Simon Abrams

The unsettling mood and creeping pace of the Indonesian horror movie The Queen of Black Magic take some getting used to.

Rubikon never offers viewers deep answers to its bigger questions, but it does pose enough questions to keep things moving while you watch.

I Did It My Way exemplifies the current state of mass-oriented Hong Kong genre cinema, leaning hard on its seasoned cast to both remind viewers of better movies and carry this one around the bases fast enough that you still get your money’s worth.

Kill tics off most of the essential boxes for a good popcorn flick, making it easy to resist but harder to pass up.

Watching Harlow struggle with the simultaneously impersonal and obviously prejudiced nature of his imprisonment is often enough to make Caged seem like more than the sum of its parts.

I’m not sure where this particular wannabe franchise is going or if anybody but initiated viewers will care to find out, but I could watch another one.

A giddy chase scene almost singlehandedly rescues Escape from Mogadishu, an otherwise unmoving South Korean political thriller about the real-life Korean diplomats who fled Somalia during that country’s 1991 civil war.

Escape finds an interesting subject in that ambiguous line, but never examines it closely enough to convey what it’s like to be invisible while in service to your own country.

Ray and his co-stars’ easy chemistry makes you want to hang out with Will, if only to see where the plot twist takes him. “Destroy All Neighbors” wouldn’t really work without that essential playfulness; the fact that it works at all suggests that Ms. Lee and her team are the movie’s real MVPs.

Christina Ricci does most, if not all, of the emotional lifting in the lightweight horror drama Monstrous, a period piece about a single mom and her son who, in 1955, run away from home and re-settle in an isolated lakeside house.

Hadžihalilović's latest is both too hazy to make a great adaptation and too focused to be genuinely dream-like.

It’s nice to see that the first horror movie to specifically address our present hellish circumstances is as unpretentious and tidy as it is.

By preferring to keep viewers in suspense until the film's finale, Pastoll makes it harder to recommend a movie that has many good ideas, but no clue what to do with them.

While “Creation of the Gods I” is not yet a personal, let alone essential, series, you can see glimpses of the epic that director Wuershan has arguably been working his way up to since “The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman,” his wildly uneven, but occasionally disarming 2010 breakthrough.

The Neon Demon only works when Refn finds the right middle ground between obliquely hinting at and explicitly spelling out what his movie's about.

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.

Co-writer/co-director duo Harpo and Lenny Guit’s apparent disregard for their viewers’ comfort can sometimes be quite funny, depending on your tolerance for messy, meandering absurdist comedy.

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.

Fassbinder's sumptuous 205-minute epic is intriguing as a prototype for later and more palatably cynical sci-fi standards like "Blade Runner" or even "Total Recall."

Charlie Says loses much of its potency whenever it's not directly about the ordinary motives of the individual Manson clan members.

While many of the jokes in Hotel Transylvania: Transformania probably won’t linger in your mind, they are still fairly well-executed.

This Changes Everything isn't a game-changer, but it is jarring enough to be scary.

As a filmmaker, Drasnin should not have relied so singularly on Rittenberg's testimony.

The Curse of Downers Grove coasts on pulpy fumes thanks to its creators' effective emphasis on circumstantial peril over character-driven drama.

Nothing in Moonwalkers matches Perlman's performance, but he frequently elevates desperate-to-please gags to stoner-comedy greatness.

Liang and Zhang’s young heroes would be far more universal if they were just credibly hormonal.

Assassination is a blast whenever the director doesn't take his melodramatic plot too seriously.

Like the anime series, Jujutsu Kaisen 0 sometimes feels too much like a Cliffs Notes adaptation, despite also featuring more interaction between the supporting characters and the lead protagonist than the original manga.

The messy but charming concert doc Straight Into a Storm works best if you treat unfocused on-camera interviews with the members of Rhode Island–based folk/grunge-rock group Deer Tick like an unintrospective but affectionate video memoir of the group’s rise to alt-rock prominence.

Farrier doesn’t really take us to any dark corners of Organ’s life that he can’t talk his way out of, but Mister Organ does capture the miasmic anxiety that surrounds his mysterious subject.

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.

Infini doesn't go anywhere that superior science fiction films haven't already, but for a while, it's exciting enough to feel brand-new.

The darkly funny American indie drama Small Engine Repair works best when it’s a hangout comedy starring three schlubby New England burnouts.

While it doesn't cohere into anything more substantial than a collection of self-loathing anxieties, Japanese teledrama Penance is effectively unnerving on a scene-for-scene basis thanks to writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's preference for ambience over character-driven drama.

