The Gentlemen (2019)

Wow, Guy Ritchie. I hadn't seen anything he directed since the 2009 Sherlock Holmes. This one looked more along the lines of Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and it has the third highest IMDb rating among his feature films.

Toward the beginning, PI Fletcher (a nearly unrecognizable Hugh Grant) crashes the English mansion of Raymond (Charlie Hunnam), right-hand man to expat marijuana kingpin Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), to tell almost the whole rest of the story, which Fletcher threatens to sell to a movie studio if Raymond doesn't pay him. The plot involves Pearson trying to sell his stash to billionaire Matthew Berger (Jeremy Strong) before it becomes legal in the UK, making an unlikely alliance with thug trainer "Coach" (Colin Farrell), and accidentally getting on the wrong side of mob boss "Dry Eye" (Henry Golding) and tabloid editor Big Dave (Eddie Marsan).

Sing (2016)

A notice that Netflix would stop streaming this animation at the end of the year inspired me to prioritize it. I'd been uncertain because the ad campaign didn't appeal much to me, but the decent ratings and slightly more popular sequel got me interested.

Slightly corrupt producer Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) is on the verge of losing his live theater after a string of flops. He decides to host a sing-off, but his elderly secretary (director Garth Jennings) accidentally overstates the prize money in the flyers. His only hope is to impress a rich, haughty retired diva (Jennifer Saunders/Jennifer Hudson in youth) with the talents of amateur finalists.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Initially, I put this title off because I felt like I'd already learned all there is to know about it. Then I put it off more when I learned that Ben Stiller starred and directed (he's even more of a red flag for me than Will Ferrell) and Jack Black was among the highest billed. But recently, I heard an interview in which Robert Downey Jr. reflected fondly on it. Maybe it would be worth a viewing after all.

The production of a modern Vietnam War epic is going slowly and over budget, apparently because the director (Steve Coogan) doesn't know how to work with prima donnas. At the advice of the gritty writer of the book being adapted (Nick Nolte), he sends the five main actors deeper into the jungle for a more authentic experience. Little does any of them know that this jungle is home to a strong gang of heroin manufacturers, who mistake the fake soldiers for Drug Enforcement Administration officers (do they have international jurisdiction?). The actors, in turn, take a little while to realize that the criminals aren't other actors.

Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)

Oh look, LAIKA again. For once, I felt like seeing their work in a theater, and so did my dad. Maybe that's because the stop-motion animation studio is trying something different this time: a setting in feudal Japan. You can't really tell from my past reviews, but I'm kind of a sucker for entertainment set thereabout.

A woman, Sariatu (uh, Charlize somebody), and her eye patch-wearing baby barely survive a stormy sea voyage and then make a home in a cave. There is a village nearby, but they have no money for better lodging. About a decade later, Sariatu spends most of the day catatonic, but son Kubo (Art Parkinson) has grown precocious, making a name for himself by telling stories of his samurai dad Hanzo fighting the Moon King's forces -- while illustrating them with moving origami controlled by his magic string instrument, which nobody identifies by name, but I determined it to be a shamisen.

Little does he know how much truth there is to his stories, until the day he neglects his mom's rule to come home by nightfall. The Moon King (Ralph Fiennes, once again playing a main villain in a family feature) is Sariatu's father and can now detect Kubo. The king and his identical other two daughters (both Rooney Mara) will stop at nothing to bring Kubo into their celestial kingdom, which pretty much requires that they blind him and make him learn to enjoy killing Earth mortals.

Contact (1997)

Having quickly lost interest in Cosmos, I'm sure I didn't put this movie on my list for Carl Sagan's writing. Instead, I must have noticed how frequently it came up in discussions -- not to mention IMDb searches. Robert Zemeckis directs, and the cast includes Jodie Foster, Tom Skerritt, Matthew McConaughey (who would go on to the similar Interstellar), David Morse, Angela Bassett, John Hurt, James Woods, and Rob Lowe. We also get a lot of public figures as themselves, including controversially altered footage of Bill Clinton. So I went in, knowing little else of what it would offer.

Ellie (Foster) works for the SETI Institute with unstable funding, because too few people have confidence that we'll connect with aliens. Fortunately, a creepily influential yet reclusive billionaire (Hurt) sponsors her. Finally, she discovers a suspicious space noise. You can imagine many of the various reactions, including legitimate fears of a new Heaven's Gate cult. The next hard part is decoding the message, followed by deciding how much trust to put in it. Just about every step of the way is a struggle for our heroine.

Interstellar (2014)

Christopher Nolan is so popular that today's top news on IMDb is that he'll direct a movie in 2017 -- with no word on the title, subject, or actors. Personally, I have very mixed feelings about his work. It's consistently admirable and entertaining but always contains bothersome elements that prevent me from loving it, such as an obsession with dead wives and girlfriends. (How does his wife feel about that?)

The protagonist of Interstellar -- identified somewhat confusingly by just his last name, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) -- is a widower, but at least he's not loaded with guilt or vindictiveness. After all, in his time, crop blight has decreased the human population so dramatically that he fears that his daughter Murphy's generation will be the last. (For once, the disaster is not evidently the fault of humans or aliens.) A former astronaut, he's disappointed that schools now teach that the moon landing was a hoax so that kids will be less inclined to become anything other than farmers. Of course, he's not alone: The stealthy remains of NASA have been looking for a habitable world to reach before it's too late. As Cooper discovers, their methods now involve aid from a mysterious source to travel by extra dimensions. He's game to head a mission despite Murphy's protests, but no one can be fully prepared for what happens in the uncharted territory of physics....