Colossal (R)
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Caution: potential spoilers

This stars Anne Hathaway. I knew that going in, and I tried really hard to recognize her, but I couldn't. I don't know why it didn't look like her to me. But that's not important. She did as good a job as ever. She plays an apparently alcoholic woman named Gloria, who has been out of work for some time, and spends her nights drinking with friends. Eventually her boyfriend, Tim, gets fed up and kicks her out of his apartment. So she moves back to her hometown, where she reconnects with an old friend named Oscar, and starts hanging out with him and his two friends, Joel and Garth, at his bar, where he also gives Gloria a part-time job. (Garth isn't particularly important to the story. Something more important does happen with Joel, but it turns out not to be that important.) Anyway, Oscar seems like a fairly nice guy, if rather overeager to please and has an almost stalkery vibe. I want to say that for a significant portion of the movie, I couldn't really get into the story, but that changes when a giant monster starts attacking Seoul, South Korea. It gets more interesting when Gloria figures out that the monster is mimicking her own actions, whenever she's within the boundary of a small playground. (This much was already known going into the movie, so I was waiting for it to happen.)

Gloria demonstrates this connection to her friends, but after awhile she gets concerned by the fact that she had unintentionally caused a great deal of death and destruction, so she wants to avoid the playground. However, one day Oscar discovers that a giant robot appears in Seoul whenever he's in the playground, and he controls its actions. (It hadn't been a playground when the two of them were kids, and we see flashbacks that eventually sort of explain the connection Gloria and Oscar have to the monsters, but it doesn't really make sense.) Gloria wants him to stop, but he becomes a colossal asshole (see what I did there?) and uses his ability to cause destruction to coerce her to stay in town when she wants to leave. (There's one scene in which he apologizes for how he acted when he was drunk, but the whole time it seemed to me exactly like the hollow apologies of abusive people, and that indeed turns out to be the case.) The battle of wills between Gloria and Oscar is the real meat of the movie. I don't want to reveal any more, except to say that while I only kind of liked most of the movie, I loved how it ends. Very clever way of meting out poetic justice. And that's all I can think to say. Oh yeah, I did also want to say that while Joel seems like a nice guy, it bugged me that he never tried to stop Oscar from what he was doing.