JERSEY BOYS
Jersey Boys, Clint Eastwood's film version of 2005's still-running Broadway smash, is a big, bizarre, cornball, clever, terrible, wonderful movie. It's hard to fathom what, beyond its inherent appeal, made Eastwood want to take on the project; this bio-musical about 1960s pop sensations the Four Seasons seems so clearly designed for Scorsese that's it's almost some kind of joke that it instead wound up in the hands of a man who, stylistically and temperamentally, is Scorsese's polar opposite. Yet somehow, astonishingly, the damned thing works. Its parts may be stronger than the whole - at least if you're allowed to cherry-pick the parts - but the film is affecting and entertaining and alive, and exudes more sheer joy than any other title on Eastwood's 43-year directing résumé.
22 JUMP STREET and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2
Music
Fewer than 90 minutes after it began, the Timber Lake Playhouse's season-opening production of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat ended, appropriately, with a blast of exuberant, life-affirming color. Yet at the curtain call for this fantastically well-sung presentation of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's and lyricist Tim Rice's beloved biblical musical, it became clear that the stars of the show weren't the gifted performers portraying Joseph, the Narrator, or any of director James Beaudry's 19 other cast members. The real stars, it turned out, were the streamers.
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS
MALEFICENT
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
BLENDED
GODZILLA
