John Semley

It's a rare feat for a director whose films, from their muted humour and dated-seeming mise-en-scène, to their use of flat, unexpressive, Bressonian close-ups of characters, have always seemed weirdly outside of time.

It’s not about the world catching up to understand poor, lonesome Hiccup. It’s about Hiccup catching up to the expectations of the world on his own.

The 15:17 To Paris, like "Sully," "American Sniper" and (to a lesser extent) "Gran Torino" before it, combines such conceptions of late style: both harmonious and intransigent, resolute and difficult, defined by lively contradiction.

Film, not film, whatever it is, Cameraperson plays like a study not only of cinema itself, but a warm, welcome reminder that there is (ideally) an intelligence, and maybe even a bit of grace, behind the moving images that wedge themselves in our memory; that they are the handiwork of a living, thinking, feeling, sneezing human being, someone who is both camera and person.

First Reformed may well be the ultimate auteur object for Schrader apostles. But ultimately its sheer archness reveals Paul Schrader as a gifted and deeply persuasive evangelist of the transcendental style – if not quite a canon saint.

Rat Film is most compelling when it moves out of the history of Baltimore's civic-planning and pest-control schemes and settles on its denizens, both human and rodent.

It’s a thoughtful, brainy, deeply considered and artful film that arouses the intellect and the passions and grapples with the problems of democracy.

There’s no doubt that the world needs more iconoclasts, whistle-blowers and anti-authoritarian rabble-rousers. But it deserves better than Julian Assange.

For its slightness and silliness, its concerns are grander. Here, the undead ghouls represent nothing but the cold prospect of death itself. “This isn’t gonna end well,” Driver’s omniscient copper keeps intoning. And it never does.

Us is the work of a gifted director who seems to be compensating for having less to say by overstating how he says it.

Most refreshingly, Johnny English Strikes Again is the rare secret-agent film that feels wholly unself-conscious.

Like the film's punishingly gory set pieces, the storytelling itself is meaty.

It’s hard to imagine another filmmaker who could invest the lives of straight, middle-class, norm-y, aggressively bro-y, immaculately groomed college sports jocks with a sense of vital anarchy and resounding humanity.

The effect of watching these viral videos as a "movie" feels genuinely singular – suspending the viewer somewhere between reality and documentary, between the dash-mounted long takes of Abbas Kiarostami's "10" and the combustible vehicular carnage of Michael Bay's "The Island," between cinema and something else.

If there’s a glaring oversight in Hail Satan?, it’s in the film’s singular devotion to the Temple of Satan. There’s little-to-no mention of other Satanic cults.

Loving Vincent is gorgeous. It's a film of immersive beauty.

That the plot is totally stupid is Boss Baby’s saving grace. It’s the rare cartoon that actually feels like a cartoon, propelled by its goofiness and sheer energy and rarely bogged down by boring, polemical lesson-learning.

Like newfangled Western revisions of ramen itself – sprinkled with corn niblets and topped with melty hillocks of shredded Swiss cheese – Tampopo is an exercise in hybridity.

Willie may not have a heart of gold. But he’s got a heart of bloody, barely thumping meat, same as the rest of us. And in this bitter season of unceasing, frostbitten darkness, it’s heart enough.

In making the first DC superhero film in a long time to aspire to anything like levity, Wan finds a way to catalyze what might have been yet another dust-dry origin story. The secret? Just add water.

For a filmmaker who was frequently drawn back to the subject of suffering, and especially the anguish of the individual cast against the collective will of cruel, foolish authority, it’s a perfectly fitting farewell.

It may not have the easy, feel-good family flick sheen to win over the box office, but it’s clever and compassionate enough to pay down a few big-ticket karmic debts.

Viewed in the despairing environment of the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, Alita is likely to find a cult of core fans drawn in by the persuasive digital animation, and pick-and-choose, smorgasbord world-building. In the longview, though, it’s likely to enjoy much the same fate as 2000s cine-technological milestone Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate case of damning with faint, highly relative praise.

Aster’s considerable discipline in matters of plot, acting, and exactingly manicured mise-en-scène resulted in a film that, for all its shocks and bravura performances, felt a little too controlled, as if its borderline braggadocious style was compensating for a lack of genuine terror.

