a) Happy Death Day

Because we spent our first Valentine's Day together snowed in, watching scary movies and eating Chinese food, my wife and I order Chinese and watch a scary movie every Valentine's Day, and this was our pick this year. I really enjoyed it, they had a lot of fun with the 'Groundhog Day as a horror movie' conceit (including a little meta nod to Groundhog Day at the end) but it had its own structure and its own twists that made it its own thing. Wild that one of Michael Landon's kids grew up to write and direct scary movies. 

b) Peter Rabbit

I took my kid to see it, and I found myself comparing it a lot to the last movie I took him to, Paddington 2, which is way better but overall more similar than it is different. Will Gluck directed two of my favorite comedies of the last 10 years, Fired Up! and Easy A, and his work in children's films still retains some of the wit and pacing of those movies, even if the overall sense of humor is a lot cornier and more broad. I'll be happy when he does some more live action movies about adults, though. 

c) Band Aid

I really adore Zoe Lister-Jones and am bummed that she's stuck in a show as mediocre as "Life In Pieces," so I'm glad that she's continuing to write and star in her own indie films, including this, her directorial debut. This movie pairs her with another very likable sitcom star, Adam Pally, as a couple who try to deal with their troubled marriage by starting a band and turning their fights into songs. It's got a lot of really clever and funny moments and also winds up pretty emotionally affecting at the end, although it kind of felt like they let Susie Essman kind of do a monologue at the end to tie up all the movie's themes instead of working it more gracefully into the story. 

d) The Girl On The Train

I like to say that Emily Blunt has great taste in projects and that I've loved just about everything she's been in aside from just really liking her as a performer. But I'd say this is definitely on the low end of her filmography, suspenseful and well made but still ultimately really maudlin and heavy-handed and dreary where I was hoping there'd be a bit more mystery or element of surprise. Certainly not remotely as good as its most frequent point of comparison, Gone Girl. I thought it was funny that Darren Goldstein has a small role in this, because the only other thing I've seen him in is "The Affair," which is very similar in a lot of ways. 

e) The Mummy

It's weird to feel kind of defensive about them moving on from the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies and rebooting with Tom Cruise. But Cruise has become kind of reliable for these old-fashioned low expectations action flicks, and this one turned out well, good visual effects and amusing comic relief with an undead Jake Johnson. 

f) The Bye Bye Man

I think this is one of those movies where the title is so hilarious and infantile-sounding that it's hard to totally take it seriously even though it's pretty decent. Movies where people's perception of the world gets distorted so that they do terrible or self-destructive things always really creep me out. I really had a crush on Jenna Kanell from an episode of "Shots Fired" she was on and she's good in this as well, kind of thought the parts with her were more interesting than the main plot with the protagonist. 

g) Arsenal

John Cusack was never exactly a superstar but I feel bad for the guy that his career has drifted into this aimless sea of undignified direct-to-DVD/VOD genre flicks. And I feel like this movie where he shares top billing with Nicolas Cage really just brings into startling relief that that's where he is, he's in Cage's world now, making crappy action movies with Adrien Grenier. 

h) The Emoji Movie

I feel like this movie was kind of designed to appall adults merely for existing, and in a way I think it's cool that kids movies can still do that in the post-Pixar age of extremely acclaimed and tasteful animated features. Like, the TJ Miller interview where he ridicules himself for taking the job, and the Jordan Peele interview where he ridicules himself for losing a role as a poop emoji to Patrick Steward, kind of exist as much in the public imagination now as the movie itself. But my kid liked it and it was kind of charming in its own proudly absurd way. 

i) The Adventures of Tintin

I started watching this with my kids and we have yet to finish it. I really have no idea who Tintin is or why Steven Spielberg wanted to make a movie of it, but my toddler thought his dog was cute. But as impressive as the animation is in this movie, it's still on the wrong Polar Express side of the uncanny valley and kind of weird to watch. 

j) Heathers

As someone who's pretty well versed in '80s movies, cult comedies, teen movies, and Winona Ryder movies, this movie has always been a weird blind spot for me where I'd managed to not see it even though I've seen pretty much every other movie it shares a fanbase with. And since there's a TV version debuting soon, I figured it'd be a good time to finally catch up. I kind of feel like the darkness of its satire was more entertainingly daring than outright funny, but I appreciate the odd unique clash of different tones. 

