Elizabeth Kerr

Like the ambitious The Wandering Earth, the last Chinese epic to make a play for international glory, and indeed Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, The Eight Hundred is thin on characterization, and too often slips into rote narrative and war movie cliches (really, a runaway white horse?). And that's despite eight writers working on the script. The sheer volume of men fighting and dying in the face of overwhelming odds and stellar technical spectacle step into the gap where emotional connection should be.

Peninsula suffers the same type of sequelitis that suggests a second entry must be more/bigger/louder than its predecessor. Where Train to Busan’s two hours were impeccably paced and every frame meticulously used, Peninsula spins its wheels in between its admittedly impressive key set pieces.

Too many endings and romantic subplots that do nothing but bloat the running time and detract from the snowy action could easily have been jettisoned by editors Tang Man To and Li Lin for a leaner, loftier final product.

A relatively run-of-the-mill cops-and-robbers thriller with few surprises.

It’s the entertaining scenery-chewing by the top-flight cast that carries the picture; each of the main actors far better than the material they’re working with.

The visuals prove crucial, as Qi makes for a weak central character.

Last Letter walks a fine line between bittersweet and saccharine, and too often topples onto the wrong side of that divide.

For all its slapsticky action and heightened reality (the subtitles could use a quick review as well), Cool Fish marries often uncomfortable, dead-serious drama to its hijinks, and it doesn’t always work.

Rampant is a little all over the map, with its biggest flaw securely rooted in its inability to maintain consistency in its mythology — an unforgivable genre crime.

Despite the general bloat, The Last 49 Days has its share of little pleasures.

Cheang does his able best to balance a love story with the heightened fantasy action expected of the previous two films, and after a rocky start he largely succeeds.

In fairness, this is unapologetically emotional stuff (call your mother), and Kim harbors no ambitions to anything else.

The three-hour runtime seems justified when Iwai lets his characters fragile, burgeoning relationships develop at a leisurely pace and revel in the little details. At other times the pic is simply self-indulgent, allowing scenes to slip from emotionally naked to embarrassingly overwrought in a flash. Iwai served as his own editor and it shows.

The normally charismatic cast doesn’t get much to chew on and thus can’t really lift the film beyond its modest, self-aware station.

The pic ends with a sermon on self-determination, and the dialogue tends toward the on-the-nose instead of the kind that allows viewers to draw their own inferences.

Warrior’s Gate has its own ridiculous internal logic, but lacks the goofy glee that accommodates suspension of disbelief to go with it.

The latest schlocky actioner by B-master Herman Yau, Shock Wave is a workmanlike (yet protracted) genre entertainment that benefits from knowing precisely what it is and its place in the cinematic hierarchy.

Throwing in a natural catastrophe in the form of an earthquake as well as a nuclear power generator meltdown for good measure, Pandora ticks off all the current societal scares and packs them into one slightly bloated, often-shrieking action drama that nevertheless gets the job done despite its worst narrative instincts.

The trouble with Chongqing Hot Pot is that despite its brief running time, it takes too long to bring its various threads together.

The emotional connective tissue that made Lee’s film so poetic, romantic, tragic and thrilling is missing here, reducing Sword of Destiny to a series of loosely related fight sequences and gauzy, overwrought flashbacks.

Ericson Core’s Point Break strips the silly fun and relatively straight-ahead narrative from the original for a humorless, if photogenic spin on extreme crime.