Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The movie’s most tantalizing mystery is the question of what’s really going on in their heads. It remains unanswered.

Sentimental, and plotted with the elegance of a silent film, Mountains is nearly hamstrung in its futuristic final section by one very bad performance and a whole lot of tin-eared English dialogue.

The first part is terrific and transfixing. Working in transportive long takes, Russell achieves some nearly miraculous effects—notably, a shot that prowls down a sloe-black mine tunnel to land in close-up on a jackhammer—as he blends the plutonic and the Platonic: the underworld and the allegory of the cave.

It is slow and solemn in stretches and often remote, but it rewards patience with a transcendent epilogue that departs from the main character’s point-of-view to find a glimmer of meaning.

Though smarter visually than its TV-ready format would suggest (the camera team includes ace cinematographers Eric Gautier and Mihai Mălaimare Jr.), Hitchcock/Truffaut doesn’t offer a whole lot more than the opportunity to watch and hear very smart people talk about something they know very well.

But despite its wry tone, the movie offers, in the character of Young-hwan, one of the filmmaker’s more caustic artist stand-ins. The aging sadsack poet can’t see anything outside of himself.

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.

Through a combination of caricature and psychological portrait, subtle touches and howls of impotent, uniformed rage, [Cummings’] film offers a memorable depiction of a man ill-equipped to deal with or direct his feelings—probably not all that different from the rest of us.

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.

Washington gives a magnetic, layered performance, backed by a largely superb cast, most of whom reprise their roles from the Broadway revival of Wilson’s classic. But the film itself is eluded by the epic qualities of the original text, which play directly to the captive space of the theater.

Part of the charm of Hermia & Helena is in the way it freely and randomly plays with form, employing luxuriantly slow dissolves, unexpected snatches of superimposed text, and even a black-and-white film-within-the-film.

Though Lafosse’s handling of the actors is pitch-perfect, his sense of structure is more problematic. The decision to start the movie at the end and then jump back several years undercuts the drama.

Like "I Saw The Devil," The Age Of Shadows is a cat-and-mouse scenario that thwarts and subverts audience expectations.

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.

Smulders, Pearce, and Corrigan are loose and eminently likable, and the direction is so in tune with the actors that one is almost inclined to think of Results as a movie carried entirely by performance, overlooking how much its shape depends on style.

Through Gray’s orchestration of themes, ironies, and flashes of transcendence, the thick of the jungle becomes as haunting and multivalent an image as the hidden city. It is that which we all disappear into.

Make no mistake, this is a film of ideas—sadder, quieter, more delicate than the Hollywood sci-fi standard.

This is, in other words, Assayas’ homage to highbrow gabfests — the mid-period films of Woody Allen (complete with a Bergman reference) and especially the work of Éric Rohmer, the pseudonymous critic-turned-director who made a career of exploring his characters’ private dilemmas, but remained famously secretive about his own personal life.

Of course, it’s self-indulgent, pushed even further into patience-testing territory by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who delivers some of the ugliest camerawork of his career.

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.

Michael Mann’s Thief is one of the most confident directorial debuts of its era, the product of an unprecedented amount of research and preparation.

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.

Liu is clearly inspired by live-action filmmakers (the Coen brothers and the Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano are acknowledged influences), but his casual side trips into the fantastic—say, an extended daydream sequence that’s part parody of Cultural Revolution propaganda, part karaoke video—can only work in drawing.

In Queen of Earth, writer-director Alex Ross Perry—who does snippy black comedy better than just about anyone else on the current American indie landscape—dials down the humor that has defined his work to this point, and turns up the queasy psychological currents that have always gurgled underneath it.

If the film seems head-and-shoulders above the average effects-driven family-matinee flick, it’s because it never gives the impression that it’s trying to be anything more (or less) than good-natured and fun to watch.

Think Vampire’s Kiss on a DIY scale, with motels and basement rec rooms in place of brownstones and nightclubs and a bladed Power Glove in place of plastic fangs. That’s Buzzard in a nutshell.

Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the movie were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else.

Special effects take pride of place in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories that is as technically accomplished as it is thinly conceived.

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.

Equity may not be the fanciest or flashiest of financial thrillers — more like off-brand David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh — but it gets the job done.

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.

This is thematically rich material; unfortunately, like a few too many dramas from the past decade, The Hunt resists expressive uses of style, opting instead for gently bobbing handheld camerawork. It's an actor-friendly approach.

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.

Still, that doesn’t detract too much from what Philomena manages to accomplish: a sober consideration of how ideals relate to institutions — whether they’re religions or political parties — anchored by two well-rounded, funny lead performances.

Everything signals birth—of Argentina, cinema, the nuclear family—until Dinesen descends into a womb-like cave and Jauja takes a hard left turn into enigma. Even the title is a mystery, the Spanish byword for a land of plenty.

