Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.