some of the stuff you see Aubrey do stands right next to the most notorious stuff that the American Pie movies did. The cast is great, I really liked the 90’s setting and it felt like an honest view of sexuality from a girl’s perspective. Sure things are ramped up to set up and follow through on jokes, but I really enjoyed it. I can’t really think of anything I didn’t like (actually, the last joke wasn’t necessary). It was really well made. Perfect run time, good editing and direction, lots of references and homages. This movie snuck out, I don’t think many people know about it. I think it’ll catch a big audience when it’s released to home viewership.