Alex Harrison

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.

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 script may be the film's rotten foundation, but no one element can take all the blame for its emptiness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.