My understanding of battle rap — informed entirely by Joseph Kahn’s Bodied, a devastatingly funny social commentary — is that it’s like a no-holds-barred comedy roast except the jokes have to rhyme, with participants insulting each other in loosely metered couplets that may be either improvised or prepared. As in a roast, every aspect of […]

Though written and directed by Tyler Perry, Nobody’s Fool starts out bearing little resemblance to a Tyler Perry film. For one thing, it’s just called Nobody’s Fool, not Tyler Perry’s Nobody’s Fool. And instead of a clumsy melodrama, it’s a clumsy raunchy comedy about a sophisticated New York ad agent, Danica (Tika Sumpter), having to take […]

For maximum nostalgia, Mid90s is presented not in widescreen but in 4:3, the way it would have looked on TV or videotape back in the day. “Maximum nostalgia” is the motivating factor for almost everything in Jonah Hill’s directorial debut (which he also wrote), a coming-of-age comedy set among adolescent skater boys in Southern California in […]

Johnny English, Rowan Atkinson’s bumbling James Bond character who is a more talkative version of his Mr. Bean character, returns for a third outing in Johnny English Strikes Again, a family-friendly spy spoof whose only flaw is that it has zero interest in the characters who aren’t Johnny English. This time around, Johnny is brought […]

The premise behind Ike Barinholtz’s dark comedy The Oath is ripe with possibilities: A liberal man and his wife host his conservative relatives for Thanksgiving week, which coincides with a particularly divisive political issue tearing the country apart. There’s comedic tension in everyone trying to stay civil, followed by comedic release when civility fails. In the […]

The rather arbitrarily titled Hunter Killer is a submarine movie for dads, based on a novel called Firing Point (another random title) that looks like it is probably only for sale in airports. The dividing line on movies of this nature is thin and extremely subjective, but for me Hunter Killer is just simple-headed enough to hit the […]

It takes its time getting there, but you know The Hate U Give is going to turn serious on us because it starts with our narrator, 16-year-old Starr Carter (Amandla Stenberg), telling us about the time when she was 9 and her dad gave her The Talk — not the sex talk, but the one black […]

See, they’re a couple of brothers whose last name is Sisters. “The Sisters brothers.” Get it? As a novel, much of what made The Sisters Brothers so entertaining was author Patrick DeWitt’s amusingly dry way with words, his knack for turning a phrase. You’re bound to lose some of that with any film adaptation, but this […]