Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Boris Without Béatrice never feels like the work of an artist who actually believes in everything he’s doing.

If nothing else, Fishing Without Nets looks good on a big screen, directed in the kind of slick, just-off-arthouse style that mandates every shot of a character walking be framed from behind.

For someone so gloomily aware of his own privilege, Wilkerson spends a lot of the film playing dumb and speculating—a writer’s trick for giving shape to a piece with a thesis and no conclusion. He doesn’t have the footage to make Did You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? come together as an investigation narrative, and his insistence on a quasi-chronological structure means that it doesn’t work as an essay, either.

The film is far less than the sum of its possibilities.

In general, Mister & Pete succeeds with this sort of narrative small stuff, establishing the housing project’s internal mythology as well as the tricky dynamics of its underworld.

At times, it’s surprisingly compelling, thanks to King’s surefooted direction of actors and well-honed formal sense; while the movie’s execution never quite makes up for its conception, it does elevate it above, well, just being the sort of movie that would be called Newlyweeds.

In its highly combustable, confusing, angry environment, where everyone from parents to rioters to cops is just making it up as they go along, the only thing that seems to matter are the underlying drives, whether it’s goodheartedness or resentment.

The absence of necessity or consistency has its appeal; it guarantees that the movie stays unpredictable even as it pilfers shamelessly, piling cliché upon cliché, but rarely in a way that makes a lick of sense.

Regardless of its high aims, most of what The Insult offers—unlikely last-minute reveals, argumentative lawyers, stone-faced judges—is the stuff of a diverting, junky courtroom drama.

Unfortunately, Java Heat is also an action movie for people who don’t mind clichéd plotting, lame dialogue, and the low-wattage charisma of third-string Twilight heartthrob Kellan Lutz.

Although it isn’t actually a comedy, Iron Mask qualifies, in substantial stretches, as one of the funniest films of the year.

A by-the-numbers spaghetti Western that’s kind of slow and uneventful—and the world has no shortage of those.

The result is perversely watchable, which puts it a cut above the average inane wannabe franchise-starter. With no likable characters or internal suspense to keep it in check, Wingard’s direction sputters out into a cloud of slickness and pastiche.

Afterimage suffers from a clunky script and an overdetermined formal palette.

It’s a patchy and seemingly unfinished film.

Simply put, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2 doesn’t pop like a Johnnie To flick. Shooting in a digital format for the first time, and without his signature Technovision anamorphic lenses, To seems to have been thrown for a loop; his sense of space and rhythm are off, and his compositions are uncharacteristically flat and conservative.

It probably shouldn’t star Ryan Reynolds, who is generally likable, but frequently miscast. Only Kingsley’s bizarre, severely mannered performance seems to be following the undercurrents of the material.

The dancing is mostly depicted in practice and rehearsal in a featureless room, captured in raggedly cut handheld sequences that betray the movie’s modest means. If Akin knows how to direct better than this, he rarely shows it. But if he never displays a knack for visualizing the physicality of dance (more impressive rehearsal footage can be found in about five seconds on YouTube), he does a decent job of conveying the frustration and passion it inspires in Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani, a professional dancer).

Secret Of The Tomb plays it as a source of corny jokes, pop-culture references, and father-son bonding moments. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of film that shouldn’t be expected to engage with its assorted bizarre subtexts — but what a movie it could be if it did.

It’s the first, and probably last, sports comedy to take its visual cues from Ang Lee’s "Hulk."

Despite all the time War Dogs spends with these two characters, it never develops them past the initial impression that one is basically a good guy and that the other is bad news incarnate.

Detour is just film-school-ish synthesis, right down to the cinematography-midterm shot lit through venetian blinds and the anachronistic analog static on the motel room TV—the story of a young man who hates his stepdad so much that he stumbles right into an over-complicated thriller set-up that can only be watched once.

To be fair, Far From The Madding Crowd isn’t the kind of novel that lends itself to adaptation; it was originally published as a monthly serial, and still reads that way.

If the bare-minimum characterizations at first feel like a refreshing alternative to the most modern survival film (think everything from 127 Hours to The Shallows), they eventually betray a movie that maybe—just maybe—doesn’t have a lot of ideas about where to go past the first act. Like its protagonist, it trudges toward an unknown destination out of obligation.

From its lifelessly anachronistic English dialogue to its Masterpiece Theatre lighting and production design, The Young Karl Marx tries to filter radical thought through the pace and aesthetics of a middlebrow drama.

