Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Christopher Nolan’s terrific new film, Dunkirk, is powered by an engine of combusting contradictions: it’s at once minimalist and maximalist, cynical and dopey, a big-boy white elephant art film that is actually a lean and mean suspense set-piece machine.

The longer action scenes may not always rank with Besson’s early ’90s highlights (Léon: The Professional, La Femme Nikita) or the mania of the more recent Lucy, but there isn’t a moment in this ludicrous, lushly self-indulgent movie that doesn’t feel like its creator is having the time of his life.

Of course, it’s self-indulgent, pushed even further into patience-testing territory by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who delivers some of the ugliest camerawork of his career.

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

The end result is too boxed in by the demands of the franchise era and the usual restrictions of a PG-13 rating to qualify as art. It can’t show morally troubling violence or embrace hopelessness, and its day trip into the heart of darkness has to end with a ray of sunshine—“The horror, the horror...” in quotation marks.

The Rehearsal, director Alison Maclean’s first feature since the 1999 Denis Johnson adaptation Jesus’ Son, is such a hodgepodge of arthouse references, arch distancing effects, and emotionally vacant wide-screen compositions that one could easily mistake it for an awkward debut film.

The pace is hectic, but the jokes just aren't there.

Does the sight of a mulleted figure in shoulder pads blasting away his foes with a weaponized keytar sound mildly amusing? Congratulations, you’ll be able to sit through this.

If Bong, the South Korean writer-director behind The Host, Memories Of Murder, and Snowpiercer, never squares the film’s satirical means with its sentimental ends, he at least throws the weight of his considerable filmmaking talent behind both.

Perhaps The Ornithologist lends itself so well to scholarly unpacking because it has too little of its own to offer. Maybe it’s healthier to just enjoy the light bouncing from the water to Hamy’s abs.

This focus on minutiae doesn’t paint a complete picture, nor is it meant to. But it underlines a point too rarely made: Every film is an accumulation of things the average person wouldn’t notice. If there’s a real educational function to criticism, it isn’t to inform, but to teach an audience how to look.

The more striking moments of The Last Knight—this is an ostentatious Michael Bay movie, after all—speak just as loudly to its director’s indifference to both source material and visual scale.

Director Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World, Safety Not Guaranteed) lacks any of the eccentricities that might make this quirky and contrived material work, even at face value.

Stylistically, Once Upon A Time In Venice is mostly indistinguishable from a middling TV pilot that never made it to series.

The problem is as old as the biopic: Somewhere in trying to tell a life story, life gets lost.

It might not be a visual buffet on the order of Guillermo Del Toro’s "Crimson Peak," but sometimes a more modest meal will do.

The movie, which marks the belated reunion of director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, who previously collaborated on "Chuck & Buck" and "The Good Girl," insists on letting its characters behave like, well, characters. And that’s what makes it frustrating in retrospect.

It’s much more involving as a work of pure and hypnotic collage than as a researched narrative of facts, dates, and names.

The result is monotonous, its only memorable image being the salacious wink of Cox’s open fly, mid-frame during a shot of Churchill getting out a car. (Presumably this was the best take.)

Captain Underpants’ charm lies in its lighthearted and lightly scatological silliness, so it’s a shame that the movie sometimes overstuffs itself.

Part of the charm of Hermia & Helena is in the way it freely and randomly plays with form, employing luxuriantly slow dissolves, unexpected snatches of superimposed text, and even a black-and-white film-within-the-film.

This is the most bizarre lead performance of Pitt’s career, as he plays McMahon as a stroke victim doing the world’s worst impression of George Clooney.

Waste enough of the audience’s time with the adventures of a couple of uncharismatic dinguses, and Depp’s stage-drunk, innuendo-laced, cabaret-emcee shtick starts to creep back into being funny.

As for what all of this represents, Small Enough To Jail doesn’t draw any conclusions that its many interviewees aren’t willing to voice themselves.

The film boasts one of Diaz’s most dramatically conventional, involving, and satisfying narratives.

Afterimage suffers from a clunky script and an overdetermined formal palette.

This is Alien gone gothic.

It stands apart from the majority of R-rated, coprolalic studio comedies simply by being fast-paced and, on occasion, pretty funny.