The visual and thematic palette immediately brings to mind Michael Cimino’s once-maligned "Heaven’s Gate" — except that The Immigrant accomplishes more in two hours than Heaven’s Gate did in nearly four.

It comes across as incomplete, its metaphors, bit characters, traumas, and tacked-on subplots never threading together into a larger canvas—a “big picture” movie where only the most tightly cornered, claustrophobic moments seem finished.

It’s almost unbelievable that something this narratively arty is being released as a mainstream horror movie, but the filmmaking ranks as some of Aronofsky’s most skillful.

: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.

Jacques Audiard’s misbegotten Palme D’Or winner Dheepan aspires to be a "Taxi Driver" for today’s Europe, but ends up as a crude cross between "Death Wish" and Ken Loach.

Franco has a fan’s affection for Wiseau’s mannerisms, but if his objective was to lionize him as an outsider auteur à la Ed Wood, then he’s failed. The idea that The Room’s strange and bitter qualities are very personal and rooted in some deep pain is obvious to anyone who’s seen the film—except, it seems, to the star and director of this movie.

The film itself is barely bluffing that it has any stakes; the caper is vague enough to be inconsequential. Tramps knows it’s small potatoes, but is it any better for it?

Alternately candid and cagey, Robert Greene’s documentary turns the chores and frustrations of a modern-day homemaker into a study in roles — social and personal, conscious and unintentional, on-camera and off. It isn’t, by any means, a difficult movie, but neither does it take any easy routes.

Perturbed and darkly funny.

Old Fashioned — a deathly dull small-town drama with the marketing smarts to bill itself as the conservative Evangelical answer to "Fifty Shades Of Grey" — is all about the importance of sexual chastity, which is another way of saying that it’s all about sex.

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

Playing with genre cryptograms of gangster villas, opera-loving killers, and glamorously lit cigarette smoke, the film never takes itself too seriously, even if its characters never seem to smile.

Shannon, best known for playing weirdos and crazies, is uniquely good at playing restrained everymen, and he inhabits the role of Roy as a man of unspoken internal conflicts and complicated feelings.

The thing is, Listen Up Philip is a comedy — a howlingly funny black comedy with really sharp teeth.

What it all adds up to has some of the unevenness of a nightmare, the belly sweat and oscillating fans of muggy summer heat mixed up with unrealities.

If Howard and Pearle’s idea was to show how an extended argument devolves into the worst values of a previous generation — lashing out with implicit homophobia, resentment, and misogyny in the film’s shouty, snotty, excessively busy final third — then it comes too late here, before being patly resolved. A sharper drama would have made it the focus.

As a close look at Jodorowsky’s work reveals, the line between “cult artist” and “cult leader” can be blurry. The line only gets blurrier with The Dance Of Reality, Jodorowsky’s first movie in 23 years, and the best thing he’s done, film-wise, since "The Holy Mountain."

If Brügger shares the doubts of Williams and other Hammarskjöld conspiracy theorists about Operation Celeste (in all likelihood a hoax, though not a Soviet one), he doesn’t let them get in the way of a good story. As for the latest official U.N. inquiry, its report is due sometime this year. But then, can you really trust it?

Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers is set in the sort of unremarkable, average, suburban America that is rarely depicted in American movies in anything but a negative light, usually as a place where dreams go to die. So one of the unexpected virtues of this small, thoughtful film is how it resists treating these surroundings as soul-crushing or as a symbol of the failure of middle-class mores.

In an era where the mid-budget movie has mostly disappeared, The Fire Inside’s modest, thoughtful reworking of the sports drama formula can feel refreshing.

While it never feels completely defeatist, her film offers scattered snapshots of an uncertain society in its dog days.

Add a script that would have seemed derivative even in the early ’90s, and you begin to get a sense of the kind of undigested pastiche that director Sam Hargrave and writer-producer Joe Russo are going for.

Despite its meager budget, The Retrieval is characterized by its authenticity. The dialogue and attitudes are persuasive in creating both a consistent psychology and a sense of the historical past, without ever lapsing into a flowery 19th century-ness.

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.

Part of the movie’s mischievous charm lies in De Heer and cinematographer Ian Jones’ sophisticated use of Steadicam, which moves almost exclusively with Charlie, often seemingly in a struggle to keep up with his brisk, determined walk.

Shot on black-and-white film that has the luster of hard coal, In The Shadow Of Women is often quite beautiful—and it has some jokes, too.

The trappings of the boarding school, with its grand staircases, centuries-old cloisters, and self-serious teenage secrecy, are gothic. But Bonello nods just as much to American teen-anxiety horror. There is even an homage to Brian De Palma’s "Carrie."

