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 I wish there were a word for "experimental fluff," because that's what "Magic Mike XXL" is. It's a new kind of critic-proof movie. You could rightly describe it as "two hours of Channing Tatum and other hunky guys bonding, flirting with women, and doing bump-and-grind dance routines" and not be wrong, and yet it's made with such aesthetic playfulness that I expect it to generate graduate theses with titles like, "Breakaway Pantomimes: 'Magic Mike' and Commodified Desire."  The film is directed by Gregory Jacobs, a longtime assistant director to "Magic Mike" director Steven Soderbergh, and co-produced by Soderbergh, who also shot and edited the movie under pseudonyms. It's quite deliberately about as close to a non-movie as a movie can be while still calling itself a movie. At times it feels like the beefiest and least douchebro-pandering episode of "Entourage" ever. Tatum's Mike and the remaining K

 The most heartening surprise about director Bill Pohlad’s “Love and Mercy” is also to my mind a pretty improbable one. That is, that it’s such a good and at times better than good movie. The rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of genius musician Brian Wilson, a life story that disproves Fitzgerald’s adage about there being no second acts in America in what seems like the most perverse way imaginable, looks on paper to be too sprawling, too chaotic, to be distilled into a coherent, never mind compelling, cinematic narrative of conventional length. But longtime producer Pohlad (“Brokeback Mountain,” “12 Years A Slave”), working from a daring script by Oren Moverman and Michael Alan Lerner, and using two first-rate actors to play Wilson at two turning points in his life, lavishes his material with love, attention to detail, and empathetic imagination. The result is a story that’s hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of

 The thing about The Grateful Dead is, if you tell some stranger that there’s a new four-hour documentary about the band, he or she is likely to respond, “Of course there is.” The legendary band is legendary in part for its devotion to duration. Long concerts, long jams on songs, a long time on the road. This documentary’s title, “Long Strange Trip” comes from “Truckin’,” a song from its 1970 album American Beauty. The band was only five years old at the time, although its ostensible leader, guitarist Jerry Garcia, had been gigging professionally since 1961. But the trip was going to get longer and stranger, grinding to a halt a quarter of a century after “Truckin’,” with the 1995 death of Garcia.  There have been challengingly long docs about classic rock bands in recent years. 2007’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream,” directed by Peter Bogdanovich, chronicled Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and justified its length by dint of Petty’s talents as a raconteur. Alison Ellwood's not-quite-four-h

 "Bird on a Wire," a documentary that follows late Canadian poet/musician Leonard Cohen on his 1972 European tour, is an atypical concert film in that it's most compelling when Cohen is not on stage. This is partly because Cohen, whose "Hallelujuah" and "Bird on a Wire" have been covered by everyone and their mother's podiatrist, has a modest stage presence. His line delivery is consistently soulful, his tone is measured. But filmmaker Tony Palmer doesn't always seem to know where to place his camera, an unfortunate byproduct of filming a performer at a live venue. Palmer favors a rather basic close-up shot of Cohen's upturned face, surrounded by a halo glare created by bright-white stage lighting.  Thankfully, Palmer captures a fascinating side of Cohen when he's backstage, trying to maintain a generous, mild, grounded persona during encounters with bandmates, would-be groupies and interviewers. Cohen's struggle to keep an air of c

 Musicals made me a romantic. They taught me that some emotion is so powerful that it can’t be put into mere words—it must be sung. Some love is so overwhelming that you just have to move your feet. With a family that loved classic films, I remember being awed by Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, thinking they were as cool as anyone in movie history. Characters in musicals not only understood love differently than those in traditional films but they turned that understanding into art—dancing, singing and transcending mere dialogue to become something greater, something purer, something closer to true romance. We’ve had some musicals since the era of Rogers & Astaire, but few that have tried to recapture that sense of fluid, magical thinking in which characters communicate with their bodies as much, maybe even more, than they do with their voices. One of many remarkable things about Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land” is how much energy and time it devotes to movement and music, not just lyri

 "Jem and the Holograms" is one of the weirdest big screen adaptations of a cheap TV cartoon that I've seen. That's praise. I don't know what I expected going into the movie, but it wasn't a coming-of-age drama that compensates for its near plotlessness with charming and sometimes touching performances, astute observations about how today's youth use technology to deepen their sense of community and self, and some lush handheld camerawork (in CinemaScope ratio!) that occasionally evokes, for real, "The Tree of Life" and "To the Wonder." If Terrence Malick had directed "Josie and the Pussycats," this is what it might have looked like. As written by Ryan Landels and directed by Jon M. Chu (director of two "Step Up" films and "G.I. Joe: Retaliation") the film boasts lots of tight shots of people's faces lost in thought, and several self-contained, intimate musical numbers, including an a capella performanc