Fred Melamed

With an appropriately jarring sense of energy, this James Brown biopic acutely captures the Godfather of Soul's iconic musical talents, although the fragmented script undermines any emotional kick in his story. The film also struggles to build up momentum, because it continually leaps between various chapters in Brown's life. Which means that it never quite connects these disparate episodes into one coherent narrative. Even so, Chadwick Boseman delivers an electrically charged central performance.

Boseman plays James from the time he was 16, thrown into prison for stealing a suit in 1949, until his comeback in the 1990s. Raised in a brothel run by his Aunt Honey (Octavia Spencer) after his parents (Viola Davis and Lennie James) abandoned him, James is in prison when he meets visiting gospel singer Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), who takes him in on his release. Together they form The Famous Flames, gaining small-time success as James catches the eye of a manager (Dan Aykroyd), a record executive (Fred Melamed) and the public. A string of major hits followed in the 1950s and 60s, then James went solo in the 70s before the usual issues of fame caught up with him: money, drugs and guns. But he returned to the stage in the 1990s.

The film completely skips over his Hollywood years in the 80s, which wouldn't be a problem if the decade was so notably missing from the film. As the story skips back and forth through the years, the audience is forced to make sense of the disparate scenes, filling in several holes along the way. Aside from one rather surreal scene in a Southern Gospel church, there's never much of a sense of how Brown found his voice or developed his inimitable style. It also never quite captures his impact on the music industry as a whole.

Continue reading: Get On Up Review

Gentle and very smart, this low-key comedy gets under the skin as it follows a smart young kid into the adult world. Without quite becoming either a frat-house comedy or coming-of-age odyssey, the film knowingly avoids cliches while telling a hugely engaging story with so much charm that it's virtually impossible to stop smiling.

The kid is 13-year-old frizzy-haired genius Eli (Wolff), who longs to attend Harvard but is instead stuck with 27-best choice Whittman College. His first friend there is the oldest freshman, 30-something Leo (Fraser), who is trying to reinvent himself and introduces Eli to the campus' party lifestyle. Then after a run-in with three Harvard snobs, Eli decides to teach his desired university a lesson: he joins Whittman's Mastermind team (alongside Bergman, Lee and de Jesus) and swiftly starts turning their losing streak around as they climb through the ranks and head to a showdown with Harvard at the national finals.

While the competition plot follows a fairly standard trajectory, writer Wierzbianski and director Kent refuse to indulge in trite formulaic melodramatics. Even the way Eli falls for a teen (Garner) from the local town feels fresh and unexpected. And while the humour is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the smiles are earned because they are grounded in the characters rather than cheap jokes. It also helps that each character is a vivid bundle of complex energy and emotion, nicely played by an up-for-it cast.

Continue reading: Hair Brained Review

After playing comical sidekicks in rom-coms like No Strings Attached and What Happens in Vegas, Lake Bell emerges as a rising-star filmmaker with the smartest, funniest comedy of the year. Winner of the screenwriting award at Sundance, this script is painfully hilarious, drawing on the characters' personalities to take us into a previously unseen side of the movie industry. It's also a rare Hollywood movie that refuses to shy away from anything.

We're talking about voiceover artists here, specifically those who provide the rumbling commentary for movie trailers. The late Don LaFountaine was the voice behind all of those iconic "In a world..." trailers, and now a studio wants to revive them for a new epic quadrilogy. The top contender for the job is Sam (Melamed), a veteran who decides to let his protege, the egotistical womaniser Gustav (Marino), have the job. Then Sam's voice-coach daughter Carol (Bell) throws her hat in the ring, which is unthinkable because a woman has never narrated this kind of trailer. She prepares for the audition with the help of a love-struck sound engineer (Martin), but is distracted by issues between her sister and brother-in-law (Watkins and Corddry) and the fact that her dad's new girlfriend (Holden) is younger than she is.

Bell juggles all of these plot strands brilliantly as a writer, director and actor, generously giving her costars the most riotously funny dialog while Carol pings around between them. And since we see everything through her eyes, she emerges as a hugely engaging woman who is smart, skilled and also likeably flawed. Every performance is natural and amusing, with the kind of astutely witty dialog actors can really sink their teeth into. And there are some uproarious cameos along the way, including Offerman as a wry colleague, Davis as a studio head, Longoria as a vocal client and Diaz as the star of a Hunger Games-style saga.

Continue reading: In A World... Review