Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Unfortunately, eccentricities are few and far between in the movie, with sleepy action that bungles its best ideas (like its potentially interesting twist ending) and finds Cage delivering one of his more moribund performances.

Though told in broad strokes, its version of the story deserves credit for never buying into the hype and surreal pageantry of the Astrodome showdown. But its lack of interest in tennis as a sport leaves the narrative—plastered with hot-button issues and character crises—with an empty center.

Quiet, slow-moving, ambiguous character studies might be a dime a dozen on the festival circuit, but there are few that remind us that there are things out there that still feel as big as myth.

Regardless of its high aims, most of what The Insult offers—unlikely last-minute reveals, argumentative lawyers, stone-faced judges—is the stuff of a diverting, junky courtroom drama.

Aside from these few flourishes of the outré and symbolically charged, there’s little to distinguish the movie from any number of overlong hit-by-hit music biopics of the nodding-approvingly-from-behind-a-mixing-console variety.

This is one of those cases where a movie is ornamented by its defects. Garrone’s undiscriminating direction of the cast, none of whom appear to be acting in the same movie, textures the film with mismatched accents, somehow adding to its macabre humor and overall strangeness.

To all appearances, it’s a solid, unpretentious piece of work, but like some of Eastwood’s more ambitious classics, it centers its murky moral contradictions without contriving a way to resolve them.

Domino is, for large stretches, just ludicrous—and atypically boring. It’s a sad sight to see from a filmmaker who, once upon a time, excelled at drawing a viewer into the thrill of seeing a sequence come together, with all the pieces falling into place. In Domino, one finds only the pieces.

Though clearly aimed at fans, it presents only a chummy overview of his life and career, too superficial to work as a biography, an in-depth appreciation, or even a primer.

Billy Chew’s screenplay takes at least one important lesson from the best of both crime movies and small-town portraits: The characters, however minor or ridiculous, seem to lead lives that started well before the movie and will continue long after. Well, except for Dick himself. He’s gone.

It’s a patchy and seemingly unfinished film.

Somewhere in there are stretches of the Coens’ funniest comedy since "The Big Lebowski"; it just takes a little patience.

Dope has more characters and subplots than it knows what to do with, and its performances are all over the place, ranging from Clemons’ and Revolori’s charismatic turns as second-banana goofballs to Roger Guenveur Smith’s stylized impression of a local millionaire, so vampiric that he might as well be slathered in German Expressionist makeup.

What a shambles. Robert Duvall, eminent character actor of the Hackman-Caan generation of difficult big-screen guys, returns to the director’s chair with Wild Horses, a dawdling and sometimes damn near unintelligible ensemble piece set in a Texas border town.

Though the movie eschews facile sloganeering, few of its characters or narrative threads are able to develop beyond their function as metaphors.

Though shot in the stolidly inconspicuous style of a low-rated cable drama, Still Alice is rarely anything short of compelling, in part because its sense of progression and scale offers such a distinctively unsentimental take on the terminal-countdown tearjerker.

If the bare-minimum characterizations at first feel like a refreshing alternative to the most modern survival film (think everything from 127 Hours to The Shallows), they eventually betray a movie that maybe—just maybe—doesn’t have a lot of ideas about where to go past the first act. Like its protagonist, it trudges toward an unknown destination out of obligation.

The most derivative movie of the summer, Earth To Echo, is also the most visually unpredictable, chock-full of degraded digital textures that seem ready to boil off the screen, picture-boxed within Mac desktops and overlaid with extraterrestrial interface trees.

The question of why Cooke’s career never materialized hangs over the movie, but is never answered. What emerges instead is a portrait of a talented teenager being readied — by coaches, basketball camps, and the media — for a future that doesn’t arrive.

The film is a masterstroke of synthesis; whatever it borrows, it makes its own.

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.

An entertaining, effects-driven black comedy, with shades of "Starship Troopers" in its depiction of warfare as a futuristic turkey shoot, the movie is distinguished more by how fluidly it handles its high-concept premise than where it takes it.

To is one of the purest directors working today, and he flourishes within Three’s self-imposed limits, folding and reorienting the space of the hospital using privacy curtains, swinging doors, and a constantly moving camera — in the process producing a rollickingly entertaining movie.

One might call this a refinement of Gibson’s fixations as a director: battles more terrifying than "Braveheart" and a portrayal of sacrificial lambhood that’s more compelling than "The Passion Of The Christ," in part because Doss, as much of an unwavering do-gooder as he might be, is an actual character with conflicts.

This is a film set entirely in places where people aren’t meant to stay for very long, a world of continual transit and gratification, with no endpoint. Maybe it’s the world that money creates for itself.

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

It plays less like a contemporary horror film than an increasingly gruesome drama, building to a climax — completely original to this version — where the movie’s core themes are expressed through grotesque imagery.

Day, who’s very good, moves through it with comfort and charisma. Her Billie Holiday is as much a star in the green room as she is onstage, faced with applause or the harsh bathroom-mirror reflection of abuse and addiction. But many of the other characters might as well be reading off of cue cards.