Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.