Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.

Like the passable original, this formulaic comedy can’t stop teasing the possibility of a funnier, smarter movie being made with the exact premise, central conflicts, and stars.

The movie has the style down pat: nonprofessional actors, un-enticing handheld camerawork, and a bevy of deteriorating exurban backdrops. But Silverstein’s sympathetic patience for her self-sabotaging characters is enough to keep one interested in what might happen to these people well past the point where it becomes clear that nothing will.

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.

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.

Surprisingly stolid and barren for a Bruckheimer production, 12 Strong skates by on the virtues of an old-fashioned programmer: technical competence, an above-average cast, and well-written dialogue, the latter courtesy of screenwriters Ted Tally (The Silence Of The Lambs) and Peter Craig (Blood Father).

Besides the cast, the best thing The Instigators has going for it is Liman’s pacing. Maybe in some earlier, irreversibly bygone era it would seem like less of a virtue, but there’s something to be said for a modern director who still has the skills necessary to move from one thing to another with a minimum of wasted time.

Maybe it’s inevitable that the film ends up feeling like an extremely diluted combination of Matsoukas’ two most famous music videos, crossing the political imagery of Beyoncé’s “Formation” with the outlaw imagery of Rihanna’s “We Found Love”—though it’s nowhere as stylish as the former or as sexy as the latter.

A generically competent but unsuspenseful chase film that never lives up to its potential for either social commentary or thrills.

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.

The characters are stubborn as ever, but in lieu of the characteristic spectacular downfall, The Legacy Of A Whitetail Deer Hunter offers only the pokiest and most rote of plots.