Simon Abrams

Taken in its entirety, Ant-Man and the Wasp may not be the best anything, but, like its perpetually challenged hero, it is plenty good enough.

Italian drama Mia Madre is an either/or film, a humorous and poignant character study that frequently becomes an ensemble piece.

Post Tenebras Lux is certainly unique, but Reygadas is often intensely more interested in provoking his audience than actually fleshing out his heady ideas.

You may not leave Sunshine Superman wanting to emulate Carl and Jean, but you will feel like you've vicariously bonded with them.

You can fully enjoy Belladonna of Sadness if you either overlook or participate in the objectification of a gorgeous victim.

A worthy documentary tribute to the drag queen icon.

I often rolled my eyes at the kitschy, broad humor that Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalzez (who co-wrote the film with Cristiano Mangione) sometimes used to characterize his sexually active queer characters.

A lot of substantial or just different material might have enriched this documentary’s tidy fall-and-rise story.

Vonnegut’s family members and biographers provide the most intriguing material in Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, but their interviews are too brief to enhance viewers’ appreciation of his work.

Faults is a richly-textured movie that concerns the weird space between thinking you know what you're doing, and actually knowing what you're doing.

Paulina is, in that sense, worth seeing, even if its basic plot repeatedly stalls. It is a thoughtful movie, but not necessarily a fulfilling one.

Geoghegan and Hendrix have the right instincts, which goes a long way, given that their vision is slightly limited by their budget. I didn't just fall for this type of film: I also admire its creators' knack for conveying what they like most about their characters through pulpy dialogue, impressive shot choices, and satisfyingly gory set pieces.

The Mermaid will make you laugh. It doesn't matter if you don't like subtitles. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of the director. It doesn't matter if you've never seen a Chinese movie in your life. It will make you laugh. Guaranteed.

The gory, but weirdly blasé Russian black comedy Why Don’t You Just Die! feels like a gross exercise in style that’s also a passable tribute to Jim Thompson’s bleakly hilarious crime novels, and a brain-dead critique of post-Soviet consumerism.

[Shirai] indulges his subjects' lack of introspection and focuses on the ephemeral beauty of the brewery's centuries-old sake-making method.

So while Enid’s investigation never goes anywhere noteworthy, Censor still fosters an increasingly desperate, anxiety-inducing effect.

Dialogue does most of the heavy-lifting here, just like in “Love”, the first and most recently released entry of Haugerud’s thematically related series. Haugerud’s knack for visual storytelling also makes a difference, specifically in how he presents the city of Oslo and its features as an enriching backdrop.

A tone-deaf celebration of Manhattan’s ritzy Carlyle Hotel.

What makes The Vigil so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis.

Instead of over-glorifying their shared past, Ericsson pays loving tribute to what remains of his subjects' relationship.

Character actor Tom Skerritt takes the lead for once in this gentle, melancholic drama about an older man who, while overwhelmed by suicidal thoughts, figures some things out for himself. Fans of David Guterson’s source novel will probably get it, but everyone else might need a moment to get the picture.

You know you're in trouble with a film when you're so bored by it that you wind up asking why things seem so implausible.

It's also genuinely warm and involving because of the participation of everyone from Carmen Vega, Giger's widow, to Sandra Berretta, Giger's former assistant and self-described "life partner." The film is, in that sense, an effective memorial, one filmed after Giger himself admitted that he had said all he wanted to say in his art.

There’s no way to enjoy “Cypher” without seeing it as an elaborate and often exasperating joke at viewers’ expense.

The filmmakers over-extend themselves to solicit empathy for their doomed protagonists. Youth is so unbearably nice that I eventually wished it were remade by misanthropes.

Watching Campbell over her shoulder or in a mirror is frustrating because it consistently limits our view of her character. Porterfield's people can't give anything away beyond their immediate aggression, frustration, and sadness. But it's hard to appreciate an intentionally blurry portrait of a family that's so impressionistic that all you can see of its already-withdrawn characters are their shadows.

To be clear: Asako I & II is not a bad movie, just one that doesn't convey much beyond its creators' intentions. There are moments of poetic beauty scattered throughout, like the few scenes that don't push the otherwise cloud-light plot along.

If you’re at all curious about “One Piece,” you might still enjoy One Piece Film Red, since it’s a better-than-average highlight reel for Oda’s ingratiating and vividly realized characters. Just don’t feel bad if you exit the theater feeling confused and a little unfulfilled; this new feature’s more of an oversized sampler platter than a full-sized meal.

