Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

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.

Ricki And The Flash is a movie of things that may have been done better earlier — sometimes by Demme himself — but which are done all too rarely nowadays, which makes it feel both retro and refreshing.

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

Director Simon Curtis, the purveyor of such middlebrow fluff as Woman In Gold and My Week With Marilyn, lays the sentimental hues and sunbeams on thick, hoping that someone will give a sh-t.

Hawke is no stranger to elevating subpar material with a committed performance, but his fidgety crook-with-a-heart-of-gold act is undercut by Budreau’s uncreative use of the limited setting (almost the whole thing takes place inside the bank) and unskillful handling of the broad tone.

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).

The difference between this film and the majority of late-period Sandler flicks—besides the fact that nobody goes on vacation and that the dialogue is partly in Spanish—is that it’s pretty funny in spots.

It’s almost sadistic to cast Jenkins, the actor who most resembles Johnson, in a supporting role in LBJ. His scenes with Harrelson suggest a man talking to his own Halloween-mask likeness.

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.

Oblivion is a special effects extravaganza with a lot of blatant symbolism and very little meaning. It starts slow, turns dull and then becomes tedious — which makes it a marginal improvement over the earlier film. It features shiny surfaces, clicky machinery and no recognizable human behavior. It's equally ambitious and gormless.

It’s the first, and probably last, sports comedy to take its visual cues from Ang Lee’s "Hulk."