Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

: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.

It comes across, instead, as a directorial flight of fancy, an imaginatively goofy take on an already goofy idea, exaggerated by Besson’s blunt style and an uncommonly fast pace.

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.

A puff piece for someone who doesn’t need one, Malala wraps Yousafzai’s life in media-circuit testimonials and fairy-tale-like animated sequences that stop just short of drawing an aureola of fire around her.

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.

Spurlock’s documentary turns out to be the exact thing it is meant to expose: an unfulfilling product passed off as something that’s good for you.

Unlike its subject, The White Crow is ultimately forgettable.

Apart from one initially funny (but ultimately over-extended) gag involving a fake credits sequence, the material is mostly glib and second-rate—and, when it comes down to it, about as dry, oversimplified, and under-dramatized as a class presentation.

Ocean’s 8 could learn a thing or two about brevity and craft: It belabors the basic plot points Ocean’s 11 dispatched with a single cut or smirk, the result a hacky imitation of the series’ glitzy pizzazz.

Fast & Furious 6 is equal parts Ocean’s movie, Road Runner cartoon, and WWE SmackDown. In other words, it’s more or less the same movie as its predecessor.

The Rehearsal, director Alison Maclean’s first feature since the 1999 Denis Johnson adaptation Jesus’ Son, is such a hodgepodge of arthouse references, arch distancing effects, and emotionally vacant wide-screen compositions that one could easily mistake it for an awkward debut film.

If you can look past the sputtering conclusion — or the pseudo-intellectual banter about memory, modern art, and other assorted nonsense — what you'll find is a brisk, breezy, style-heavy crime flick that happens to be one of the most purely entertaining movies Boyle has made in a long time.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The result puts a handful of good actors on autopilot, maneuvering around Intro To Screenwriting character beats, occasionally accompanied by sappy piano music.

It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.

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.

Raze is a brain-dead exploitation flick in which barefoot, white-tank-top-clad women beat each other to death.

It’s often more strikingly funny-looking than laugh-out-loud funny.

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.

The continual wobbling of on-screen space, combined with some endearingly awkward attempts at humor (dog reaction shots abound), gives this tony biopic a smidgen of charm, though it doesn’t make it any less tedious.

Aside from Beatty’s performance, the only consistent thing the movie has going for it is ineffable strangeness; it seems to be trapped at the bottom of the chasm that separates its subversive aims from its nostalgic pursuits.

Yes, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is extremely silly. For its first 30 or so minutes, it also manages to be fun.

Call it a dumbed-down "Good Will Hunting."

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the title of which should be taken as a warning, knows all too well that its target audience wants more of the same. Heck, some of the songs (“Dancing Queen,” “Waterloo,” “Mamma Mia,” “The Name Of The Game,” etc.) are recycled from the first film.

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

Despite the therapeutic functions ascribed to art by both its creators and its audiences, very few of us actually want to play the therapist. Triet does, handling her characters with an almost diagnostic detachment.

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.

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

While The Best Man Holiday doesn’t have anything especially original to say on the subject, it’s still refreshing to see a reunion movie set aside the usual themes of aging and reconciliation to focus on how a group deals with death.

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

Gelman and Bravo, who wrote the script together, are married in real life, a fact that somehow makes Lemon’s mix of broad caricature and broader relationship metaphors even clumsier.

Like much of the later work by writer-director John Sayles, Go For Sisters is overlong, style-less, and dramatically undercooked.

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.

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.

Bantering back and forth, Lawrence and Smith manage to recreate some of their screen chemistry — though not enough to make anyone want to go on another bumpy ride.

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

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."

There’s the requisite cutesiness: magnetic poetry, unnecessary animated sequences, multiple discussions of Elvis’ eating habits, a screening of The Princess Bride. (Perhaps "When Harry Met Sally" would have been too obvious.)

God Help The Girl is, in other words, a spotty movie — sometimes silly, sometimes dead serious. It is, however, nobly spotty — inconsistent in a way contemporary productions rarely are, its shortcomings the result of an excess of creative energy, rather than a lack thereof.

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.

Sion Sono’s hip-hop musical is a chiefly visual pleasure, in part because most of the cast can’t rap worth a damn; its warped frame bounces between shimmering neons and fluorescents, disco-ball samurai suits, living statues, and all kinds of things that have been painted gold for gold’s sake.

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 Barber’s London-set vigilante movie "Harry Brown," it’s another lurid exploitation film classed up with moody lighting and character monologues, with none of the authentic regional flavor or amateur energy that gave real grindhouse flicks their tang.

The problem, mainly, is that Lapeyre’s kids are stock types: runts, bullies, toadies, a girl with a big crush. In essence, they are kids’-movie tropes pretending to be war-movie tropes — one layer of generic material being used to cover another.

This is the kind of thing that should come effortlessly to Pacino, one of the all-time greats of American acting, but no longer does. In fact, this qualifies as his best and most easygoing film performance in a good decade.

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.

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.

This kind of hamfisted manipulation seems par for the course in a movie that’s eager to lob as much as it can as its central problems. The theme of change is purely cosmetic: The characters are intractable, and they all offer different versions of the same pathology.

The overarching theme is the slow, trickling spread of evil; the old familiar story of violence begetting violence, which Kurosawa is able to render in terms that seem mysterious and sub-rational.

