Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

It’s a clever but self-defeating exercise: a meta-fictional cautionary tale about itself.

Fortunately, Pompeii’s second half is tailor-made for Anderson’s established skill set, unfolding over a matter of hours, with many scenes set in and under a gladiatorial amphitheatre that recalls the arenas, subterranean tunnels, and cavernous vessels of Anderson’s best movies.

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.

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

Plotted as a round robin of dalliances and coincidences, it’s relationship comedy as weightless movement, meaning that something is always happening, but that none of it matters a damn bit.

If Ross had embraced anything like a narrative line, would it have taken away from the elemental imagery of his brief, unconventional film? One can’t really tackle life and what it means on both a personal and social level without prying into the people who live it. Ross keeps his distance—and in doing so, keeps Hale County’s potential at an arm’s length.

Yet for all of its imaginative inspirations, The Legend Of Ochi feels under-conceptualized: It’s a fairytale without much stirring under the studiously designed surface.

Fishback and Hall move confidently between the obvious ironies and foreshadowings of Spiro’s kitchen sink (as in, “everything but the ______”) realism.

One just wishes it weren’t doing all the work for the viewer.

January skirts by on its tastefulness and appreciation for the source material, however single-minded. It’s a movie of small pleasures: slow-burn suspense; period flavor, with an emphasis on the textures, clothes, and luggage; an effective score by Pedro Almodovar’s regular composer, Alberto Iglesias.

It’s often more strikingly funny-looking than laugh-out-loud funny.

Rigor Mortis functions best as an above-average fright flick, distinguished by its sense of supernatural folklore—scads more imaginative than its Western counterparts—and Mak’s eye for bizarre close-ups.

Israel’s most interesting — and revealing — footage tends to be the most candid: beach-goers in the ’30s, scenes from family gatherings and celebrations, a coke-fueled celebrity wedding in the ’70s. The commentary gimmick justifies itself in these stretches.

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

It is an episodic, chunky film of over-explicated ideas and speculative set pieces.

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 at its best in the brief moments when Besson plunges into complete, comic-book-panel unreality, as in an early shot where a hitman in a black trenchcoat, black trilby hat, and black gloves emerges silencer-first from behind a wall of smoke. It's the rare occasion when you might wish a director were more over-indulgent.

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

Hammer’s performance — always game, never mugging — certainly helps; his likable but buffoonish Lone Ranger is an essential part of the movie’s irreverent tone.

A pleasant, albeit very minor, surprise: a movie that never quite rises above its clichés, but which nonetheless tries to invest them with emotional credibility.

Need For Speed’s dialogue-centric scenes are often clunky, and its comic relief is at times embarrassingly unfunny, but whenever Waugh shifts his focus to figuring out how to best convey an ingenious practical stunt with the camera, the movie comes alive.

There aren’t thrilling dramatic insights to be found here, but Wright’s showboating is unflaggingly watchable.

We’ve seen it all before in movies and video games, but the packaging is slick and hard to resist; any sci-fi crime movie with moody camerawork by Chung Chung-hoon, a Cliff Martinez score, a cast this strange, and an original end-credits ballad by Father John Misty (also a cast member) is begging to be watched, regardless of actual content or the messiness of the action scenes.

While there isn’t much to distinguish Born To Be Blue’s dramatic stakes from any number of stories about self-destructive, self-centered artists (or “movies about jazz musicians,” as they’re more commonly known), the film is given a spark of life by the inspired casting of Ethan Hawke.

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

Though The Competition lacks critical distance, what it offers, in spades, is the engrossing experience of watching other people endure pressure and humiliation — a thrill not unlike that of addictive reality TV, though one presumes that everyone involved would retch at the comparison.

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.

Cutesy title notwithstanding, Microbe And Gasoline stands as one of director Michel Gondry’s most restrained works.