Martin Tsai

Director Timothy Wheeler manages to wrangle for interviews some active and reformed egg offenders along with authorities, conservationists and volunteers. Some are quite the characters, indeed.

Perhaps the vapid existence of millennials is precisely the point that co-writers Erik Crary and Steven Piet (who also directs) are driving at, but the film itself proves inarticulate and unsubstantial.

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

Atom Egoyan's 2002 "Ararat" had been perhaps the most notable film to tackle the Armenian genocide, but it did so only anecdotally. The historical epic approach seems long overdue, and Akin does it justice.

Though not as thrilling as the original, this third installment is an improvement over the paint-by-number 2013 direct-to-video “12 Rounds 2: Reloaded.”

To call it amateurish would be kind.

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.

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

There isn't a whole lot to the script, and the exasperating direction by Natalie Bible only makes the film look like an extended trailer that teases but never delivers.

It's almost inconceivable that this effective, nerve-racking thriller is the first feature from former NFL defensive end Simeon Rice. It requires the usual suspension of disbelief, and pacing problems are a sign of Rice's directorial inexperience. But the tension he creates is unrelenting.

It's too bad that Bühler and Mariani take Kirk's tall tale at face value instead of doing their own investigative work and tracking down other characters for interviews.

Ribière and Le Bourdonnec get almost hypertechnical with all the cattle breeds, feeds, grades, cuts, marbling, dry-aging and preparation. Nevertheless, most any carnivore would find this absolute torture on an empty stomach.

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

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

Searching for Home: Coming Back From War touches on wide-ranging veterans' issues, but goes no deeper than that.

Filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki withholds judgment and resists editorializing, but the result is frustratingly nebulous and devoid of context.

Top Spin grips, exhilarates and breaks hearts like the 1994 film "Hoop Dreams."

Bollywood veteran Jackie Shroff, assuming Nick Nolte's part as the recovering alcoholic father, delivers the kind of acting reel that would guarantee an Oscar nomination for some Hollywood actors. It's a pleasure to marvel at his performance alone.

Court invites comparisons with the 2011 Iranian film "A Separation," even if Court director Chaitanya Tamhane hasn't achieved the same level of mastery with his feature debut.

The film is most effective when Bauer and Cartwright are battling the surroundings instead of each other.

The movie can't do much to address the inherent flaws in the premise.

The film is more lifestyle puff piece than journalism.

Filmmaker Lloyd Handwerker treats the project as genealogy rather than corporate image-making. And with home movies and private interviews at his disposal, no one is better equipped to tell this story.

Northmen: A Viking Saga uses a relatively smaller scale to its advantage.

More filmmakers should treat the zombie subgenre as allegorical, the way George A. Romero intended. But Extinction and "Maggie" both arrive at the same conclusion about fatherhood, thereby confirming it as a cliché rather than a coincidence.

Fans will be thrilled that the auteur hasn't missed a beat with Wild City, although he appears to be making the same concessions to the Chinese market as his contemporaries.

Writers Christopher Borrelli and Michael C. Martin commit quite a handful of sins of contrivance that are difficult to absolve.

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.

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.

Despite the film's made-for-TV aesthetic and performances, Coley has saturated its backstory with vividly drawn details that make this convoluted saga wholly believable.

The film's apparent faithfulness is admirable, but interviews with actual survivors shown during the end credits provide more impact and resonance than the rest of the film can muster.

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.

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

Although Michael J. Kospiah's script isn't exactly predictable or didactic, it does feel contrived and improbable on occasion.

Unfortunately, the human relationships depicted here are less credible than the solid special effects.

Although Beef and Conan are far from stereotypical, the quirkiness and eccentricities ascribed to them by writer-director Kenny Riches harp on their otherness all the same.

Laughter can break down barriers, but don't count on director Matthew Ladensack to help bridge differences.

Even jaded viewers who have gathered vague ideas from clues planted by screenwriters Rock Shaink and Keith Kjornes about how things will ultimately play out might find a genuine surprise or two in store.

