In Theaters: June 30, 2017

There are THREE wide releases this weekend.

Baby Driver (Wednesday Release)

The latest from Edgar Wright, a director with enough fiercely loyal fanboys to rival Batman himself.  To be fair, I should mention that he writes his own films.  He's probably most well known for not directing Ant Man.  You read that right.

Edgar became well known after writing and directing the 2004 spoof Shaun of the Dead, starring Simon Pegg.  He solidified his cult following with Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  And not long after Hot Fuzz he was attached to write and direct Ant-Man.  After being attached to the project, he left sometime in 2013 or 2014 and was replaced by Peyton Reed.  It didn't matter how good a job Peyton Reed did, the Edgar Wright fanboys inevitably went off about what a missed opportunity Ant-Man was, after pretending to see it (they really didn't, they just waited by their keyboards until they could have seen it).

To be honest, the Ant-Man episode is probably what ultimately caused my general distaste for Edgar Wright.  And to be honest, he probably doesn't deserve that.

And by the way, his new movie has a plot!  I'll tell you a little about that now.  Thanks for waiting.

Baby driver is about a professional getaway driver named Baby.  He gets involved with some pretty hard dudes who rob banks, and he wants out.  But walking out on these people ain't that easy.  This movie is supposed to be extremely stylish.  Personally, I doubt it will be as stylish as the Ocean's movies from Steven Soderbergh.

Baby Driver is rated R for violence and language throughout.

Despicable Me 3

I never really liked the first one and I never saw the second one.  Or Minions.  But if that's your thing you should totally go see it!

Despicable Me 3 is rated PG for action and rude humor.

The House

This one looks like your bi-monthly dose of forgettable R-rated comedy.  Thank Judd Apatow.  It's so obviously going to be so forgettable that I've already forgotten what I'm writing about.

The House is about a married couple (Poehler and Ferrell) whose daughter has been accepted to a university.  To pay for the expensive tuition, and avoid breaking their daughter's heart, they open an underground casino in their own house.

The House is rated R for language throughout, sexual references, drug use, some violence and brief nudity.

      Big Shot Critic

In Theaters: June 23, 2017

There is only ONE wide release this week.

Transformers: The Last Knight (Wednesday release)

I don't even know what to say at this point.

The fifth Transformers movie is upon us.  And just like all the prior films, we really have no idea what it's about.  Even after we've seen it.  But does that really matter?  No.  Not at all.  This franchise has evolved well beyond the primitive need for things like story and character.  Giant robots fighting each other in drawn out, but exciting-the-first-time action sequences is the pinnacle of filmmaking.

If the Donald Trump campaign was a movie franchise, it would undoubtedly be Transformers.  It's loud.  A lot of people say it's stupid.  But in the end it always gets results.  Even if you believe the foreign hacking story, the comparison stands up.  The last Transformers movie owes almost thirty percent of its worldwide gross to a single foreign power.

Transformers: The Last Knight is rated PG-13 for violence and intense sequences of sci-fi action, language, and some innuendo.

You're not kidding anyone, you know you want to see it.

      Big Shot Critic

In Theaters: June 16, 2017

There are FOUR wide releases this weekend.

47 Meters Down

Two women on vacation try diving in a shark cage for the first time, and their cage drops (read with emphasis) ****47 Meters Down****.  I wasn't counting the shots in the trailer that showed a shark inches away from eating someone, but - I'm not kidding - it was at least a dozen.  And, as you can see in the poster, there are only two women stuck down there.  So either at least ten other women dive down to rescue them (and they ALL get eaten), or this population of sharks has a spectacular mutation that causes them to grow gummy bears instead of teeth.

47 Meters Down is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense peril, bloody images, and brief strong language.

To be fair, the underwater photography looks solid.

All Eyez On Me

Spoiler alert he dies at the end.

It's a movie about Tupac.  Why?  Because N.W.A. got their own movie and now HE wants one!!

I know very very little about Tupac.  But I know a lot about movies, and in terms of quality this will be a big step down from Straight Outta Compton.  You've been warned.

All Eyez On Me is rated R for language throughout, drug use, violence, some nudity and sexuality.  No surprises there.

Cars 3

In Cars 3 Lightning McQueen is an old race car, near the end of his career, maybe already past.  There are newer, faster, and better race cars out there.  It's a really good angle to take for the story.  And it looks to be a heck of a lot better than Cars 2, which I didn't really enjoy very much.  I'm not the only one either, and that means it's not just Lightning McQueen that has something to prove, but the Cars franchise itself.  Can Lightning - as well as the Cars franchise - be relevant again?  I doubt this parallel is a coincidence.

Cars 3 is rated G.

Rough Night

No matter how bad the movie looks Kate McKinnon still makes me laugh sometimes.