Guns Akimbo may be too mild to be memorable, but it is a mostly satisfying time-waster.

Redeemer may not be as good as its star, but it does give Zaror enough room to shine.

There may be nothing new about America Underdog, but it’s still good enough, as far as non-perishable comfort food goes.

Hover may sometimes be unbelievably generic, but Osterman, adapting Coleman’s clever scenario, nails a universal power dynamic.

Derrickson and Cargill successfully tailor their focused and mostly compelling narrative to a Steven Spielberg/Amblin Entertainment–esque bit of Stephen King–sploitation.

Established “My Hero Academia” fans will probably enjoy Class 1-A’s typically endearing group dynamic, even if none of the jokes in the movie are that great. And their big fight with Nine is genuinely well-staged and climactic, thanks to some impressive computer graphics and director Kenji Nagasaki’s thoughtful staging and choreography.

Unfortunately, the best and worst thing about director Dominique Rocher and his two co-writers’ scenario is its familiarity.

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

Despite its title, Drew: The Man Behind the Poster is not a documentary about movie poster artist Drew Struzan. Instead, Struzan's poster art is the film's real subject.

A strong ensemble cast, led by Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall, does a lot of emotional heavy lifting in the otherwise lightweight mockumentary Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

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

Pretty Lethal doesn’t even fully take flight once it finally escapes the realm of good taste, though it does feature a handful of standout moments and images. You might scratch your head a few times, but you also may enjoy yourself if you only want the filmmakers to embrace their unhinged high-concept premise

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.

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with the idea of setting an all-ages haunted house-style chase movie in a corny bulk retail store. The main thing holding back Spirit Halloween: The Movie is that its young stars never get to convincingly act their age.

Neither the action scenes nor the musical numbers stand out though, and none of the characters or their performers transcend their expected roles.

Shooting the Mafia is, if nothing else, a decent introduction to Battaglia’s work, even if the rest of Loginotto’s primer doesn’t tell us much about who Battaglia is, or how to appreciate what she does.

Unlike its predecessor, “Troll 2” doesn’t have enough canned dramatic or comedic incidents to make it seem particularly eventful.

Bloodthirsty isn’t as deep or dark as it needs to be, and that’s way more frustrating than its general lack of werewolves.

How badly do you want to see rabid computer-generated zombie-monkeys die violently? Because there's not much else worth recommending in [Rec] 4: Apocalypse.

Carpignano’s impressionistic plot and pseudo-naturalistic style also tends to boil down human emotions so as to only suggest rather than reveal complexity. The limiting style and characterizations in A Chiara are only so thoughtful.

Watching La Flor is like being on the last legs of a road trip with a group of people you’ve grown increasingly alienated from. Look at the happy artists, they’re having fun playing with themselves; good for them, can I go home now?

Judgmental and ungenerous, Alex’s story gives you enough answers to either tsk-tsk or nod sadly in response. The rest’s up to you, the viewer, which feels like a bit of a cop-out.

As it is, “The Gardener” suggests that Van Damme still doesn’t know how to both give his audience what they want and show off his range.

If only Baker and the gang had fleshed out horny hero Pikelet’s journey with the same earthy details that make Pikelet and Loonie’s friendship seem real enough to be worth mourning.

That opening scene is also, in retrospect, somewhat depressing for the way that it conflates a glib fatalism with an unbelievable sort of turn-the-other-cheek optimism ("If they hurt others, it's because they hurt, too,” as Benedicta says in one scene).

James Murphy never says that his music will sound different after LCD Soundsystem disbands, so why fearfully anticipate a change that we don't even know is coming?

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.

I want to recommend Don't Sleep because it is, intellectually, more compelling than many of the indie horror films I tend to watch. But I can't recommend this movie, mostly because it's not smart enough to deserve that praise.

Burial has a hard enough core, both in terms of its central premise and its pulpy tropes, that for about 30 minutes, it almost works as a decent B-movie, right before it unceremoniously falls apart.

American Made may be superficially a condemnation of the hypocritical American impulse to take drug suppliers' money with one hand and chastise users with the other. But it's mostly a sensational, sub-"Wolf of Wall Street"-style true crime story that attempts to seduce you, then abandon you.

Never feels as momentous or as angsty as a good story about moody teenagers should, and that's mostly because the film lacks a menacing parental adversary.

There’s a significant difference in quality between the mediocre scenario (and dialogue) and thrilling production design (and direction) in White Snake.

Even the most open-minded viewers may have difficulty relating to the two lead protagonists in Border, a cynical Swedish romantic-fantasy that follows estranged border patrolwoman Tina (Eva Melander) and her unconvincing attraction to Byronic stranger Vore (Eero Milonoff).

