Martin Tsai

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.