Mike D'Angelo

Like text that’s been translated into another language and then re-translated back by someone else, Uncharted bears a clunky resemblance to any number of classic action-adventure movies.

When this film is over, viewers with voice-activated smart TVs are liable to look around for the long-dormant physical remote.

The film’s more or less a mashup of Emmerich’s two wheelhouses: alien contact (Stargate, Independence Day) and cataclysmic disasters (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), with some Armageddon thrown in for good measure. You will actually hear your brain cells commit seppuku as you watch it.

There’s something uniquely intense about hearing an entire audience remain utterly still during a movie’s transporting final minutes, afraid to cough or squeak their seat’s rusty springs or even breathe too loud, for fear of breaking the spell. Memoria inspires that kind of rapture. Experience its full dynamic range.

A musical with numbers written by The National was a terrific idea, and so was Dinklage as Cyrano. Just not at the same time.

What’s certain is that a stronger, more searching exploration of this scenario—one not so starkly conceived in terms of victims and villains—would have gone a long way toward alleviating potential misgivings. Wolf is so thin that one can’t help but look right through it.

The whole thing comes across as a movie star’s anti-vanity project, just an opportunity for Bullock to demonstrate her ostensible range. Okay, she can be hard and stoic and affectless. Noted.

Mills’ core insight remains the same in every film: We’re all screwed up to some degree, all constantly improvising, all doing the best we can with relatively few guidelines. That’s not especially innovative or profound, perhaps, but seeing it refracted through a connection that movies tend to ignore lends it a certain sparkle.

Moss spends the better part of a year just trying to get his subject to betray some raw emotion, even going so far as to have Chasten pose interview questions at one point. It’s not as if Buttigieg stonewalls the camera, either. He’s just not, at heart, a very demonstrative guy.

Finch’s main problem is its amiable, low-key vibe, which feels at odds with such a grim scenario.

The more Electrical Life conforms to what one would expect of a Louis Wain biography, the less idiosyncratically compelling it becomes. An entirely fictional story loosely inspired by the man and his wife, but beholden to nothing, might have been genuinely electrifying.

Why the murderer feels compelled to don a 3-D printed mask of each victim’s own face isn’t entirely clear—nothing about, say, recording a repugnant podcast episode merits symbolic self-inflicted harm—but, hey, it’s a novel gimmick.

What keeps Ghostland from flatlining is Sono’s gift for delirious spectacle, along with the movie’s tacit acknowledgment that it’s utterly ridiculous.

This is a movie, not a book or feature article. And having a subject who largely refuses to cooperate, thereby forcing the filmmakers to sit around at home and relate much of what happens indirectly, doesn’t exactly make for a classic.

There are no outright disasters and two superlative shorts, one of which may well turn out to be this year’s single greatest cinematic achievement. Even if the rest are mostly forgettable, that batting average still qualifies as success in this notoriously erratic mini-genre.

That Radwanski so expertly navigates the fraught subject of mental illness, avoiding most pitfalls, makes it at once harder to understand and easier to forgive the lack of subtlety in Anne At 13,000 Feet’s titular controlling metaphor.

Sealey, whose formal touch often flirts with cliché (lots of circling around Hagmaier and Bundy, with one man’s face temporarily obscured by the back of the other’s head), pointedly reminds us of Bundy’s many victims, even though none of them are shown.

Thankfully, Flag Day isn’t another disaster, though neither is it anywhere near the vicinity of Penn’s best work.

The film’s tension between sincerity and falsity is nonstop palpable; virtually every scene threatens to collapse and implode due to the gravitational weight of its heightened reality. The correct answer to any such mighty swing for the fences is: Yes, you may start.

Over time, its perspective subtly mutates, even as its methodology remains exactly the same.

If you seek something that coalesces in a satisfying way, this ain’t the auteur for you. If you long to be caught off guard, take a seat.

Like the animal itself, Pig is considerably smarter and more ardent than it appears at first glance, and unearths treasures that are barely evident on the surface level. We’d have settled for much less, but what a rare treat to be offered a great deal more.

Movies routinely place characters in desperate, life-or-death situations, but rarely do we see them behave in a genuinely desperate way. No Sudden Move, a period crime drama written by Ed Solomon and directed by Steven Soderbergh, corrects this oversight in a way that’s at once hilarious and distressing.

Even at its dumbest, The Ice Road holds your attention; a climactic fight/chase scene even acknowledges that it’s hard to look badass on a slippery surface.

