Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Nikki, who appears to be making the most of an extremely limited budget, has attempted to make something like a modern-day take on the creepy, kinky, deeply personal B-movie, studiously avoiding anything that would smack of revivalism; after all, no authentic B-movie ever set out to look like a B-movie. The surrealists would have liked this film.

It’s snarkier and a little more self-conscious than the rest, but just as cornball.

Less fluid than "Russian Ark," Francofonia is even harder to pigeonhole, which is something of a feat.

It takes Hawking getting out of his wheelchair — a sequence as tender as it is tasteless — for The Theory Of Everything to register as anything more than impersonal kitsch. It is the one ballsy moment in an otherwise thoroughly neutered movie.

Get On Up is the Hollywood biopic at its near-worst — a formless, extravagant assortment of historical incidents and lip-synched musical numbers, which ultimately amount to little more than a 138-minute showcase reel for Chadwick Boseman’s technically impressive and utterly opaque James Brown impression.

The result feels like a DVD or Blu-ray special feature with a celebrity pedigree, rather than a movie that can stand on its own two feet.

What is often the most businesslike part of a superhero origin story—establishing the hero’s powers — ends up becoming the most entertaining part of Shazam!, carried along by Levi’s fidgety, boyish charm. (Similarly, the inevitable climactic light-show showdown — a reliably butt-numbing staple of the genre—is surprisingly zippy.)

It makes for a compelling viewing experience, thanks to Villeneuve’s formal chops and the uniformly strong performances.

If you can look past the sputtering conclusion — or the pseudo-intellectual banter about memory, modern art, and other assorted nonsense — what you'll find is a brisk, breezy, style-heavy crime flick that happens to be one of the most purely entertaining movies Boyle has made in a long time.

The result often feels superficial; it is neither a definitive account of the creation of Scott’s touchstone of horror and sci-fi, nor a cogent analysis of its aestheticized subtexts, those gritty and unnerving surfaces and the things lurking underneath.

The Nice Guys is funny enough when it sticks to its heroes — whether pinned in a tight spot or bickering with each other — that its less-than-compelling intrigues and digressions come as an acceptable trade-off.

The result is busy, murky, and remote. It doesn’t have the leftie political clarity of Ken Loach, the purposeful intensity of the Dardenne brothers, or even the character development of Ramin Bahrani’s early features.

For better and worse, Ant-Man And The Wasp knows it’s small potatoes.

A minor effort in which the movie-within-the-movie never seems like a real project — can’t help but be riveted by the fake production it’s mounted within itself.

The problems with Anita start with director Freida Lee Mock’s attempt to fit this story into the template of a generic empowerment narrative.

The problem with art like Jia’s is that a straightforward approach isn’t going to reveal anything that isn’t already there in the work or document anything that the movies don’t already document themselves. And why settle for second-hand when you can just go and watch the real thing?

It’s a provocative premise, and one that manages to go beyond the usual themes of the crime genre. Too bad, then, it’s forced to share screen time with a humdrum and occasionally heavy-handed police procedural.

Perhaps too ambitious for its own good (or at least its budget), the film is impossible to dismiss, even if it exhausts its reserve of ideas.

Big Game fails to live up to the kookiness of this set-up. Instead, it opts for ’90s action movie clichés and generic coming-of-age-isms. Helander’s inelegant, exposition-heavy English-language dialogue doesn’t help matters.

There’s a reason folks like Singer and Morano are able to affect public policy with specious data, and it’s because they’re good at playing characters and cracking self-deprecating jokes and generally being interesting on camera, and real climate scientists aren’t.

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.

Ironic, given what a deeply personal filmmaker she could be, that the film that best shows her brilliant intellect and insight isn’t her own.

Across the extended, handsomely shot sit-down interviews (with Ma’s daughter and the three other writers), what emerges is a fragmentary oral history of Chinese rural life across several transformative decades of the 20th century: family stories, tragedies, remembered slogans, the particulars of trying to grow crops in alkaline soil or coming of age as the son of a declared “counterrevolutionary.”

The structure is episodic, somewhat elliptical, and occasionally clumsy. Even the widely imitated and parodied Anderson style, with its symmetries and whip pans, wavers toward the end, leading to an incoherent climax. (The fact that this is the first live-action feature Anderson has made without his longtime cinematographer, Robert Yeoman, is only a partial explanation.)

Candid and audaciously minimalist, Afternoon risks self-indulgence, but comes out with insight.

It seems as though the artist, all too aware of his reputation for both pageantry and shock value, has decided to offer nothing of the kind.

In distancing itself from its disaffected characters, Palo Alto evokes only more emptiness — and emptiness has a habit of being dull.

If one is not already paranoid about the relationship of politics, money, and the tech sector or about the industry’s general lack of perspective on itself, then this sort of uncritical puff piece should do the trick.