The Qwipster Film Review Podcast

As with the first film, we're greeted with a title blurb informing us that what we're about to watch is footage found in the woods of Burkittsville, MD -- aka, the Black Hills Forest. We see the beginnings of the footage at the home of a 20-ish aged man named James, who has seen a YouTube video that gives him a clue that his sister Heather, who has been missing since trying to document the origins of the Blair Witch, may be still alive in those woods. Embarking on this quest, James seeks the assistance of his filmmaker friend Lisa to record their travels and make it into a documentary, traveling to the area to meet with the YouTuber who shot the footage, bringing along friends Peter and Ashley in tow. They get plenty of their questions answered in due course, though not exactly the way they wanted.

Bridget is now 43 years old, alone and still living in the same flat in London -- no husband and no children -- working as a producer for a London televisions news program. On the urging of a friend and colleague, Bridget is cajoled into attending an outdoor music festival where people can expect to get laid, and often, where she soon meets a charismatic and good-looking American dating-site wunderkind named Jack Quant, with whom she decides to "have relations." About a week later, she runs into her reserved and refined old flame Mark Darcy, who says he's going through a divorce but still has feelings for her, and they also, "have relations." when Bridget ends up pregnant, it becomes an awkward situation, as she doesn't know which of the two appealing men will be the father, and if so, if they will accept the situation of responsibility.

Jake is an artistically gifted but introverted 13-year-old kid whose therapist mother Kathy and actor father Brian relocate from Manhattan to Brooklyn when they take over the abode of the recently deceased father Brian barely spoke to anymore. The properties inhereted also contain a modest dress shop run by a middle-aged Chilean immigrant named Leonor, who also has a son, Tony, around the same age as Jake. Tony quickly befriends actor-in-training Jake, but difficulties arise between the two families when the lease on the shop is found to not exist, and a major readjustment to the very low rent she had been paying to the grandfather is proposed to keep up with the skyrocketing property prices in the radically changing Brooklyn neighborhood they reside in.

The film takes place over the course of a year, with the primary focus being on a struggling comedy writer and improv comedian named David (Plemmons), returning to his hometown of Sacramento from New York to look after the needs of his terminally ill mother, Joanne (Shannon), uncomfortably reuniting with his mostly estranged father, Norman (Whitford), who has yet to fully accept him since coming out, and two mostly annoying younger sisters. The family is preparing for the inevitable life after Joanne, as she has decided to forego additional grueling chemo treatments and accept her fate with the cancer that is overtaking her. While there, David also begins to find some healing time with dormant familial relationships and a bit of perspective on the other trials and tribulations in his personal, professional and romantic life.

Sully is a docudrama that tells the story of the events surrounding the water landing in the New York's Hudson River for a commercial jet en route to Charlotte piloted by veteran Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger on January 15, 2009. The Airbus A320 lost both engines after flying into a large flock of Canada geese turing takeoff from LaGuardia Airport, causing Sully and co-pilot Jeff Skiles to have to make the quick decision on whether they could make it back to LaGuardia or a nearby airstrip, or if they must take the risky chance of downing the plane in the icy river. The well-publicized end result on that fateful morning was that Sully, all of the crew, and all 150 passengers survived that day, dubbed the "Miracle on the Hudson", making the pilot an overnight celebrity and hero in the eyes of millions.

Naomi Bishop, a self-made, shrewd and successful investment banker who has made great gains in launching highly successful IPOs, though her most recent less-than-stellar effort, in which she was pulled from representing just before launch, had been seen in the media as a black mark on her career. Her latest client is a potential billion-dollar social-media business named Cachet that prides itself on hiring skillful hackers whose know-how have made its CEO confident that all of its clients data is safe and secure from any and all attacks. The film also spotlights two other women related to the event, Erin, Naomi's protégé in the firm who has been anxiously awaiting seeing more money and opportunities come her way, especially now that she has a baby on the way, and Naomi's friend from way back, Samantha, a federal prosecutor for the Justice Department who has reemerged in her life in her investigation of alleged securities fraud.

Blood Father casts a weathered Mel Gibson as a former alcoholic tattoo artist ex-con divorcee named John Link, who's spent the last few years mostly off the grid in a trailer park in California's Coachella Valley (shot in New Mexico). He has been anxiously searching for his 17-year-old daughter, Lydia, who ran away at 14. She re-enters his life soon enough, desperately looking for money to make her getaway when she ends up shooting her ne'er-do-well boyfriend, Jonah, during an armed heist, causing others in his criminal organization tied to the drug cartels from Mexico to come after her. Fatherly instincts, and a resurgence of dormant survival skills picked up from his days as a not-so-nice-guy, kick in when the bad guys come around.

Most of the action takes place, as with Ex Machina, at a large house in a scenic remote location that doubles as an experimental laboratory where scientists are observing the maturation of a synthetic young woman named Morgan, who is five years old in actuality but with the accelerated aging that gives her the appearance of a young woman. The staff there all have fond feelings for Morgan, though that trust is shattered one day when Morgan appears to lash out violently unexpectedly, resulting in severe injuries to one of their own. The corporation behind the experiment sends a risk-management agent to assess the risks of continuing, Lee Weathers, who finds that, despite their fear of a repeat occurrence that has Morgan more or less imprisoned, they rationalize that this outburst is an anomaly, and part of the acceptable risk for the project.

