Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 release, One From the Heart, was given a good long three year gestating period for Coppola to recover from the bowels of hell he’d thrown himself right up against while making his edge-of-sanity opus Apocalypse Now. That 1979 release itself had gone gaspingly over budget and seemingly came close to mangling, killing, or rendering insane every one who worked on it at one point or another, and Coppola himself lost four years of his life producing his stunningly indulgent rambling mess of a war film less interested in exploring war than in burrowing into our soul with some of the finest tone poem imagery the American New Wave ever saw. The film is regarded as a masterpiece, but having their pride and joy screw with their hearts and wallets so did not make our corporate masters happy.
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“American New Wave” New Wave: The Outsiders
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First things first, Christopher Nolan is not a particularly good writer. Generally working with brother Jonathan Nolan in their most archly self-important holier-than-thou register, their scripts reek of arbitrary complication and self-important puzzle-box trickery designed to bowl you over with highfalutin airs. He doesn’t have an acerbic bone in his body, and his films mask their non-personal nature by confusing better story with more story. Interstellar may be his messiest screenplay yet, shifting course every half-hour, developing certain ideas only to drop them almost completely because it saw something shiny in the distance. And then it has the gall to return to them later like they are the capper to a fully nourished, satisfying through-line when in reality they are simply shots in the dark. On paper, Interstellar is pretty terrible. 
It’s a known quantity to criticize our corporate masters for breaking apart book adaptations for the sake of profit, and this is an avenue of criticism I tend to shy away from. If the individual films, broken apart, are compelling, I don’t much care for the “completeness” of having a “full” adaptation of a source in one film. And complaining about cliffhanger endings have always seemed a red herring to distract from actually discussing the film. But good god is Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay hurt significantly by being cut in half. Or, at least, this first part is. While The Hunger Games and its sequel Catching Fire weren’t perfect films, they were never unwieldy. Snug filmmaking was the order of the day, except when they sought to make good on their pop-Terrence Malick aspirations and linger on the poetic depression of the earth, which was itself lightly satisfying in its own way. 
Edited for Clarity
Clash of the Titans
In a nearly dialogue-free sequence blanketed together by long-shots that cut only when absolutely necessary, capturing feeling and physical space with stunning, sparing clarity, we learn just about everything we could possibly need to know about the state of Wall-E‘s world with an awe-inducing elegance that casts its gaze on inspired little moments of action and (mostly) inaction. We are also treated to the finest cinematic homage to bright, feeling, humanist silent cinema snark this side of …well, the heyday of silent cinema. While Pixar’s follow-up film, Up, pulled out all the stops for a life (or two) in a minute, Wall-E is wonderfully content to just chill and explore its world a little in the most wonderfully non-narrative fashion, invested less in “arc” than in the little visual moments that define character. The opening scenes of the film are, quite literally, just a slice-of-life drama, except there’s nothing alive to be found. There’s just a robot, and his name is Wall-E.
If, as I am increasingly inclined to believe, every Guillermo del Toro film is a “Guillermo del Toro idea delivery device”, Hellboy 2 is right up there with his best works. This is to say, if a Guillermo del Toro film is all about the Guillermo del Toro visuals he can imagine for us and transfer to the screen, which is not necessarily the case but has some value for his highly and pointedly surface-level films, then Hellboy 2 is a hell of a film. It’s weighty yet zippy, filled with consequence yet light on its feet, it’s buttoned-up in all manner of cozy, boisterous lights and sounds, and it has a dreamer’s streak a mile wide. Many blockbusters attempt to find a center in their visuals, some of which succeed and many of which crash under their own superficiality. The visual splendor on display in Hellboy 2, however, exists on another level – its images do not merely heal the eye, but they achieve genuinely transcendent emotional heft all their own. 
2008’s Tropic Thunder, while far raunchier and more overblown, is the closest mainstream American cinema of the 2000’s has come to its own Sunset Blvd. While it was marketed as something of a comedy poking fun at war movies, that is only true by technicality. The narrative of the film, as such, has the movie stars making a war film let loose in the jungle where they must 1. survive, but more importantly, 2. battle their egos and the fact that their struggle isn’t just a test designed to help them work as a team in the name of making a better movie. If it pokes fun at war movies, that’s because the film is primarily a mockery of the filmmaking process at large, and more specifically, the actors, producers, directors, agents, and everyone else in Hollywood who combine limited skill with limitless, towering, monumental egos. 
The Long Take 