The Qwipster Film Review Podcast

Set in late 18th Century England, Kate Beckinsale plays recently widowed and unquestionably un-wealthy Lady Susan Vernon, visiting (or, more accurately, mooching off of) her brother-in-law Charles and his wife Catherine with eyes use her prodigious skill in flirtation on Catherine's handsome younger brother Reginald, who is a man of some means. Lady Susan also aims to get her teenage daughter Frederica hitched as well, setting her sights on Sir James Martin, a man who is also of great wealth, albeit without a lick of intelligence, but he does take a liking to the girl enough to continue to pursue her despite her reticence at his "silliness." Difficulties abound, as Lady Susan has a few entanglements of her own in the form of Lord Manwaring, who is married to another woman, and a few others near the situation have their suspicions that Susan's intentions are less than honorable all around, even though her crafty and manipulative ways keep her from being pinned down for sure.

The film starts off at a 25th high-school reunion where Charlie meets up with an old friend named Max, who seems to have far exceeded his initially dismal expectations in life in almost every respect by being the kind of "Action Jackson" globe-hopping alpha male every boy dreams of becoming. Max sees Charlie is in a loveless marriage to his philandering high-school crush, raising two kids that humiliate him at every turn, is employed at a dead-end job managing an in-supermarket bank outlet, and lives a life that is in a perpetual state of stagnation -- he even drives the same car he's had since high school, and it was a lemon even then. After convincing Charlie to some out to his yacht for a weekend of fun and sun while his wife's away, Max ends up hatching a plan to fake their deaths and assume stolen new identities with some big shots who were living the high life in Puerto Rico before their untimely demise. However, with the new identities comes had guys out to get the men they're assuming to be, leading Max and Charlie to fight for their second lives.

Tilda Swinton stars as Marianne Lane, a Bowie-esque,world renown rock star who is on vacation with Paul, her documentarian boyfriend of six years, on Pantelleria, a small, secluded Mediterranean island off between the coasts of Sicily and Tunisia. Marianne is there for some R&R from her most recent tour, in recovery from surgery on her throat that she is hoping will be successful so that she can resume her singing career. Their "alone time" is soon ended by the arrival of her rambunctious previous lover and legendary music producer Harry Hawkes, along with the grown daughter Harry has only recently discovered, Penelope, ostensibly as a friendly visit, but it soon becomes apparent that they're seeking to cause division in the relationship for their own ends.

The story picks up as Alice has come home to London for a spell after traveling the world as the captain of her own ship. However, she comes to find that her ex, Hamish, is using financial leverage that pressures her to stop adventuring by handing over the ship and taking up a job as a clerk at his shipping company in order to pay for the family home that Alice's mother had signed over to him. Unable to deal with the stress at hand, Alice finds a portal in the large mirror above her fireplace which returns her to Underland, where she's immediately greeted by her fantasy friends. It's not all a happy reunion, as she soon discovers that the Mad Hatter has taken ill, learning that his thought-deceased family may still be alive, but he's unable to locate them. To save her friend, Alice visits the realm where Time, in human form (played by Sacha Baron Cohen in a German accent that channels Werner Herzog if he were trying to do an impression of Christoph Waltz), has a free-floating vehicle called the Chronosphere, which will allow Alice to go back in time to make things right for Hatter and his kin. Along the way, she also discovers more information about the dreaded Red Queen's early years, who, once again, stands in the way of Alice's success.

Jason Sudeikis voices Red, aka "eyebrows", a hot-headed cardinal (one presumes) who frequently doesn't quite see eye to eye with his feathered flock around him on the island they all reside in, Bird Island. These non-flying birds think they are all there is in this world until the day that a ship drops anchor on Red's home, destroying it, making him an enemy but the other birds seem more friendly toward their new porcine visitors, not knowing that the fun and friendship they're ostensibly bringing is merely a ruse to get closer to grabbing their precious and delicious eggs from right under their beaks. Now it's up to Red to try to figure out how to save the eggs by getting his bird brethren to mount an attack on the porker stronghold before the swine have had their dinner.

This entry in the retro X-Men series finds the mutants in the series-alternate universe year of 1983, ten years after the events of Days of Future Past, where the cold war is rampant between the United States and the Soviet Union, with most people already worried about being on the brink of annihilation of life on Earth within just a few hours if nuclear war should ever break out. Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, is living as a closeted mutant to keep his family safe, working as a metal worker in Poland with a loving wife and daughter. Professor Charles Xavier is at the mansion that serves as the School for Gifted Youngsters (aka, mutants confronting who they are and learning to control their powers). Both have their home worlds rocked in tragedy. And Mystique spends her time traveling to the four corners of the Earth in order to liberate mutants wherever she can, such as the German teleporter, Nightcrawler. The mutants begin to fight amongst each other yet again when the world's first mutant, the powers-absorbing En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse, is resurrected from his dormant state since 3600 B.C., wastes no time in hatching a plan to lay conquest to the entire planet. He sets about pulling together powerful mutant accomplices, dubbed his Four Horsemen, in an effort to bring humanity under their rule, after threatening them with nuclear annihilation. Now it's up to Xavier, Mystique, Beast, and a band of untested gifted students to fight for the right of people who want their kind destroyed from being crushed under the rule of these mad mutants.

