Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Linklater, for all his gifts in directing ruminative, digressive gab, isn’t exactly the king of dramatic structure. There are clumsy, didactic, and sentimental moments scattered through the film; at 124 minutes, it’s too long and episodic for its own good. But his sensibility—sympathetic, politically skeptical—strikes through at simple, important truths.

Even though In The Heart Of The Sea’s framing device often feels like it was written by someone who’d never read a word of Melville, its visual style makes for a bold approximation of his allusive prose.

Through a combination of caricature and psychological portrait, subtle touches and howls of impotent, uniformed rage, [Cummings’] film offers a memorable depiction of a man ill-equipped to deal with or direct his feelings—probably not all that different from the rest of us.

Shot on black-and-white film that has the luster of hard coal, In The Shadow Of Women is often quite beautiful—and it has some jokes, too.

Wrong Cops does what underground movies used to do: It gives the viewer the sense that what they’re watching is thoroughly wrong in terms of both behavior and style. What’s missing is the transgressive kick, the sense that a real boundary has been crossed.

The cast carries the film; Dowd, as Linda, is especially terrific. Yet the feeling that one is watching a latter-day teleplay is hard to shake: The unvisual, periodically clumsy direction never finds a way around the confined space or the ugly lighting. One can applaud Kranz’s restraint.

With Lin at the helm, and the Enterprise crew reimagined as a family unit in the mold of Dom Toretto’s gang, the movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage and into currents of artificial gravity, pausing just long enough for a punchline or a knowing exchange of looks.

A comedy about sequels. Like its predecessor, the movie continually teeters on the edge of breaking through the fourth wall.

For better or worse, X-Men: Days Of Future Past is the first Marvel movie to truly embrace comics-style storytelling.

A big part of the appeal of Men Go To Battle lies in its poky sense of humor, which recalls regional filmmaking gems like "The Whole Shootin’ Match" in the early going.

The Wind And The Lion—which was a hit, but not on the order of Milius’ later Conan The Barbarian or Red Dawn—never feels like the product of post-Vietnam America; it just comes from Milius’ imagination, where history and fantasy meet each other halfway.

Though this movie can’t match the formal qualities that made the pair’s most iconic films work, it goes a long way toward recapturing their sense of cheesy fun.

It is, in other words, just a few musical numbers and a whiff of marijuana smoke short of being the Thomas Pynchon book of big-budget, effects-driven movie sci-fi.

If Mayor succeeds at conveying some of the awkward cringe comedy of running a community under occupation, it also captures the dread.

If Greyhound isn’t a stylistic achievement on the level of Dunkirk, it at least manages to make something gripping out of staggering numbers and distances involved in combat at sea—even if its climactic stretch sometimes struggles with visual monotony.

There’s something deeply appealing about an already stripped-down cat-and-mouse scenario that becomes dirtier and more elemental as it goes along, tracing a devolutionary arc from the rules of the road to primeval combat.

The situational humor is more varied than in In The Loop, even if it still largely comes down to a lot of people badgering each other in hallways, offices, and banquet halls. But the dialogue lacks the earlier film’s vicious, creative, lighting-fast profanity.

Arabian Nights’ off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis.

Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.

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.

American Sniper is imperfect and at times a little corny, but also ambivalent and complicated in ways that are uniquely Eastwoodian.

Of all the great actor/directors, Kitano has probably come the closest to creating a style that parallels his approach to acting.

Plotting has never been a strong suit for Lelio, who made his name with character studies of unconventional women. Here, he tries his hand at something akin to classicism, and ends up mounting a compelling drama. Curiously, its main shortcoming parallels the human flaw that is its main theme: our yearning to leave often loses out to our inability to let go.

With stencil-typeface credits that can’t help but bring to mind the scrappy regional genre movies of the 1970s, and an opening sequence that finds Hall sampling moonshine with his buddies, Stray Dog announces itself as something homegrown—a verité look at a quintessentially American oddball, made with an eye for life in rural Southern Missouri.

Fast & Furious 6 is equal parts Ocean’s movie, Road Runner cartoon, and WWE SmackDown. In other words, it’s more or less the same movie as its predecessor.

Tangents involving government committees and the nuclear energy lobby only serve to scatter the already-diffuse narrative, as do numerous intertitles relaying facts about nuclear power in Japan or indicating the passage of seasons; they seem like leftovers from a longer film.

In Dumont’s version of agnostic mysticism, paradoxes have often stood in for miracles, but here, where the laws of physics follow Looney Tunes rules, the secular miracle is that Billie is more or less normal — the only character who isn’t a cartoon.

Plenty of movies sympathize with outcasts, but only De La Iglesia’s sympathize with their ugliest feelings: envy, resentment, and self-loathing.