CAFÉ SOCIETY

Woody Allen has made dozens of movies I’ve been happy to watch. Café Society may be the first one I’d be happy to eat.

Friday, July 22, 9:55 a.m.-ish: Few things get me more psyched for a quadruple-feature – or, more accurately, get me less dreading one – than knowing my day’s first screening will be over in a scant 80 minutes. So I enter director David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out feeling pretty good. Somewhat incredibly, I exit feeling really good, because this hour-20 horror trifle gives you just what you want from these things and too rarely do: a creepy and clever premise, a snappy pace, a bunch of good scares, a few strong portrayals, and a relative lack of eye-rolling stupidity.

GHOSTBUSTERS

Haters, as we all know, gonna hate. So there was probably no way the new Ghostbusters was ever going to win over the trolling Internet fanboys convinced that director Paul Feig’s female-led reboot – a nuclear bomb aimed directly at their childhood memories – was the end of civilization as we’ve known it. What consequently saddens me is that the movie spends so much time sucking up to those guys. While watching Feig’s latest, it’s easy to forget about the film’s underwhelming, dare-I-say-dreadful trailers, as the work in full is frequently very funny. But it’s also exhausting, because hardly a minute passes in which you’re not reminded of the Ghostbusters legacy – Ivan Reitman’s 1984 original, sure, but also the tired “controversy” surrounding its new presentation. All told, this might be the most simultaneously apologetic and defensive Hollywood blockbuster I’ve ever seen.

Friday, July 1, 10:45 a.m.-ish: My latest quadruple-feature begins with The BFG, and the movie is a bit of a BFD, because it’s been nearly five years since Steven Spielberg directed anything a little kid might conceivably want to attend. (And even that 2011 release was The Adventures of Tintin, so, you know, it’s actually been more than five years.) But even though the crowd I’m with is barely deserving of the term “crowd” – it’s merely a couple-dozen tykes accompanied by taller chaperones – you can tell that this gentle, charming adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel is working for them, because they’re unusually quiet during Spielberg’s many moments of lovely stillness, and they really dig the fart jokes. And hoo-boy are there fart jokes.