Into The Storm is an uncanny valley disaster movie — not as consciously cheesy and cheap as something like "Sharknado 2," but built around a similar equation of unreality and gratification.

Combining Anderson’s symmetrical camera style with frenetic editing ends up imploding the sense of depth and space that has long made the director’s movies must-sees in 3-D.

The result is busy, murky, and remote. It doesn’t have the leftie political clarity of Ken Loach, the purposeful intensity of the Dardenne brothers, or even the character development of Ramin Bahrani’s early features.

In the end, it all comes down a cautionary tale call to “real life” — a call that the movie will heed, just as soon as it’s done with this latest scene of David pretending to f--k a polygonal figure to Vivaldi.

Ron Howard’s documentary Pavarotti is content to bask in his glow; despite the broad array of home movies, family photos, interviews, TV outtakes, and concert recordings at its disposal, it never feels intimate with Pavarotti the person.

The grace notes—including a final shot that could, potentially, be Schrader’s most sublime—are lost among the inconsistencies, incomplete subplots, and airlessness. It shouldn’t take an expert to figure out what a film is trying to articulate. Unfortunately, in this case, it does.

Might be smarter that the average live-action kids’ movie, but it’s hamstrung by a lack of visual imagination and a generic script.

The franchise-hungry tentpole-itis of the present studio model has produced oh-so-many dumb rehashes of classic myths and fairy tales, but this is the first that is always funny on purpose.

The problem with this kind of universal narrative is that, like the cult of the golden ratio, it emphasizes formulas at the expense of those expressive qualities that actually make art and entertainment.

Daguerrotype is frustratingly easy to rationalize. It’s also about an hour too long; by the time it reaches the end credits, even the spell cast by his eerie direction and handsome widescreen compositions has worn off.

Like Cooper’s Rust Belt faux-noir "Out Of The Furnace," it’s an exercise in strained seriousness, the potential ironies and dramatic tensions lost in a repetitive, episodic, and politically vapid narrative.

Resurgence ends up falling victim to its attempts to differentiate itself while remaining completely derivative.

Nestled within the movie’s overtly schematic design are strong performances—namely, newcomer Bado—and a few details about German-Argentinean life which are, frankly, more interesting than the question of Helmut’s past.

Running only a little shorter than the average season of On Cinema At The Cinema, it’s never as cringe-inducingly funny or inventive as the webseries that spawned it.

When it comes time to morph and break out the Zords to the sound of “Go, Go, Power Rangers,” the film groans and shuffles, like a sulky teen who’s been told that they have to finish the dishes before they can borrow the minivan.

A story is only as interesting as what can be drawn from it, and Becker and Mehrer seem reluctant to draw too much, perhaps realizing the confines they have to work within; even at a scant 83 minutes, the movie feels over-stretched.

It would be a waste of everyone’s time to go on about how this 95-minute movie deviates from the source. Let’s just say it turns The Dark Tower into something generic, and leave it at that.

Packed with rare footage from the band’s early years, and narrated through present-day sit-down interviews, it’s pop oral history at its most formless and fannish: fixated on juicy tidbits, points of influences, and historical cameos, and sorely lacking a point of view.

It stands apart from the majority of R-rated, coprolalic studio comedies simply by being fast-paced and, on occasion, pretty funny.

The gonzo factor (sadistic violence plus multiple music numbers) is intermittently engaging. The characters, not so much.

Refreshingly unpretentious, Risen reimagines the Gospel as an ancient Roman cop movie.

This latest film, which was made on about half the budget of either of its predecessors, is as close as the Langdon-Howard cycle has gotten to actually being fun.

As entertainment, it works in the most rote way: the star power of Wahlberg, Russell, and Kate Hudson, who plays Mike’s worried wife; Malkovich’s predictable sliminess; the minor pleasure of seeing the good guys get out; the slight kick of watching something big crumble and burn while knowing that it’s only a special effect, real-world basis be damned.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard, which bears the tagline “Get triggered” and is essentially a dumber, tackier "Midnight Run," was destined to be one of those Neanderthalic, faux-merican EuropaCorp action movies, like "The Transporter" or "From Paris With Love" ­­— except fate fumbled, and the film ended up as a coasting-on-star-power Hollywood programmer directed by The Expendables 3’s Patrick Hughes.

