Clarence Tsui

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.

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

The Nightingale is technically remarkable. Beyond its socio-political context, however, the film offers hardly anything inventive to the familiar generation-gap rite-of-passage dramedy.

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

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 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.

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.

Radivojevic's film is a valiant call for a new way of thinking about the impact of immigration on abstract notions of nationhood.

Love at First Fight is overflowing with relentlessly acerbic humor that shapes the way the film's two young protagonists contend with not just each other, but also with the uncertainties of the world they're emerging into as adults.

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.

Sunada has managed the incredible task of editing all these anecdotes into a flowing whole, an unfettered celebration of cinema as a concoction of vision, persistence, collective faith and, of course, some canniness about how the world operates. Rather than diminishing the seventh art's magic, Sunada's documentary enhances it.

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

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.

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.

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.

Deng and Yu have delivered a ceaseless juggernaut of incoherently-strung together gags like a lightweight Stephen Chow; this could make Adam Sandler, who could easily be imagined dabbling in something like this, look like a nuanced artist.

An impressive debut driven by a timeline-blurring narrative and nuanced performances.

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

Snowpiercer is an ambitious piece with a universally comprehensible theme and accessible aesthetics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

True to Wong’s style, The Grandmaster is infused with melancholy and a near-existentialist resignation to the uncertainties of fate.

It's visually that Season of the Devil ranks among Diaz’s best work.