Mark Jenkins

Well-made and likable, without any major missteps. It’s also just a little bland.

Yes, The Rocket is a sports movie, with an outcome that's easily foreseen. The cultural specifics of this Laos-set tale, however, are far less predictable.

Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It’s part Kurosawa, part “X-Men,” part “Ichi the Killer.”

Quietly, the film makes the case that "enhanced interrogation techniques" were no enhancement. Interviewing jihadis "by the book," one interrogator testifies, yielded better information than violence and deprivation.

The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.

In the Chinese martial-arts film The Final Master, the fighting is more lucid than the plot. That may be characteristic of the genre, yet this smart, stylish movie diverges from the expected in many ways, most of them enjoyable.

Post Mortem is - intentionally - not an engaging movie. And Larrain sometimes overplays the existential anguish, notably during a few scenes of joyless, mechanical sexual release.

It was frantic sex that earned Shame an NC-17 rating, but this arty drama is mostly slow and methodical. And thoroughly unsexy.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

The documentary’s resulting mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting — although Sharp and Bwayo say they excluded the most horrific footage.

The brawling itself is every bit as inventive and exhilarating this time around... The script and acting, however, prove less successful.

Like most mysteries, this one relies heavily on coincidental discoveries, even if they arrive via Gmail or FaceTime, rather than more traditional means. But the plot’s contrivances are less problematic than the movie’s insistence on maintaining its artifice even after it becomes a hindrance.

Succeeds as a character study, while gently raising questions about human use and misuse of animals.

Shot entirely in Hackney — a mostly ungentrified London borough — My Brother the Devil has a strong odor of authenticity.

The Empire State's eminent domain laws are unusually loose, but most of the rest of this story is pertinent far beyond New York. Change a few names and add the next credit bubble, and a Brooklyn-style Battle could be headed to a neighborhood near you.

His latest, the earthy yet subtly evocative 11 Flowers, is in the same mode as the one that's best known in the U.S., 2001's "Beijing Bicycle." Both are simple, resonant tales of youths who have something taken from them.

In the movie’s first hour, all the blood is medical. Then the director stages a big shootout, mostly in slo-mo, that’s more clunky than epic. Before that misstep, though, Three is singularly entertaining.

If nothing else, while watching Ruppert, you'll believe he believes this stuff.

The movie's principal liability is that most of the music is highly derivative. Ghobadi spends a lot of time on songs that are more interesting sociologically than musically.

Oddly, Countdown to Zero ends by suggesting that viewers get those nukes abolished by texting their disapproval to a phone number listed in the credits -- as if the governments of China or North Korea (or the United States, for that matter) are just waiting for a gentle rebuke from civic-minded documentary viewers.

The Attorney can be melodramatic, and first-time feature director Yang Woo-seok is not yet a singular filmmaker. But the movie is carried by its rousing pro- democracy message and a lively performance from the versatile leading man.

The documentary's most memorable vignette is suitably unnerving: a visit to northern China, where the threatened disappearance of bees has already come to pass, leaving workers to pollinate fruit trees ... by hand.

Rodeo looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.

This is the story of two young people whose aspirations are of absolutely no interest to their elders. Zero Bridge is a fitting found title for the movie, but Tapa could also have called it No Exit.

The moments when the guitarists teach the others their best-known riffs are fascinating.

It's a surprisingly nuanced and sober tale of brotherhood and betrayal.

Despite its fanciful premise, Never Let Me Go looks and feels utterly real.