Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Though told in broad strokes, its version of the story deserves credit for never buying into the hype and surreal pageantry of the Astrodome showdown. But its lack of interest in tennis as a sport leaves the narrative—plastered with hot-button issues and character crises—with an empty center.

If only for a few minutes, The Childhood Of A Leader becomes its own film, a tour of the printing presses, paternoster elevators, and mazes of power that ends with a convulsive blur of bodies crowding in a public square. A viewer can’t help but think, “What took so long?”

The longer action scenes may not always rank with Besson’s early ’90s highlights (Léon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita) or the mania of the more recent Lucy, but there isn’t a moment in this ludicrous, lushly self-indulgent movie that doesn’t feel like its creator is having the time of his life.

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.

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.

Like "Winter’s Bone" and "Frozen River," the movie attempts to re-mystify a handful of old tropes—the tragic snitch, crime as a family business—by placing them in unfamiliar terrain.

It’s much more involving as a work of pure and hypnotic collage than as a researched narrative of facts, dates, and names.

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.

It’s derivative and drowning in stagnant machismo, but stark enough to work.

It’s a beat-for-beat remake of a movie whose plot was never meant to do anything except get characters to jump from rooftops, made by a less confident director (Camille Delamarre, one of the studio’s go-to editors) and set in a culture Besson has never been able to grasp. It’s also a silly pile-up of exaggerated action clichés—and much of the time, it’s pretty fun.

It might not be Donald Westlake, but it does its thing: meaningless, nonstop violence and movement, enacted by a large cast of characters who are only looking out to survive into the next scene.

Though a screenwriter by profession, Heisserer proves to be more economical with style than storytelling. Like a few too many contemporary genre films, Hours suffers from flashbackitis, a chronic condition that leads filmmakers to believe that a tragic backstory will add gravitas.

With every overblown character introduction and goofy twist, it announces itself as intentionally cheesy guilty pleasure. With Woo, one expects a higher, more transcendent grade of cheese.

If The Great Wall is too spotty to really satisfy as the old-fashioned medieval adventure it sometimes aspires to be, it is consistently engaging as an almost abstract exercise in visual sumptuousness.

Like so many of the works of Eastwood’s long late period, Jewell offers a story without much of an endpoint, with an uplifting coda that feels almost as jarring as the ending of "American Sniper." But somewhere within its surprisingly pacey two-plus hours is a compelling group portrait of ordinary oddballs in cruel circumstances; it relays Eastwood’s appreciation for individuals over masses better than any speech ever could.

Ironic, given what a deeply personal filmmaker she could be, that the film that best shows her brilliant intellect and insight isn’t her own.

Much of what makes X-Men: Apocalypse legitimately interesting also makes it frustrating and lopsided, since Singer and screenwriter-producer Simon Kinberg remain committed to the structure of an overlong comic-book blockbuster, complete with a climax in which the world has to be saved using as many different colors of energy beam as possible.

With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.

A live-action Hammacher Schlemmer catalog of pseudo-retro novelties, spiced up with self-aware asides and over-the-top violence — slick entertainment, provided the viewer turns off whatever part of their brain is responsible for recognizing and parsing subtext.

What is often the most businesslike part of a superhero origin story—establishing the hero’s powers — ends up becoming the most entertaining part of Shazam!, carried along by Levi’s fidgety, boyish charm. (Similarly, the inevitable climactic light-show showdown — a reliably butt-numbing staple of the genre—is surprisingly zippy.)

Buried underneath the movie’s many layers of pulp fluff and knucklehead comedy is a compelling take on why people are drawn to familiar, generic pleasures—self-aware caper comedies, for instance. Perhaps it’s buried too deeply for its own good.

It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.

One can smirk at the movie’s fuzzy philosophies and primordial clichés and still appreciate the delivery of Lee’s action scenes.

There’s a couple badass heroes with humongous swords, a few big scaly monstrosities, and frequently not much else. The minimalism is consistent with Anderson’s career-long devotion to delivering caloric content with an unlikely combo of classical unities and pounding, insta-dated electronic beats. The movie’s called Monster Hunter—what more could it reasonably need?

A disorganized, dawdling mess of a movie that is rarely anything less than charming.

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.

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

It makes for a compelling viewing experience, thanks to Villeneuve’s formal chops and the uniformly strong performances.

An occasionally perceptive and endearingly un-commercial drama undercut by some serious narrative awkwardness.

Though it can’t overcome the source material’s problematic themes — namely, Card’s intentionalist morality, which prizes a character’s ideals over their actions — or its all-too-convenient characterizations, the film manages a sustained sense of momentum and tone that is rare for a contemporary, big-budget movie.

Refueled isn’t a good movie by most metrics, but it is consistently committed to mainlining the basest action-movie pleasures at the expense of damn near everything else.