The filmmakers that Schanelec draws on for inspiration are all masters of one kind of economy or another. The problem is that Schanelec herself is not. Despite its austere, theory-heavy minimalism, I Was At Home, But… is lopsided and lumpy, filled with longueurs in which the brain begins to check out.

A fitfully entertaining mix of offscreen gore and Maxim-esque T&A.

These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.

Though Irrational Man’s existentialist moral crisis is mostly hokum, the movie still has a whiff of charm, thanks to a handful of good one-liners, a little misdirection, and Phoenix’s off-kilter performance, which completely ignores the rhythm of Allen’s speech in favor of naturalistic mojo.

Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.

The problem is as old as the biopic: Somewhere in trying to tell a life story, life gets lost.

Stultifying in spots, the period drama Sunset Song marks an unexpected misstep for Terence Davies, the eccentric filmmaker whose movies evoke limbo states of memory and repressed feeling using a very British vocabulary of drab spaces.

Packed with misfiring grenade launchers, blue lens flares, and Mercedes armored cars, 13 Hours makes the best case for Bay as a toy-box aesthete with an abstract sense of motion and color—and the best case against him as an incoherent jingoism fetishist.

Perhaps The Ornithologist lends itself so well to scholarly unpacking because it has too little of its own to offer. Maybe it’s healthier to just enjoy the light bouncing from the water to Hamy’s abs.

While director Jake Shreier (Robot & Frank) doesn’t do a whole lot with the camera besides make sure that there are people in the frame, he does manage to provoke strong performances from Wolff—who looks kind of like a young Dustin Hoffman, but stretched out like a piece of taffy—and the young supporting cast.

My King is overlong and overheated, suggesting a filmmaker who’s better at getting actors to yell at each other than at judging what’s essential.

The unfortunate trade-off of Eastwood’s efficient, real-deal classical direction is his stubborn commitment to the script.

The result often feels superficial; it is neither a definitive account of the creation of Scott’s touchstone of horror and sci-fi, nor a cogent analysis of its aestheticized subtexts, those gritty and unnerving surfaces and the things lurking underneath.

The film avoids every potential area of deeper interest: the economic conditions in Jan’s tiny ex-coal-mining community; the mid-to-late 2000s period setting; any nitty-gritty details about what it takes to train or race a steeplechase horse.

It’s such a conceptually fertile film that one wishes that it weren’t also a bore.

Odd Thomas is at its best when it’s presenting — rather than commenting upon or explaining — juxtapositions of the wholesome and the supernatural.

Unremarkable, though hardly unpleasant, the middlebrow middle-age romance At Middleton often plays like a forgotten trifle from the Golden Age of Hollywood studio filmmaking, distinguished more by its competence and affable performances than by any formal or thematic potency.

True to its title, Begin Again periodically restarts itself, nestling flashbacks within flashbacks; it’s an unnecessarily complicated structure for what is, frankly, little more than a corny, overstuffed, “let’s put on a show” musical.

There’s an irony that a movie about a trans individual who needs to live and be accepted as a woman should have some of the worst symptoms of a very straight and very male gaze.

Cooper’s charm, imposing post-American Sniper physique, and proficient French carry the movie, propped up by a very strong supporting cast... whose roles mostly consist of fascinated or exasperated reaction shots. It just doesn’t carry the movie anywhere interesting.

More well-intentioned than accomplished.

The film is something like a digital tiger itself: an approximation, not exactly the same as the real thing. With the cut to credits, it ceases to exist.

Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.

In spurts, it resembles an homage to classic French cinema and an overheated, Tinto Brass-esque Euro skin flick, but still finds plenty of room for stultifying, upstairs-downstairs costume drama.

Christmas has some good points going for it (e.g., Plummer’s grumpy, rascally Scrooge, who’d be great in a straight adaptation), but its portrayal of Dickens’ biography and family life is resoundingly dull, apart from some tense notes in Pryce’s performance.

A potentially interesting-if-imperfect mash-up of contrasting sensibilities (Stark vs. Black) turns out to be just another one of the curiously fake-looking blockbusters that emerge every now and then from streaming’s abyssal money pit and immediately disappear from the public consciousness.

For all the pains the movie takes to explain why someone shouldn’t play football—to win, to be a star, to defeat others — it never bothers to explain why someone should play the game. It’s a collection of well-intentioned absences with no defining presence to speak of.