12 Mighty Orphans tells the true story of a Depression-era high school football team improbably formed at a Texas orphanage, but the screenplay may as well have been invented from whole cloth, given its relentlessly formulaic nature.

Awake becomes the saga of a mom’s redemption. Rodriguez works hard to make this personal angle compelling, exhibiting mama-bear ferocity, but the film’s ultra-bleak premise doesn’t cooperate.

What’s atypically clumsy here is Petzold’s effort to synthesize big ideas: Not only is the architectural metaphor overstated and the mythological element frustratingly vague, but the two have nothing much to do with each other, making Undine play like a bidding war between high concepts—one of them academic, the other genre-inflected.

Ultimately, a movie like this succeeds or fails largely on the strength of its lead actors, and Machoian cast his well.

A deadly combination of enfeebled comedy and maudlin melodrama.

Hákonarson alternates between crowd-pleasing defiance . . . and a downbeat assessment of how much change is realistically possible, never fully committing to either mode. The result feels less complex than just wishy-washy.

The film is strongest when simply exploring the terrible notion of triage among the healthy, with everyone involved fully aware of which individual will be deemed the most expendable.

The movie’s period spookiness and its #MeToo outrage have virtually nothing to do with each other, diminishing the efficacy of both and making it feel like a tract.

As Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taught us, you need a montage, and The Courier serves up several expert ones, leaning hard on shots of Penkovsky snapping photos of documents in shadowy storage rooms. Cooke also has a terrific camera sense in general, and can create a mood just by abruptly shifting angles.

Like a Saturday Night Live sketch that airs in the show’s final 10 minutes, Quentin Dupieux’s Keep An Eye Out tosses around ridiculous comic ideas as if secure in the knowledge that few people will ever see them.

Jacobs manages this controlled chaos with a dexterity and brittle artificiality that’s quite distinct from all of his previous films

Western Australia’s sunny, arid expanse makes Colin and Les’ endless, pointless rivalry seem small and petty, rather than deeply rooted in the landscape itself.

Because Watts is a gifted actor, Penguin Bloom does sometimes convey paraplegia’s emotional trials.

Eventually, Preparations has to stop preparing and deliver some sort of answer to its central mystery, even if that turns out to be one of those maddening or exhilarating (according to taste and/or how skillfully it’s handled) shoulder shrugs. Sadly, the reveal here is quite banal, which retroactively makes the film as a whole play like a prolonged, unsatisfying tease.

Mackie’s performance, for better and worse, is anything but robotic. He plays more or less the same charismatic wiseacre he usually does, interpreting Leo as a machine that’s every bit as uniquely expressive as is any human being. That injects some welcome levity into what’s generally a flat, dour adventure, directed by Sweden’s Mikael Håfström with little of the old-school verve that he brought to Escape Plan.

Steven Soderbergh’s latest film boasts the relaxed, improvisational vibe of a temporary diversion—the sort of thing one might cook up to help pass the time during an extended voyage.

The overall impression 76 Days delivers is that of dedicated professionals coping with an unprecedented onslaught of emergencies to the best of their ability, grimly waiting for the curve to flatten.

There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been good hokey pseudo-historical fun along the lines of, say, The Imitation Game. (Let’s just ignore that some folks perceived that film as Oscar-worthy.) All it required was putting the exceptional character front and center throughout, rather than shrouding his gift in pointlessly vague mystery.

If it’s strictly information that you want, that’s what the Discovery Channel is for. The pleasures of a Herzog doc are unique to him.

Director and cowriter André Øvredal (Trollhunter, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe) gets credit here for “original story,” but every single element has been borrowed, and precious little else of note about Mortal remains.

It’s giving ordinary citizens the floor that makes the difference, and City Hall truly comes alive when Wiseman’s out on the street.

Give Love And Monsters credit: If nothing else, it does at least come up with a new (albeit ludicrous) twist on the killer-asteroid premise that once fueled two dumb disaster movies in the same year.

There’s a pleasing kernel of genuine warmth glowing at the heart of this movie, but it’s been heavily insulated—almost buried—by juvenile silliness. One could argue that this merely echoes the family dynamic, but your tolerance for buffoonery will still need to be quite high.

Save Yourselves! didn’t have the budget to pull off its ambitiously bizarre and essentially unresolved ending (which might not have been satisfying even had it been fully realized—it’s really way out there, quite literally), but it gets the small things just right, and that’s far more important.

