Martin Tsai

Little parallelism or consequence can be gleaned from Kwak's narrative that crosscuts points between 1963 and 2010. Seeing as his surrogate in the first film is absent in the sequel, the shared cultural memory has also given way to genre exercise.

When a director merely goes through the motions, even Chekhov can be reduced to daytime soap.

Making sense was never a top priority for "K," and its sequel is just as much of a hot mess.

Whereas Haneke's films grapple with the blunt force of violence, novice filmmaker Markus Blunder just lets the violence snowball all the way down a slippery slope.

So instructional is the film, directed by Brook's son, Simon, that it feels like one of those P90X or Insanity home fitness programs: Try this at home. You too can perform on stage.

SlingShot has about enough material to fill one interesting "60 Minutes" segment.

First-time filmmaker Tony Aloupis, formerly frontman of the New Jersey rock band Shadows of Dreams, serves up Americana like a stale slice of apple pie.

The film, unfortunately, treats the important and complex subject of post-traumatic stress disorder in an oversimplified and reductive way.

Familiar paternal regret gets ratcheted up here with an illogical and gratuitous investigative exercise.

Flashily shot and cut like a long-form music video, the film is merely an empty vessel for a Guy Ritchie-esque stylistic exercise.

Writer-director Diane Bell suggests that these women are so steeped in low self-esteem and codependency that they would not be able to leave their men if they didn't have each other.

Whereas the original "Monsters" was a road movie about an odd couple fleeing an alien-infested zone, "Dark Continent" cribs from contemporary war movies like "The Hurt Locker" and "American Sniper," then tosses in extraterrestrials as an afterthought.

The film hardly scratches Abu Ghraib's surface.

The Curse of Downers Grove seems to be jumping on that 1990s teen slasher bandwagon two decades too late.

The performances are cringe-worthy, the appeal of the material marginal.

The script, the special effects and Jack Heller's direction simply don't add up in the profile of the mythical creature. It's quite obvious the filmmakers didn't put a lot of thought into it and went straight for the cheapest thrills.

Touted as a documentary "about the crowd revolution," Capital C devotes its entire running time to just one aspect of crowd-funding: small entrepreneurs raising capital.

Dela Torre tinkers with some of the undead's best-known traits, yet his reinvented wheel still feels like a retread.

There's no characterization to the cartel members beyond freeze-frame title cards; they are interchangeable and expendable.

Andrew Douglas, who directed the 2005 "The Amityville Horror" remake, mishandles the standard noir as straightforward drama and gives it an unfortunate after-school-special vibe.

If only writer Stacey Menear and director William Brent Bell took the very real horrors of domestic abuse as seriously as they do the virtual horror of paranormal activity.

Since the rally ultimately proved ineffectual, the film could at the least serve as a sobering postmortem on where it fell short. But filmmaker Amir Amirani instead gives protesters a figurative pat on the back by insinuating that they helped inspire the Egyptian revolution some eight years later.

The film has the vibe of something you might see on Nickelodeon or ABC Family but with a lower budget.

By cramming in as many tangents as imaginable, Olvidados ultimately loses sight of what the story is even about.

Ghoul can't decide whether it should be about cannibals, serial killers, ghosts or demons.

The film never gives a real sense of the daily travails associated with traumatic brain injury.

The film might have gained some heft had director Ruby Yang let the transformations unfold before our eyes instead of force-feeding us testimonials.

Novice screenwriter Craig Walendziak has followed England's template, charting the daily worsening of the symptoms. But he doesn't get that the 2013 "Contracted" was special because it was much more than a zombie flick.