Dennis Harvey

Indonesian director Mouly Surya’s well-crafted first English-language feature is too formulaically contrived to qualify as “elevated genre” or to boast the personal stamp of her prior work. Still, it’s an entertaining, pacey action melodrama.

That convoluted storytelling tack at times threatens to muffle “Funny’s” potent narrative agenda. Yet in the end, this ambitious, imperfect drama does pull off a complex thematic mix.

Psychotronic cinema fans may wish Queen of the Deuce spent more time on her celluloid stomping ground, and a bit less on family ties. Still, she did have a fascinating backstory, and surviving relatives’ (as well as some colleagues’) reminiscences are colorful.

Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee’s documentary “Any Other Way” combines archival materials, interviews and animated reenactments into a compelling investigation of an elusive life, as well as a talent so striking you’ll be amazed it remained forgotten for so long.

Its stripped-down approach to a familiar gist has a distinctiveness that is impressive, and is sure to please fans who are always up for a new slasher film — but wish most of them weren’t so interchangeable.

Daniel Hanna (“Miss Virginia”) and a strong cast, making for a satisfying scenic ride that picked up several festival audience awards last year.

David Gregory’s documentary won’t convince most viewers that the resulting flood of opportunistic cheapies are worth more extensive investigation. But they’re certainly cheesy fun in excerpt, and interviews with surviving participants provide an entertaining window into an anything-goes heyday for Hong Kong cinema.

Fun if perhaps a little too tongue-in-cheek for its own good, the results will no doubt appeal most to Moore fans who’ll revel in his Byzantine plotting, noirish tropes and other signature elements.

A grim diagnosis of a fast-spreading cancer, Against All Enemies may provide much less reassurance than cause for alarm, but its wakeup call is certainly worth heeding.

Masterful as he is at creating the stuff of nightmares, Morgan (as well as co-writer Robin King) is much less assured handling the character actions, psychology and dialogue outside his heroine’s fevered psyche.

On paper, it would hardly be expected to remain funny for eight minutes, let alone 108. But this ingeniously home-made lark never runs out of steam.

While imperfect, Bloody Hell does entertainingly offer food for thought via an important overall point made in non-preachy form: Nature indeed does have room for variation in gender and sexual norms, no matter how loudly political or religious conservatives these days protest otherwise.

The fact-inspired story’s central situation is compelling enough. But director/co-writer Henrik M. Dahlsbakken (of recent biopic “Munch”) delivers a middling effort too sparing of excitement to satisfy action fans, and without the character depth or involvement to score as drama instead.

There are enough formulaic elements, especially teens meeting gory deaths, to keep undiscerning viewers in their seats. But the script (co-written by Erik and sibling Carson) stumbles in its climactic revelations, with an even worse epilogue bound to send patrons out rolling their eyes in unamused disbelief.

The players are deft enough that a little more wit in the writing would have surely been well-served. (Nighy in particular makes much of relatively little.) And while briskly handled, none of the ideas here are fresh enough for Role Play to score points on narrative or character unpredictability.

While most performers are fine within the material’s limitations, principal villains Avgeropoulos and Montesi are notably underwhelming.

Despite so much cause for grief, what’s striking about the protagonists is their cordiality and resilient hopefulness.

Contrastingly notable for their absence are emotional depth, narrative cogency or non-scatological humor — lacks that much ultra-violence and a surprising amount of sexual content can only distract from so much over such a long, bombastic, shallow course.

Following events over the course of several years, this cautionary tale has an impact not unlike watching the rise of similar anti-transparency policies and politicians elsewhere of late: dismaying, yet with all the lurid appeal and colorful personalities of any juicy public scandal.

While seldom going for big laughs, the film never takes itself too seriously, allowing its story to occupy the realm of cineaste fantasy.

There’s no lack of effort here, but too often Suitable Flesh just feels effortful, rather than the outrageous good time aimed for.

It’s an involving, empathetic if one-sided portrait.

Though the results aren’t terribly original or memorable, they do provide a creepy 90-odd minutes.

In some respects an improvement on its predecessor, in others not, this is finally one more good-enough if unmemorable entry sure to extend the series’ life in lucrative fashion.

If The Dive’s final stretch feels a bit less urgent than what precedes it, one appreciates that the filmmakers did not pile on the usual melodramatic gotchas, hewing to a relatively realistic course of events.

The tension that should fire up this joint throughout never quite catches hold, because there are never any tangible stakes. These characters and their crisis remain just a premise, too incompletely worked out to either generate urgent suspense or enter the realm of surreal fantasia as Cage did in a long-ago road nightmare, “Wild at Heart.”

Director Samuel Bodin’s first theatrical feature is atmospheric, and departs from stock slasher conventions just enough to make for an entertaining if unexceptional scarefest.

The result is a fresh mix of social satire and relationship dissection with a saving dollop of heart.