Although the intriguingly named first-time director Greg “Freddy” Camalier makes the twice-told tales of the film’s second hour watchable, they end up paling in comparison to its essayistic first half.

Rosi’s compositions, static and mostly wide angle, are ennobling, albeit ambiguously. Life is going on, but not as usual.

It’s overlong, but behind its jabs at literary pretension, droll punchlines, and minimalist sight gags lies a search for the kind of guidance that parables used to impart.

What Goodbye To Language presents — with its nonstop chatter, its endless musical and literary quotations, and its silly puns and poop jokes — is a dense, expressive, aggressive new medium rich with possibilities for juxtaposing images and creating meaning.

There aren’t thrilling dramatic insights to be found here, but Wright’s showboating is unflaggingly watchable.

In its most compelling stretches, Santosh operates as a kind of subverted procedural in which every aspect of the investigation is, at best, an informality of dubious legal standing.

Lavishly expanding on the first film’s comic-book-esque internal mythology and its sense of the absurd, it’s less of a pure genre movie than its predecessor—more gothic, more narratively stylized, its superlative stuntwork sometimes taking a back seat to visual gags and vignettes of deadpan comedy.

The Wolfpack is perhaps too reluctant to pursue lines of inquiry; what starts as a nonfiction mood piece grows frustratingly opaque as the brothers begin to venture out into the real world, meet girls, and get jobs.

Ultimately, it’s the awkwardness that they’re prodding. The Plagiarists isn’t asking why one person would tell a lie, but why another would be so bothered by it — an ambitious line of inquiry for which the film provides more references than concrete answers.

An always welcome presence, Law is the only cast member in The Rhythm Section to give the impression that he had any fun making the movie, playing B as a survivalist sourpuss with impossible reflexes. Nonetheless, he is consistently dressed and lit as though he were posing for a watch ad.

If Mayor succeeds at conveying some of the awkward cringe comedy of running a community under occupation, it also captures the dread.

Whitney herself remains a figure of some mystery, her rise and fall refracting the hopes and anxieties of the people around her, with a tragic echo in the death of her daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, in 2015.

For better or worse, X-Men: Days Of Future Past is the first Marvel movie to truly embrace comics-style storytelling.

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

Cutesy title notwithstanding, Microbe And Gasoline stands as one of director Michel Gondry’s most restrained works.

The impression left is that of a movie bending over backward to not let its subject tell her life story.

If Bong, the South Korean writer-director behind The Host, Memories Of Murder, and Snowpiercer, never squares the film’s satirical means with its sentimental ends, he at least throws the weight of his considerable filmmaking talent behind both.

A feature-length tribute to great directors with no direction of its own, his second feature is the kind of self-consciously quirky, slapdash movie that still leaves a viewer eager to find out what its director will do next.

It’s ironic that a movie about social restrictions is at its best when it restrains itself—that is, when it treats its characters as characters rather than figures, and its plot as drama rather than statement.

Joseph H. Lewis’ kinetic, psychosexual B-movie laid many of the creative foundations of the American cinema of the 1970s, though it took a round trip to Europe for the movie to develop a reputation at home.

[An] overstretched look at the poorly regulated medical devices industry.

However inconclusive as a story, the resulting film is a rarity among the overlong effects-heavy blockbusters of the last decade: One actually wishes it didn’t have to end so soon.

Plotting has never been a strong suit for Lelio, who made his name with character studies of unconventional women. Here, he tries his hand at something akin to classicism, and ends up mounting a compelling drama. Curiously, its main shortcoming parallels the human flaw that is its main theme: our yearning to leave often loses out to our inability to let go.

My Big Night, pitched in a state of perpetual frenzy, whiffs out in its ending.

Clint Eastwood’s Sully is not a perfect film, but it comes close to being a great one as it turns the real-life emergency landing of a passenger plane in the Hudson River into a meditation on duty and crisis that’s more Bertolt Brecht than “based on a true story.”

It is an episodic, chunky film of over-explicated ideas and speculative set pieces.

Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.

Big Hero 6’s considerable graces as an animated film — its fantastical layouts and bouncy sense of figure and motion — are offset by its deficiencies as a second-rate superhero flick.

Made 15 years after Żuławski’s last film, Cosmos makes for a fittingly offbeat and mystifying statement of purpose for a filmmaker fascinated by confrontations with the cosmic unknown.

There’s something here about men becoming monsters, righteous goals, and so on, but the symbolism is inchoate; the violence, however stylized, never represents anything more than itself.

If it weren’t for "The Act Of Killing," Narco Cultura would be the year’s queasiest documentary. The film — which counterposes Quintero’s day-to-day life with that of Richi Soto, a crime-scene investigator in Juarez — is both an unflinching record of Mexico’s drug war and an investigation of how violence becomes unreal and glamorized.