Toni is a tough but socially disconnected eleven-year-old girl from the projects in Cincinnati, who is a regular participant and a helpful assistant in the nearby community center, where her older brother, Jermaine, a boxer, also trains. Toni tries out to be a member of the Lionesses, the highly successful all-girl competitive dance-battle squad. The girls all regularly work out their highly complicated dance routines, but one of the girls falls during the routine in what appears to be an epileptic fit (hence the title). Some time later, another, then another. Are they overworked? Is it there a problem with water contamination at the community center? Is it something worse?

Chris Pine and Ben Foster play brothers Toby and Tanner Howard, who we find at the beginning of the film on a bank-robbing spree in West Texas. Toby's the smart one who has generally been above the fray, but he's now going in headfirst into a life of crime with his ne'er-do-well Tanner to secure the funs necessary to keep the banks from seizing the property willed to debt-plagued Toby, whose mother's property was mortgaged to pay for her medical care, which he aims to give to his two mostly estranged boys. With the Feds not interested in chasing down criminals who aren't stealing much more than a few thousand here and there, a soon-to-retire Texas Ranger named Marcus Hamilton assumes the case, along with his deputy Alberto, to catch these guys before they strike again.

The story, inspired by anecdotes chronicled in the memoirs of their actual first date, begins in August, 1989, in the South Side of Chicago, on a day in which a young, smart and career-minded corporate lawyer, Michelle Robinson, accepts spending the day with a Harvard-bound summer office mate, Barack Obama, on the pretense that they attend a housing project community meeting as colleagues, making whatever else they do socially that he has planned definitely not a date. Obama, driving his rusted-out car to greet her, feels differently, and makes it his task to convince her otherwise before the day is through.

War Dogs follows two lifelong friends, struggling massage therapist and bedsheet salesman David Packouz and two-bit wheeler and dealer Efraim Diveroli, two down-and-out Miami stoners who are looking to find a way to make ends meet in a variety of schemes they hope will give them a leg up. They end up finding a bit of success as small-time dealers of armor, weapons and ammo for bid on a government-run auction site, where they make a nice sum of cash flying under the radar with contracts too small for the big dogs to care about. They build up a nice mini-business as AEY, and their success eventually leads to bigger and better chances at contracts, ultimately leading to a sizable one in the form of a contract to supply AK ammo to the Afghan army to the tune of $300 million. After connecting with a shifty big-time weapons dealer named Henry Girard, they find that the bigger the contract, the more dangerous the game, especially when dealing with black-market suppliers in unstable countries.

Set in Detroit, a trio of young poverty-stricken friends make ends meet by robbing the houses in more affluent areas around the city, though fencing the hot merchandise doesn't always make the risk worth their while. These petty thieves want to get out of their bleak, dysfunctional home lives, hoping they can find greener pastures in California, but to do that, they have to find a place to rob that has enough real cash on hand to allow them to make the leap. After doing the research, they spot their next target in, surprisingly, one of the worst neighborhoods in the area -- an isolated place as most of the neighbors nearby have left, and the owner of the house is an older recluse who came into a load of cash following a settlement when his daughter was tragically killed in a car accident. Unfortunately, what they don't take into account is that the man is a war vet with a "particular set of skills" that makes him a dangerous presence, even without the benefit of his sight, and that he's made his home into a place that's about as difficult to get out of as it is to get into.

Set in 1951, Logan Lerman plays Marcus Messner, an incoming Jewish college transfer at Ohio's small but prestigious Winesberg College during a time when many of his friends are fighting in the Korean War. He must overcome the influence of his overprotective parents from his home town of Newark, New Jersey, and the powers that be at the school in order to try to be his own person, with his own beliefs, and sense of autonomy he's never been given before. The sheltered lad ends up dating a non-conformist classmate named Olivia Hutton, whose struggles with her own sanity has been a challenge, but to whom he can't help but be drawn to. It soon becomes a trying time for Marcus at his new school, with sexual confusion, loud and intrusive roommates, controlling parents, and Dean Hawes Caudwell, the school administrator who doesn't take kindly to Marcus's inability to assimilate properly to the environment of the conservative school. Indignation ensues.

Arthur Bishop is) retired from the contract killing profession, but gets pulled back in again by one of his old enemies, an international arms dealer named Riah Crain, looking to root him out for another contract that Bishop initially rebuffs. While on the resort beaches of Thailand, Bishop ends up saving an abused damsel named Gina and soon enters into a romance with her. When the big-bad ends up kidnapping Bishop's new lover, he reluctantly consents to perform three near-impossible assassinations of extremely well-guarded targets within a day and a half, and has to make them all look like they were fluke accidents. Failure means the end of Gina, and probably Bishop too, if Crain manages to find him again.