[Wild Canaries], produced by Takal, written and directed by her real life husband Levine, is unquestionably ambitious, skewering itself at every turn while also paying homage to many of the more paranoid and schizophrenic classics of the genre (films like The Parallax View, Charade, Shadow of a Doubt and The Marathon Man come to mind). It’s clear the filmmaking team is having a blast, a party the entire cast seems gleefully willing to be a part of, everyone throwing themselves into it all with genuine exuberance playing things straight even when the motion picture itself is brazenly winking at the audience.

A Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee, this deliriously entertaining, confidently composed satire of cultural, gender and class politics and mores is astonishing, deftly moving from one story to the next with freewheeling enthusiasm. While each segment is unconnected from those surrounding it, they all manage to convey common themes eviscerating the status quo, showing while catharsis and vengeance can go hand-in-hand, the price extracted for revenge is almost always worse than the cost of turning the other cheek.

Chappie shows great promise, it just maddeningly refuses to live up to it, its final moments as robotic and as poorly engineered as a malfunctioning Furby ready for the scrapheap.

Levring’s affection for the genre is apparent, while his handling of the tale’s central moments pack a powerful punch that knocked me upside the head leaving me just to the right side of awestruck. [The Salvation] is a fine film indeed, one I’ll happily ride along with again with no hesitation whatsoever.

[Everly] is like some crackpot melding of a one-room Tennessee Williams’ melodrama crossed with some comic book obsessed fanboy’s most gloriously asinine fever dream, featuring a central protagonist that’s more charismatic and charming than she has any right to be.

I think what makes me mad is that it’s easy to see the movie that could have been.

The Lazarus Effect is your typical horror enterprise about very, very smart people doing very, very stupid things, the film a convoluted hodgepodge of Frankenstein, Lucy, Limitless, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Re-Animator, a whole fleet of additional B-grade shockers thrown into the mixture for good measure.

If you threw Juno, Mean Girls and She’s All That into a blender you’d probably end up with something relatively similar to The DUFF, a well-intentioned and relatively charming High School coming-of-age comedy that’s frothy and effervescent enough to entertain but not inspired or creative enough to become memorable.

To paraphrase a very old adage, laughter cures just about anything, and while it can’t make Hot Tub Time Machine 2 a good movie it does manage to transform it into a far more enjoyable one than it otherwise would have been.