TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

As a lover and proponent of original filmmaking, I seem to have found myself in a bit of a hypocritical stance. This year alone I have seen four superhero films, a reboot of a Disney movie...and The Nice Guys . Let's stop now, and keep reading to see my review of the threequel to a rebooted franchise of the now eight-strong X-Men films. The movie starts (in a startlingly cinematic epic fashion I hadn't seen in an X-Men movie thus far) with an ancient Egyptian landscape, where the world's first mutant En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) is worshipped by practically all of CGI Egypt. After betrayal by his men who see him as a false god, Grandaddy Mutant is trapped in the rubble of a pyramid, until 1983 rears its retro head, and some...culty people (??? it's never explained ???) are able to summon up from his slumber. En Sabah Nur (who's actually never called Apocalypse come to think of it) like Ultron and countless others before him is unsatisfied with machinery, weapons and...

The odd couple troupe is one of the oldest cinema can offer: but if it ain't broke, right? The joy of The Nice Guys , a good turnaround for acclaimed writer/director Shane Black, who we last saw helm Iron Man 3 , is seeing these two Oscar-nominated actors play the camera for laughs. You don't think belly laughs when you think of Russell Crowe. Ryan Gosling was in last year's Oscar-winning comedy The Big Short , and he was pretty funny it, and we know he has chops from his "SNL" appearance. But they're generally seen as dramatic actors, so the joy of seeing them drive around 1970's L.A. with a hallucinatory creature is pretty spectacular. The plot (for a mystery, anyway) is much pretty straightforward, with a few curves and backtracks to make it juicy. Healy, a "hit man," as I like to call him, because he pretty much just punches you in the face (Crowe) comes to private eye Holland March's (Gosling) door, breaks his arm and tells him to not ...