Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.

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.

A pile of muck (old muck, too) with no rake, Steven Spielberg’s National Board Of Review-approved Nixon-era newspaper drama The Post lacks the exact thing it glorifies: a reporter’s instinct for story.

Critics are often accused of reviewing a filmmaker’s politics over the film. But the truth is that, outside of welcome stretches of humor (in the beginning) and tension (towards the end), there isn’t much more to Dear Comrades!. The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky’s static direction.

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.

Though No Home Movie is a very personal work by someone who was always a deeply personal artist, it’s hard to tune into. It contains a lot of Akerman, but very little of her art, and that seems intentional.

Over and over, it pitches us reasons to care about these young women—an all-too-perfect example of a documentary that exists to make people feel good for watching it.

Simply put, it lacks its predecessor’s curiosity about its world—its fascination with colorful backdrops and machines.

For much of the movie, nothing happens, and it’s not the rigorous, locked-in nothing of the long-take art film, but the slow-motion, music-montage nothing of the artsy American indie.

The problem with Banana Split isn’t the surface phoniness or lazy comedy but the fact that the movie doesn’t offer any insight into its ostensible subjects—among them break-ups, female friendship, and teenage jealousy

A stolid film that largely rests on its director’s competence at helming extravagant aerial views of pyrotechnic destruction.

Not to say that the movie is a mess. Instead, it plays out as a more or less conventional direct-to-video-style thriller, distinguished by a handful of subtexts and images that might have been developed in a different version, but here register as mere quirks.

The problem is that Mank never transcends its borrowed cornball arc, depicting its title character as a genius in eternal conflict with villains and phonies like Hearst (Charles Dance, terrific), Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard, even better), and Welles (Tom Burke, blood-curdlingly bad).

The problem with Beasts Of No Nation is that it approaches war largely on the level aesthetic challenge, meaning that whatever sense of revulsion it creates comes from the personality of Commandant. It’s his absence, rather than memories of murder and rape, that hangs like a dark cloud over the movie’s intriguingly unresolved epilogue.

Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.

As this somewhat overlong film continues on, it becomes increasingly shapeless, finally succumbing to the sort of soupy sentimentality it’s trying to critique.

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.

Hypocrisy aside, Off Label’s biggest problem is that, for a movie that features a lot of people talking about a lot of things, it doesn’t have a lot to say; its scatterbrained, switching-between-browser-tabs structure guarantees that no idea gets developed very far.

In The Blood plays like demented cruise-commercial fan fiction.

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.

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.

Hittman (It Felt Like Love) turns out to be a conventional storyteller; despite her evocative styling and Dickinson’s surprisingly assured lead performance, her sophomore feature remains confined in monotonous, psychologically shallow coming-of-age-drama indiedom.

Rendered in the over-polished, pre-packed prestige style of director John Curran (The Painted Veil, Stone), Davidson’s journey appears meaningless, little more than a succession of pretty vistas for the dirt-caked trekker to squint at while having flashbacks of her childhood.

If one were to diagnose a central problem with The Marksman, it’s that it isn’t actually a Clint Eastwood movie; it lacks the breathing room, the first-take nonchalance that always makes an attractive opposite to the Eastwoodian sense of purpose.

Chi-Raq, Lee’s modernized take on "Lysistrata," is mostly bad art; it’s about an hour too long, sometimes leadenly unfunny, and set in Chicago, a place the Brooklynite director has no feel for.

Geoffrey Fletcher’s directorial debut, Violet & Daisy, has a lot of arch dialogue and very little depth. Talky and artificial, it moves like a sort of lobotomized Hal Hartley movie; it has plenty of Hartley-esque rhetorical devices — theatrical speech patterns, naïve characters, jokey plotting — but lacks Hartley’s sense of curiosity or engagement with the real world.

:ike a lot of intentionally shoddy or derivative movies, Bad Milo! can’t overcome what it’s trying to be. It’s neither focused enough to work as straight parody, nor outrageous enough to be appreciated for its excess; it’s a movie about butt monsters where butts are never shown.