Clarence Tsui

While the director unleashes his taut action sequences like clockwork, he's less deft in handling the characterizations and the decade-leaping plot, which seems designed to provide the film with some historical weight.

Rigor Mortis’ strongest suit lies with its cast. The film comes with lavish (and sometimes distractingly so) digital effects, but it’s the old-timers who are instrumental in injecting humanity and life into the film.

Office is undermined by a simplistic screenplay lacking the nuances and frisson one expects of a cutting-edge satire of a capitalist world propelled by graft and greed.

While Brosnan has quite a few opportunities to show his acting chops, Chan makes do with less.... In any case, it’s good to see Chan swapping his happy-go-lucky persona for two hours for some gravitas as a tragic rogue with a marked past.

It's a throwback to Chan's wham-bam action comedies of the past, and a pretty effective one, too.

Heneral Luna is a sturdy, stirring if perhaps sometimes simplistic historical epic about bravery and treachery in a country at war.

While the film is filled with shimmering images aplenty – including a literally sparkling trompe d’oeil – the director falls short of using the texture of his 16mm film stock to its full potential. The same could be said of his characters, who could do with more thoughtful fleshing out, while their slow-burning relationships generate more a sense of lethargy than melancholy.

Tokyo Tribe is a spectacle more in its form than its content.

While the director prides herself for having a mix of pro and amateur actors improvising scenes, many awkward moments emerge as the characters seemingly are just instructed to let their conversations and interactions flow: the result is missed beats, protracted silences and characters staring at each other or into space for too long.

Radiance remains mired in underwritten relationships that end up less emotionally engaging than they appear.

Clocking in at just over an hour, Hill of Freedom is Hong Sang-soo's shortest feature film to date. And it's his most lightweight, as well, with the Korean auteur merely reshuffling his tried-and-trusted play on non-linear structure, camera movements and characterizations without offering anything decidedly new

The Demon Strikes Back soldiers loudly along, alternating between high-octane, digitally enhanced skirmishes and the equally cacophonic bickering between the monk and the monkey.

While certainly lushly mounted, Two Women is at best a piece of dated heritage cinema, and at worst cliche-ridden pomp.

A straightforward spectacle motored by relentless high-octane action sequences between simplistic heroes and grotesque villains.

Kwek's critical view of his home country is certainly there, burning brightly, but Unlucky Plaza should be considered a small step for a promising socially-conscious filmmaker trying to connect his fury with the right kind of art.

While the film is a much more powerful visual feast than the original Monster Hunt from two years ago, it offers little in terms of expanding the first film's themes or pushing the storyline significantly forward.

In the end, sensationalism and simplistic emotions, bolstered by Klaus Badelt's sweeping score, decimate a story that has otherwise been unfolding nicely with gloom and intrigue.

Tiny Times certainly offers fantastical lifestyles which is nearly unattainable for most of its viewers. But what makes the film even more beguiling is probably its inability to create empathy, as it goes without accounting for where these individuals came from and why their friendships were so rock-solid.

Sadly for a story so fraught with desire and violence, Elisa & Marcela is painfully lacking in frisson and danger. Despite competent performances from her two young stars, Coixet fails to inject the girls’ relationship with complexity, tension and conflict. In the end, they are ciphers in a message-driven movie, which is made worse by contrived one-liners and gestures.

The film is surprisingly shoddy stylistically.

Replacing the first two films' simplistic, man-on-the-run premise with a stuttering plot comparatively light on action and stuffed with red herrings and inconsequential characters... Besson's team has signed off the trilogy with a whimper rather than the kind of unfettered bang delivered by the first two films.

The characters are ciphers, the narrative is dull and even the sights and sounds become numbingly bombastic after a while.

Personal Tailor is, indeed, a sad example of an once eagle-eyed director losing touch with his audience.

Brad Anderson has basically thrown everything into the film's furnace so as to keep its wobbly narrative running — to no avail, sadly: as the leaps between genre tropes and divergent threads exposes ever wider plot holes, this incoherent adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe attempts endless twists and turns culminating in a supposedly cathartic denouement drenched in sap.

Belying its ominous title, Age of Extinction barely skirts the idea that humankind and planet Earth are about to be totally annihilated. What is extinguished is the audience's consciousness after being bombarded for nearly three hours with overwrought emotions...bad one-liners and battles that rarely rise above the banal.

Perhaps keenly aware of the short attention spans and the reluctance in the ordinary viewer to countenance long-lingering malice on screen – especially among good-looking, self-proclaimed friends – everything gets neatly resolved sharply and swiftly, so that shouting matches will quickly give way to yet another round of gags and all-round tomfoolery.

Indeed, all this teeters closely to all-out tastelessness, but what makes 3.0 even more unbearable than its predecessors is the sheer ineptitude beneath the glossy surface: the laughable narrative, scatterbrained storytelling and inconsistent characterizations basically magnify the previous film's flaws to an improbable extreme.