Clarence Tsui

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The Film Verdict, The Hollywood Reporter
For 59 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Clarence Tsui's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Graves Without a Name
Lowest review score: 10 The BreakUp Guru
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 28 out of 59
  2. Mixed: 26 out of 59
  3. Negative: 5 out of 59
59 movie reviews
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    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    Assassination
    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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Monster Hunt 2
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Clarence Tsui
    Sea Fog
    It's a gripping ride through the storm...with powerful imagery, a simple and accessible story and a stellar performance from Kim Yoon-seok.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    A straightforward spectacle motored by relentless high-octane action sequences between simplistic heroes and grotesque villains.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Tokyo Tribe
    Tokyo Tribe is a spectacle more in its form than its content.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    Heneral Luna
    Heneral Luna is a sturdy, stirring if perhaps sometimes simplistic historical epic about bravery and treachery in a country at war.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Still the Water
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Legend of the Demon Cat
    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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 90 Clarence Tsui
    Butterfly Jam
    Balagov‘s latest outing is a warm, colour-saturated and sporadically magical and comical family drama set in a tightly-knit community in Newark, but with tension and trauma looming ever close on its seemingly happy-go-lucky protagonists.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    The Foreigner
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Two Women
    While certainly lushly mounted, Two Women is at best a piece of dated heritage cinema, and at worst cliche-ridden pomp.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    Rigor Mortis
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    Lost and Love
    Lee's eye for everyday Chinese life - whether in isolated rural villages or among aggrieved laborers on fish farms - compensates for the film's minimal commentary on the larger social trauma brought about by human traffickers, and the stigma faced by their victims.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Clarence Tsui
    Stonehearst Asylum
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Radiance
    Radiance remains mired in underwritten relationships that end up less emotionally engaging than they appear.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    Railroad Tigers
    It's a throwback to Chan's wham-bam action comedies of the past, and a pretty effective one, too.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Clarence Tsui
    The Great Wall
    The characters are ciphers, the narrative is dull and even the sights and sounds become numbingly bombastic after a while.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Clarence Tsui
    Dragon Blade
    Exerting significant control over the film – from a screenplay filled with modern resonance to very effective production design – Lee just barely manages to overcome the jarring problem posed by its (mugging) American cast.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Clarence Tsui
    Tiny Times 2.0
    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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Clarence Tsui
    Unlucky Plaza
    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.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 40 Clarence Tsui
    Elisa & Marcela
    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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Clarence Tsui
    Transformers: Age Of Extinction
    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.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 Clarence Tsui
    Taken 3
    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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Clarence Tsui
    Tiny Times 1.0
    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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Clarence Tsui
    Personal Tailor
    Personal Tailor is, indeed, a sad example of an once eagle-eyed director losing touch with his audience.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 20 Clarence Tsui
    Tiny Times 3.0
    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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Clarence Tsui
    Evaporating Borders
    Radivojevic's film is a valiant call for a new way of thinking about the impact of immigration on abstract notions of nationhood.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Clarence Tsui
    Savage
    Savage rivals most mid-budget Euro-American wintry police actioners in its lush production values and slick execution of genre tropes. There are plenty of visceral thrills on offer in the dark and violent confrontations between a hard-boiled detective and a gang of cold-blooded robbers, as the action unfolds in impressively choreographed sequences on Changbai’s snow-covered slopes in northeastern China.
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