What enlivens My Scientology is Theroux himself: watching him stumble from one idea to the next, interact with intense actors pulling their best Tom Cruise grins, butt heads with Rathbun, bicker with church insiders and throw their own idiotic lingo back in their faces.

So where the hypocrisy, didacticism and inaction of previous popes righteously roused our anger and indignation, Francis stands as a palliative cure-all for anti-papal sentiment. Likewise, Wenders’s documentary seems to yearn to excite the viewer’s passion, to ignite a desire to take meaningful action against the very real social problems the Pope so clearly diagnoses.

Don't Talk to Irene feels rote and re-hashed, despite the strength of its central character and the ungainly charm of McLeod's performance. Watching Mills' film, one wishes it were as weird and wonderful as Irene herself. It's almost as if the writer/director doesn't realize how rare his own creation is.

Regrettably, the film’s place-setting opening lays the scene for a different, more exciting film that never really unfolds.

The nature of this fantasy is boringly feel-good and aspirational.

All of which is to say that Dumbo feels totally consistent with Burton’s late-period slump. Abysmally scripted and hammily acted – and not, for the most part, in an interesting or ironic way – Dumbo recasts Disney’s animated classic in the trappings and suits of Burton’s pinstripe-and-pinwheel upholstery.

The direction is similarly yearning; practically begging for admiration. A sequence in which Hemsworth swishes toward the camera, piece of pie in hand, grooving to the strains of Deep Purple’s Hush, is so desperate in its attempt to appear iconic that it becomes difficult to watch head-on.

For faithful and faithless alike, The Shack may seem stupid, laughable, blasphemous, poorly acted and totally banal. And yet there are probably worse things then being told it’s righteous to forgive and that love is good.

Pretty much everything about Rings is incoherent. And the most incoherent thing of all is the film’s arrival a decade and a half after Verbinski’s original remake (if such a term even makes sense).

The Peanuts Movie is a sloppy mash-up of disconnected vignettes and rehashed jokes, all lazily reverse-engineered from the premise that a Peanuts movie is a thing that people will like and will happily pay to see.

For the already faithful, believing in John’s miraculous recovery demands not a leap of faith, but a small hop. The film tells them absolutely nothing that they don’t already presume themselves to know. So what, then, is its point?

In its neediness to be liked, the new Shaft – the third of five films in the series to be titled, simply, Shaft – says everything and nothing.

And that’s how Detroit unfolds: like a horror film. The film flattens its historical personages and its particularities of time-and-place into excruciating exploitation – somewhere between a Straw Dogs-style “survive the night” home invasion narrative, Milgram experiment moral problem play and racial torture porn.

I won’t presume to understand what passes for popular taste. But seeing an audience in the tens of thousands lose their mind for Hart’s jokes about hating his family and the hypothetical perils of dating a woman with only one shoulder, I can’t help but feel skeptical.

Even by Marvel’s own standards of serviceable mediocrity, Infinity War fails.

That’s what Shazam!, and all these endless superhero action epics, amount to: hollow toys smashing against other hollow toys.

Nevertheless, as the sort of rote horror movie that’s fun to laugh at, The Recall has its moments.

Office Christmas Party is a hopeless muddle. A joyless, laughless – that’s right, not even one laugh – affair that proves how indulgent and (worse) boring ensemble comedies such as this become when the ensemble has next to no natural chemistry and even less of a script to riff off of.

A film so dull, flat, and totally joyless that, in the absence of anything compelling unfolding on screen, one’s mind may be forgiven for turning to the corporate machinations grinding behind it.

It’s the kind of film that can’t even bother to commit to its own cynicism, which makes it the most deeply cynical kind of film there is.

The problem with the Purge films is they feel like they’re made for people who would actually take part in the purge.

The performances, the writing, the direction, Segel’s D.F.W. impression, everything is just fine. But The End of the Tour is disgraceful. It feels like it’s towing out the real Wallace’s ghost to perform some soppy parody of himself.

More manipulative, maudlin trash from the Disney-Pixar content farm.

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.