Leslie Felperin

Like so many pictures about artists, be they visual artists or composers or even writers, Modi, Three Days on the Wing of Madness doesn’t dare to engage with any seriousness about craft, application and technique or any of the nitty-gritty stuff that truly makes their creations important.

This splatterfest horror feature is better than its predecessor much in the same way succeeding Covid variants are better than the early, more lethal strains.

Other viewers are likely to be more entranced by the film’s borderline magical realist elements, but for this viewer the story felt rote, on the verge of trivializing and exploiting the horrors of the Holocaust. Mileage will certainly vary, but for me there’s very little that’s either original or artistically interesting about The Most Precious of Cargoes.

Alas, the film is an inept, ill-made mess — or as my grandmother would call it, a mishegoss, so muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong.

Sure, it’s entirely possible that the film will find a constituency who will love its mirthless, shouty performances, its tortured random plot twists and its appallingly shonky-looking CGI. But there is also a distinct possibility audiences will turn up their noses at this like it’s a fresh litter box deposit.

Not only is it as derivative as chatbot-written free verse, it’s also not even pleasant to look at. Walk like an Egyptian very quickly away from the multiplex.

Bruce Willis continues his campaign of reputation self-ruin – not that he has that far to fall – with this cruddy, derivative action thriller.

The Commando contains a number of egregious implausibilities and cliches.

[A] cheap and cheerless sci-fi action film.

Where the first few Hellraisers had an interesting if somewhat icky erotic tang to them – alluding to S&M/fetish culture as much as horror, and featuring female protagonists – Judgment is less about desire than just straight-up misogyny and gory, gross-out money shots.

There’s no doubting that this film was more fun to make than it is to watch, although there is a sort of guilty pleasure in the spectacle of ruins and decay and wondering whether the film-makers actually found a real abandoned resort, or if it’s all a set.

While it has a few incidental felicities to admire, by and large Music is a sentimental atrocity so cringe-inducing it should come with an advisory warning for anyone with preexisting shoulder or back injuries.

It would be risible if it weren’t so offensive, mean-spirited and, frankly, nasty.

It's as if a bunch of horny grad students decided to loot a costume store and then remake Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom with camera phones, but less fun.

The corny, eventually rather contrived result doesn't end up doing justice to either its cast's talents or the quality of Winton's acclaimed prose.

There almost isn't a single shot in it where every member of the cast isn't Acting ... The result is, at times, insufferably pleased with itself.

It’s a nonsensical premise and a pretty incoherent, painfully inept film.

It’s not a problem there’s a hole, as it were, in the common-sense logic of the film’s world; it’s that there’s a big, gaping hole where the illogic should be, a whole lot of nothing where there should be metaphor, playfulness, all that juicy, enigmatic, magical-realism stuff that helps films like Being John Malkovich and its many knockoffs become fodder for film-studies essays.

Too often the pic feels as if it’s killing time to pad itself out into feature length.

The problem with The Pyramid is that it doesn't have a single new idea in its arsenal. All the shocks are cribbed from the likes of Alien, The Descent and a ghostly host of other horror films, but they're not even very effectively done here.

The film just looks a mess, apart from some of the rather pretty shots of banana slugs and redwoods. It doesn’t help that the characters, even accounting for how little developed they are, come across as entitled, self-absorbed brats, and that the very title is, on a first viewing, a complete enigma. At least it’s only 72 minutes long.

The film manages, impressively, to be both crushingly banal and offensive in its use of cultural stereotypes. Watching it is like being brutally violated by a greeting card.

The film forms a near-perfect storm of misjudged decisions, with its implausible plot, irritating or outright-dislikeable characters, and strained attempts at “wacky” British humor that fall so flat they’re below sea level.

A sci-fi confection that, at best, momentarily recalls the dystopian whimsy of the director’s best-loved effort, “Brazil,” but ends up dissolving into a muddle of unfunny jokes and half-baked ideas, all served up with that painful, herky-jerky Gilliam rhythm.

Picture has some redeeming features, like its glossy, fashion-shoot-inspired black-and-white look, and a clutch of respectable performances among some very poor ones from the toothsome young cast, but the script is a mess, the characters barely sympathetic.

An only fitfully convincing Hudson leads a strong-on-paper cast, but most of the actors look uncomfortable here, particularly Gael Garcia Bernal as her love interest.