I know, I know, it’s been a while since I’ve visited this list but with SIFForty stuffing my mouth full of films like I’m Takeru Kobayashi at a hot dog eating contest, I didn’t have time to do anything outside of the magical land of the international film festival. But now that that’s over and done with for the year and I don’t feel the pressure of consuming screener after screener, we’ll return to the most irregular regular segment we’ve got here at Silver Screen Riot: Weekly Review.

Last week was quite honestly one of the best weeks of cinema of the past year with screenings of How to Train Your Dragon 2, Snowpiercer, 22 Jump Street and The Rover all clogging up my cinema pipes with their epic awesomeness. Seriously, not a miss amongst them. As for at home watches, there wasn’t much that I was bowled over by, save for an effort from the always lovely (but always grumpy) Julie Delpy.

Once (2006)

After seeing Once land amongst the 17 Most Universally Agreed Upon Movies of the past 11 years, I felt that I had to check it out. And for all the singing of songs, blushing indie charm, belted powerful ballads, and intentionally miffed emotional connections, I just have to admit that it wasn’t my bad. It’s not a movie so much as a mix tape of sappy love songs caught on lo-fi footage and bustled out for the masses. Had there been more of a story and less of, uh, singing, I think this really could have worked for me but as is, I quickly found myself bored and ready for the crooning to reach a caesura before I had a seizura.

C

Mars Attacks! (1996)

A gleefully ridiculous genre take on 1950s B-movies, Mars Attacks! is as absurd as having an exclamation point at the tail end of your title but packs just the right amount of senseless fun to engage us for its running time. From Jack Nicholson inexplicably pulling double duty as two completely unrelated characters to Pierce Brosnan getting probed by aliens, Tim Burton corrals an eclectic group together, giving us a strange view of how the end of the world would affect difference peoples and classes. But that cone-headed alien’s trot all but makes up for other misgivings.

C+

Filth (2014)

As powerful as James McAvoy‘s performance in Filth is, Jon S. Baird‘s film of the same name is nothing short of a tonal nightmare that – like McAvoy’s character – doesn’t know what it wants, or needs, to be. Danny Boyle knew how to take on Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and his ironically black material but Baird gets things jumbled up quickly. It’s like he’s failed to properly parse the elements from each other; he’s mixed his reds in with his whites and ended up with a big heap of pink. Things only really start to heat up in the third act and when they do, they admittedly lean towards greatness, but without a solid foundation to rely on, even a finale this painful ends up feeling soggy and soft.

C-

2 Days in Paris (2007)

A smart subjugation of the romantic comedy genre, 2 Days in Paris sees Julie Delpy stepping into frequent collaborator Richard Linklater‘s shoes and approaching her film with his style of close quarters, unadulterated, matured grit. As her high maintenance American boyfriend, Adam Goldberg brings just the right measure of NYC chupatz to his fish-on-the-line routine, his increasing irk with her many encounters with exes is jealousy-ridden and yet sympathetic. Goldberg’s rocky relationship with Delpy – his bonafide meshugenah – drips the truth of a weathered relationship.

B+

About Last Night (2014)

A lazy, customary, cliched rom-com whose only twists and turns are that it takes exactly the twists and turns we expect it to make up this rom-com of rom-coms. Every once in a long while, Kevin Hart will crack a joke worth laughing at but About Last Night is a largely joyless affair, another tired relationship reckoning that’ll have you glad you don’t date anyone resembling these cardboard characters or deal with their laugh-tracked, sitcom problems. When Hart is your best asset, you can smell trouble a brewing and this is a movie where three out of four characters and unthinkably noxious. For my money, I’d rather spend two hours doing laundry than with these characters.