Simon Abrams

There are hints of a deeper movie here, but the one on-screen sticks too closely to stories and ideas we already know.

Killing bigots is a fine enough pretext for this sort of watered-down post-grindhouse entertainment, but if you’re honestly going to go there, you can’t stop til you’re past the point of apology.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

Hypnotic may not be clever or energetic enough to keep your mind from wandering, but it is charming in its own stumbling way.

Ratnam and his collaborators stick the landing on their gargantuan pot-boiler, and while Krishnamurthy’s world may not look as grand as it seemed, either in the moviemakers’ heads or on the page, it is big enough to get lost in.

You never have to wonder or try to understand what the characters are feeling because they never stop telling you how to feel. The answer, invariably, is sad and fearful, but From Black is neither, really.

Ride On isn’t a generic beat-em-up but a stingy elegy to a bygone era of filmmaking and an unbelievable melodrama about an older artist and his estranged daughter. A lot of emotional baggage is attached to Ride On, and very little of it gets unpacked.

Zlotowski’s stylized depiction of Rachel’s life is overly fastidious. Many creative decisions, from the score to the camera blocking, took me out of the movie. Instead of a complex character processing involved, compound emotions, I saw a talented filmmaker lightly touch upon a range of emotions while also studiously avoiding dramatic clichés and stereotypes.

Yen doesn’t exactly swing for the fences here, but Sakra still lands exactly where its multi-hyphenate star needs it to.

Smoking Causes Coughing works because Dupieux’s already been here and done similar things before. This is just a superior collection of shaggy dog jokes.

Byun ultimately pulls too many punches, but Kill Boksoon remains impressive, if only for its unexpected sensitivity and considerable emotional range.

More detailed critical or historical context might have enhanced director Amanda Kim’s already informative and loving portrait of Korean video artist Nam June Paik. But there’s so much in Kim’s movie—especially in actor Steven Yeun’s voiceover narration and talking head interviews with Paik’s colleagues and contemporaries—that this account of Paik’s working life still resonates.

Thankfully, there's a considerable nasty streak that runs throughout Furies, and it isn't limited to the movie's antagonists.

It’s schtickier and less assured than the first “Shazam!” but these leftovers still reheat well enough.

The corridors of power are narrow and spider-vein-thin in Full River Red but still well-traveled and precisely navigated by Zhang and his well-synchronized collaborators.

Hokey and unconvincing, “Tetris” skims the surface of a genuinely curious “true story” thriller, which too often plays out like a Disney-ified version of “The Social Network.”

While the first Children of the Corn was made on a reported budget of $800,000, it somehow doesn’t look as cheap as this new Children of the Corn, which eventually delivers just enough formulaic violence.

The consistently disjointed ensemble dramedy She Came to Me never settles on a sensible tone to match its anxious, but well-meaning characters, most of whom are neither so ridiculous nor so tragic to be either laugh aloud funny or convincingly dramatic.

This isn’t a story, but an evocative collection of asked-and-answered prompts. You buy a ticket to Pacifiction and then you react, until the nudging stops.

These episodic sketches immediately feel monotonous since the plot isn't arranged in chronological or sequential order; leaps in time from 1945 back to 1941 and then forward to eventually 1944 are a distracting overcompensation for an otherwise lifeless chain of impersonal betrayals, cold-blooded murders, and unbelievable moping from all involved.

Only the most committed genre fans and academic-minded masochists will want to hang around until the bitter, arthouse-meets-choose-your-own-adventure style ending.

The climax of Godland feels conclusive in ways that the rest of Pálmason’s mystery play does not, making one wish that there was an extra hour or two between its beginning and the very end.

Knock at the Cabin does not disappoint. It’s a movie that reminds us why Shyamalan is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest alchemists and a prime example of a filmmaker at his best and boldest.

Some high-concept set pieces rise above shoddy execution and creative mismanagement, particularly any wire stunts involving helicopters, byplanes, or rocket-powered jet packs.

The retrospective nature of this documentary character study requires some creative liberties, but treating one of your two main characters like a special guest in her own movie suggests that telling a better story was unfortunately the top priority here.

Somehow, The Wandering Earth II never feels tonally unbalanced or narratively convoluted, partly because Gwo and his collaborators keep their movie’s plot focused on feats of action-adventure heroism.

While the first hour of “New Gods: Yang Jian” is about as attractive as it is surreal, the back half only works if you care about the destinies of its undistinguished protagonists.