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“Are you a believer in order?”

The natural order of things during the summer movie season is to be pummeled by one would-be blockbuster after another, each aiming to be louder and more extravagant than the last. So debuting A Little Chaos — a 2014 British period drama about a seemingly esoteric chapter of French faux-history — amidst all this noise is a curious decision. While the film certainly nails the “extravagant” part and largely adheres to costume drama conventions, there’s just enough here to make it a thoroughly pleasing alternative to the typical multiplex fare.
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“If you call out to one of the dead, all of them can hear you.”

This lesson is very familiar to anyone who has seen either of the first two Insidious films, a pair of old-fashioned (no sex, no gore), highly-profitable chillers. Of course, a potential problem for this third installment was that the characters in these movies really should have learned that lesson by now too. The makers of Insidious: Chapter 3 smartly sidestep that issue by turning back the clock on the franchise. I just wish the rest of the film had more of that ingenuity and fewer blatant, unearned jump scares.
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“We’ll get hit again…and it’s going to be a bigger monster.”

The character who utters these words in San Andreas is referring to an impending earthquake that could literally rip California apart. But he could just as easily be talking about the summer movie season, when audiences who have just been rocked by a catastrophic quake have to deal with something called “Indominus Rex” a mere two weeks later. San Andreas almost certainly won’t end up as the biggest bully on the Hollywood block, but it’s a big, dumb, fun disaster flick the whole family can enjoy.
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