Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The late Chantal Akerman had a unique way of filming a room. She would place the camera below eye level, with the lens flatly parallel to a wall, forming a box of perspective that seemed to enclose characters (usually women) within their surroundings. There’s a remarkable shot in her 1978 film Les R…

There have been more than a few bad movies about the Holocaust; perhaps we were long overdue for a bad movie about the Holodomor, the catastrophic forced famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. In rides Bitter Harvest, a gooey Canadian-produced soap opera that tackles mass star…

Expensive-ish (by Russian standards, anyway) and claustrophobic, Aleksei Mizgirev’s The Duelist resembles an unholy cross of the worst of Tom Hooper and Zack Snyder—and worse yet, it’s mostly diverting. Stalingrad’s Pyotr Fyodorov plays Yakovlev, a disgraced nobleman who returns to mid-19th century…

Suffering from a bad case of “too few and far between,” the new film adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s turn-of-the-20th-century “succès de scandale” Diary Of A Chambermaid—which has already been made into movies by Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir—does itself no favors by refusing to stick to a through-line…

Like an étude for dolly track and zoom lens, the suspense flick Three finds genre-hopping director Johnnie To exercising his mastery of visual style, perspective, and buildup. The setting is a Hong Kong hospital, where a crooked cop, a criminal, and a neurosurgeon match wits and wills over six tense…

To get the obvious out of the way: The Woman Who Left, the newest film by the independent-minded Filipino writer-director Lav Diaz, is black-and-white and 228 minutes long, with every scene directed as a static master shot, and during much of its running time (which is short by Diaz’s standards), th…

Cast as a prince who falls for a spinster in Matteo Garrone’s fairy-tale anthology Tale Of Tales, the French actor Vincent Cassel proved that he could do a mean impression of a horny cartoon wolf, which is enough to make him seem like an inspired and maybe even subversive choice for the role of the…

André Téchiné, who was once a film critic, reached a turning point with his 1981 masterpiece Hôtel Des Amériques, a psychodrama of doomed romance in early middle age, set in the French resort town of Biarritz. In his telling, it was the film where he finally broke his addiction to movie references a…

It’s very early morning and still dark as an armored car moves west through the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena. The armed crew hits during the guards’ coffee stop at a donut shop. They are shit-hot and move tactically, so it’s obvious that these guys are professional, probably ex-military. But shots…

The Kid Who Would Be King, the English writer-director Joe Cornish’s family-friendly take on the King Arthur legend, might be smarter that the average live-action kids’ movie, but it’s hamstrung by a lack of visual imagination and a generic script. It starts promisingly enough. After an animated pro…

Dresden, in the mid-1930s. A precocious little boy and his beautiful young aunt follow a tour through an exhibit of “degenerate” artworks, taking in the paintings of Otto Dix and Wassily Kandinsky while their tour guide blathers on about the common man, real art in the Reich, and the like. Nazism is the status quo,…

Adam Sandler’s latest Netflix release, Murder Mystery, isn’t going to dispel the longstanding rumor that the Sandman mostly makes movies as an excuse to go on paid vacations, using his Happy Madison production shingle as a personal travel agency. Yes, the movie is set at an assortment of pricey European resort towns,…

It’s about the impossible desire, shared by both expats and artists, to forge an identity of one’s own.

Bertrand Bonello takes the zombie back to its Haitian roots.

What if you could rendezvous with a younger version of your spouse?

Jessica Swale’s debut feature is one of those sapfests that flatters our modern attitudes by introducing them to our primitive ancestors. The past is reeducated and happy endings are possible.

While Notturno’s lack of narration or background information necessitates some guesswork, there is never any doubt about the subject: The threat and trauma of the Islamic State group looms over the disconnected vignettes and vast, empty landscapes.

The misadventures of SpongeBob and his pals and frenemies have be enough to sustain more than 200 continually rerun episodes of TV, but filling out a feature like Sponge On The Run, even though it’s barely 80 minutes without credits, takes a lot of squeezing.

Ralph Fiennes is a reluctant badass in this uninspired, long-delayed entry in the Kingsman franchise

Missed opportunities abound in this indie thriller from director Randall Okita