Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The truth is that crummy, un-scary horror movies are nothing new, and are more the norm than the exception. And while The Home doesn’t distinguish itself in terms of style or subtext (one can argue that it doesn’t have any of the latter), it at least throws out just enough gross-out imagery to keep a viewer awake.

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

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.)

Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history (the reported budget was around $400 million), it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie passes that crucial point where a critic stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.

It goes without saying that much of it will feel familiar to those already well-versed in the Jia filmography: there’s a yearning, a search, and, finally, a return.

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.

Gunslingers drags on for a little over 100 minutes, and the best it can show for it is Cage yelling about Jesus in a funny voice.

While it lacks the surrealistic and fairy-tale elements that distinguish many of Guiraudie’s films (among them Sunshine For The Poor, Time Has Come, and Staying Vertical), Misericordia is nonetheless pervaded by a casual dreaminess and a disregard for the strictures of realism that leads in some (intentionally) silly directions.

Throughout, one is continually reminded of other, better movies—not least of all, the kind of eminently watchable genre films Anderson was producing at his peak.

There are, in trademark Sorrentino style, moments of Catholic-Church-baiting blasphemy and playful surrealism (a gigantic bloated toddler makes an appearance), but for all of its eccentricities and ruminations, Parthenope can’t overcome the very prosaic problem of a main character who isn’t really much of a character at all.

Burger—a Hollywood journeyman who’s done some hackwork but began his career with the 2002 conspiracy mock-doc Interview With The Assassin—keeps things moving with a vérité point-of-view that sometimes makes it feel like the camera is the one doing the spying.

In its most compelling stretches, Santosh operates as a kind of subverted procedural in which every aspect of the investigation is, at best, an informality of dubious legal standing.

In an era where the mid-budget movie has mostly disappeared, The Fire Inside’s modest, thoughtful reworking of the sports drama formula can feel refreshing.

One could even make the argument that Jenkins has made a fundamentally better film than Favreau while working with inferior, less elemental material. But that doesn’t change the fact that Mufasa is, ultimately, compromised by its studio formulas in terms of both story and style.

One can’t help but feel as though the whole movie were periodically bellowing the original’s most famous line: “Are you not entertained!?” The answer is no, not really, and no amount of digital gladiatorial carnage or bug-eyed overacting can mask the prevailing air of exhausted, decadent imperial decline.

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.

For all of its ambitions, Here is ultimately too simplistic to work as either a domestic drama or a deconstruction of the same—an experiment in storytelling that turns out to be an object lesson in undercooked ambition.

Its true shortcoming is that it isn’t very funny, offering only generic diversions.

Even in these early scenes, a strangeness pervades the film: ironic, sometimes stagey or soapy, occasionally punctuated by over-the-top musical cues.

The familiarity is, of course, the point: Anyone going to a new Kevin Smith movie in 2024 is either already well-versed in the comfort food of the View Askewniverse, or is being dragged on a date by someone who is. The result evokes a kind of bittersweet nostalgia—not for the much-mythologized pop-cultural ‘80s, but for a younger, fresher writer-director who was able to do a lot more with a lot less.

Underneath the prickly screwball banter, the jokes, the movie-isms, the occasional zaniness are probing questions about how we define ourselves and whether a community of faith can still represent something more important than gossip and an annual Holocaust remembrance bake sale.

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.

It makes for an ironically modest, tasteful tribute to two filmmakers who, in their finest and most moving moments, were anything but restrained.

There’s something here about men becoming monsters, righteous goals, and so on, but the symbolism is inchoate; the violence, however stylized, never represents anything more than itself.

While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense.

Adapted from a 2008 memoir by former New York Times writer and editor Dana Canedy, it trades in cloying sentimentality and romance, the gooey melodrama done no favors by Washington’s stiff, anonymous direction.

The concept of a supervillain hellbent on Scottish independence is, admittedly, kind of funny (not to mention in keeping with the overall politics of the Kingsman films). But The King’s Man can’t figure out what to do with the idea, apart from having the largely unseen bad guy yell a lot in a Scottish accent. Like so much of the film, it’s trying to have it both ways—to be stupid and clever at the same time, and coming across mostly as the former.

Dumont does not make conventionally satisfying films, and, for all of his visual minimalism, he loves a mess. But he is more than capable of making movies that are engaging on a level beyond the purely intellectual. France, for the most part, isn’t one of them.