Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Téchiné has made one of his simplest and most elemental films, which is both Being 17’s most arresting feature and its weakness.

Taylor’s direction is cosmetic, focused on well-groomed and well-dressed actors, spotless interiors, and the arty, textured camerawork supplied by cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, whose gifts are both self-evident and sort of wasted here. It’s artificial without a hint of intentional façade: No home looks lived in and no conversation feels like it could have occurred outside of a laboratory environment.

It’s difficult to imagine what a script for all of this would even look like. Whatever The Alchemist Cookbook has to express, it expresses through scenes that feel as though someone were dared to do something while a camera rolled, in the near-extinct tradition of the transgressive underground movie.

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.

If nothing else, Jean-Christophe Jeauffre’s insipid Passage To Mars instills a greater appreciation for the classic movies that clearly inspired it.

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.

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

More importantly, copying an earlier era’s empty slickness still produces only empty slickness.

Without a poignant note or undercurrent of suggestion, it amounts to a world of effects, rather than a world of magic.

The sort of uninspired international pre-sales item that usually goes straight from a basement booth at the Cannes film market to a Netflix parent’s peripheral vision. The sole interesting thing about NWave’s animation is its use of the camera, which plays to 3-D’s pop-out factor.

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.”

Almost as schlocky as the original, but not nearly as fun.

In old age, Lewis’ vanity has become touching. But Max Rose — shelved for more than three years before finally making its way to theaters — is as trite as a film can be while piggybacking off the reality of age.

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.

Somehow, Hands Of Stone even manages to make Don King (Reg E. Cathey) seem bloodless.

As it turns out, there is something worse than Nicholas Sparks, the king of morbid romantic kitsch, and that’s a Nicholas Sparks pretender with highfalutin pretensions.

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.

The Wyler film’s rousing chariot sequence—filmed separately and at lavish expense by Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt, one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived — is hard to beat. But Bekmambetov acquits himself nicely, offering up a loud and vicious circular chase, with point-of-view shots of people getting hit by chariots as armored Romans scamper around like rodeo clowns.

The trick of Disorder is that it plays right to the audience’s suspicions and desires.

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.

Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.

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

Like so many of Ayer’s directorial efforts, Suicide Squad feels like it was re-drafted in the editing room. It’s clumsy, disrupted by at least eight different plodding flashbacks, filled with lines of dialogue that cut well into trailers but make zero sense in context, and patched up with an embarrassment of rock-along musical cues.

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.

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.

The fact that movies are a technology of motion makes them uniquely suited to capturing stillness; Geyrhalter takes full advantage, using vivid sound design and his own eye for striking static compositions to create haunting tableaux.

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?”

With Lin at the helm, and the Enterprise crew reimagined as a family unit in the mold of Dom Toretto’s gang, the movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage and into currents of artificial gravity, pausing just long enough for a punchline or a knowing exchange of looks.

Director Brad Furman (Runner Runner, The Lincoln Lawyer) can’t mount a coherent scene even in a Scorsese-aping Steadicam long take, but with this ersatz sting flick, he’s made something so amateurish and baffling that it comes around to being memorable.

A big part of the appeal of Men Go To Battle lies in its poky sense of humor, which recalls regional filmmaking gems like "The Whole Shootin’ Match" in the early going.

Objectively speaking, it’s garbage, a suffocating mix of dad redemption, not-ready-for-Mr.-Right romance, and a bogus lit-world success story, with mental illness, slobs-vs.-snobs legal drama, and an Electra complex thrown in for flavor. On that level, it’s as shameless as porn.

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

For all its flaws, Election Year has those baseline pleasures associated with violent American B-movies of the 1970s and ’80s — that mix of simplicity and scuzzy, juicy execution.

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

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

To is one of the purest directors working today, and he flourishes within Three’s self-imposed limits, folding and reorienting the space of the hospital using privacy curtains, swinging doors, and a constantly moving camera — in the process producing a rollickingly entertaining movie.

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.

That it manages to score a good laugh every couple of minutes is mostly a credit to stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, who make for a better mismatched-buddy comic duo than the movie probably deserves.

Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.

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.

No music mockumentary has really managed to reproduce This Is Spinal Tap’s comic mojo, but Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping gets closer than most to that subgenre-defining comedy’s mix of the dead-on and the over-the-top, even if it tends to go for quantity over quality.

Too high-minded to ever stoop to suspense or fun, Approaching The Unknown is almost completely interiorized, unspooling in voice-over narration that sounds like a writing exercise that got out of control.

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?

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.

Bi is a poet as well as a filmmaker, and some of his verse is in the film. He treats almost every shot as an opportunity to further develop the movie’s plainspoken lyrical vocabulary, in which disco balls and side-view mirrors take on metaphorical significance and water stands in for time.

The Nice Guys is funny enough when it sticks to its heroes — whether pinned in a tight spot or bickering with each other — that its less-than-compelling intrigues and digressions come as an acceptable trade-off.

Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.

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.

The intoxicating mix of kitsch and chic barely conceals the psychosis underneath.

