Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.

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.

Suspense remains a foreign concept for actor-director Kenneth Branagh. His erratic direction — more interested in cut glass and overhead shots than in suspicions and uncertainties — bungles both the perfect puzzle logic of the crime and its devious solution.

The mystery itself is rote and, despite its jokey foreshadowing and its constant winks to the audience, never smart enough to really work as a genre parody. Instead, the movie just breezes along on the strength of Aniston and Sandler’s easygoing rapport.

At once thinly conceived and maddeningly over-designed, irreverent and over-serious, and chock-full of strained references (to World War II, environmentalism, and drugs, among other things) and creepy violence, Pan is an elaborate flight of fancy with no vision — which makes it strangely compelling in spots.

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.

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.

A workmanlike cross between a disaster movie and a caper-chase flick...the film never rises to the promise of its awesomely literal title.

Waste enough of the audience’s time with the adventures of a couple of uncharismatic dinguses, and Depp’s stage-drunk, innuendo-laced, cabaret-emcee shtick starts to creep back into being funny.

A high-concept thriller that teeters like a seesaw between deranged and dull.

The problem with art like Jia’s is that a straightforward approach isn’t going to reveal anything that isn’t already there in the work or document anything that the movies don’t already document themselves. And why settle for second-hand when you can just go and watch the real thing?

An inoffensive children’s film with an above-average voice cast, competent animation, and no product placement. This is enough to make it the finest film ever made about the Smurfs.

Kung Fu Panda 3 is Kung Fu Panda minus a dramatic arc, but with way more pandas.

The fact is that, as a movie, Cry Macho is slow and sometimes dull. But as a statement by Hollywood’s oldest leading man and working director, it offers its share of gleaming low-key insights.

Every scene in Cliff Walkers will feel familiar: the close calls, the dead drops, the car chases, the poor man’s Hitchcockisms.

The initial hour is a tightly wound piece of directorial surveillance in Assayas’ trademark style, fluidly tracking the obscure motives and movements of the characters. The rest is a lot less compelling.

While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.

It feels like a dumbed-down, poor man’s "Die Hard," despite costing a lot more to make.

In spite of its modest running time, Burying The Ex feels stretched thin; it takes a good 35 minutes to get going, only kicking into gear once Evelyn returns from the dead.

It’s a shame that The Last Witch Hunter ends up crumbling into another generic showdown of murky fantasy effects and snatched artifacts, with a final shot that is literally framed around a door to possible sequels.

Clothed in a colorful mishmash of historical fashions and scored to sweeping strings, the movie is like an antique cut-crystal vase: gorgeous, fragile, empty.

There are, in trademark Sorrentino style, moments of Catholic-Church-baiting blasphemy and playful surrealism (a gigantic bloated toddler makes an appearance), but for all of its eccentricities and ruminations, Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all.

As for what all of this represents, Small Enough To Jail doesn’t draw any conclusions that its many interviewees aren’t willing to voice themselves.

The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.)

The movie is an underwhelming coming-of-age fable that skirts around its own lurid undertones.

The fundamental problem is that Tricked is more mildly amusing than funny, and most of said amusement comes from the pacing, which is one uninterrupted sprint.

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.

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.

The Ballad Of Lefty Brown’s lack of flash keeps it from sinking comfortably into pastiche, but it doesn’t make for thrilling viewing.

In the case of The Cloverfield Paradox, it’s just a fancy word for “junk drawer.”

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?

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.