Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Azazel Jacobs’ The Lovers is set in the sort of unremarkable, average, suburban America that is rarely depicted in American movies in anything but a negative light, usually as a place where dreams go to die. So one of the unexpected virtues of this small, thoughtful film is how it resists treating these surroundings as soul-crushing or as a symbol of the failure of middle-class mores.

To some degree, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 is a more offbeat film than the original, with better gags, better (and more cartoonish) action, and more visual variety.

The difference between this film and the majority of late-period Sandler flicks—besides the fact that nobody goes on vacation and that the dialogue is partly in Spanish—is that it’s pretty funny in spots.

The truth is that what sinks the film is Shainberg’s insipid direction.

The film itself is barely bluffing that it has any stakes; the caper is vague enough to be inconsequential. Tramps knows it’s small potatoes, but is it any better for it?

In Dumont’s version of agnostic mysticism, paradoxes have often stood in for miracles, but here, where the laws of physics follow Looney Tunes rules, the secular miracle is that Billie is more or less normal — the only character who isn’t a cartoon.

Only Bale’s man-of-action reporter comes across as a personality rather than a statistical composite. In part, that’s because the performance recognizes that people of unwavering integrity can still be dicks.

It’s a stale, phony, grunt-level sort of view of American intervention, cast in large part with Brits and shot in the familiar desert backlots of Jordan, which has stood in for the site of one Middle Eastern conflict after another since "Lawrence Of Arabia."

Through Gray’s orchestration of themes, ironies, and flashes of transcendence, the thick of the jungle becomes as haunting and multivalent an image as the hidden city. It is that which we all disappear into.

More so than in any of the other movies, Dom’s wrecking crew of car nuts comes across like survival-of-the-speediest tacho-fascists, high-fiving their way through a path of destruction and to a collateral death toll that one presumes now numbers in the hundreds.

Perhaps Mimosas is nothing more than a high-minded (but very affectionate) paean to naïveté, an incomplete adventure that eschews both sophistication and interpretation.

Call it a dumbed-down "Good Will Hunting."

An inoffensive children’s film with an above-average voice cast, competent animation, and no product placement. This is enough to make it the finest film ever made about the Smurfs.

In fact, Aftermath only becomes interesting if considered as a dour subversion of the daughter-and-wife revenge scenarios of Schwarzenegger’s action movies — as star text, in other words.

It has no clue what it’s going for.

It is in its designs, more so than in its generic corporate-conspiracy plot, that this new Ghost In The Shell finds tantalizing expressions of theme.

It’s such a conceptually fertile film that one wishes that it weren’t also a bore.

Karl Marx City is at heart a psychological family drama—the story of a tightly knit household that outlived an oppressive society, only to find itself faced with a doubt about the past that amounts to an existential quandary.

It’s a lazy, crappy film, and perhaps even a cynical one, but its ineptitude is charming.

When it comes time to morph and break out the Zords to the sound of “Go, Go, Power Rangers,” the film groans and shuffles, like a sulky teen who’s been told that they have to finish the dishes before they can borrow the minivan.

When it’s all done, More and Morgan remain ciphers, and not the type whose intangibility is evocative of something greater. All we have are the known facts, and that is all that I Called Him Morgan provides in the end.

It teeters on the edge of relapse, aimless and at a loss as to how it can motivate its returning ensemble of former and current lowlifes, who only ever needed one thing to get them from scene to scene.

An exercise in mellowness, right down to the snatches of tinkly-twinkly sentimental music.

Stewart makes the scenes of her character’s day-to-day life seem unrehearsed and intimate, as though the movie were peering in on someone whose thoughts were always someplace else.

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

Pellington, a music video veteran who was once known for inconsistent-but-diverting thrillers like The Mothman Prophecies and Arlington Road, doesn’t show much interest in making either of movie’s central relationships work, leaning on the brittle, snappy MacLaine to carry almost every scene.

There’s nothing about this unconscionably long movie (it runs a whopping 132 minutes) that suggests anyone involved ever watched it from start to finish. But it looks nice enough, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation, with lots of flowers and flannel.