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

The stranger and more corrosive subtexts it locates in the Kennedy circle’s actions in the aftermath of the crash are undermined by its classy restraint, which saps the most conceptually outrageous moments.

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

Beneath its wistful tone, Christopher Robin supplies the purest wish-fulfillment fantasy that a children’s movie can offer adults: that our childhoods miss us as much as we miss them.

Even though he never gets a grip on the over-complicated plot, the director hasn’t lost his knack for those elemental qualities that make a good action flick.

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.

Rowan Joffé’s drizzly, workmanlike thriller Before I Go To Sleep turns a ludicrous premise into a fitfully suspenseful, consistently interesting exercise in audience manipulation.

More playful than genuinely creepy, Adam Green’s hybrid mockumentary Digging Up The Marrow deserves credit for trying to re-think the done-to-death found-footage horror formula, even if its self-reflexive angle amounts to little more than a whole lot of unrealized potential.

Boasts a handful of colorful, gonzo set pieces of the kind that made Tsui’s reputation at home and abroad.

The movie, which marks the belated reunion of director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, who previously collaborated on "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl," insists on letting its characters behave like, well, characters. And that’s what makes it frustrating in retrospect.

Puerile, demented, and often funny.

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.

Closed Curtain is a spotty meta movie that might leave a viewer wishing Panahi could go back to making films that aren’t about himself—which seems to be the point.

Comedy is complicated and contextual, and the line between intentional and unintentional humor becomes confusing when the former mimics the latter.

What Zeros And Ones conveys, in its shoestring terms, is the actual mood of a world of uncertainties.

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.

At its core, Barbarians is about the failure of communication. (The subplot about Mariana’s affair is more important than it seems.) This places it into a long tradition of modernist responses to fascism that stretches back to Eugène Ionesco—though one still can’t shake the feeling that Jude is more interested in pointing out obvious ironies than in anything else.

It owns up to its cheese.

Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.

Like its predecessor, it’s a one-joke movie; the difference is that this time around, the joke is better.

Though bringing in a bona fide action-cheese aesthete like David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, John Wick) to direct counts as a minor coup, Deadpool 2’s attempts to fight superhero fatigue with self-awareness and meta shock value can become exhausting. Indulgent and uneven, but in spots gruesomely funny, the new film badly lacks the basic momentum of the original’s formulaic plot.

In that respect, it may be self-conscious to a fault. Plotted with typical shagginess, it lags as it tries to treat its two protagonists equally; they may be kindred spirits, but Khaled’s fears of deportation and his search for Miriam are a lot more urgent than Wikström’s mid-life crisis. But in drawing the two men together, the film creates a simple, persuasive metaphor.

Unfortunately, Cutie And The Boxer feels the need to contextualize — and possibly valorize — the Shinoharas as artists, which detracts from its portrayal of them as a couple.

Unlike the best programmers, it never transcends its derivative origins and basic thrills. It’s another movie about thin characters and bland monsters—albeit one that’s better than the norm.

An exercise in mellowness, right down to the snatches of tinkly-twinkly sentimental music.

Integrity and personality can go a long way, especially in a movie as unquestionably flawed as The Homesman. Tommy Lee Jones’ off-beat minor-key Western has plenty of virtues, but straightness isn’t one of them.

Quiet, slow-moving, ambiguous character studies might be a dime a dozen on the festival circuit, but there are few that remind us that there are things out there that still feel as big as myth.

An exercise in gratuitousness that’s fitful by design, Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog avoids any relationship between character psychology and visual style; they jab against each other, angrily vying for attention, as a nihilistic commentary on crime movies and genre stories.

It’s a provocative premise, and one that manages to go beyond the usual themes of the crime genre. Too bad, then, it’s forced to share screen time with a humdrum and occasionally heavy-handed police procedural.

In an era of predictably tweaked horror premises and haunted-house flicks with 10-dollar titles, a doggedly straightforward monster movie like Blood Glacier can feel refreshing, if not exactly fresh.

The cast is mostly made up of film and TV comedy pros, all of whom seem to be having a good time overacting Hosking’s Bizarro World dialogue.

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.

Burger—a Hollywood journeyman who’s done some hackwork but began his career with the 2002 conspiracy mock-doc Interview With The Assassin—keeps things moving with a vérité point-of-view that sometimes makes it feel like the camera is the one doing the spying.

Early Man can’t overcome the limitations of its premise—one of Park’s less fruitful genre mashups.

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

It’s a movie that seems to have been designed more than directed, and edited around principles of color and line, rather than around performance or plot.

Coppola's approach to the subject is largely impartial; depending on the viewer, this can seem refreshing or off-putting.

Generic but enjoyable with some nifty low-budget effects work.

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.