Fessenden’s prickly sense of humanism makes a considerable difference in Depraved, his engrossing take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and maybe his best movie to date.

Blood Relatives isn’t always a great comedy about vampires, or fathers and daughters, but it is a charming road movie.

The retrospective nature of this documentary character study requires some creative liberties, but treating one of your two main characters like a special guest in her own movie suggests that telling a better story was unfortunately the top priority here.

Sometimes, the suggestive nature of Gregg’s impressionistic mood piece—as well as a characteristically strong lead performance by Riseborough (Possessor, Mandy)—is enough to sustain one’s interest in Here Before. Right up until Gregg lobs an unsettling and only partly satisfying twist at viewers and leaves us to work through our feelings on our own time.

Most of the gags in this pandering spoof are about their own schematic nature — they’re jokes about how you’re smarter than the jokes.

Song's performance makes me wish the rest of A Taxi Driver was as thoughtful.

A general lack of urgency are the main things holding Get Duked! back from being as good as it is promising.

The Elephant Queen may not suit every adult viewers’ taste, but it is exceptionally sensitive and consistently thoughtful, especially when it’s concerned with the sorts of facts of life of which younger kids are probably already vaguely aware.

The makers of the irresistible character-study doc Itzhak capture Itzhak Perlman’s characteristic warmth and bravado through short, anecdote-centric scenes that make the Israeli American violinist sound like a big-hearted raconteur who’s just dying to tell you everything about himself.

The Taiwanese horror movie The Sadness is both conceptually exhausting and viscerally upsetting—an ideal summer movie for the third year of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

So often bogged down by pseudo-naturalistic long takes and generic cop/robber power dynamics that it makes one wonder what the point of watching such a film is.

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko succeeds where so many other movies like it fail simply by making its characters seem real enough to be going through a series of familiar growing pains.

For those who have understandably not seen Takakura's original film due to international distribution issues: think "The Fugitive," only this time, Tommy Lee Jones' gruff cop is replaced by a more sympathetic hot-shot detective.

The Conjuring is as toothless as it is because it's two different kinds of boring. The film's plot is explained exhaustively whenever loud noises aren't blaring, and random objects aren't teasingly leaping out at you from the corner of your eye.

There’s some appreciable serenity and a lot of personal grief on display in Out Stealing Horses, but it’s only visible in fits and starts.

Deerskin isn’t weird enough to be great, mostly because Dupieux (“Rubber, “Reality”) is a little too precious when it comes to pacing, characterizations, humor, etc.

Villain is the kind of stiflingly reverent genre picture that is so beholden to its main characters’ pity-me worldview that its predictably downbeat ending feels like the kind of hero worship that you often find in either a cloying biopic or a hidebound true crime adaptation.

It is also the post-punk writer/director Sion Sono's most accessible film: a middle-aged filmmaker's tribute to the kind of epic-sized gangster-romance he used to fantasize about making.

Poser might have been more satisfying if its gauzy night-club aesthetic and bold, underlined dialogue didn’t smother viewers with trite observations about hipster artistes.

Unfortunately, The Deer King fatally (and repeatedly) stalls as its plot starts winding down and its creators lunge for a character-driven moral to a symbolically freighted parable.

Ne Zha 2 is a rare sequel that amplifies both its action and drama without sacrificing much of what already worked in the last movie. It’s also a rare blockbuster that offers something worthwhile for a wide-ranging audience.

If you’re looking for meaning, humor, or comfort, you’d best not look for it here.

A few heavy-handed stabs at commentary aside, “Queens of the Dead” gets by with good, flirty cheer.

There are a lot of fragmentary ideas in The Real Thing, but they’re not cohesive or worthwhile as they’re loosely formed into one grey 232-minute lump.

I can’t honestly recommend Climate of the Hunter to everybody; it’s not a generic horror movie, but rather a dark arthouse fantasy that brings to mind the films of Ingmar Bergman and Andy Milligan. To say that Reece’s movie is bound to be an acquired taste would be something of an understatement.

Quintana's emphasis on Jungian dream logic gives his otherwise spartan parable a compelling mythic dimension. The Vessel may bring Malick to mind, but it also feels like a major work by an exciting new talent.

Too bad writer-director Leena Yadav only infrequently uses innuendo-driven sex talk to break up a monotonous series of confrontations between misogynistic alpha males and their unhappy wives.

Psycho Goreman isn’t clever or lively enough to be more than fitfully fun, especially given how much time is spent mocking generic, but painstakingly recreated plot contrivances.

Byun ultimately pulls too many punches, but Kill Boksoon remains impressive, if only for its unexpected sensitivity and considerable emotional range.