The Nest’s true star is that cavernous 15th-century mansion, which provides Durkin and Erdély with endless opportunities to carve out sinister voids that threaten to swallow this nuclear family whole.

Every so often, Egoyan takes another stab at the offbeat, achronological, weirdly intimate mode in which he originally specialized, but the spark never quite fully ignites. Guest Of Honour, his latest effort, is decidedly that sort of low-wattage Egoyan classic, serving up familiar preoccupations and structural curlicues—minus any inspiration.

It’s good to see Kore-eda try to stretch himself a little, and The Truth demonstrates that his talent can survive on foreign soil. But there’s not as much powerful emotional veracity to it as one might hope.

Deriving endless anxiety from brawny men moving as gingerly as possible, it’s a riveting anti-action movie, one of the most memorable high-concept pictures ever made in Europe.

Viewers who cherish ambiguity will have no trouble finding plenty of it here, as Hong never explicitly tips his hand regarding this woman’s disputed identity.

Twists and turns shape the narrative, but not always to Ree’s benefit; he responds by scrambling his film’s chronology in ways that threaten to rupture any sense of trust between director and viewer. Questions that one might ordinarily have dismissed instead take hold and fester. Just how real is any of this?

The gradual, matter-of-fact way that Côté transforms Ghost Town Anthology into an actual ghost story is quite impressive.

What’s both intriguing and frustrating about the screen version, however, is the way that it flirts with a much thornier and potentially richer possibility, only to ultimately back away from that idea in favor of a straightforward plea for justice.

In short, this is fundamentally a movie of surface pleasures, placing gorgeous actors in an equally stunning location and letting them parry with sharp words and lithe, angular bodies.

The film’s true power is elemental, rooted in weather conditions that all but erase the distinction between land and sky, and in the inky darkness of a tunnel traversed by one haggard, trudging figure whose weary body intermittently blocks a sliver of light barely visible at its far end.

It deviates enough from formula — especially in its arresting ending, which takes full advantage of Bielenia’s haunted visage — to be worth seeing.

This is a more professional-looking production, with a much stronger cast, but it has the same half-assed feel.

The screenplay — written by Bellocchio in collaboration with several others — has no particular point of view regarding Buscetta, seeming content merely to take us step by step through his two decades as an informant.

Hagiography doesn’t magically becomes less tedious simply because its subject made the ultimate sacrifice for his country, however, and this stolid, mournful drama does little more than solicit the viewer’s respect and admiration for Pitsenbarger, whose entire life gets reduced to a single act of uncomplicated nobility.

Viewed as any sort of follow-up to "Beasts," Troop Zero looks like a sellout. By the standards of mainstream live-action children’s fare, however, it’s more mature and thoughtful than average. Just don’t expect any Oscar nominations, even for recent winners like Davis and Janney.

There’s no mystery here, no narrator wrestling with the limits of his own generosity and tolerance. Just a lot of stunning scenery and exemplary rectitude.

What he discovers is powerfully moving, but every step of his journey — and of the copious flashbacks that fill in various blanks — tests the viewer’s patience. It’s like eating an entire box of stale cereal to get to the prize.

So it feels quite ironic that Ip Man 4: The Finale wraps up the parent series with a movie that’s comparatively weak in the kung fu department but atypically solid at killing time between set pieces. The highs are lower than usual, the lows higher. It all goes down smooth.

In any case, what remains of John F. Donovan is a barely coherent mess, and so eager for your approval that it’s hard to feel anything but sorry for it.

The movie version plays exactly like every other rehab-facility melodrama ever made. Even the stuff that Frey invented seems overly familiar, borrowed from sources ranging from "28 Days" to (somewhat improbably — people in recovery aren’t necessarily allowed dental anesthetic, it turns out) "Marathon Man."

Apart from its impressive (though partially digital) recreation of the Sistine Chapel, The Two Popes offers little in the way of purely cinematic pleasures, relying almost exclusively on the expert parrying of Hopkins and Pryce.

Dark Waters would likely have been a forgettable mediocrity in anybody’s hands, given its fact-based, muckraking limitations. Coming from the visionary who gave us Safe, Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, and Carol, it’s a crushing disappointment.

All of this letdown occurs only in the last 15 or so minutes, however. Until then, it’s good grotesque fun watching the hand make its way across town, scuttling Thing-like on its fingers. (Make it a double feature with the Addams Family reboot, if you like.)

One hires Cage for a generic timewaster like this in the hope that he’ll make it at least a little more interesting on screen than it was on paper, by virtue of some crazed facial expressions and off-the-wall line readings, but he evidently wasn’t in the experimenting mood.

