Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

If nothing else, Exodus: Gods And Kings makes it easier to appreciate Darren Aronofsky’s "Noah," which, for all of its flaws, was at least animated by a personal relationship to the Old Testament.

Much of what makes X-Men: Apocalypse legitimately interesting also makes it frustrating and lopsided, since Singer and screenwriter-producer Simon Kinberg remain committed to the structure of an overlong comic-book blockbuster, complete with a climax in which the world has to be saved using as many different colors of energy beam as possible.

Epic is heavy on celebrity voices and light on imagination.

If Peeples had more bite, it might pass for an underhanded critique of its producer’s work.

By reducing teachings to vague platitudes and inspirational truisms, Bilal robs its religious story of any sense of grace, leaving only those components of early Islamic history generally not considered off-limits for visual interpretation—that is, a lot of early medieval warfare and violence.

Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s anti-biopic on the fashion icon, is overlong and opaque, even boring in spots, but it contains long passages of real poetry.

Boris Without Béatrice never feels like the work of an artist who actually believes in everything he’s doing.

Love, a movie with very little to say about relationships and even less to say about sex, is somehow one of the most interesting attempts any filmmaker has made in recent years at conveying the experience of memory.

The longer action scenes may not always rank with Besson’s early ’90s highlights (Léon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita) or the mania of the more recent Lucy, but there isn’t a moment in this ludicrous, lushly self-indulgent movie that doesn’t feel like its creator is having the time of his life.

One could easily imagine Desierto as a lost exploitation film from the 1970s — better made than most, but not an exceptional example.

It feels like a dumbed-down, poor man’s "Die Hard," despite costing a lot more to make.

The Face Of Love provides itself with countless similar opportunities for emotional sweep, and squanders most of them by being workmanlike and unambitious, presuming that a story and a string score are enough to carry a movie.

The performance, one of Hoffman’s last, is unostentatious, but sensitive. Hoffman inhabited lifelong losers better than any other actor.

Refreshingly unpretentious, Risen reimagines the Gospel as an ancient Roman cop movie.

Though it can’t overcome the source material’s problematic themes — namely, Card’s intentionalist morality, which prizes a character’s ideals over their actions — or its all-too-convenient characterizations, the film manages a sustained sense of momentum and tone that is rare for a contemporary, big-budget movie.

The film is something like a digital tiger itself: an approximation, not exactly the same as the real thing. With the cut to credits, it ceases to exist.

Shot with head-mounted GoPro cameras, the Russian-made action flick Hardcore Henry mimics the experience of watching someone else play a very derivative first-person shooter with sub-Duke Nukem humor.

The absence of necessity or consistency has its appeal; it guarantees that the movie stays unpredictable even as it pilfers shamelessly, piling cliché upon cliché, but rarely in a way that makes a lick of sense.

His (Crowe) movie is a male weepie, slickly lit, but clearly the work of an amateur. Its emotional thrust — the search — is made limp by indiscriminate direction and the kind of quantity-over-quality mindset that invites tacked-on romances and dream sequences that play like dream-sequence parodies.

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.

Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.

American Ultra is one of those geeky genre mishmashes that’s very clever about being dumb.

Less intended, perhaps, is the fact that a viewer may find themselves identifying with one of Joan’s ecclesiastical jurors, who insists at every opportunity that his colleagues stop wasting their breath and burn her already. He’s right in the sense that the church court is just dragging its feet to a foregone conclusion. In its own way, so is the film.

As a McCarthy adaptation, it’s an abject failure; as a piece of art - damaged trash, it occasionally delivers the requisite squirms. Visually and thematically, it has less in common with "No Country For Old Men" or "The Counselor" than with ’90s shot-on-VHS gonzo efforts like "Red Spirit Lake."

Like Franco’s other directorial efforts, it ends up coming across as an academic art object, somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation—interesting, but only in context.

Much of what makes Now You See Me so entertaining — in a gaudy, disposable, Vegas act sort of way — is its ever-escalating ridiculousness.

Retains the original’s premise and politics, but actually puts them to use.

What keeps Don’t Let Go watchable is, ironically, its predictability: the cop-movie clichés, the shootouts, the mishandled evidence, the bargain-bin twists.