The Christmas-themed home-invasion movie Better Watch Out starts out as one kind of unpleasant, then switches gears to a higher level of unearned nastiness.

An irresistibly gory science-fiction melodrama, is B-movie schlock done right.

The Paper Tigers is still very much a martial arts movie that ends with a late-night rooftop fight, and then a celebratory dim sum meal. But if you already like this sort of lightweight crowdpleaser, you’re bound to find something worthwhile here.

Legends of the Mountain’s narrative fuse may be long, but Hu knows exactly when to light it and when to snuff it out.

Gender inequality may be a potentially complicating factor when it comes to sexual trauma (i.e., men can also be abused by women), but that provocative conceit isn’t considered with much care or intelligence.

A charmingly filthy, albeit rather amateurish stab at making a macho action-hero persona out of Moore's stand-up sensibility.

The most enchanting thing about “ChaO” isn’t necessarily its hyperpoptimism, but the many little ways in which its breezy and arresting style reflects its creators’ lightly held Utopianism.

The film's rote right-makes-might fantasy wouldn't be so obnoxious if pandering to the lowest common denominator wasn't its default mode.

Generally speaking, the museum seems like a modest, but vividly-detailed freak show.

The resulting episodic narrative is light on dialogue and heavy on ambiance; it's precise to an unsettling degree since a number of scenes start and stop whenever Lizzy can feel her way in and out of them.

You shouldn't watch Shin Godzilla for Godzilla alone. He's not really the star of the film—Yaguchi and the rest of his human adversaries are. They credibly resist the end of the world with ingenuity and teamwork, making Shin Godzilla just as winningly optimistic as it is pleasurably eccentric.

The exhilarating Japanese animated coming-of-age fantasy Mind Game plays out like a hallucinogen-fueled shaggy-dog joke that only ends after twenty-year-old horndog Nishi (Kôji Imada) discovers that the world does not revolve around him.

Thankfully, Cooke crams in so much persuasively appalling information — especially during a tangential aside on mentally ill patients’ high death rates — that it’s easy to forgive him for seemingly trying to push all viewers’ proverbial buttons at once.

While Les eventually becomes more tolerable, LaBute's cloying dialogue makes it impossible to appreciate what turns out to be a bracingly pragmatic sense of optimism.

There's not only nothing new here, there's nothing convincing either. And if I'm supposed to judge Bumblebee based on how well it succeeds at what it tries to do (rather than what came before it), it's still not very good.

Writer/director Chad Archibald still shows some promise here, especially whenever he lets his actors, cinematographer, makeup, creature, and production designer sell what is, at heart, a generic possession story. He thankfully does this often enough to keep the plot’s familiar and slowly dispensed beats from feeling too rote.

Cornish's gift for working with child actors is still apparent, as is his knack for dynamic action set pieces. The Kid Who Would Be King is not, in that sense, everything that it could have been. But it is fun where it counts and that's realistically what matters most.

In spite of its conspicuously crude sense of humor, Delhi Belly is much more family-minded and innocent than it would like its young target audience to believe.

Dumont's characters' motives are consequently hard to divine, despite convincingly twitchy performances from French actors Fabrice Luchini and Juliette Binoche. So while I do recommend Slack Bay, I must warn you: this is a misanthropic comedy that features cannibalism, weird religious overtones, and a lot of goony pratfalls.

The movie’s fun, if a bit staid, when it’s in all-monsters-attack mode, but Ultraman: Rising doesn’t stand out whenever it requires more of your attention.

The Archies celebrates its protagonists’ character-defining youth by letting them be cute, doofy, and mostly self-absorbed.

Unfortunately, The Public Image is Rotten often feels like an illustrated airing of grievances that also happens to be an in-their-words history of Lydon's best band.

The movie’s cast members all seem to understand their assignments, which makes even the sketchiest material seem more robust. There’s also more technical polish, as well as a general knack for comic timing, than you might expect from a remake of “The Toxic Avenger.”

Scafidi’s movie appropriately reflects its director’s neurotic need to show all the different ways you can think about Argento and his art.

Goofy, over-earnest, and just good enough where it counts, Kalki 2898 AD outdistances its competition simply by digging deeper than expected into its patchy lore’s rich melodramatic turf.

Stevens slowly and subtly unpacks that heady, provocative conceit with care and in a way that makes his directorial debut feel like the arrival of a major new talent.

People are not good or bad in The Cut — they are subject to violent whims, and rarely given fair opportunities to defend themselves. The Cut can therefore be seen as a historical corrective.