Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

A feature-length tribute to great directors with no direction of its own, his second feature is the kind of self-consciously quirky, slapdash movie that still leaves a viewer eager to find out what its director will do next.

An exercise in tasteful pointlessness, shot in flat black and white and scored (by Gruff Rhys, of all people) with tinkling piano and sawing strings that evoke nothing so much as an aura of cut-rate class.

Part of the movie’s mischievous charm lies in De Heer and cinematographer Ian Jones’ sophisticated use of Steadicam, which moves almost exclusively with Charlie, often seemingly in a struggle to keep up with his brisk, determined walk.

What a shambles. Robert Duvall, eminent character actor of the Hackman-Caan generation of difficult big-screen guys, returns to the director’s chair with Wild Horses, a dawdling and sometimes damn near unintelligible ensemble piece set in a Texas border town.

Smulders, Pearce, and Corrigan are loose and eminently likable, and the direction is so in tune with the actors that one is almost inclined to think of Results as a movie carried entirely by performance, overlooking how much its shape depends on style.

Handsomely shot by Steve Yedlin, Rian Johnson’s regular cinematographer, and boasting a typically likable Dwayne Johnson as its star, San Andreas nonetheless struggles to drum up tension or interest, even as skyscrapers topple like Jenga towers and massive tidal waves sweep through San Francisco Bay.

These fight scenes—and the chases that often precede them—are neither ingenious nor novel, but they’re fun and cleanly shot; the fact that this can be considered a major virtue probably says more about the state of the big-budget action movie than about Skin Trade itself.

Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s anti-biopic on the fashion icon, is overlong and opaque, even boring in spots, but it contains long passages of real poetry.

A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.

To be fair, Far From The Madding Crowd isn’t the kind of novel that lends itself to adaptation; it was originally published as a monthly serial, and still reads that way.

Here, in this entertaining, preposterous goof of a kung fu movie, are all those values missing from the mainstream of American action filmmaking, not the least of which is a sense of the camera as a participant.

His (Crowe) movie is a male weepie, slickly lit, but clearly the work of an amateur. Its emotional thrust — the search — is made limp by indiscriminate direction and the kind of quantity-over-quality mindset that invites tacked-on romances and dream sequences that play like dream-sequence parodies.

Gloomy, dishwater gray, and often framed through dusty glass, Child 44 wastes no time announcing itself as a capital-S Serious movie that doesn’t have a clue what it’s supposed to be about. Stalinist paranoia, marital anxiety, and a serial killer figure in the murky plot, done no favors by Daniel Espinosa’s inert direction.

The problem with this kind of universal narrative is that, like the cult of the golden ratio, it emphasizes formulas at the expense of those expressive qualities that actually make art and entertainment.

Binoche and Stewart inhabit their characters’ complicated friendship, whether they’re doing the nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes business of managing a career or getting drunk at a small casino.

Make no mistake, this is a film of ideas—sadder, quieter, more delicate than the Hollywood sci-fi standard.

Packed with rare footage from the band’s early years, and narrated through present-day sit-down interviews, it’s pop oral history at its most formless and fannish: fixated on juicy tidbits, points of influences, and historical cameos, and sorely lacking a point of view.

This is a film set entirely in places where people aren’t meant to stay for very long, a world of continual transit and gratification, with no endpoint. Maybe it’s the world that money creates for itself.

The character of Houellebecq implicitly understands that this is just a transaction, and doesn’t take it personally. It’s too bad that, like so much of the movie, this germ of satire is never developed past the point of premise.

A deranged melodrama where any sense of soapy, campy fun is undercut by the preachy, self-serious tone.

Everything signals birth—of Argentina, cinema, the nuclear family—until Dinesen descends into a womb-like cave and Jauja takes a hard left turn into enigma. Even the title is a mystery, the Spanish byword for a land of plenty.

The Gunman is too disorganized and sloppy to make sense as political commentary or to work on the most basic level as a globe-trotting chase thriller.

This is the kind of thing that should come effortlessly to Pacino, one of the all-time greats of American acting, but no longer does. In fact, this qualifies as his best and most easygoing film performance in a good decade.

Clothed in a colorful mishmash of historical fashions and scored to sweeping strings, the movie is like an antique cut-crystal vase: gorgeous, fragile, empty.

Even though he never gets a grip on the over-complicated plot, the director hasn’t lost his knack for those elemental qualities that make a good action flick.

The result is a movie of complicated interpersonal and cross-cultural tensions.

Think Vampire’s Kiss on a DIY scale, with motels and basement rec rooms in place of brownstones and nightclubs and a bladed Power Glove in place of plastic fangs. That’s Buzzard in a nutshell.

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.