Elizabeth Kerr

If nothing else, director Stanley Tong and martial arts superstar Jackie Chan’s latest effort, Vanguard, proves the law of diminishing returns. Not too long ago a Chan film guaranteed an entertaining time at the movies and heaps of awe at what the human body could endure. Now? Not so much.

Like the ambitious The Wandering Earth, the last Chinese epic to make a play for international glory, and indeed Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, The Eight Hundred is thin on characterization, and too often slips into rote narrative and war movie cliches (really, a runaway white horse?). And that's despite eight writers working on the script. The sheer volume of men fighting and dying in the face of overwhelming odds and stellar technical spectacle step into the gap where emotional connection should be.

Peninsula suffers the same type of sequelitis that suggests a second entry must be more/bigger/louder than its predecessor. Where Train to Busan’s two hours were impeccably paced and every frame meticulously used, Peninsula spins its wheels in between its admittedly impressive key set pieces.

While not as strong, or nuanced, an entry as any of the three that preceded it, Yen once again proves at 56 to be something of an ageless wonder.

Too many endings and romantic subplots that do nothing but bloat the running time and detract from the snowy action could easily have been jettisoned by editors Tang Man To and Li Lin for a leaner, loftier final product.

As a director Teng isn’t a standout stylist, and the film’s technical specs are perfectly adequate, not flashy. Similarly Send Me to the Clouds doesn’t go out of its way to be overly confrontational.

A relatively run-of-the-mill cops-and-robbers thriller with few surprises.

It’s the entertaining scenery-chewing by the top-flight cast that carries the picture; each of the main actors far better than the material they’re working with.

The film’s only real draws are Gibson and Penn, who come at the material from opposite ends of the acting philosophy spectrum...It's simply confounding, much like the rest of the movie.

Quickly paced and based on a novel, and creepy, idea, the film fritters away its potential by delivering only a modicum of horror and compounding that disappointment with some creaky performances.

Sensitive, keenly observed and unflinchingly honest. ... House of Hummingbird can be a little too deliberate in its contemplations and contextualizing Eunhee in her solitude and search for intimacy can be bloated at times, but ultimately it's an assured and affecting portrait of teenaged uncertainty and insecurity.

The lush production design by Raymond Chan, Joyce Chan’s swanky ’60s costuming and some astoundingly clever set pieces — a duel between Tin-chi and one of Kit’s thugs atop of a strip of neon signs, a brilliantly old-school four-way fight at Cheung Kok’s offices, a whiskey glass tango with Yeoh — more than make up for any plot flaws, with the exception of the shameful underuse of Tony Jaa as a mysterious assassin.

The picture is a slow-burning but ultimately empowering drama that works despite a lack of the bigger, louder, more outwardly emotional moments it could have succumbed to.

The visuals prove crucial, as Qi makes for a weak central character.

Pang’s cast of regulars is a well-oiled machine, and he and co-writer Sunny Lam are as fond of their characters as the characters are of each other.

One Cut wears its cheapness as a badge of honor, a tricky endeavor given its actual production polish; make-up effects by Kazuhide Simohata and Jyunko Hirabayashi go a long way to supplying the film-within-the-film its guerilla feel. But the pic's best effect is its ability to ensure the same jokes land just as well in their second contexts.

Last Letter walks a fine line between bittersweet and saccharine, and too often topples onto the wrong side of that divide.

For all its slapsticky action and heightened reality (the subtitles could use a quick review as well), Cool Fish marries often uncomfortable, dead-serious drama to its hijinks, and it doesn’t always work.

Rampant is a little all over the map, with its biggest flaw securely rooted in its inability to maintain consistency in its mythology — an unforgivable genre crime.

Despite the general bloat, The Last 49 Days has its share of little pleasures.

Cheang does his able best to balance a love story with the heightened fantasy action expected of the previous two films, and after a rocky start he largely succeeds.

In fairness, this is unapologetically emotional stuff (call your mother), and Kim harbors no ambitions to anything else.

The three-hour runtime seems justified when Iwai lets his characters fragile, burgeoning relationships develop at a leisurely pace and revel in the little details. At other times the pic is simply self-indulgent, allowing scenes to slip from emotionally naked to embarrassingly overwrought in a flash. Iwai served as his own editor and it shows.

The normally charismatic cast doesn’t get much to chew on and thus can’t really lift the film beyond its modest, self-aware station.

The pic ends with a sermon on self-determination, and the dialogue tends toward the on-the-nose instead of the kind that allows viewers to draw their own inferences.

Warrior’s Gate has its own ridiculous internal logic, but lacks the goofy glee that accommodates suspension of disbelief to go with it.

The latest schlocky actioner by B-master Herman Yau, Shock Wave is a workmanlike (yet protracted) genre entertainment that benefits from knowing precisely what it is and its place in the cinematic hierarchy.

Love Off the Cuff’s little parts add up to a much greater whole.