Irrational Man (2015)

Woody Allen is the rare filmmaker proficient in both comedy and drama. But his latest release, an uneven mix of burlesque and menace, reveals a lack of commitment to either and suffers for it. Read the rest of the review.

Mr. Holmes (2015)

In the opening scene of director Bill Condon’s (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls) latest film, an aged Sherlock Holmes, played by Ian McKellan, determinedly wobbles from the Sussex train station to his country cottage. One of his first tasks on his return home is to check on the apiary he keeps on the picturesque property; the other the prickly ash plant he’s just brought back from Japan. It’s 1947 and the famous private detective, 93, has been retired for 30 years. His biggest case now involves discovering what’s killing his beloved bees. Read the full review here.

Trainwreck (2015)

It’s usually not difficult to tell whether Amy Schumer is in on the joke. On her Comedy Central sketch show “Inside Amy Schumer,” she’s clearly in charge of the spoof despite portraying characters who, more often than not, are guilty of the behaviors her writing skewers. She’s admitted she likes playing dumb and obnoxious, but with a subversive punchline payoff. Unfortunately, in Schumer’s first feature film, shanghaied by producer/director Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up), her part in the parody is less incontrovertible. Read the full review here.

Amy (2015)

If ever there were another public figure deserving of director Asif Kapadia’s (Senna) sympathetic posthumous treatment, it’s Amy Winehouse. It’s been almost four years since the English singer/songwriter died from alcohol poisoning at age 27, and Kapadia seeks to liberate her abbreviated but resonant musical legacy from the pathetic caricature written about in the tabloids. Read the full review here.

Magic Mike XXL (2015)

In 2012 director Steven Soderbergh titillated, and by turns implicated, audiences with a double-edged look at male strippers. Notwithstanding its hyperbolic title, the sequel, directed by Soderbergh’s longtime first assistant director Gregory Jacobs, takes a smaller view of the subject matter. Read the full review here.

Spy (2015)

Director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat) reunites with actor Melissa McCarthy for a spy movie satire, which Feig also wrote. More than just a spoof of James Bond films, Spy’s mocking jabs at well-worn tropes hit their mark, bringing a smart indictment against Hollywood’s double standards of beauty while also pulling off the near-impossible task of still being funny. Read the full review here.

Entourage (2015)

The storyline is anemic at best, and completely circumvents the process of moviemaking, which in its early days the show did best, reveling in the details of how a movie actually gets made. Now that Ellin has actually made a movie, he’s avoided all discussion of it. Read the full review here.

Ex Machina (2015)

To describe screenwriter Alex Garland’s (28 Days Later, Sunshine) directorial debut as film noir disguised as science fiction could be giving away the plot. But anyone unsuspecting of the final femme fatale reveal deserves to have the story spoiled. Read full review here.

Pitch Perfect 2 (2015)

About halfway through Pitch Perfect 2, the members of the Barden Bellas reprise a signature song from the first movie in an attempt to recover their spark. In this solipsistic follow-up to about the all it’s a cheap shot, referencing a genuinely surprising and authentic moment and forcing it to burden an emotional appeal under an entirely different set of circumstances. Read the full review here. 

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

In Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller has brought back his vision of a nightmarish post-apocalyptic wasteland, which turned Mad Max (1979); Mad Max 2 (1981), known better as The Road Warrior, and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) into cult classics; their raw post-punk expression influencing on-screen dystopias for the last 30 years. Neither prequel nor sequel, the latest in the series is a do-over in the same vein of George Lucas’ 1997 Star Wars re-releases — altered to take advantage of advances in visual effects and sound quality — but at least Miller had sense enough to leave his originals intact. Read the review here.

Merchants of Doubt (2015)

It’s been a long, embattled nine years since Al Gore’s PowerPoint eco-crusade in 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth laid out the science behind climate change and made its human-made causes a subject for general concern. The force that quashed the momentum of the movie’s message and spent millions to fabricate a grassroots movement to promote confusion and denial is the starting point for the latest documentary feature by director Robert Kenner (Food Inc.).

Read the full review here.

Woman in Gold (2015)

In Woman in Gold Curtis presents the six-year legal battle undertaken by Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) and her lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), the grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, for the restitution of Altmann’s family heirloom — Gustav Klimt’s 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” — seized by the Nazis not long after the March 1938 Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Adele Bloch-Bauer was Altmann’s aunt; Klimt a family friend who benefited from the frequent patronage of the Bloch-Bauer clan. Neither the provenance of the painting nor Nazi plundering is at issue here.

Read the full review here.