What made this particular project so toxic? Simple: American Dharma is a fundamentally cordial conversation with Steve Bannon.

Éric Rohmer used to make one of these pictures practically every year, but it’s a tricky genre to pull off, and Sachs (working with regular co-writer Mauricio Zacharias) doesn’t supply the neurotic wit that would make Frankie distinctive rather than just… nice.

Mostly, though, this very empathetic project suffers from an inability to offer anything beyond what one would expect from its synopsis.

Written and directed by Ulrich Köhler (and co-produced by Köhler’s romantic partner, Maren Ade, a superb filmmaker in her own right), this droll yet poignant amalgam of the fantastic and the mundane ultimately suggests that while people can dramatically alter their behavior in response to extreme circumstances, on some fundamental level they don’t really change.

Banderas’ performance is so rich, in fact (he won Best Actor at Cannes), that it creates the illusion of a narrative with real depth and texture—he keeps us invested in Salvador even as the film repeatedly declines to complicate the man’s life any further.

First Love ranks among Miike’s most purely entertaining movies (out of more than 100 now!), gradually building steam until it reaches a sustained pitch of cheerful insanity.

Servillo—who previously embodied another former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, in Sorrentino’s Il Divo—never fails to deliver a memorably offbeat take on an outsize figure. Loro loses a bit of momentum once Berlusconi finally becomes its central figure, but it also gains some much-needed complexity.

There’s no much going on here, either thematically or narratively.

The film shrewdly keeps us inside Chloe’s head, filtered through her very limited comprehension of her burgeoning and truly awesome abilities.

Things perk up when Fiennes belatedly appears, and while this isn’t one of the performances he’ll be remembered for, by any means, he delivers a fine moment of utter disgust at the government’s naked corruption in the film’s very last scene. Ending on that note feels right.

Once Sackville-West gets bored with Woolf and starts seeing another woman, garden-variety jealousy takes over. Not quite as fascinating as the story of a man who inexplicably metamorphoses into a woman and doesn’t age for 300 years.

Uncaged improves on the first film only with its ending: This one boasts a modestly effective twist rather than a truly moronic one. Encouraging, but not nearly enough to justify a third trip down this 47-meter well.

Gottsagen is too lively to be completely pinned down by feel-good clichés, and his unpredictability brings out the best in LaBeouf. As in most buddy pictures, so long as the chemistry works, all else is forgivable.

Some petals are admittedly prettier or more fragrant than others (and the film has serious stem problems), but there’s forbidding beauty in the sheer ambition itself.

There’s no satisfying end point to this movie (which premiered at Sundance as a 135-minute work in progress; over 20 minutes have since been trimmed), which reaches its alarmist conclusion quite early on and then functions more as a frustratingly sporadic video diary.

Running just 75 minutes and seemingly loath to move beyond superficial feints at both comedy and melodrama, A Faithful Man, by comparison, barely qualifies as a trifle.

It’s a pleasure to see Shelton in her element again, guiding actors to places that feel unexpected yet authentic. Maron is an ideal match for her sensibility, and they make terrific scene partners, too. May this be the start of something special.

They’ve created not a bold revision but a bland empowerment tale, devoid of everything that makes Hamlet great.

It doesn’t help that The Command looks phony right from the outset, being an English-language film involving virtually no actual Russians.

However truthful or invented Our Time may be, its dynamic is tiresomely petty and small, resisting Reygadas’ occasional efforts at expressionism. It plays like therapy.

Ultimately, the copious, unmanipulated (one hopes!) footage of Dylan himself is what will endure.

So many truly disturbing revelations pile up in the final half hour or so that processing the relevant information leaves little time for raw emotion. Swank’s nameless character, in particular, remains a pencil sketch. Still, there’s no question that Sputore can direct a movie.

Eventually, both characters and narrative start to feel like an elaborate pretext for what’s really, at heart, a documentary about the various ways that wealthy corporations avoid paying taxes, combined with an earnest public-service message about helping the homeless. Those are admirable goals, but springing them on viewers via an entertaining bait-and-switch risks inspiring disappointment, or even provoking resentment.

For better and worse (mostly better), Too Late To Die Young is a mood movie, situated on an emotional precipice.

But Zwick and Fletcher, in their eagerness to make an argument against the death penalty, needlessly stack the deck.

Solid, creative melodrama is nothing to sneeze at, but it can’t compete with enduring genius.