Martin Tsai

While the gangsta lyrics and posturing are laden with cliché, there's still some novelty in sustaining a rap narration for nearly two hours. But whenever the music stops, the film can never stay in the game by landing on a figurative chair.

The AIDS scare remains as much window dressing as do other period details such as rotary phones and cassette tapes. Test seems to be about dance above all, with choreographed montages filling the bulk of its running time.

Hector may indeed learn that narcissism stands in the way of happiness, but he also walks away with his privileges intact and unchallenged.

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

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

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

Directors Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein put the focus on the standard reality-TV repertoire like "Making the Band." Their repeated disregard for Hioki's pleas to go off the record smacks of opportunism and exploitation rather than revelation.

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.

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

Like many found-footage films before it, The Den never entirely suspends disbelief. It doesn't satisfyingly account for how the characters are producing all the footage.

The narrative of Strachwitz as preserver of obscure music just repeats like a broken record with the introduction of each region, genre and musician.

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.

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

It's a derivative trove of swashbuckling action, romance, comedy, special effects and revisionist history — the kind of film that would be pitched to studio execs as "Pirates of the Caribbean" meets "Free Willy."

If "The Bible" was CliffsNotes for the Scriptures, Son of God is the cheat sheet. The two-hour film condenses about four hours of what already was hasty television, and it all winds up a little dramatically static.

The temporal puzzle is enough to distract from the artless direction, visibly cheap set designs and tacky special effects. But if the expository scenes are any indication, his writing could benefit from some refinement.

By performing narrative gymnastics, the film sacrifices any possibility for viewers to identify with the characters. Although the film does answer the myriad questions it raises along the way, it would have benefited from more straightforward storytelling.

Writer-director Ken Kwek means for the proceedings to be farcical, but seldom are they actually funny. A former journalist, he's quite observant of the clashes among the classes and cultures in this diverse society.

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.

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.

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

Earnest and well-meaning, The Congressman devolves into predictable schmaltz.

Writer-director Jonas Carpignano glosses over much of the sociopolitical context in his depictions of the chain of events.

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

Even during the fantasy musical numbers, which give cover to stray from the overall aesthetics of the film, Phillips is just incapable of delivering the genre’s requisite razzle dazzle that would surely complement Joker’s persona.

The film seems to have an entire deck of cards up its sleeve, and they're dealt out with more tedium than fun.

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.

[Minn] runs around with a microphone in hand like an if-it-bleeds-it-leads ambulance chaser, playing out that local news reporter stereotype often spoofed in mockumentaries.