a) "A.P. Bio"
"It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" is heading into its 13th season while this makes, along with "The Mick," the second show that one of the stars of "Sunny" is moonlighting with on one of the big 4 networks, basically doing variations of the same bawdy misanthropic thing that their main show does. It reminds me of those bands that have been around forever without ever breaking up but still have solo albums and side projects that sound exactly like the main band. That said, the first 3 episodes of "A.P. Bio" have been pretty entertaining, out of the whole burgeoning mini-genre of shows about adult employees of elementary schools behaving badly ("Teachers," "Those Who Can't," "Vice Principals," "Bad Teacher"), it feels like it has more potential than most of those, partly because it's kind of the only one that really considers what the students are thinking at all.

b) "Corporate"
The last couple decades of comedy have been full of satirical depictions of office drones and cubicle culture, from Office Space to "The Office" and so on. Comedy Central has at least put a slightly wilder spin on the Dilbertification of television with "Workaholics" and now "Corporate," which reminds me a bit of the ABC cult classic "Better Off Ted" but is a little more over-the-top with the dark touches and does stuff like an entire episode of Banksy jokes. Lance Reddick and Anne Dudek are just in the supporting cast but they're really the MVPs of this show.

c) "Absentia"
Stana Katic of "Castle" fame stars in this Amazon series about an FBI agent who disappears for 6 years while tracking a serial killer and is assumed dead, only to turn up alive. So there's a whole mystery to unravel, but the first couple episodes that we watched are more about her just returning from society and reuniting with a son who doesn't remember her, and it's all pretty emotional and gut-wrenching. I find it pretty distracting that they named a tertiary character Kelly Price, though. And when I tweeted something to that effect, the show's official Twitter account responded with what looked like a plot spoiler, so that was pretty weird.

d) "Chris Rock: Tamborine" 
Standup specials used to be something I'd channel surf to and drop in on for a 10 or 20 minutes at a time regularly when they were mostly on Comedy Central or HBO. But now Netflix produces standup specials at such a dizzying volume that I've kind of checked out and don't even watch the ones by comics I love most of the time. But I grew up in the era where Chris Rock specials were cultural events, and it felt like a big deal to see his first one in a decade. He's not firing on all cylinders all the time anymore, but in pretty much every section of the show he works his way up to a couple hilarious crescendos, there's always a musical rhythm to his routines that I really love. His piece about police brutality is about as great as you'd expect ("Some jobs can't have bad apples...American Airlines can't be like, 'Most of our pilots like to land!"). But what I really liked was how the bit about divorce led, surprisingly, into some fairly good marriage and relationship advice (alongside some stuff that was funny but not necessarily words to live by).

e) "Bellevue"

f) "The Resident"
It's been a while since I watched medical procedural time shows with any regularity, so picking up this show and "9-1-1" recently has reminded me how stressful they can be to watch, just the minute-to-minute life and death matters. "The Resident" can be pretty gripping and well done, but I don't know if I actually like or care about the cast at all. The main guy played by Matt Czuchry is kind of supposed to be a flawed character but I can never quite tell if they're writing him as unlikable or if I find the actor totally unlikable.

g) "Let's Get Physical"
Matt Jones and Chris Diamantopoulos are two guys who've both had memorable supporting roles in some popular shows, so it's a great idea to make them the leads of a show where they're rivals, especially since they have such different screen presences. I feel like the show is off to a slow start, though, like they don't really know where the laughs are supposed to come from aside from the storyline full of campy aerobics outfits.

h) "Altered Carbon"
This show is rumored to be Netflix's most expensive show to date, costing even more than "The Get Down"'s $120 million season. And it really seemed to land with a thud, and probably wasn't helped by the fact that Netflix had a more high profile sci-fi release, "The Cloverfield Paradox," just a couple days later. It's not bad, has some cool visual ideas, but I always say, even in high concept genre shows, casting and dialogue is really key to making a show anyone actually wants to watch, and aside from Martha Higareda's character, I don't really care much for the people or what they're saying in this.

i) "2 Dope Queens"
I adore Jessica Williams and I guess it's nice that she has a popular podcast, but this whole thing of adapting podcasts into TV shows seems like not a great idea. I attended a live taping of a podcast a few months ago and it was a fun night and this show reminds me a lot of that, but the loose fun of a mostly improvised stage show of a few people making conversation does not really translate to television that well.

j) "Grown-ish"
Doing an "A Different World"-style college spinoff about one of the kids from "Black-ish" seems like kind of a natural, if unimaginative idea. But Yara Shahidi really is pretty capable of carrying a show on her own, even if I wish they dropped the "Black-ish"-style voiceover narration in every episode, and they do a pretty decent job of making it a topical show about what the college experience actually is today. It's not laugh out loud funny very often, but it's had its moments, I think they're still finding their footing, the cast is pretty good. Importing Deon Cole's character from "Black-ish" has been implemented a little awkwardly but he's always funny so it's not really a problem.