Even the most talentless and narcissistic fame seekers on reality television are not nearly as vile, reprehensible or worthless as a film that actively wishes harm on them.

The film reveals frustratingly little about the sisters themselves.

Imaginatively interspersing testimonials with reenactments, comic panels and Claymation, the film plays out like an entertaining absurdist satire.

Fascinating as it may be, the film could have used outside perspectives to provide more context.

If nothing else, patience has rewarded Hoogendijk and moviegoers with an inside look at an art administration without common sense.

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

In spite of its fanciful tendencies, the film nails the growing pains that result from love and loss.

Unfortunately for English speakers, nothing here is lost in translation. Everything is exactly as lame as it sounds.

The film couldn't be more timely and germane for the American audience. If it weren't a documentary, it would seem like a post-apocalyptic allegory of our own vaccination debate.

The engaging plot gets a bit absurd toward the end.

We get too little character development to be invested in the story and barely a glimpse at the horrific plight of enslaved people.

In writer-director Raj Amit Kumar's heavy-handed political theater, characters are little more than avatars of opposing cultural currents.

One would almost be inclined to give Morgan a pass for interviewing some of his executive producers as expert sources. A bigger disappointment is the missed opportunity to address the significant retailer markups that could have gone toward improving sweatshop conditions instead of profit margins.

The make-it-rain clichés are abundant and Jean-Claude La Marre's direction is pedestrian, but at least a few of the choreographed numbers here prove more magical than what Soderbergh mustered.

The musical numbers are inconsistent, ranging from radio-ready to after-school-special quality. Some story lines pale compared with the others. But overall, this is an immense achievement.

The film proves much more valuable as a historical allegory than as a musical survey.

Dark Star might have been more fascinating had Sallin delved deeper into his place as an artist.

Director Bradley King and his co-writer, B.P. Cooper, manage to overcome their shoddy premise as the plot progresses assuredly and persuasively.

If bare-knuckle fights are what you seek, director Ekachai Uekrongtham certainly delivers. But the film scarcely scratches the surface of the horrors of human trafficking.

Miles Away comes off like some low-budget take on "Trapped in the Closet" or a Tyler Perry movie, except it treats kitsch with all sincerity and seriousness.

Writer-director Gerard Johnson resists all impulses to please the crowd. The graphic sex and violence never feel gratuitous, and there's something interesting in the way he deliberately denies his characters and the viewers any reprieve.

With a succession of tangential flashbacks, the film gradually disengages viewers from the plot.

Self-discovery through artistic expression is often trite, but Frank's rehabilitation and transformation readily win us over when we're least expecting it.

Director Daniel Monzón delivers a conventional genre exercise — albeit a very effective one, with twists and turns that manage to surprise.

If director-co-writer Karim Aïnouz has set out to depict soulless gay lives, he has more than succeeded.

Amid thespian antics, it contemplates weightier ethical dilemmas such as personal tragedy versus collective grief, artistic license versus historical responsibility, revisionist history versus corrective narrative, forgetting versus moving on. It's one creative way to do justice to such a monumental topic when full-blown reenactments aren't within the budget.

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 only aspects of the tale that seem uniquely Maori are the action sequences featuring the martial art of mau rakau. Aside from intermittent dream sequences in which Hongi communicates with his late grandmother (Rena Owen), the storytelling is Westernized.

Co-directors Dana Nachman and Don Hardy haven't attributed all of their facts and figures, hence the proverbial grain of salt.

Unfortunately, directors Rachel Lears and Robin Blotnick have squandered a worthy subject.

While Chopra attempts to crack the American market with a slice of cinematic apple pie, he holds up a mirror to how Hollywood's tried-and-true narrative of vigilantism connotes who we are, at home and overseas.

While fans can appreciate all the winks and nudges, the film is a wreck for the uninitiated.

With "Whiplash" setting the new bar for depicting the rigorous discipline and competitiveness in a music academy, the stale, one-note narrative seen in Boychoir sounds even more out of tune.

