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.

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.

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.

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.

If nothing else, director Stanley Tong and martial arts superstar Jackie Chan’s latest effort, Vanguard, proves the law of diminishing returns. Not too long ago a Chan film guaranteed an entertaining time at the movies and heaps of awe at what the human body could endure. Now? Not so much.

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.

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

Quickly paced and based on a novel, and creepy, idea, the film fritters away its potential by delivering only a modicum of horror and compounding that disappointment with some creaky performances.

The film’s only real draws are Gibson and Penn, who come at the material from opposite ends of the acting philosophy spectrum...It's simply confounding, much like the rest of the movie.