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne return as married couple Mac and Kelly Radner, set to find a bigger home in a nicer neighborhood to live in after Kelly finds that she has another baby on the way. After putting down for their new abode, they find a buyer for their current one, but it's still in escrow, which, overly simplified for the purpose of this film, means that the buyer can swing by anytime within thirty days to inspect the house and can back out of the deal if things aren't up to snuff. The problem: a new, unaffiliated sorority, Kappa Nu, has moved in to take over the empty home previously used by the fraternity next door, built mostly on the notion that, unlike other sororities that aren't allowed to throw parties where they serve alcohol, they will do all of the drinking, raving and weed smoking they want, just like their male counterparts in fraternities do, without the overhead of being treated like "hos" by so-called rape-y frat boys.

Set in 1977, we watch an opening sequence in which a hot young porn star named Misty Mountains ends up killed. Ryan Gosling plays widower private dick Holland March, whose been recently hired to find Amelia, a young woman who many think is dead, despite a few claiming to have recently seen her. Holland soon has a run-in with a tough-as-nails thug-for-hire named Jackson Healy, who happens to be protecting then also looking for Amelia, at first punishing then ending up needing him and hiring the detective himself. It's a shaky pairing, but together they follow clues and thump on potential witnesses, not always successfully, as they peek into the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles, with Holland's precocious thirteen-year-old daughter Holly finding herself in the middle of the action more often than not. The further they dig, the more they stir up trouble for themselves, putting themselves in the path of a deadly bad guys and in the choke-hold of local politics.

The film covers about eight years of the life of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pelé (a name borne from a youthful insult he would later embrace), from his young childhood as a nine-year-old boy from an poor family in 1950, through his debut on the biggest stage of all for fans of soccer (aka, football to most of the world outside of the United States), in the 1958 World Cup where he would be instrumental in helping Brazil win the championship.

The Man Who Knew Infinity looks at the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematician from India who would become famous in the math world for his prodigious work in the early part of the 20th Century. Ramanujan had a gift for mathematics that was seemingly ahead of what anyone else had been dealing with at the time, claiming that the numbers and formulas just come to him out of divine origin. His work would soon draw interest in England, causing Ramanujan to leave his wife Janaki and mother behind to pursue his calling among the top minds in the field at the time, hoping to realize his dream of getting his mathematical journals published.

As adults, siblings Annie and Baxter Fang are played by Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman, respectively. Annie is a famous actress who has recently become a tabloid sensation after going topless in her latest film role, while Baxter is a struggling writer and journalist who still hasn't found great success. Their parents, Caleb and Camille Fang, played in their older form by Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett, are famous for being public performance artists who once used Annie and Baxter (whom they refer to as Child 'A' and Child 'B') to do pranks out in public in order to elicit a reaction from the crowds around that would be filmed with a camera as part of their art to show a certain truth about humanity by provoking it through the falsehood of their performance. As they grow older, the Fang children pull away from their exploitative parents, while also continuing to be influenced by their philosophies on life and art, though they continue to be challenged trying to fit in with so-called 'normal' society, unable to form permanent relationships and resorting to a bit of self-medication to ease their persistent anxiety. The family reunites after Baxter is hospitalized during a journalistic piece he is writing that has him talking to men who enjoy shooting off spud guns (guess who gets shot with one?), though the relationships are now strained and most are generally unhappy with their current situations in life. Annie and Baxter additionally connect later after they receive notice that their parents may be the latest victims in a string of killings while on the road in North Carolina, with blood found in their abandoned vehicle, but no bodies in sight. But are they truly dead, or is this yet another one of the infamous Fang family pranks meant to unite the once close family into another series of adventures?

George Clooney stars as Lee Gates, a flashy Jim Kramer-ish cable television network host of a financial advice program called "Money Monster", happy to dole out stock advice in a snarky, cocky manner, drawing more out of entertainment and spectacle than in how it might affect those on the other side should any of his "rock-solid" tips prove wrong. Someone it has affected finally forces him to learn first-hand when a distraught young man named Kyle Budwell storms onto the set during the live feed of the show, forcing Lee at gunpoint to put on a vest full of explosives, wanting some answers, as well as some contrition, after losing his life savings on supposedly sure-fire advice in putting one's money in Ibis Clear Capital, a company the host persistently extoled the virtues of that suffered a major setback to the tune of $800 million in losses practically overnight, claiming a software glitch to its complicated corporate algorithm as responsible for things going haywire. Now Lee's going to have to put his life on the line to get Kyle the answers he's seeking from the show's slated guest, Walt Camby, the jet-setting CEO of Ibis, on just how such an unlikely event could occur that would cost investors to potentially lose their livelihoods on a freak error. Julia Roberts plays "Money Monster" producer Patty Fenn, who is set to leave to greener pastures to work for another network. Patty is the voice in Lee's earpiece who tries to keep him on point, and in this case, to try to keep him alive, feeding him advice on what to do or say to his violent unexpected guest, while also making the decision to keep directing the show, coercing the host to do his job and get Kyle the answers he's after by asking tough questions to IBIS chief communications officer, Diane Lester, in lieu of actually getting to the absent Camby for information. Those questions make Lester, who was hired to just deliver PR talking points (and to entertain Camby on the side), take a more aggressive stance, digging for some real answers that now even she's curious about.

