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Kim Hollis: I caught up on some releases from earlier this year. Turbo is a better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be animated flick that steals elements from movies like Ratatouille and Cars and somehow manages to make it not seem like highway robbery. It’s a fun little movie and I think any kid would enjoy it. I also had low expectations for The Internship, and wound up enjoying it a surprising amount. It’s a film that has the best of intentions, even if the whole “ha ha, look at the 45-year-olds who don’t know how to use Google” shtick got a little old. It’s certainly not Wedding Crashers era Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, but it’s a movie I think I’d watch again. Finally, Stoker is a strange, fascinating, disturbing movie. It reminded me of Oldboy in an odd way, which makes sense because they’re from the same director (Chan-wook Park).

Since a few people have mentioned TV now (Miami Vice is one of the greatest shows ever and I’m not ashamed to say it), I figured I could weigh in with some of my favorites out of the new shows this season. The one I look forward to the most is The Originals, which you have probably never heard of. It’s on the CW, and since it’s about vampires I was ready to dismiss it immediately, but it has a really nice Interview With the Vampire vibe going and not just because it’s set in New Orleans. The four leads are all excellent.

I’m also enjoying several of the new comedies (something I haven’t been able to say for a long time), and my favorite of them is The Goldbergs. It might be because it’s set in the ‘80s, which is when I grew up, but I laugh every week. It feels like a lighter version of Freaks & Geeks. The actors who play the three Goldberg kids are terrific.

David Mumpower: As I continue to catch up on 2013 releases, I’ve experienced an odd epiphany. Tyler Perry Presents Peeples and The Big Wedding are basically the same movie. Both involve patriarch caused hijinks involving an attempt at matrimony. Each includes not quite incestuous but close enough sexual encounters among “siblings”, a frustrated father of the family acting out against his aging, and a major character outing herself as lesbian. Apparently, Robert De Niro and Craig Robinson are getting the same scripts these days. I must have been in a good mood for this double feature, because I liked both movies well enough to recommend marginally. The casts of both productions are excellent, and I am thrilled that Malcolm Barrett from Better Off Ted is getting some decent parts. That dude is a brilliant comic actor.

R.I.P.D. was a movie whose trailers always interested me more than most folks. It was already a punchline before it was released in theaters yet I held out hope that I would go against the grain here. The movie all but begged for Men in Black comparisons, and that happens to be a franchise that I love. R.I.P.D. is no Men in Black. There is one cute romantic subplot involving Mary-Louise Parker. Other than that, it is 90 minutes of nonsense. Avoid at all costs.

I also caught a double bill of horror movies with The Conjuring and Mama. I wish that I had watched the former movie first because it suffered severely by comparison with Mama, an exceptional scarefest that demonstrates once again that the most terrifying creatures on Earth are little girls. Particularly noteworthy was the disconnect between the older sister who had been indoctrinated into civilization and the younger one who had gone native. The dichotomy between the two daughters captivated me throughout Mama. Meanwhile, The Conjuring is the Ed and Lorraine Warren story that nobody believes is true yet we all kind of wish it were. The farmhouse thriller provides exceptional balancing of multiple characters, and those people are all juggled for maximum tension at the end. It is nowhere near as good as Mama but I still think it is one of the best horror flicks in recent memory. Conversely, Mama may be the best horror film since the original Paranormal Activity.

I didn’t hate After Earth the way that I experienced visceral reactions against Movie 43 and A Good Day to Die Hard, easily the worst movies of 2013 thus far. What I actively despised, however, was the performance of Will Smith in the film. I am ordinarily a huge fan of his, and I believe that his decision making in choosing projects is the gold standard. After Earth was a mistake from one perspective because it was a box office bomb (please don’t waste my time arguing that its overseas box office saved it). It was a much bigger miscalculation to have Will Smith portray such an icy, soulless semi-protagonist. I should note that the movie really belongs to his son Jaden more than him. Still, the Fresh Prince’s acting was so forced that I had a great deal of difficulty separating the action on screen from the distraction of him talking.

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