Alex Harrison

Ritchie is a prolific action director, and he leans action here, which is fine. When it's not being distractingly stylized, the action is good. But treasure hunt movies have a nerdy side that sometimes feels undervalued by this film.

The central conceit is both interesting and clever, it's often touchingly performed, and it has some ideas that are, when dwelt on, quite profound. But the story is wrapped in a self-consciously "artistic" style that is only rarely additive. More often, it just gets in the way.

Abandoned has a few things in its favor, but the disappointing conclusion obscures them while making the movie's flaws even more prominent, which ultimately makes it difficult to recommend.

Hill is willing to look critically at some of his industry's darkness, but he's also far too inclined to let his lead off the hook, and his film is weaker for it. As dark comedy, Outcome feels underbaked; as drama, it lacks sufficient introspection to have earned its emotional catharsis. Part of that is length: At under 90 minutes, the film is sometimes choppy and out of breath, and more time to flesh out its ideas might have helped it feel more tonally balanced. But no one change could fix a problem that's rooted in the vision for this material.

This low-budget sci-fi film is actually doing something quite clever, but by keeping it hidden until the final minutes, it leaves viewers with a character drama that just isn't compelling enough to merit revisiting, even after learning how all its pieces fit together.

What enjoyment there is to draw from the action, which has its ups and downs, is tainted by the skepticism of this whole endeavor that's baked into the filmmaking. Even knowing better which direction they should go in, McQuoid & Co. remain frustratingly unwilling to commit to it. What they've made is tellingly at its best when making fun of itself.

Lord of Misrule feels like it was made with a lack of understanding of what actually works about its premise, and the result is a constant ebb-and-flow of being drawn in by the imagery and pushed back out by the storytelling.

Fully engaging with the film, as one might be forced to do in a theatrical setting, will prove unrewarding — both intellectually and emotionally. But it's the kind of movie that's perfect for streaming while doing chores, or to turn on after a long day of work with the intention of putting one's brain on standby.

Rosario stretches the material of a really good short film into an underwhelming feature.

Sympathy for the Devil is a missed opportunity with a collection of engaging moments, none sustained enough to really satisfy.

Its absurdity is enough to appeal to the right group of adventurous friends, perhaps, but even those with the stomach for its grossest impulses might find themselves wondering what it was all for.

Bleeding Love remains under-written and over-directed, unable to fully justify the time it asks for. If you're wanting to see Ewan McGregor do some quality acting, there are plenty of more rewarding options.

Already working with a shakily thin script, Jákl weighs his movie down with an overly self-serious aesthetic, to the point that even the target audience might find the two-hour runtime a tough sit.

Atlas is like an artificial sci-fi movie that walks and talks like the real thing, but just isn't.

The problem is one of focus, and had the movie trusted its protagonist enough to let her be the true center, it might have provided a viewing experience worth recommending.

Though it's an often beautiful showcase for the Arabian desert landscape, Desert Warrior is a slow, awkward jumble, trying so hard to be cool and lacking any of the style or charisma to pull it off. The climactic battle has some redeeming qualities, but after waiting 90 minutes to see it and finding it so choppily edited as to be distracting, the prevailing feeling I carried with me after it ended was still disappointment.

Lucky Strike is simultaneously so familiar and so off that it sometimes feels like WW2 movie cosplay. While watching, I thought often about how that is essentially what all period filmmaking is – anyone who's ever seen an unofficial set photo will know what I'm talking about – but whatever movie magic that usually gets us to suspend our disbelief is just totally absent here. Aside from the intellectual curiosity of trying to diagnose that, the viewing experience is fairly dull.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow hopes to hide a clunky, unfunny script behind the veneer of a solid filmmaking apparatus, but it manages to test one's patience even at a merciful 89 minutes of runtime.

Netflix's new movie is no shoddy disaster – it's a competently, if unexceptionally, mounted production by director Thea Sharrock, featuring an impressive British and Irish cast. It's not entirely without laughs, either. But this story of a chauvinist who bumps his head and wakes up in a world where women are in charge is so fundamentally misguided that I at times could not believe I was actually watching it. A comedy sketch premise stretched to feature length, the team behind Ladies First should have spent a little less time on thinking up gender-flipped jokes and more time wondering whether they actually had a coherent story worth telling.

With nothing of substance to chew on, the only thing a (committed) viewer can do is strap in for the 90-minute runtime and wait to hear a tune they like - and hope that, once it's over, they emerge earworm-free.

The heart of the problem is The Monkey King makes its central character, whose story has been told and retold for hundreds of years, uninteresting. Without that spine to hold it together, everything collapses.

The only real saving grace is the cast, who end up guinea pigs in a test of how difficult it is to overcome underbaked material.

Damsel is a lifeless experience. The filmmakers have assembled all the constituent parts of an interesting fantasy adventure film — genre-bending premise, a starry cast, locations with character, and some creative creature design — but the connective tissue is paper-thin.

The dialogue is clunky and almost universally awkwardly performed, much more so than in the first movie. The tonal mix of horror and silliness feels more jarring than complementary, and the filmmaking, which could accomplish so much just by sticking to genre fundamentals, is often egregiously sedate.

The film is unable to sustain any tension and is seemingly afraid of its own potential for violence, despite gesturing toward the creative weapon choice that is practically a bar for entry into the slasher genre.