Director Hilarion Banks dutifully captures all of it in a series of nicely shot extended takes, which would have been fine if the cast had been able to interact in some sort of uniform tone.

It's excusable for a sheltered novice filmmaker to be out of touch like this, but not for a veteran.

Filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods water down the element of surprise, even if they get the found footage shtick down to a science.

By ambitiously aiming to encompass the full scope and complexity of the social pandemic, Lost and Love winds up being all over the map.

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

Despite the deliberately schlocky effects and puppetry, other aspects of the filmmaking are surprisingly satisfactory. It needs to be only one notch more bonkers to help its chances for cult status.

Rather than evincing any expertise or affinity for the genre, Wolsh's effort seems glib and hollow.

There are tangible improvements in the techniques of writer-director Terron R. Parsons. But some of the nagging plot holes remain unresolved.

Even if you do manage to make sense of the plot, it still doesn't make the film any more watchable.

Otherwise fairly routine, the film draws fear from ancient mythology and historical grudges in a way more reminiscent of Japanese horror than its American contemporaries. Had Ojeda delved into that a bit more, he could have really set the film apart.

The Business of Disease seeks to cast suspicion on Big Pharma, but it proves to be a glorified PowerPoint presentation interspersed with commentary by people of questionable qualifications who aim to incite paranoia with propaganda, conspiracy theories and straw-man arguments.

Unfortunately, each main character serves as an avatar emblematic of a societal symptom instead of a real person in whose shoes we can stand. As a result, their trajectories are didactic and predictable.

If you are a cinephile or an aspiring filmmaker looking for some behind-the-scenes edification, there's little.

With Snyder-Starr producing the film, My Way impresses as an exercise in narcissism.

Rountree and Banks have come up with a nonsensical and pointless genre exercise.

There's a lot of truth in writer-director Sai Varadan's observant depictions of the battle of the sexes, the East Coast-West Coast cultural clash and struggling artists in soul-crushing showbiz. Too bad he isn't particularly sympathetic or fair toward his female characters, because there's much to commend otherwise.

The film is enough to prompt soul-searching among parents, educators and the LGBT community on how to provide adequate guidance and support for LGBT youths.

Unexpectedly, the film best serves as a cautionary anecdote that epitomizes the mutual apprehension between Internet-age start-ups and establishment media.

With "Looper" and the fantastic recent release "Predestination" using the same plot device to explore existentialism, the potboiler Project Almanac feels like a leap backward.

The film's stark juxtaposition of domestic melodrama and gonzo exploitation is very much reminiscent of "Audition." Whereas the Miike film turned into a feverish anxiety dream about feminist revolt, R100 suggests that extreme and perverse films allow the everyman to seek thrills in his otherwise-monotonous life.

Directors Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto — collectively known as the Mo Brothers — skillfully handle the moral complexity of the script by Tjahjanto and Takuji Ushiyama. With some of its biggest twists happening out of focus and in the background, the film rewards the most observant viewers.

Director Theo Avgerinos seems preoccupied with making the film look expensive, but no amount of flair could make it less vacuous.

Tiu finds absolutely nothing redeemable in Cissy's upbringing. Her wholesale rejection of her parents' values isn't the enlightenment filmmakers would have you believe; it's internalized racism — conditioned by a lifetime of exposure to stereotypical depictions and cultural colonialism — to think that Asians' heritage and culture necessarily deprive them of happiness and fulfillment.

Impressively, Gangs of Wasseypur manages its sprawling story lines deftly and maintains a brisk pace throughout its daunting length. The performances are uniformly excellent, even if no character in Part 1 is at all likable.

The messy relationships and sexual predilections make for an equally messy plot, which distracts from the film's strength — depicting the truths of a romantic relationship that's past the initial excitement and the selective memories of love lost.

There's little going on in the final product other than good intentions, as Jeta Amata always seems overreaching for the right buttons to push.

The Spierig brothers have deftly fashioned an unpredictable thrill ride, and the joy is to fit together all its puzzle pieces.