Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Enemies Closer finds Hyams senior and his screenwriters, Eric and James Bromberg, channeling Lynch and Mark Frost’s TV series "Twin Peaks," mixing bizarro characterizations and woodland intrigue with wholesome national imagery.

Despite a few electric moments, the movie never makes anything of its stylized displays of frustration, ending in a whiff of narrative and emotional cop-outs. Say what you will about "American Beauty," but at least it had a climax.

An exercise in tasteful pointlessness, shot in flat black and white and scored (by Gruff Rhys, of all people) with tinkling piano and sawing strings that evoke nothing so much as an aura of cut-rate class.

It tries to replicate the earlier film’s redemption arc, all the while proving that it is more than willing to adhere to the same double standards it ostensibly pokes fun at.

It’s derivative and drowning in stagnant machismo, but stark enough to work.

Art is actually as complicated as the lives that inspire it, which is probably why Mary Shelley builds its specious and underwhelming climax around the question of ownership. Perhaps that’s the most contemporary thing about it: intellectual property passed off as modern myth.

As this somewhat overlong film continues on, it becomes increasingly shapeless, finally succumbing to the sort of soupy sentimentality it’s trying to critique.

Frankenstein’s Army is a ludicrous World War II horror flick bogged down by its found-footage gimmick, which is compromised and contradicted so often that it becomes a distraction.

A clumsy and internally confused sequel to Insidious: Chapter 3 (which was, uh, a prequel to the first film) that offers strictly mechanical jolts.

In an era of high-falutin’ tentpole sci-fi, there’s something to be said for a filmmaker still devoted to crafting plain old genre pleasures.

While the partnership between Wahlberg and actor-turned-director Peter Berg has produced a few duds since the success of Lone Survivor, none have been as generically mediocre. At the very least, one can appreciate it for being environmentally friendly.

It’s a movie that seems to have been designed more than directed, and edited around principles of color and line, rather than around performance or plot.

Only Bale’s man-of-action reporter comes across as a personality rather than a statistical composite. In part, that’s because the performance recognizes that people of unwavering integrity can still be dicks.

Does the sight of a mulleted figure in shoulder pads blasting away his foes with a weaponized keytar sound mildly amusing? Congratulations, you’ll be able to sit through this.

Combining Anderson’s symmetrical camera style with frenetic editing ends up imploding the sense of depth and space that has long made the director’s movies must-sees in 3-D.

Bissell’s fudging of the facts (which includes completely making up the reasons behind the charrette) doesn’t create a story that’s more insightful or dramatically cohesive than the real thing; the only thing it reveals, if indirectly, is liberalism’s longstanding discomfort with the relationship between civil rights and labor movements.

The idea of a group of decidedly minor-league cons trying to make it into the major leagues, maybe with a Now You See Me standard of realism, is not unappealing. But the promise of a brainless good time proves false once the actual thieving begins.

Lacking both the exploitation-movie claustrophobic urgency of Golan’s "Operation Thunderbolt" and the Irwin Allen-disaster-film factor of the Irvin Kershner-directed NBC version, "Raid On Entebbe," 7 Days instead goes for businesslike professionalism.

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.

Packed with misfiring grenade launchers, blue lens flares, and Mercedes armored cars, 13 Hours makes the best case for Bay as a toy-box aesthete with an abstract sense of motion and color—and the best case against him as an incoherent jingoism fetishist.

The movie isn’t without its pleasures, most of them related to performance. Farmiga, a perennially underrated actor, gives Samantha a measured confidence that sets Hank’s manic cockiness on edge, and Billy Bob Thornton does an effective variation on a slimy archetype as the prosecutor, Dwight Dickham.

The high point of Last Vegas is also arguably the low point of Robert De Niro’s career.

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.