A light touch doesn’t suit the heavy themes in The Power, a horror psychodrama that’s specifically concerned with sexual misconduct and then more generally about the abuse of (you guessed it) power at a London hospital.

This movie is progressive intentionally, but not formally, and the difference between its creators’ themes and consideration is unfortunately glaring.

In theory, that sort of self-victimization could be funny; in this reality, not so much.

Zlotowski’s stylized depiction of Rachel’s life is overly fastidious. Many creative decisions, from the score to the camera blocking, took me out of the movie. Instead of a complex character processing involved, compound emotions, I saw a talented filmmaker lightly touch upon a range of emotions while also studiously avoiding dramatic clichés and stereotypes.

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.

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.

The film patly confirms what "The Lion King" already taught '90s kids: we should take comfort in knowing that everything in life is natural when seen as part of the "circle of life," as surprisingly effective voiceover narrator John Krasinski reminds us.

This big, splashy blockbuster is perplexing because it's full of loosely-connected incidents that are rarely character-driven, or even narratively intelligible beyond a point.

The first and maybe biggest problem facing viewers when they watch The Spine of Night is its drab and dramatically inert animation style.

A few compelling emotions and themes are suggested but rarely well expressed in Nimona, a sometimes cute but mostly hyper and overextended animated sci-fi fantasy.

The best thing I can say about Daniel Isn’t Real is that it’s a promising early feature made by young artists who haven’t yet worked out how to express and/or synthesize what they like about their favorite artists and their work. It’s all style and very little substance.

Informative but tedious talking-head doc Our Man in Tehran is for anyone who watched Argo and then wished to hear a ditzy, history-obsessed uncle ramble about the real-life political stakes of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.

The Banished, about a grieving woman’s search for her missing brother, sometimes feels like a compendium of modern horror movie clichés. That doesn’t always matter, since the movie is thick enough with dread to work despite its distracting familiarity.

As it is, “Land of Bad” is a pandering drama with some action movie thrills.

At some point, queasy horror-comedy Another Evil stops being about one man's comically vain attempts at exorcising his home, and starts being a weird character study about a laughably desperate wannabe exorcist.

Jimmy & Stiggs is a slick wallow into a cranked-up, self-destructive headspace that frequently over-compensates for what it lacks in plot and character development with sheer vigor and volume alone.

A typical Hong character performs the same actions over and over again, with minor, but noticeably different results.

A sometimes diverting, but overly familiar series of set pieces in search of a good melodrama.

Lacks sufficient inspiration and follow-through to be truly exciting.

Arthouse horror flick The Eyes of My Mother actively alienates viewers by presenting episodes in a woman's life from a post-human, God-like perspective. Sometimes. Usually. Probably?

Wiig really shines in the film, proving that her finely honed comic timing can make a character work even when the film ultimately doesn't.

The brutality of Tyrannosaur isn't so over the top as to make director Paddy Considine's sympathy for his flawed characters look like a sham. But it does frequently bring his film's seesawing exploration of blue-collar existence to the brink of collapse.

Sting has a lot of the right ideas but not enough inspiration to string them all together.

Paley's segment proves that The Prophet is more of a missed opportunity than an ambitious folly.

Neophyte writer/director Christopher Papakaliatis eventually shows an affinity for filming two people in love, but his actors often lack the chemistry to make us believe that their bond transcends all socioeconomic boundaries.

It's for-horror-nuts-only, but if you can see it with a rowdy crowd, Dead Snow 2 will appreciate exponentially.

Four Latinx-themed horror segments of variable quality are sandwiched between a modestly amusing wrap-around story about a haunted traveler, simply called “The Traveler.” It’s not enough, despite some amusing performances and effects-driven thrills.

This bloated, unfocused follow-up—which was tellingly crowd-funded by fans and then released by Fox Searchlight—takes all of the charming goofiness of the first film, and runs it deep into the ground with gags that either over- or under-think these stock characters' original appeal.

Unfortunately, Lau just isn't charming enough to carry the utterly forgettable The Adventurers, a tepid remake of John Woo's already lame heist flick "Once a Thief."

The Limehouse Golem only reflects its creators' lack of imagination. Medina and Goldman invest so much time in (poorly) misleading audiences that they say nothing memorable about the past, or why it matters to today's audience.

With the uninspired pity party comedy The Day After, self-lacerating Korean dramatist Sang-soo Hong continues a trend towards un-productive self-loathing that began last year with the half-empty "On the Beach At Night Alone" and continued with the half-full "Claire's Camera."