Force MajeureFORCE MAJEURE and GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE 3D

On Friday, I caught a foreign-language double-feature at Iowa City's FilmScene venue, and was happy to do it. In retrospect, I might've been even happier had I only stuck around for half of it.

Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum in 22 Jump Street22 JUMP STREET and HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

This past Friday was my birthday. (Aw, thank you for asking! Belated gifts can be sent care of the Reader!) And like a present delivered specifically for me, the day brought with it not only two movies featuring Jonah Hill - even if one only features the voice of Jonah Hill - but two follow-ups I wasn't at all dreading: 22 Jump Street, the sequel to a comedy I loved, and How to Train Your Dragon 2, the sequel to an animated adventure I liked just fine. I suppose it was both fitting and inevitable, then, that I wound up liking the former just fine, and the latter ... well, I didn't love it, but I did enjoy it a heck of a lot more than the original.

Eva Green in 300: Rise of an Empire300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE

No movie that opens with Gerard Butler being beheaded, even off-screen, can be all that bad, and so maybe I shouldn't be surprised by the not-so-bad-ness of director Noam Murro's 300: Rise of an Empire. I still am, considering how little fun I had at Zack Snyder's smash-hit predecessor from 2007, yet personally speaking, it's not hard to identify what makes this CGI-heavy bloodbath an overall better time - a much better time - than 300. But we'll get to her momentarily.

James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in EnoughENOUGH SAID

It should go without saying that romantic comedies are generally more enjoyable if you enter them with already-fond feelings for their leads, which is why it was more fun to sit through, say, one of Tom Hanks' and Meg Ryan's 1990s outings than the ugly one that transpired, in 2009, between Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. But until writer/director Nicole Holefcener's Enough Said - which finally landed locally at Moline's Nova 6 Cinemas two months after its original nationwide release - I'm not sure I'd ever seen a rom-com with quite this much built-in goodwill before. Then again, no one until Holefcener had designed a rom-com for Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the late, great James Gandolfini before, either.

Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx in White House DownWHITE HOUSE DOWN

At the start of the Roland Emmerich thriller White House Down, Channing Tatum's military veteran John Cale is seen applying for a position with the president of the United States' Secret Service detail. By the film's end, he'll have rescued hostages, shot innumerable bad guys, ensured peace in the Middle East, averted nuclear apocalypse, and saved the commander in chief's life several times over. In short: most impressive job interview ever.

Jane Levy in Evil DeadEVIL DEAD

While I like the movie just fine, I'm not enough of a fanatic for Sam Raimi's 1981 splatter classic The Evil Dead to get in a twist about the existence of director Fede Alvarez's new, definite-article-free remake Evil Dead. (It's when Hollywood inevitably remakes Raimi's priceless horror sequel Evil Dead II that we're gonna have problems.) But despite being mostly entertained by Alvarez's beyond-bloody outing, especially during its second half, I do have to question the decision to make it, for so much of its length, so bloody serious. This is a film, after all, in which a demon is released by a supernatural incantation, nail guns and electric carving knives are the weapons of choice, and one character escapes a (more-)dreadful fate by enacting a speedier version of 127 Hours. How are we not asked to laugh at all this?

Leslie Bibb, Justin Long, and Jason Sudeikis in Movie 43MOVIE 43

Ordinarily, Movie 43 would be the sort of unsatisfying, throwaway release that I'd dispense with in a paragraph, or maybe just a sentence or two. And it's not as though its opening-weekend box-office intake - a meager $5 million, despite the presence of nearly every star in Hollywood - necessitates longer consideration of the film. But this anthology comedy in the style of those '70s cult classics Kentucky Fried Movie and The Groove Tube seems to me a special case. How often, after all, do you get the chance to write about what might be your all-time least-enjoyable experience at the cineplex - including that time during the early '90s when you had to leave a screening for emergency root-canal surgery?

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Gerard Butler in Playing for KeepsPLAYING FOR KEEPS

In director Gabriele Muccino's dramatic comedy Playing for Keeps, Gerard Butler portrays a former star athlete who hopes to reconnect with his ex-wife and son by coaching the kid's pee-wee soccer team, and who is consequently forced to (try to) resist the advances of a trio of beautiful, aggressive, lascivious soccer moms who can't keep their hands off him. This, in the language of Hollywood screenwriters, is what is known as "a problem."

Tom Hanks and Halle Berry in Cloud AtlasCLOUD ATLAS

I've seen plenty of movies in which a number of excellent passages can't seem to blend into a satisfying whole. But prior to the release of Cloud Atlas, the film version of David Mitchell's sprawling 2004 novel, I don't think I'd ever seen a movie in which so many merely adequate sequences combine to form a whole that's not only satisfying but downright exhilarating. Directed by Tom Tykwer and siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and running just shy of three hours, this genre fantasia should be a mess, and it oftentimes is. It's also, however, a hypnotic, glorious, grandly entertaining mess, one that's probably far more enjoyable than a more presentationally faithful adaptation would've been.

Tom Hardy, Chris Pine, and Reese Witherspoon in This Means WarTHIS MEANS WAR

The latest instantly disposable, cinematic-junk-food entertainment by Charlie's Angels and Terminator Salvation director McG is the romantic-comedy action thriller This Means War, and it should be said that the first half of the movie isn't bad. It's closer to excruciating.

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