From Peter Debruge’s 1.31.15 Sundance review: “Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea for Kevin Bacon’s corrupt small-town sheriff to leave the keys inside his unlocked patrol car. And maybe he should have thought twice before tossing his gunbelt in the backseat and stuffing a beaten-and-bound criminal in the trunk. But all those bad decisions make for B-movie gold in Jon Watts’ Cop Car (Focus World, 8.7), a tight, easily marketable genre exercise that pushes its lean premise and all-around disrespect for authority to entertaining extremes, taking wicked delight in imagining what might happen if two 10-year-olds were to stumble upon an abandoned police cruiser and take it for a joyride.

The Aero is still my all-time favorite Los Angeles theatre — excellent repertory selections, first-rate digital projection. Closely followed by the Egyptian. But I won’t see 35mm shows at either venue for the simple reason that with very few exceptions, 35mm projection almost always guarantees a degraded experience. But the Vista, a first-run vintage theatre hanging by its nails, is probably the best place to watch a film in an old-timey atmosphere. (I’m not counting the downtown LA venues that occasionally host special-event screenings.) Digital plus 35mm, beautiful marquee, haunting pre-war decor, great-tasting popcorn, good enough seats. Cinefamily is my fourth favorite venue, especially if I’m able to sit in those cushy armchair-like seats near the front. For whatever reason I almost never think about going to the Nuart these days. And way, way, way down at the bottom of the list is Quentin Tarantino‘s New Beverly Cinema, which only shows 35mm and is therefore committed to perpetuating a kind of ’70s nostalgia time-machine atmosphere. If I never see another 35mm film it’ll be too soon. And I’m speaking as a former projectionist. And yet there’s something oddly alluring about seeing Fritz Lang‘s The Big Heat there on Wednesday or Thursday, 6.3 or 6.4. I know it won’t look or sound as good as the Bluray, but just once I want to see The Big Heat in a theatre.

In a 1.24.15 review from the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith called James Ponsoldt‘s The End of the Tour (A24, 7.31) “by far the most moving and profound odd-couple buddy movie [to play here], with a funny, lightly intellectual script by Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist Donald Margulies that should merit heavy awards consideration. Falling halfway between Almost Famous and My Dinner with Andre, this love song to the art of conversation is about a Rolling Stone journalist, David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) who is infatuated with the postmodernist novelist David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan novel ‘Infinite Jest’ and begs for the opportunity to profile the author, who’s about to leave his snowbound rural home in Illinois for a five-day book tour to Minneapolis.” I tried to fit this film into my Sundance schedule but stuff got in the way. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Okay, maybe I didn’t try hard enough on some level. Maybe I don’t relate all that well to guys who who have trouble controlling their appetites or who live in Illinois or who off themselves. But I wanted to see it. Want to, I mean.

Consequence of Sound’s Michael Roffman, filed on 3.16.15: “Not since Anton Corbijn’s Control, his excellent 2007 retelling of the life and death of Ian Curtis and Joy Division, has a biopic felt so authentic and conditional of its own subject. Screenwriters Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner lean heavily on a number of must-read bookmarks in Brian Wilson’s career, but [director Bill] Pohlad adds a surreal touch, capturing the ’60s druggy landscapes and Wilson’s manic inner voices with dreamy perspectives Love & Mercy leaves the darkest hours of Wilson’s life — his weight gain, his drug abuse, and his rigorous early therapy sessions alongside Eugene Landy — for the imagination or extra-curricular studies. The film has enough struggles to resolve, specifically how Wilson’s love for music nearly crushed him, and how love eventually saved him. The way Pohlad orchestrates this strange dichotomy on-screen is about as beautiful and heartwarming as any of The Beach Boys’ best material. And when your favorite songs bubble up or weave through Atticus Ross’s unique score, the marriage of sound and screen will win your tears, your smiles and your soul. To paraphrase Wilson, that’s what you need tonight.”

I’ll grudgingly vote for Hillary Clinton in the end, but I don’t like her that much. She’s okay in a corporately liberal, center-right sort of way, and like everyone else I love the idea of a woman succeeding Barack Obama. But I really love who Bernie Sanders is — a man of balls and integrity and blunt truths. I would honestly prefer that he become the next President, or someone like him. But he’s the guy — he’s it. He won’t beat Hillary in the primaries, of course, but for the time being and the foreseeable future I’m a total Bernie guy, and that means donating and wearing a Bernie for President T-shirt and all the rest of it. But I wish they would make European-style Bernie T-shirts like they do for women. I won’t wear a coarse, inelegant, low-thread-count T-shirt for any reason, Bernie Sanders included.

