🎬 "You haven't taken a shower once this summer. Not once in 8 weeks."

I think I like Moneyball better than most sports movies because it’s not really about sports, or even the second-order idea of what sports supposedly represents to a community.

Billy Beane, played here by Brad Pitt, seems to spend almost zero time in Oakland and never once indicates that the A’s mean anything special to him. Instead, his efforts to reform the team — by way of data-driven sabremetrics — is a purely personal struggle, an attempt to correct for how his own pro baseball career went horribly wrong.

On paper, that’s a risky proposition, but the screenplay, co-written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, really delivers. Pitt and his costar Jonah Hill are both in top form here, with Hill providing some excellent comic relief to balance out the darker, nastier sides of Pitt’s character. Recommended.

I watched Moneyball on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Starz and DirecTV.

I remembered liking The 40-Year-Old Virgin when it came out because (to my idiot teenage brain) it felt daring.

And while it did introduce me to several actors I would come to love, including Steve Carell and Catherine Keener, a lot of the edgier jokes have aged like fine milk. Rather than pushing the envelope, the script falls back on misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and rape culture, using humor to make the people who spread that sort of stuff endearing. Unlike Anchorman, which puts misogynistic dialogue in the mouth of an obvious buffoon, this movie advances a warped idea of “normal” masculinity that is more harmful than humorous.

In one scene, a group of bros try to teach Steve Carell’s late-bloomer character how to meet women, and their dialogue is SO similar to what “pick up artists” write in men’s-rights circles, I did a double-take. Although talking frankly about sex ran counter to what conservative groups advocated at the time, the themes and message of the movie are deeply retrograde. Not recommended.

I watched The 40-Year-Old Virgin on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on fuboTV, DirecTV, and Sling TV.

Wet Hot American Summer is a ridiculous movie that never gets old for me. It’s an elaborate send-up of summer camp movies, but you don’t need to have seen any of those to have a good time.

Set at a camp in Maine on the last day of summer 1981, the story bounces among several storylines about the counselors and kids, none of which you should think about too much because they’re all supremely silly. In about 90 minutes, we get teenagers in and out of love, a sci-fi disaster, a “let’s put on a show” theater story, an action movie training montage, a PTSD-riddled veteran coming to terms with his own sexual kinks, a downward spiral into drug addiction, a heroic rescue, a marital drama, and probably more that I’m not remembering.

The other highlight of this movie is seeing all the actors who would go on to be famous, including Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Molly Shannon, and Joe Lo Truglio (a.k.a. Charles Boyle on Brooklyn Nine-Nine). This is a crazy talented ensemble cast and a fun, original film; it’s a shame that so many critics misunderstood it.

I watched Wet Hot American Summer on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Starz and DirecTV.

If there’s a canon of great movies about the Great Recession and its aftermath, Hell or High Water deserves to be on it.

It’s a neo-western about cops and bank robbers and when you watch it, you know you are in the careful hands of a writer, director, and cast who know exactly what they’re doing. It’s a simple enough story, but the competence in the execution is refreshing.

Chris Pine and Ben Foster play the bank robbers, while Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham play the Texas rangers on their scent. Each of the four has a quiet, intense desperation at his core; these are people who have run out of options, except to move forward on the track they’re currently on.

Hell or High Water is beautifully shot, empathetic to all, and is one of the few crime movies that doesn’t glorify bloodshed and mayhem. Recommended.

I watched Hell or High Water on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on Sling TV.

I liked Her the first time I saw it, back in 2013, but I appreciated it even more on a second viewing.

Writer/director Spike Jonze walks a tricky line here between dark satire and earnest warmth, and amazingly, he pulls it off. Scene by scene, you never know quite how the narrative is going to zag, but every beat feels earned and “right.”

This is a story about love and technology taken to an extreme, and yet not implausible, degree. Joaquin Phoenix is in his element as a slightly off-putting but deeply empathetic man who falls in love with a Siri-like operating system, played to breathy excess (in a good way) by Scarlett Johansson.

The largely subtle world-building in this movie has few equals, and the music is sweet and suspenseful in all the right places. Recommended.

I watched Her on Vudu, but it’s currently streaming on Sundance Now.

Hidden Figures is an enjoyable, well-acted movie about an inspiring true story … and yet, it falls a bit short of greatness for me.

Focusing on the Black math prodigy Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), the film argues that history has forgotten some of the most important contributors to the Space Race, including Johnson and her colleagues, Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe).

I really like all the lead performances, but I wish Vaughan and Jackson’s stories got more screen time because they’re honestly more interesting to me than Johnson’s more cinematic arc. All the characters, in their own ways, are fighting racism and discrimination, but only Johnson’s storyline implies that this is a personal rather than systemic challenge.

Put another way: This movie was filmed in mid-2016, and it shows. Johnson’s boss, a white savior character played by Kevin Costner, rings false in today’s political climate. All that being said, there’s no denying the satisfaction that Hidden Figures delivers when it counts. Recommended.

I watched Hidden Figures on Blu-Ray, but it’s currently streaming on FXNow and DirecTV.

(new additions in bold)