Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

Without Gibson’s baggage, it’s easy to appreciate the movie as a minor throwback to the R-rated action films of the ’80s and early ’90s, which similarly mixed the very lurid and the very wholesome, even if the action scenes don’t live up to the genre’s heyday.

Boasting no less than five credited screenwriters, the film is like an exquisite-corpse exercise in kiddie-movie plotting.

Like so many of Ayer’s directorial efforts, Suicide Squad feels like it was re-drafted in the editing room. It’s clumsy, disrupted by at least eight different plodding flashbacks, filled with lines of dialogue that cut well into trailers but make zero sense in context, and patched up with an embarrassment of rock-along musical cues.

It undoes itself over and over, as though struggling for the right choice of plot points. And yet, League Of Gods is also a dazzling example of the Hong Kong high artifice, in which the least important thing about a special effect is whether it looks convincing.

Equity may not be the fanciest or flashiest of financial thrillers — more like off-brand David Fincher or Steven Soderbergh — but it gets the job done.

The fact that movies are a technology of motion makes them uniquely suited to capturing stillness; Geyrhalter takes full advantage, using vivid sound design and his own eye for striking static compositions to create haunting tableaux.

If only for a few minutes, The Childhood Of A Leader becomes its own film, a tour of the printing presses, paternoster elevators, and mazes of power that ends with a convulsive blur of bodies crowding in a public square. A viewer can’t help but think, “What took so long?”

With Lin at the helm, and the Enterprise crew reimagined as a family unit in the mold of Dom Toretto’s gang, the movie bounces along, hurtling its heroes over colliding wreckage and into currents of artificial gravity, pausing just long enough for a punchline or a knowing exchange of looks.

Director Brad Furman (Runner Runner, The Lincoln Lawyer) can’t mount a coherent scene even in a Scorsese-aping Steadicam long take, but with this ersatz sting flick, he’s made something so amateurish and baffling that it comes around to being memorable.

A big part of the appeal of Men Go To Battle lies in its poky sense of humor, which recalls regional filmmaking gems like "The Whole Shootin’ Match" in the early going.

Objectively speaking, it’s garbage, a suffocating mix of dad redemption, not-ready-for-Mr.-Right romance, and a bogus lit-world success story, with mental illness, slobs-vs.-snobs legal drama, and an Electra complex thrown in for flavor. On that level, it’s as shameless as porn.

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

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.

Resurgence ends up falling victim to its attempts to differentiate itself while remaining completely derivative.

A fitfully entertaining mix of offscreen gore and Maxim-esque T&A.

To is one of the purest directors working today, and he flourishes within Three’s self-imposed limits, folding and reorienting the space of the hospital using privacy curtains, swinging doors, and a constantly moving camera — in the process producing a rollickingly entertaining movie.

Made 15 years after Żuławski’s last film, Cosmos makes for a fittingly offbeat and mystifying statement of purpose for a filmmaker fascinated by confrontations with the cosmic unknown.

That it manages to score a good laugh every couple of minutes is mostly a credit to stars Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, who make for a better mismatched-buddy comic duo than the movie probably deserves.

Now You See Me 2 gets giddy on its own unreality. That sense of freewheeling excess extends from the chip heist — set in a metal-free clean room — to the nonstop contrivances and coincidences to the cast.

In spurts, it resembles an homage to classic French cinema and an overheated, Tinto Brass-esque Euro skin flick, but still finds plenty of room for stultifying, upstairs-downstairs costume drama.

No music mockumentary has really managed to reproduce This Is Spinal Tap’s comic mojo, but Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping gets closer than most to that subgenre-defining comedy’s mix of the dead-on and the over-the-top, even if it tends to go for quantity over quality.

Too high-minded to ever stoop to suspense or fun, Approaching The Unknown is almost completely interiorized, unspooling in voice-over narration that sounds like a writing exercise that got out of control.

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?

Much of what makes X-Men: Apocalypse legitimately interesting also makes it frustrating and lopsided, since Singer and screenwriter-producer Simon Kinberg remain committed to the structure of an overlong comic-book blockbuster, complete with a climax in which the world has to be saved using as many different colors of energy beam as possible.

Bi is a poet as well as a filmmaker, and some of his verse is in the film. He treats almost every shot as an opportunity to further develop the movie’s plainspoken lyrical vocabulary, in which disco balls and side-view mirrors take on metaphorical significance and water stands in for time.

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.

Cheang builds flourish upon flourish with a ballsiness that recalls Brian De Palma in his prime.

Stultifying in spots, the period drama Sunset Song marks an unexpected misstep for Terence Davies, the eccentric filmmaker whose movies evoke limbo states of memory and repressed feeling using a very British vocabulary of drab spaces.