#GAfilm Review: "The Nice Guys" (***½)

Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling star in "The Nice Guys."

“The Nice Guys” jostles your funny bone and warms the part of your heart (the top right half, I think) that stores all your nostalgia. It makes you admire a time, or even a mentality, that you didn't know you missed. I wasn't alive in the 1970s and I'm not a violent person, but this is a time/universe I want to occupy (minus the guns and danger), even if only for a day.

It’s indubitably a Shane Black film—dialogue that sizzles and jokes that zing. There’s also some violence, raucous behavior, perfectly 70s outfits, and lots of glorious vinyl. Black directed as well as co-wrote the script with writing partner Anthony Bagarozzi. 1977 is as much a character in this film as its two stars, the moralistically misguided Jackson Healy (played by the talented and surprisingly bellied Russell Crowe) and the shambled mess of a detective, Holland March (Ryan Gosling, handsome even in his drunken stupor).

Review: "Laggies" (**½)

Chloe Grace Moretz and Keira Knightley star in "Laggies"

Lynn Shelton has created one of my most favorite movies of all time. Now I haven’t seen all the movies in the history of all time, so that first statement isn’t entirely accurate, but of all the movies I have seen, Lynn Shelton has captured me. But not with “Laggies,” her most recent directorial venture, but with “Your Sister’s Sister.”

I saw “Your Sister’s Sister” three years go, and this is the only time I’ve done this, but once the credits rolled, I immediately played the movie again in its entirety (I was watching it OnDemand). This isn’t the best movie ever made, it’s not even among the best, but this movie, it reached inside my chest, worked around my breastbone, and squeezed my heart until I felt nearly ready to burst. I loved its honesty, its sincerity, its small, freehanded charm. Everything about it, to me, is gorgeous. And since watching “Your Sister’s Sister,” I’ve followed Lynn Shelton’s career with a magnifying glass and a fine-tooth comb. I have a Google Alert set for her name. So when “Laggies” headlines started filling my inbox, as you can imagine, my excitement started to boil.