In Rough Night, Scarlett Johansson's character is having a bachelorette party with her friends that includes a male stripper.  The stripper dies in some kind of accident and the movie goes from there.  You know those "wouldn't it be funny if" kind of ideas that sometimes get stretched into WAY longer runtimes than the premise can support?  Yeah.  That's my bet for Rough Night.

Rough Night is rated R for crude sexual content, language throughout, drug use and brief bloody images.

      Big Shot Critic

In Theaters: June 9, 2017

There are THREE wide releases this weekend.

It Comes At Night

I don't quite know what's going on here.

It Comes At Night is apparently a horror movie.  I watched the trailer and I have absolutely no idea what was happening.  Many scary images of blood and screams and running and stuff, with no apparent villain or monster.  So I don't actually know if this is a monster movie or about, like, a serial killer or something.  No idea.

This movie is also clearly designed to copy the general look of last year's The Witch.

It Comes At Night is rated R for violence, disturbing images, and language.

Megan Leavey

Based on a truly boring story.

True story films tend to have the same problem.  You sacrifice some truth of the story, or you sacrifice traditional narrative structure.  Do either at your own peril.  This one seems to have thrown out the narrative structure.

I watched the trailer and I can't tell if this movie is about patriotism, dogs, or PTSD.  It could be all three, I suppose.  The only thing I'm certain of is that Megan Leavey is the main character, played by Kate Mara.

Megan Leavey is a soldier who sees action in the middle east and serves with a bomb-sniffing dog.  She gets blowed up a little bit (yes, "blowed up"), and when she wakes up in the hospital she immediately asks where her dog is.

From there it gets more confusing.  Among heroic clips of the dog helping soldiers we get a clip of her approaching an elected official of some kind to see about adopting the soldier dog.  Then a clip of her commanding officer telling her that these types of dogs are warriors, not pets.  So maybe it's a legal drama.  Who knows?

The main take away I got from this trailer was that the movie looks kinda boring.

Megan Leavey is rated PG-13 for war violence, language, suggestive material, and thematic elements.

I almost forgot!  Before she even joins the military we see her butting heads with her family, and society at large, so add domestic drama to the list of potential genres here.

The Mummy

The Brendan Frasier classic finally gets rebooted.  Or is it the 1932 original getting rebooted?  Nobody knows.

I'll make this simple.  The down side is it's directed by Alex Kurtzman, and he is untested as a director.  And his extensive writing credits are questionable.  The up side is Tom Cruise stars, and I find him entertaining and watchable in everything.

Also on the plus side, the woman who plays the title monster (yes, the mummy is a woman this time) has most certainly proved herself in her previous roles.  She gets top marks.

As for the story, it's set in today's world.  The general idea of a mummy being revived through an ancient curse and being a general nuisance to planet Earth is the same as the last two.  Beyond that the only relevant detail I am aware of is that Russell Crowe is in this film as Dr. Jekyll.  Yes, that Dr. Jekyll.

This is also meant to be the beginning of a shared universe of classic monsters for Universal.  I'm not opposed to the idea because Universal really does handle their franchises well.  I hope it works out, but we'll see.

The Mummy is rated PG-13 for violence, action and scary images, and for some suggestive content and partial nudity.

      Big Shot Critic

P.S. I saw Wonder Woman and you should too.

In Theaters: June 2, 2017

There are TWO wide releases this weekend.

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie

These books started circulating when I was near the end of elementary school.  I never read them because I figured anything with such a title could only include the most juvenile humor.

The film itself has not been well publicized.  It is not noteworthy in any way as far as the film world is concerned.  I haven't heard a single thing about it in the world of film news - a world to which I pay very close attention.

The good news is that I watched the trailer so you wouldn't have to do so!  It honestly was not as bad as I feared, yet it did nothing at all to encourage me toward this movie.

Proceed with caution.

Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie is rated PG for mild rude humor throughout.

Wonder Woman

Here we are.  Four years since Warner Bros kicked off their DCEU with Man of Steel.  It's been four years, and it looks like they're finally going to get a proper superhero film.

This iteration of Wonder Woman was introduced in last year's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and that was the character's very first appearance on the big screen.  It should be noted that this is the first female-led superhero film since 2005.  Because America is sexist.  Lol.  Just kidding.  It's because comic books are predominantly read by young men, so the vast majority of successful comic book characters are men.  But even though I'm not a feminist by a long shot, this is a significant moment, because Wonder Woman is shaping up to be something truly special.

Since the first trailer it has looked like DC has turned their act around with this one.  Their first three have been regarded from "okay" to "bad".  Wonder Woman looked good.

Then the next trailer came out.  It still looked good!

And just recently the reviews started coming in - and as of this writing, it has an equal or higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes than EVERY Marvel Studios film, excepting only the one that started it all, Iron Man.

In short, it started out looking good, and along the way it has only looked better.

Just go see it.

Wonder Woman is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and some suggestive content.

      Big Shot Critic