In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark's hubris leads to the creation of a lethal robot with daddy issues. Ultron, who is supposed to be the ultimate planetary line of defense, im­me­di­ate­ly goes rogue upon achieving sentience. He vows to destroy humanity to save the planet, and in particular to destroy his maker and the other Avengers. His ally Wanda Maximoff (the Scarlet Witch) uses her powers to sow dissension in their ranks, which nearly tears them apart. They defeat Ultron only after enormous de­struc­tion of life and property, with con­se­quences that are …continue.

The Age of Affluence ended when the coastal cities drowned as the icecaps melted. Many now eke out a living digging through the detritus of the past. Nailer is a scrawny teenaged scavenger who finds a broken clipper ship after a storm. There's only one survivor, Nita, a swank girl who fled in­ternecine feuding in her trading clan. To protect her from his psychotic father and others who would sell her to her enemies, they go on the run to Orleans, with the aid of a “half-man”.

Baci­galupi's …continue.

Tom Mus­grave—­Mas­ter of Defence and Master of Logic, friend to Will Shake­speare—is present at the very first per­for­mance of Romeo and Juliet when the actor playing Mercutio is somehow fatally stabbed with an envenomed rapier during an on-stage duel. He uncovers perfidy and poisonings which stretches back for years and rises into the highest halls of the land.

Tonkin has not only created a brilliant and dangerous pro­tag­o­nist, he has metic­u­lous­ly recreated Eliz­a­bethan London, a city that is a stew of ambition, peril, and intrigue.

First Musgrave book; precedes …continue.

Jet Butler lives on an isolated mesa in New Mexico. One of her few friends is a suspect in a murder. Cordelia Morgan, an outsider, who turns out to be far more than she seems, is also interested in the murder, which seems to be somehow tied up in the sale of water rights.

This never quite gelled for me. Despite the author's flair for de­scrip­tion, I found the plot confusing and I was not engaged with the two pro­tag­o­nists.

Conor Lalor's family life is falling apart. His parents are breaking up and they're broke, there not being much work in Dublin in 1985. To economize, they take the 15-year-old out of his fee-paying Jesuit school and send him to the Christian Brothers' school in Synge Street. Conor wants to impress the beautiful girl who lives across the street and he offers to put her in his music video. Raphina accepts and then he has to pull together a band with his school mates, which they call …continue.

What We Do In The Shadows is a mock­u­men­tary about four vampires living in the suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand. They are being filmed by a doc­u­men­tary crew in the months running up to the Unholy Masquerade Ball, the highlight of the social season for the local vampires, witches, and zombies. Not well adapted to modern life, Viago, Vladislav, and Deacon are all hundreds of years old. 8,000-year-old Petyr turns a new vampire, Nick, who brings his human friend, Stu, a computer programmer, into their circle. Stu—who the older vampires like …continue.

Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), a self-effacing, overweight, desk-bound CIA mission controller, spends her days in a verminous CIA basement talking into the earpiece of her glamorous field agent coun­ter­part. When he's killed before her remote eyes and other field agents are com­pro­mised, she goes into the field for the first time and soon blossoms into a deadly agent.

I had never seen McCarthy in anything before and I assumed that Spy would be a dumb, gross-out comedy. It was better than I feared and genuinely funny at times. McCarthy inhabits several personas, ranging from the initial doormat of an …continue.

Jurassic World is an un­nec­es­sary retread of the Jurassic Park franchise. New, scarier, smarter monster Imperator Furiosa¹ breaks out of its enclosure and wreaks havoc, killing humans and dinosaurs for pleasure. Plucky kids—or are they darn, meddling kids?—aided by unlikely romantic couple—and by ve­loci­rap­tors and a T. Rex—manage to save the day. Meanwhile, greedy human villains plan to profit off the mess but get eaten before the end to audience applause. Chris Pratt delivers scruffy heroics while Bryce Dallas Howard runs around the entire movie in ridiculous heels without breaking either an ankle or a heel.

¹ …continue.

Ant-Man is a light­weight but appealing entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Decades ago, Hank Pym discovered the Pym Particle and invented the Ant-Man suit, which allowed him to shrink to the size of an ant. He buries the technology, believing it's too dangerous. Now his former protégé Darren Cross is close to perfecting the Yel­low­jack­et shrinking suit and selling it to Hydra. Pym and his daughter Hope recruit Scott Lang, a former burglar, to don the Ant-Man suit to stop Cross.

Much of the movie is played for laughs. Unlike Deadpool, these are PG-13 laughs. Paul …continue.

It's Spring and crime is heating up in the 87th Precinct. A hippie has been found crucified, a cat burglar is leaving kittens at the scene of the crime, and the Deaf Man is taunting the detectives again, sending them clues of his upcoming crime. We see blackly humorous slices of life in the big city as the cops work their cases.