Gabriel Byrne stars as Gene, a widower high school teacher trying to establish a firm connection again with his two sons, Conrad and Jonah, over two years after the death of his award-winning war photojournalist wife's death in a fatal car accident. A museum gallery wants to show some of her previously unpublished work she may have left behind, and her former colleague Richard at the New York Times would like to run a piece about the exhibit, as well as about her life, including the tidbit that the accident may have actually been a suicide. Gene knows he must tell his younger son, the troubled and mostly withdrawn teen Conrad, before it becomes public knowledge, while eldest Jonah,, who ends up visiting following the birth of his own son to sift through the photographs to hand over to the museum, thinks his dad should stop them from mentioning that part of the story altogether, which he denies the validity of.

Jonathan Pryce stars as elderly widower Nat, the current owner of the family's century-old Jewish bakery that's just barely been scraping by of late, mostly because his predominantly Jewish clientele are moving away from the East End London neighborhood (filmed mostly in Budapest) or dying off. When Nat's only assistant leaves for a better paying job, he's stuck having to do it all himself, unsuccessfully, as he advertises for a new apprentice, but the prospects are dismal. It's bad enough that Nat, who moves slower and is woefully out of practice, isn't going to be able to deliver the quality and quantity the shop needs to stay afloat; he really feels the squeeze when a greedy developer (who, we learn, also stole away his baker) buys the building and wants to push Nat out before the five years remaining on his lease. Nat reluctantly accepts the services of his Muslim African refugee shop cleaner's son, Ayyash, who needs a cover job in order to start to peddle drugs and make much needed money for his family to get out of the dilapidated slum in which they currently reside. Ayyash doesn't have time for both his full-time job and his drug dealing, so he decides to do both at once while at the bakery, unbeknownst to Nat. When Ayyash rashly hides a stash of weed inside a mixing machine, causing the latest batch of kosher baked goods to give their customers a lift, repeat business begins to pick up for the first time in many years. Seeing this opportunity to both help himself and his kindly boss who will certainly lose his livelihood, he decides he can kill two birds with one stone by selling his weed through by keeping the customers as baked as the items they purchase.

Loosely taking off from an idea borne of the giant crossover storyline mostly under the direction of comics writer Mark Millar, Civil War is a movie that addresses something that is not often remarked upon in superhero stories, and that is the cost of the collateral damage, especially in human lives, when super-powered humans battle one another over an urban landscape. The beginning of the film shows us firsthand the cost of trying to save people, as the Avengers' mission against villain Crossbones in a battle at the heart of Lagos, Nigeria, sees the deaths of many innocent bystanders, including many from the (fictional) country of Wakanda. Enter Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross, who pushes forward the Sokovia Accords, a law that requires United Nations approval and oversight when engaging in future world-saving battles that might jeopardize the lives of helpless people. Tony Stark, haunted by guilt of a young and promising teen's death resulting from his own perceived recklessness, signs on, thinking that this law will not only be inevitable, but that agreeing with it now saves them from a more severe implementation down the road. Steve Rogers, once used as a government propaganda tool for things he didn't always believe in, think it's a bad idea, not only opening up the superheroes to be used as a tool for a bunch of selfish bureaucrats, but also because the absence of quick and decisive action, or even inaction in some cases, may cost countless more lives down the road. After a terrorist explosion ends up killing the Wakandan leader, his son, prince T'Challa, who is also a super-powered human clad in a pliable form of vibranium (the same nearly indestructible substance from which Cap's shield is composed) known as the Black Panther, vows revenge on the responsible party, with signs pointing toward Bucky Barnes, once the Soviet-brainwashed assassin called the Winter Soldier, as the main culprit. Barnes disavows any knowledge, Captain America, who sees the good in him when he's not triggered into malice, protects his old friend, and together they vow to unearth the real mastermind behind the tragedy. However, they can't get far, as acting on their own brands them as criminals, which means the Avengers who've signed the new law, led by Iron Man, must keep the peace so that costumed vigilantes aren't acting of their own accord, possibly causing more distrust from the public and governments they've sworn to protect.