Andy Webster

24 Exposures plays like an exercise. With a thin plot — the usual parade of possible killers — it falls to the actors to provide zing.

Story clarity and emotional depth tend to evaporate amid the visual pyrotechnics.

[A] strained, overheated thriller.

Sure, the new action workout Kickboxer: Vengeance — a reboot of a foot-fighting franchise from the 1980s and ’90s — follows a tiresome martial-arts movie formula. But amid the hoary conventions are agreeable inklings of an alternate sensibility.

It’s all very solemn, convoluted and a bit bloody, but not engrossing, despite impressive cinematography by Jasmin Kuhn and Mr. dela Torre and the best efforts of a hard-working cast.

It’s all high-end flash, but less romantic than wearying.

A modest effort only fitfully attaining its aims.

As with other staples of the screen-parody genre, the comic bull’s-eyes arrive only intermittently.

If not for Mr. Jones, “Resurrection,” while competently edited, would be devoid of humor, an area where Mr. Statham has shown promise in the past.

Its willful determination to be outré proves its undoing.

When the Rangers engage in “Transformers”-lite mayhem, an intriguing group portrait collapses into generic pyrotechnics.

Deficient even in most of its set pieces, In the Blood does Ms. Carano (and Caribbean tourism) few favors. Somebody, please give her a better script and director.

Fortunately, Camera Obscura has decent actors to flesh out its dubious premise.... But their diligent efforts cannot raise the whole enterprise above a mere exercise.

Relationships unfold with a bright, glossy and antiseptic sentimentality in Park Hyun-gene’s Like for Likes, which brings abundant social media usage to shopworn rom-com contrivances.

For all the healing here — the revived include a bird, an ailing uncle and a blind man — The Young Messiah performs no miracles.

For all the movie’s flashy pyrotechnics and pulverizing techno-ish musical numbers, gleaning an emotional pulse can be challenging.

The film is about exotic locations (including a volcano), garish humor (often at the expense of Mr. Chan or women), fisticuffs, stunts and frenetic visual bombast.

For all its spectacle, The Fatal Encounter is wanting for profundity.

Tai Chi Hero merely fills the eye, offering little that stays with you.

The conventions are trundled out in Stanley J. Orzel’s cross-cultural romance, Lost for Words, but not the tension or the chemistry.

[A] glossy, fawning valentine to conspicuous consumption.

What Lotus Eaters can take pride in are Gareth Munden’s stunning black-and-white cinematography and Ms. Campbell-Hughes, a riveting visual subject suggesting miles of internal depth. She makes this wallow in callow company watchable.

Although the subject is potent, the film, directed with a seemingly effortless commercial acumen, doesn’t burrow deeply.

While this unrelentingly midtempo movie milks Brooklyn for its chic, it manages to denude it of its color.

The script, by Mr. Dekker, spirals into a muddle of ambiguity, leaving only the imagery and the performances to save the movie. And try as they might, they cannot.

The emotional dynamics in domestic violence, for the abuser and the abused, are often too disturbing and complex to be treated as superficially as The Living does.

A “EuroTrip” with balance sheets, the slick, innocuous comedy Unfinished Business fails to seal the deal.

Underlying this overlong and overheated enterprise is a surfeit of ambition. Maybe too much.