Perhaps too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss, even if it exhausts its reserve of ideas.

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.

Billingsley (Couples Retreat) has a remarkable disregard for anything that might hold viewer interest, though he and Vaughn (who also produced) have managed to put together a heck of an ensemble for something that’s basically a low-tier Nicolas Cage cheapie, minus Nicolas Cage.

The more Special Correspondents skirts bad taste — by having the heroes record an ISIS-inspired ransom tape, for instance — the closer it gets to having something to say about mass media and geopolitics.

Like a lot of entertainment pitched at the family matinee audience, it sits at the zero point of watchability.

This is one of those cases where a movie is ornamented by its defects. Garrone’s undiscriminating direction of the cast, none of whom appear to be acting in the same movie, textures the film with mismatched accents, somehow adding to its macabre humor and overall strangeness.

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

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

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.

Despite a few electric moments, the movie never makes anything of its stylized displays of frustration, ending in a whiff of narrative and emotional cop-outs. Say what you will about "American Beauty," but at least it had a climax.

Shot with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the Russian-made action flick Hardcore Henry mimics the experience of watching someone else play a very derivative first-person shooter with sub-Duke Nukem humor.

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

Candid and audaciously minimalist, Afternoon risks self-indulgence, but comes out with insight.

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.

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.

While there isn’t much to distinguish Born To Be Blue’s dramatic stakes from any number of stories about self-destructive, self-centered artists (or “movies about jazz musicians,” as they’re more commonly known), the film is given a spark of life by the inspired casting of Ethan Hawke.

Desplechin tackles drama with wildly confident eclecticism, sometimes even besting Martin Scorsese in pure movie-mad feverishness: iris shots, radically different camera styles, unexpected musical and literary quotations, theatrical flourishes, scenes broken up in collage.

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.

Unchecked impulse can be a boon, but Landis writes his way through every scene as though it were overdue homework, and directs with nary a hint of style.

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.

Perhaps the movie’s politics—which range from tone deaf to irredeemable—would be more of an issue if it weren’t so inept.

A treasure trove of gilded fantasy bric-a-brac and clashing accents, Proyas’ sword-and-sandals space opera is a head above the likes of Wrath Of The Titans, but it rapidly devolves into a tedious and repetitive succession of monster chases, booby traps, and temples that start to crumble at the last minute.

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.

It’s somehow both mannered and style-less, fantastical and under-imagined—perversely watchable, in other words.

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

One just wishes it weren’t doing all the work for the viewer.

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.

Photos, clips from Eisenstein’s own films and from newsreels, and the director’s erotic drawings are spliced in or sometimes projected over the background, but the overloaded visual plane only underlines the fact that Eisenstein In Guanajuato never moves anywhere; eventually, it becomes stultifying. It’s a movie jumping in place.

Somewhere in there are stretches of the Coens’ funniest comedy since "The Big Lebowski"; it just takes a little patience.

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

If it’s any consolation to the parties involved, Exposed could have ended up being worse; however, it’s unlikely that it could have been much better. Trainwreck-bad movie enthusiasts will be disappointed to find a film largely defined by its lack of energy, in which every scene seems to be stalling for time.

Aside from a taste for Visual Storytelling 101 basics (a close-up of a dropped teddy bear, held for what seems like half a minute), British director J Blakeson (The Disappearance Of Alice Creed) doesn’t do much to distinguish himself from any number of hired guns.

By turns inert and logorrheic, William Monahan’s pseudo-intellectual nut-scratcher Mojave is a movie of barely furnished mansions and lens flare-speckled landscapes.

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.

By the umpteenth scene where the “joke” is that one of the characters is on drugs, the movie’s strained wackiness becomes wearisome.

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.

Over the years, Porumboiu (Police, Adjective) has come to be considered an acquired taste, but this droll comedy is his most accessible movie since the breakthrough "12:08 East Of Bucharest"; its left turns and sense of humor shouldn’t seem alien to anyone who appreciates, say, early "Louie," even if the style is a heck of a lot more minimalist.

Directed to resemble rather than act, Eastwood comes across as stiff and unemotive, though Diablo doesn’t even have the sense to let its star get upstaged by the overqualified supporting cast.

The new Point Break drops the original’s Zen-like balance of macho mysticism and camp in favor of dour humorlessness.

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.

This is the writer-director’s take on the betrayed promise of America: a perverse vision of sadistic men comforted by false causes.

Even though In The Heart Of The Sea’s framing device often feels like it was written by someone who’d never read a word of Melville, its visual style makes for a bold approximation of his allusive prose.

Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.

Fighting misery means having fun, which is what filmmaking is supposed to be, and, despite its lengths and scope, Arabian Nights always feels handmade.

The second interesting thing about Every Thing Will Be Fine is that it’s very bad, and that its bizarre throwaway lines and shrugged-off subplots brings to mind Tommy Wiseau instead of Douglas Sirk — an impression underscored by extensive, largely mismatched dubbing.

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.

The movies may be, in part, about fantasy, but they always look like they’re from somewhere very real.

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.

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.