Justin Lowe

Setting aside the movie’s tediously lame dialogue, self-conscious performances and frequently predicable scares, the narrative’s compulsively shifting chronology intermittently manages to engage, although it does little to obscure the distracting shortcomings of both plot and character development.

The film manages to generate only mild shocks and surprises.

Commercial director Bruce Macdonald’s first feature film feels curiously inert.

The too-infrequent scare techniques, however, are mostly by the book, rarely developing sufficient dread to heighten the film’s rather unremarkable climax.

What new information The Culture High offers is almost entirely subsumed by its sprawling ambitions to make every conceivable connection to the marijuana debate, limiting both its reliability and its impact.

Actor and first-time feature director Matt Rabinowitz’s intense focus on a fragile father-son relationship makes for unexceptional developments in The Frontier, an insubstantial low-budget ensembler.

This passably palatable film never hits any real high notes.

Fastvold and co-writer Corbet subscribe to the less-is-more branch of screenwriting, assuming that audiences will be drawn in by the air of mystery surrounding the sisters, when in fact the lack of narrative detail is consistently off-putting.

With its measured pacing, focus on family and repurposing of familiar horror conventions, the film represents a rather adult offering that can’t manage any memorable frights until well into the first hour of running time.

The film’s central conflicts are almost stereotypically outlined, with the flawed locals arrayed against intrusive outsiders, and Doleac’s characters don’t display much more depth either.

Debuting directors Damon Maulucci and Keir Politz have a better sense of storycraft than the filmmaking on display.

Lacking the flash of big-budget blockbusters or the originality of a uniquely imagined world, First Light is left trying to make the best of overly familiar sci-fi themes.

Monson does succeed in editing the frequently dissimilar footage together into a fairly attractive package, although an animated sequence depicting the power of cosmic forces and another illustrating an historical timeline of human events feel rather too forced and self-consciously showy.

The performances in the 1997 scenes are relatively low-key, relying more on the dramatic development of personal relationships than the shock value of unexpected events. The contemporary storyline offers little of particular interest, however, serving more to contextualize earlier developments.

The second installment, which reveals some of the reasons behind their imprisonment, lacks a similar sense of originality and urgency, undercut by overly familiar characterizations and dilatory pacing.

Playing it safe with a script that offers Riddick up as a lone avenging hero, Twohy passes on the opportunity to effectively shade the character’s distinctive dimensionality.

The outcome is usually fairly tiresome, but on occasion reaches levels of moderate originality.

Temple comes off as more of a half-hearted attempt at exploiting typical J-horror themes than an actual homage to the Japanese genre.

Michael and Thomas Matthews’ debut feature Lost Holiday gives the impression of an in-joke that never quite lands.

Ku shows a decent grasp of plot mechanics, but never manages to adequately develop the characters or effectively modulate the film’s pacing, even in the brief action scenes, which prove too tame by typical Cage standards.

There’s no shortage of eye candy on display, with acrobats, dancers, fireworks and carnival rides providing a colorful backdrop to the fairly formulaic story arc. The lack of specific background on the event's origins and history is somewhat frustrating, however, since the 85-minute runtime could certainly accommodate further exploration.

The filmmakers’ reliance on romantic situations throughout the midsection may have some older teens and adults rolling their eyes, but the final scenes over-deliver with a literal flood of action that enables Hinako to definitively prove herself and discover her true calling.

Shea's intense focus on constructing an overly intricate plot isn't borne out by the film's visual style, which is more workmanlike than inspired.

Writer-director J.C. Khoury’s second feature is a romantic dramedy featuring a conventionally appealing cast that’s squandered on a dissatisfingly derivative premise.

DeNucci has a good sense for period detail, costuming and accessorizing the cast with a color palette ranging from earthy yellow through fashionable beige to muddy brown. Stylistically though, the film doesn’t have much in common with its most distinctive progenitors, missing an opportunity to recreate an authentic 70s aesthetic.

Writer-director Shaka King clearly knows this world, perhaps too well, but making pot use, or denial, the focus of nearly every scene becomes tedious.

Alternately both repetitive and repulsive, this home-invasion thriller never quite hits its stride.

Surprisingly for a writer turned director, the most evident shortcomings with Garcia’s feature originate with the script. With barely any backstory to support them, the characters consistently appear to lack the motivations necessary for their actions.