k) "Waco"
I remembered when it was announced that Michael Shannon had been cast in a miniseries about the Branch Davidians and thought it was gonna be amazing to see him play a cult leader. But then I realized that he's too old to play David Koresh and Taylor Kitsch would be Koresh while Shannon plays an FBI hostage negotiator. I always dismissed Kitsch as a pretty boy would-be action star that Hollywood failed to make happen, but I tried to give him a chance to prove himself in this. I dunno, though, I feel like the voice he does is so stylized and maybe it's accurate to play Koresh as having sex with his mom glasses on but it felt like Kitsch was just going over-the-top with his portrayal. And even though there are two whole episodes before the ATF standoff begins, it just feels like you don't get that much meaningful background on who these people were and how they got into that mess.

l) "The Four: Battle For Stardom"
I feel like this show was designed as an alternative to "The Voice" but they didn't really develop the idea much further than "what if we have the singers in 4 big circular brightly lit chairs instead of the celebrity judges/coaches?" It's pretty entertaining because 2 of the judges are Diddy and DJ Khaled (and Khaled is basically a prop comic on this show). But the whole idea is that any given time they have 4 singers in contention and new challengers can always knock them out of the 4. And there was so much turnover from week to week that it was hard to really get attached to anyone and root for them, although there were a few I rooted against, especially Jason Warrior (a total weirdo who is said to have taken anger management classes after he lost on "The Voice" but really did not take it well when he was eliminated on "The Four"). Plus there was a whole debacle where the one non-famous judge, label exec Charlie Walk, was accused off sexual harassment and kicked off the show right before the finale, and it was really awkward how they kind of tried to pretend it had always been 3 judges and minimized his footage in clips from previous episodes. The girl that won last week, Evvie, was really good, though, she deserved it.

m) "Llama Llama"
My kids only have one or two of the Llama Llama books that we haven't read a whole lot, but I showed them a little of the Netflix series based on them, and they weren't too interested and I can't blame them. Kid's books usually need some creative license to turn into a decent screen adaptation, especially when the books are heavy on wordplay or rhymes, but unlike say, most Dr. Seuss adaptations, they didn't really even incorporate the rhyming into the show that much.

n) "Breathe"
Apparently Amazon is getting into distributing foreign series in America like Netflix has been doing a lot of, which is a good idea. But the Indian crime series "Breathe" doesn't have subtitles for all the Hindi and Tamil dialogue on U.S. Amazon, unlike Netflix's imported shows, which seems pretty stupid. I watched one episode and the story seemed intriguing from what I could make out, and visually it's really well done, but I can't keep watching a show where I have no idea what anybody is saying.

o) "Grand Prix Driver"
I started watching this Netflix documentary series narrated by Michael Douglas but quickly realized that I just don't care about racecars.

p) "Dirty Money"
Another Netflix doc series, one that's pretty interesting and centered around white collar crime and financial scams, really some good explanation of all this infuriating stuff that happens all the time that I think the newsmedia really has failed to explain or highlight the importance of enough to the general public.

x) "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend"
The third season has been such a rollercoaster ride of pretty emotional episodes that I was starting to feel like there were fewer songs and laughs. But the last few episodes as they run up to the end of the season this week have been pretty great, bringing back weird Trent for another episode was inspired, Paul Welsh is such a delightfully creepy performer.

z) "The X-Files" 

a) The Cloverfield Paradox

I was a pretty big fan of the original Cloverfield, and I was disappointed when initial plans to do a proper sequel explicitly tied into that movie's plot never came to fruition. So I was pleasantly surprised when 10 Cloverfield Lane came out, which was probably an even better movie, even if it was pretty much a completely unrelated project that was kind of repurposed as part of the 'franchise' fairly late in development. Continuing in that lane of kind of making the franchise a loosely connected anthology of orphaned mid-budget sci-fi films is sort of a neat idea, but it's also a gamble. And in the case of The Cloverfield Paradox, which was titled God's Particle during production and which the screenwriter learned would be a 'Cloverfield' during shooting and began rewriting, that gamble didn't really pay off. It reminded me heavily of the space station mishap movie Life that I saw a couple months ago, which I think helped me enjoy it more than most people did -- at least The Cloverfield Paradox has a few really memorably bizarre FX setpieces, Life was just kind of violent and dumb. But the reaction to this movie, which was released immediately after being advertised during the Super Bowl on Sunday, has been overwhelmingly negative, and I'm not gonna defend it too vehemently, it was at best a pretty flawed movie. 