The most derivative movie of the summer, Earth To Echo, is also the most visually unpredictable, chock-full of degraded digital textures that seem ready to boil off the screen, picture-boxed within Mac desktops and overlaid with extraterrestrial interface trees.

A minor effort in which the movie-within-the-movie never seems like a real project — can’t help but be riveted by the fake production it’s mounted within itself.

Donnybrook aside, Sutton has largely devoted his career to mood pieces like Dark Night and Memphis where concept is key. In Funny Face, he puts everything in movie-movie-ish scare quotes—a self-defeating approach for a paean to urban authenticity.

Lacking both the exploitation-movie claustrophobic urgency of Golan’s "Operation Thunderbolt" and the Irwin Allen-disaster-film factor of the Irvin Kershner-directed NBC version, "Raid On Entebbe," 7 Days instead goes for businesslike professionalism.

More so than in any of the other movies, Dom’s wrecking crew of car nuts comes across like survival-of-the-speediest tacho-fascists, high-fiving their way through a path of destruction and to a collateral death toll that one presumes now numbers in the hundreds.

The movie is a catalogue of Nolanisms translated into Tagalog and executed on a tight budget.

The result feels like a DVD or Blu-ray special feature with a celebrity pedigree, rather than a movie that can stand on its own two feet.

There are too many montages and musical numbers that seem to be searching for a punchline.

Less intended, perhaps, is the fact that a viewer may find themselves identifying with one of Joan’s ecclesiastical jurors, who insists at every opportunity that his colleagues stop wasting their breath and burn her already. He’s right in the sense that the church court is just dragging its feet to a foregone conclusion. In its own way, so is the film.

Many Jerry Lewis staples, including bratty children and imposing tough guys, are present and accounted for; at one point, Hart even childishly leaps into Ice Cube’s arms, Lewis-style.

The film, however, struggles to make a point under Colangelo’s stolid direction, losing itself in thinly drawn subplots while trying to give an unconvincing feel-good redemption arc to Feinberg, a character who is neither very interesting nor very sympathetic. The result feels, perversely, unearned and a little cheap.

It sets out to take the viewer on a journey, but ends up giving them little more than a pleasantly diverting sight-seeing tour. There are worse ways to spend two hours. Better ones, too.

Like Snyder’s Sucker Punch, it’s a confused but fascinating mishmash of religious, military, and sexual imagery.

Rough even by Russell’s standards, this grab bag of dropped plot points, visual metaphors, and theatrical cues looks like the underdrawing of a comic drama, only half covered in bright impasto strokes.

The film also contains fleeting moments of authenticity. Most of these come courtesy of Robert Patrick, who plays David’s father, and Greenwood. Together, these two veteran actors turn could-be-thankless “good dad/bad dad” roles into credible depictions of wounded masculinity. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t about them.

Big Game fails to live up to the kookiness of this set-up. Instead, it opts for ’90s action movie clichés and generic coming-of-age-isms. Helander’s inelegant, exposition-heavy English-language dialogue doesn’t help matters.

On the most basic level, the con-artist romance Focus is a Cary Grant movie in the "North By Northwest" or "Charade" mold.

Dumont does not make conventionally satisfying films, and, for all of his visual minimalism, he loves a mess. But he is more than capable of making movies that are engaging on a level beyond the purely intellectual. France, for the most part, isn’t one of them.

Never betraying an iota of lived experience, it trots out tropes seen in dozens of movies and sitcom episodes (the embarrassing dad, the big party, the fictional rock star crush, etc.), which can ring true only because they’ve been in circulation for decades.

The movie isn’t without its pleasures, most of them related to performance. Farmiga, a perennially underrated actor, gives Samantha a measured confidence that sets Hank’s manic cockiness on edge, and Billy Bob Thornton does an effective variation on a slimy archetype as the prosecutor, Dwight Dickham.

The premise of intrigue and revenge in a high-society Tsarist underworld is irresistible and pulpy, but Mizgirev’s script is an indigestible, soap-operatic mess of backstories, clichés, and the kind of ambiguous mystic overtones that have become an unbreakable addiction for Russian film.

We watch as the film moves from year to year, the characters sometimes disappearing illogically, with Kurt forever at work on one unsatisfying project or another, until he finally finds a subject that speaks only to him. The movie’s German title — Werk Ohne Autor, which means Work Without Author — seems almost too apt.