The Nice Guys

And ‘The Angry Birds Movie’ is to blame. Ryan Gosling explains how...

If Lethal Weapon made it to Season 2, you can bet FOX has an eye on other Shane Black buddy comedies. The Nice Guys may be next on the TV reboot line, albeit with a female-centric twist that changes a major element of the film’s setting.

Too much time and effort in Cinemaland is wasted turning film into a game of winners and losers; Movie X made Y dollars so it matters more than Movie Z. But a film is way more than its box-office total. Some of the best movies released in 2016 failed to meet their financial expectations.

How many times has this happened to you: You’re at home, bored, looking for something to watch. You try Netflix, but the movie selection isn’t great (or even good). There are a million viewing options at home and online, but how do you choose what to watch? Enter On Demand With ScreenCrush. Every two weeks, ScreenCrush Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer joins you to recommend three handpicked new titles you can watch at home right now from Movies on Demand. These are big new releases you won’t find streaming on Netflix, and the choices run the gamut from indie favorites, to major blockbusters, to insightful documentaries, and everything in between — all available with your remote.

Okay, so it was one of the worst summer movie seasons in recent memory. Trying to find the good blockbusters amongst the last four months releases sometimes felt like trying to find a needle in a stack of s---. But even this year there were diamonds in the rough. Today we’re celebrating the ten best, the summer movies of 2016 that didn’t make us weep for the future of cinema — and note that this list is just movies that got wide releases in at least 500 theaters. We’ll have a separate piece on under-the-radar summer films you might have missed next week on ScreenCrush. In the meantime, let’s celebrate the highlights from a depressing summer before we clear the decks and get ready for the fall.

Someone had to dethrone Captain America: Civil War from its spot at the top of the box office top 10, so why not The Angry Birds Movie? The animated adaptation of the popular mobile game glided into first place with a fairly strong opening weekend, relegating Marvel’s latest adventure to second place.

In keeping with the retro vibe (and setting) of The Nice Guys, the latest promo for Shane Black’s crime comedy reimagines the film as an old school animated series — the kind of thing you might have watched on CBS on a Saturday morning back in the ’70s. And while this promo is a little more kid-friendly, it’s still for a film that is most certainly not for kids (but it is for everyone else, and you should make time to see it this weekend).

The Nice Guys opens with a shot of the Hollywood sign in 1977, dilapidated and covered with graffiti. While modern film nerds look back at that era as a kind of Golden Age, the Los Angeles of The Nice Guys is a place that has lost its luster. The town is swimming in smog and porn; it is literally and metaphorically dirty from top to bottom. The crumbling Hollywood sign is historically accurate, but it also makes a convenient symbol, not just of the place as it was, but as it still is — particularly at this time of year, when everything is based on something else and it sometimes feels like the studios are remaking movies that were just released a few weeks earlier.

A lot of people do what Shane Black does. He just does it better.

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s ambitious Grindhouse project — a double feature of horror flicks modeled after the look and feel of ’70s sleaze cinema — had its troubles upon release, mostly that it felt approximately a million hours long...