Too often, The Next Level passes off callbacks to gags from its predecessor as jokes, all while presuming that viewers have an unhealthy familiarity with the Jumanji canon.

We’ve seen it all before in movies and video games, but the packaging is slick and hard to resist; any sci-fi crime movie with moody camerawork by Chung Chung-hoon, a Cliff Martinez score, a cast this strange, and an original end-credits ballad by Father John Misty (also a cast member) is begging to be watched, regardless of actual content or the messiness of the action scenes.

The real problem is that the film isn’t trashy, soapy, or stylized enough be fun.

A confused, toothless comedy.

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.

Every year, so many artless, gormless, generically slick thrillers make their way into theaters that any time a genre director displays basic filmmaking smarts, the result ends up seeming like a retro novelty. Such is the case with writer-director Scott Frank’s murky potboiler A Walk Among The Tombstones.

The only thing Mascots has to be is laugh-out-loud funny, and yet, most of the time, the only things it elicits are reflexive chuckles and a sense of creeping boredom.

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 movie eventually evokes the sense that Branagh is better at directing in front of the camera than from behind it; its best moments are typically the ones that feature Branagh’s Viktor Cherevin on-screen.

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.

One could even make the argument that Jenkins has made a fundamentally better film than Favreau while working with inferior, less elemental material. But that doesn’t change the fact that Mufasa is, ultimately, compromised by its studio formulas in terms of both story and style.

The Commuter’s script may not be an exercise in fool-proof logic (the actual plot makes almost no sense in retrospect), but its politics are consistent — a rare quality for a contemporary thriller.

Aside from the Tour De France segments (the only scenes in the movie to be shot entirely handheld), La Maison lacks the warmth that’s characterized Philibert’s best work. Eventually, the film begins to resemble a cross between a radio station’s webcast and a security-camera feed.

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.

The viewer is presented with a series of caustic, vignette-like scenes which tease bigger themes but end before they can tackle them, as though the film had accidentally started a conversation it didn’t want to have — an impression underscored by the tidy, arbitrary ending.

The imagery is cliché, and therefore ineffective; the characters don’t seem to operate in the world of finance, but in the world of financial thrillers.

Million Dollar Arm is the kind of sports movie that crams everything subject-specific into quick-cut montages to make room for maudlin drama and fish-out-of-water comedy — a baseball flick where no one is actually shown playing baseball.

The problem with films like Radioactive is that they neither fulfill the biography’s basic duty of elucidating the life and times of the subject nor offer a compelling artistic vision or drama as a substitute for the hard facts.

Here’s the frustrating thing about You’re Not You: Wolfe clearly knows what he’s doing and has the actors to pull it off, but he’s tasteful to a fault. Great melodramas achieve the sublime by risking ridicule, something which You’re Not You does only once.

On the most basic level, the con-artist romance Focus is a Cary Grant movie in the "North By Northwest" or "Charade" mold.

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.

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.

Part locked-room mystery, part political allegory, Non-Stop is one of the most purely enjoyable entries in the ongoing cycle of Liam Neeson action-thrillers.

As hackneyed as the movie’s portrayal of Parker’s life might be, it seems subtly shaded in comparison to the King narrative, which mostly consists of people in lab coats saying things aloud that they should already know, using easy-to-follow metaphors while pointing to a conveniently posted chart or diagram.

In brief spurts, the film is funny, but taken as a whole, it feels like a waste of talent. Cheesiness should not be the most memorable thing about a Tony Jaa movie.

This is the most bizarre lead performance of Pitt’s career, as he plays McMahon as a stroke victim doing the world’s worst impression of George Clooney.

More well-intentioned than accomplished.

While Carnahan’s sense of humor has always been juvenile, in Stretch it at least benefitted from a gonzo factor and the crucial quality of having funny parts. Boss Level, however, is clumsy from the jump, with lame gags and a ceaseless, obtrusive voice-over that is always telling us why the next part is funny or what’s happening on screen (in case the viewer is distracted by their phone).

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 above-average cast of adult and child actors has its charming moments, but once the plot enters the tearjerker cliché phase, it becomes clear that what we are being offered is a nostalgia that’s no different from the kind that extolls more conservative values. It’s less a new coat of paint than a varnish.

The Foreigner is a good, lean cut of meat—in other words, a typical Martin Campbell movie, expeditious and cold-blooded in its cross-cut, cloak-and-dagger plotting and violence.

Like Snyder’s Sucker Punch, it’s a confused but fascinating mishmash of religious, military, and sexual imagery.

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.

Its refusal to over-simplify gives it the structure of a rough cut. Being a grown-up, as far as I Love You, Daddy is concerned, means picking your failures and frustrations; it picks to be too long and poky.

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.

Occasionally, the viewer gets the sense that the camera’s jittery swaying is meant to draw attention from the film’s clunkiness. Fragrance is a poor substitute for depth.

A refreshing (and memorably strange) genre piece, premised almost entirely on a child’s willingness to accept grown-up weirdness as long as it ensures stability.

It owns up to its cheese.

A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.

Though adapted from her memoirs, Godard Mon Amour dubiously minimizes her character. The most it offers is a depiction of a deteriorating marriage between a beautiful woman and an asshole who’s in the middle of a crisis of artistic conscience. And Godard already made one of those. It’s called "Contempt."

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.

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.

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.

The unfortunate trade-off of Eastwood’s efficient, real-deal classical direction is his stubborn commitment to the script.