Brad Peyton’s San Andreas (Warner Bros., 5.29) is exactly what the trailers have been selling — a serving of stupidly entertaining, over-the-top disaster porn that flirts with absurdity. Yes, everyone plays it totally straight and the script hits the usual predictable beats as the all-but-total destruction of Los Angeles, San Francisco and much of California is reduced to a story of six or seven people who show what they’re made of when push comes to shove. But it’s the very sincerity in which Peyton and his cast and FX team embrace this mudslide of cliches that makes it screamingly funny. Not “wow, these guys are really hilarious” funny but “wow, these guys will stop at nothing…they’ll push any button they can think of.” You just have to laugh or at least chortle.

After it’s all over at the very end we’re shown small groups of survivors holding hands and praying together along with a fence display of paper-mounted photos of possible survivors with messages asking if anyone has seen this or that person. We’re also shown a huge American flag being unfurled from the remnants of the Golden Gate Bridge. “You contemptible whores,” I muttered to myself. “You’re using memories and echoes of 9/11 to augment your finale, which you’re totally ‘sincere’ about. Serious balls, gentlemen…hats off.”

This is an appalling, never-boring, kill-the-world action film — a movie that goes beyond what any reasonable person would call a bogus, full-of-shit dramatic strategy to embrace something crazier and more meta. I’m not sure how to describe it except to say that San Andreas makes Irwin Allen‘s The Towering Inferno look like Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront. (If you’re fair about it you’ll acknowledge that Inferno was at least semi-realistic in its use of practical fire-fighting realities.) It’s not so much a “we will rock you” experience as one that says — boasts! — “we are the owners of this bullshit and we will fucking amaze you with our shamelessness.” And I submitted. I had to. I just shook my head and sat back in my 4DX chair and muttered, “Whatever, guys…go to town.”

You can stream Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Moonlighting (’82) but every now and then a Bluray comes along that you just want to own. Because on some level owning this or that title will make me feel good and affirmed. And because I want to re-experience the mesmerizing big-screen impact when this great allegorical film played during the 1982 New York Film Festival. I have it in my head that this British Bluray will somehow deliver a better facsimile than ever before. I love that moment when Jeremy Irons is lying on his bed and staring at a photo of his girlfriend (Jenny Seagrove) and suddenly she seems to come alive within the frame, very slightly and somewhat erotically. I’ve been remarking for years that the world is divided into two camps — those who hear Moonlighting and think of Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepard and those who think of Irons and Skolimowski and that ending with those shopping carts crashing into the wall.

Ridley Scott‘s The Martian (20th Century Fox, 11.25) is about Matt Damon somehow figuring out ways to survive on Mars for months on end despite being stranded with meager supplies of water and food. The film has a healthy roster of costars — Kate Mara, Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels — so it’s not some man-alone thing like Castaway or 127 Hours, but even if Damon’s ingenuity allows him to survive (and I’m presuming it will) I just don’t believe the U.S. government would spend God knows how many hundreds of millions (billions?) to send a rescue mission to save him. I think the powers-that-be would say, “We’re very sorry but every now and then you have to face reality and stand down and let nature take its course.” The film is based on Andy Weir’s book, which I’m not going to read as preparation.

I’ve just finished reading a 5.24 Salon piece about an allegedly strong domestic drama called Bad Hurt, which played at last month’s Tribeca Film Festival but currently has no commercial distributor. Bill Curry‘s article, titled “Karen Allen’s brilliant comeback: A Raiders of the Lost Ark star forsakes Hollywood for a brilliant, blue-collar film,” describes Mark Kemble‘s film, an adaptation of his 2007 stage play called “Bad Hurt on Cedar Street,” as an American kitchen sink drama — “a good movie that felt very real.”

“American cinema never got into social realism,” Curry writes. “Italian neorealists like De Sica, Rossellini and Fellini had counterparts in British ‘kitchen sink’ auteurs such as Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson in new-wave film movements everywhere in the world but here. Such films show people trapped by income, education or family circumstance who don’t get rescued by upward mobility or the kindness of strangers. In America the idea of anyone being trapped in the system is heresy, but after 40 years of political and economic stagnation that may be starting to change.”

With Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha opening three days hence with no buzz and no currents in the wind except those that spell dread, how much worse could the reception be if Crowe and Sony had adopted Hollywood Elsewhere’s pet title for this calamity, i.e., Son of Deep Tiki? Especially with certain native Hawaiians reportedly disapproving of the Aloha title, which they feel is “a disrespectful misappropriation of culture and simplifies a word that’s rich with meaning”? I’m asking anyone with modest Photoshop abilities to take a crack at a Son of Deep Tiki poster. I’ll post the best of the submissions. C’mon…it’ll be easy. The more subversive, the better.