Andy Webster

If there’s one rewarding thing about many Hong Kong action directors, it’s that they rarely dawdle in getting to what fight fans have come for: bracing shootouts and high-impact fisticuffs and footwork.

The director, Joey Kuhn, making his feature debut from his own script, has created fairly credible and sympathetic characters, despite the 1-percenter milieu.

The Offering, a muddled horror film, falls over itself incorporating as many genre elements as possible. The result is the cinematic equivalent of combining every paint color on a canvas: a murky mess.

It’s often said that the Irish, blessed with the gift of gab, can be splendid raconteurs. You’ll find generous evidence to that effect here. And a bit of poetry as well.

Mr. Irons handily hits the emotional beats, as does Mr. Patel.

It has little story to tell and few ideas to offer. Just a great deal of product to sell.

There are heroic adults here.... There is also deft editing, artful camerawork and effective music in abundance.

Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.

German Kral’s documentary Our Last Tango is a combination of things, all fascinating.

Thanks to his editor, Domingo González, Mr. de la Iglesia skillfully keeps these many balls in the air, a palpable affection for his players seeping through.

Ms. Kendrick — whether playing daffy, amorous, insightful or indignant — carries the movie. And her surprising shades of grit don’t hurt, either.

Mickey Keating’s horror outing Darling manages to conjure an effectively unsettling miasma.

One notion underlying Shalini Kantayya’s winning documentary, Catching the Sun, is that solar power is not only a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels but can also effectively curtail unemployment.

A richly satisfying poison-pen letter to the music industry.

The diagrammatic script, by Jarret Kerr, has wit but could sometimes use more nuance. But there are tasty performances.

The pleasures are modest but rewarding in Bob Nelson’s character study The Confirmation.

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

Mr. Peng has charisma, though his moves are less convincing than those of an earlier Fei.... But “Legend” does offer the hefty authority of Mr. Hung, who at 64 can still — almost — hit, kick and do wire work with the best of them.

Quiet, graceful, stately and infused with slow tension, Dana Rotberg’s White Lies unfolds with inexorable weight.

Mr. Hosoda is skilled with fight scenes, and his settings — the pastel-hued Jutengai and the drab Shibuya, evoked at times with surveillance-camera perspectives and crowd-paranoia angles — are impressive. But the characterizations and conflicts here are strictly generic

Trapped is not a balanced analysis of the abortion debate; it makes its sympathies clear. But it is a powerful and persuasive rendering of a corner of women’s health care under siege.

Ventura Pons’s stagy drama Virus of Fear tries to walk a thin line about its volatile subject — child sexual abuse — as it weighs a man’s possible innocence against a mob’s rage. But its attempts at ambiguity work against it.

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.

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

Despite Mr. Yen’s impressive physical virtuosity, his stoic, often humorless presence tends to neutralize the emotional temperature.

It’s depressing to see Ms. Moretz — so spirited in “Clouds of Sils Maria” and the “Kick-Ass” movies — reduced to constant mooning at Mr. Roe.

Given [Ms. Cohn] confident hand behind the camera and gift for rich female characters, you hope to see more portraits from her in the future.

Breezy, intelligent, diffuse but uncluttered, Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Bikes vs Cars could be called a tale of congestion-plagued cities.