b) Mudbound 

It speaks to how good Mudbound is that it got multiple Oscar nominations even though it was largely seen on Netflix and not in theaters. I was most curious to see Mary J. Blige's nominated performance, but really I think what's impressive is just how restrained and almost unrecognizable she is, for someone who puts so much catharsis into her music, she really got a chance to let the emotions mostly stay just under the surface here as an actress. The end is pretty gut-wrenching. People like to say there are too many movies about slavery, which is a loaded but debatable topic, but I think there are probably not enough movies like this that take a hard look at the Jim Crow era. 

c) Rough Night

Rough Night is a movie burdened by comparisons, particularly as a female version of Very Bad Things, and as a mostly white counterpart to the far more successful Girls Trip released a few months later. I haven't seen Girls Trip yet to compare, but Very Bad Things is one of the shittiest movies I've ever seen in a theater, so that's a pretty unflattering parallel. Rough Night is moderately better than that comparison suggests, but it's also a bit like the series "Search Party" in that it's at its best before the accidental murder plot point where everything takes a dark turn and it doesn't quite recover its sense of frothy absurdity. Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell and Ilana Glazer are all incapable of not being at least a little entertaining, but this still felt well beneath their usual scene-stealing work. 

d) Snatched

Another ill-fated comedy that mainly seems to exist to put women in the kind of raunchy absurd comedies that men usually star in but fails to really hit the mark. A bit better than Rough Night, Amy Schumer as Goldie Hawn's daughter is some pretty good casting, but really feels like the wrong vehicle for Schumer at a time when she needed to follow-up on Trainwreck with something stronger than it and really cement her spot in movies. 

e) Wilson

Woody Harrelson has had a great, busy last decade or so of playing cranky yet lovable mentors in seemingly every movie. But as he settles into a groove as America's favorite supporting actor, he doesn't get as many leading roles, and so I was curious to see Wilson, Craig Johnson's follow-up to The Skeleton Twins written by Daniel Clowes. Harrelson and Laura Dern and Judy Greer are typically great in Wilson, but I dunno, it felt like just another rambling story where a veteran actor plays a misanthropic guy who constantly says blunt, rude things to people. 

f) The Layover

William H. Macy has started directing films in the last few years, and I kind of assumed that even given his work in "Shameless" he'd probably direct the kind of character-driven indie films he's known for and not, well, a sex comedy starring two women, Kate Upton and Alexandra Daddario, who are primarily known for having large breasts. It's kind of an anti-Bechdel Test movie where the babes just spent the whole movie competing for a guy, so even when they ultimately inevitably choose to put their friendship first, it all feels pretty pandering and lowbrow. 

g) Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie

My son absolutely loves the Captain Underpants books, so the movie was a real anticipated event for him. But that was my wife's turn to take him to the movies, so I didn't actually see it until it hit Netflix more recently, and I found it pretty enjoyable, I dug the way they transferred the amateurish drawing style of the books to slick computer animation in a way that felt right. 

h) Gold

Gold is about a lot of wealthy investors getting ripped off in a scheme to mine gold in Indonesia, and it kind of feels like the movie itself mirrored that. Lots of big names were attached to the project at various points, including directors Michael Mann and Spike Lee and star Christian Bale, before it ultimately wound up falling to Syriana director Stephen Maghan and star Matthew McConaughey (who does pretty much the same kind of bald schlubby sucker that Bale ended up playing in American Hustle instead). It's not a bad movie, but you can kind of sense that the people behind the film got strung along hoping for a bigger payoff just like the characters. 

i) Newness

This is a movie about a couple who meet and go through  a rough patch and then start trying to have an open relationship with threesomes and voyeuristic titillation to spice up their relationship, and it all feels very po-faced meditation on dating apps and promiscuity. It might've had the profundity it was going for with better actors or a little more color in the dialogue, but it just felt like all these pretty people were scowling through the whole movie. 

j) Hell Or High Water

As I've said in this space before, my house is a place where Ben Foster is held in high regard, and he got to have a ball playing an unhinged bank robber in this Best Picture nom, he really carried the movie even if Jeff Bridges was the one who got a nomination. 

k) Don't Knock Twice

I think I came home after my wife had started watching this movie so I missed the beginning, but it was a pretty good creepy ominous horror flick, some good jumpy moments.