Simon Abrams

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

The film may be cinematic comfort food, but its creators do earn our trust and nail all the essential beats they need to along the way.

The main distinguishing feature of this film is its almost-novel nesting-doll plot structure, and passing thematic interest in its narrative's formulaic nature.

These episodic sketches immediately feel monotonous since the plot isn't arranged in chronological or sequential order; leaps in time from 1945 back to 1941 and then forward to eventually 1944 are a distracting overcompensation for an otherwise lifeless chain of impersonal betrayals, cold-blooded murders, and unbelievable moping from all involved.

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.

What Taylor and his game cast, led by Selma Blair and Nicolas Cage, do get right will leave you excited, and eager for more.

Only the most committed genre fans and academic-minded masochists will want to hang around until the bitter, arthouse-meets-choose-your-own-adventure style ending.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

Writer/director Barnaby Clay successfully keeps viewers on our toes, even if a lot of his movie feels like a series of programmatic jabs at our complacence.

Too bad The Djinn is often as plodding as it is impersonal. This movie crawls whenever it needs to sprint.

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

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

The Dead Lands doesn't add up to much, but it is always on the verge of becoming more than just a bed time story for guys that wish "Braveheart" had a biceps-kissing baby with "Ong Bak."

The movie’s half-hearted jokes, on frustrated women artists and their blind male collaborators, tend to be one-note and thankfully besides the point. But if you adjust your expectations, you’re more likely to accept Lux Aeterna as a vigorously realized doodle.

It's not a complicated narrative, possibly because the movie’s designed for younger viewers. But the conception of “Drifting Home” is so stunted that its only memorable thing is its untapped potential.

A tepid situation comedy in indie drama drag, "The Black Sea" lacks a sense of urgency beyond a few moments of canned tension between Khalid and Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), a haughty Bulgarian fisherman.

Wu and Lin have great chemistry, but only because Chow was smart enough to reimagine Journey to the West as a rare character-driven big-budget action-adventure — the kind of thing Americans might love if they knew it existed.

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

Deepsea Challenge has too little interest in anything that's not Cameron's personal experience.

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.

There doesn’t seem to be a romantic-comedy cliché missing from the bland French domestic Back to Burgundy, a wholly contrived post-adolescent coming-of-age yarn.

Veiel’s refreshingly open-ended approach invites you to find your own answers.

Baskin does what many horror films try and fail to do: it makes you feel like you're a passive prisoner/spectator, watching as an especially vivid nightmare unfolds.

Tokyo Tribe, an adaptation of a popular Japanese manga, is bound to charm viewers — both the uninitiated and the diehard fans of director Sion Sono ("Why Don't You Play in Hell," "Love Exposure") — with its boundless energy ... for a while, anyway.

Everything matters in Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, but not everything is necessarily the same as DeLillo's book. And that makes the film, as a series of discussions about inter-related money-minded contradictions, insanely rich and maddeningly complex. We can't wait to rewatch it.

Gibney may encourage viewers to condemn the police, but his self-righteous editorializing doesn’t make up for the lack of convincing evidence.

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

Before its typically inoffensive and unmemorable finale, Four Samosas inevitably skids into a self-conscious Anderson parody that even the uninitiated will see coming from miles off.

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.

Sun Choke is, after all, a melodrama, so you have to believe in Hagan's character. All of the impressionistic cinematography and special effects in the world couldn't save the film if you didn't care enough about Hagan's performance.

Believer works best as a series of perpetually escalating confrontations.

With Nocebo, Finnegan and his collaborators have put their finger on something dark and disturbing. Too bad it’s never as upsetting as it is suggestive.

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.

A prime example of a horror omnibus film: even the weaker segments have something to recommend them.

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.

Is it worth seeing? Yes, but only if you enjoy being grossed out.

If Retaliation were a friend, you’d eventually avoid them.

The Lords of Salem is a product of Zombie’s better creative impulses, so it’s ok that it also features several of his worse indulgences, too.

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

Rabbit Trap, a supernatural drama about a young couple haunted by a creepy child, revels in the tropes and tics of a few decades’ worth of British folk horror.

R100 is, consequently, a comedy that tries to alienate you by suggesting that escapism is futile, all things inevitably devolve, and nothing inherently means anything.

Stone-faced martial-arts star Donnie Yen does a lot with a little in wuxia weepy Ip Man 3, the rare kung fu film whose sentimental dialogue scenes are just as good as its stripped-down action sequences.

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

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.

A week after seeing The Wandering Earth, I'm still marveling at how good it is. I can't think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators' can-do spirit and consummate attention to detail.

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

Each propulsive segment features a handful of disturbing sequences... But such pleasures barely compensate for the vapidity of V/H/S: Viral's sketches.

Blackout is nothing new, or even essential, but it mostly works anyway thanks to Fessenden and his cast’s impressive collaboration.

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

Basically watchable.

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

Your enjoyment of “Tornado” depends on how much you want to root for thinly drawn characters who don’t look strong enough to carry an entire movie. They can and they can’t, depending on how patient you’re feeling.

Co-directors and writers Billy Bryk and “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard pay homage to ‘80s body count pics with a sappy but likable coming-of-age comedy about a group of summer camp counselors who are stalked and slayed by a masked killer.

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

The atmospheric but threadbare male bonding horror flick The Ritual is so well-directed that you can't help but groan at its lightweight script's many little inadequacies.

Even with so many talented actors involved, there’s nothing really galvanizing or particularly provocative about Redford’s latest.

Pseudo-sensitive bro-dude rom-com Date and Switch comes out today, and it already feels dated.

Almost everything that’s enjoyable about Escape From Pretoria is a variation on stuff you’ve probably seen in superior prison movies, though Radcliffe’s haunted performance is exceptionally compelling.

The maddeningly unfocused Israeli documentary West of the Jordan River doesn’t reveal anything insightful about Gaza settlers’ reasons for either supporting or rejecting a two-state solution.

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.

Somehow, The Wandering Earth II never feels tonally unbalanced or narratively convoluted, partly because Gwo and his collaborators keep their movie’s plot focused on feats of action-adventure heroism.

Our Time is even funny sometimes, albeit in the same kind of wryly mordant and cosmically alienated way as Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Antibirth is novel, mysterious, and sometimes even dangerous enough to suck you in if you surrender to its confrontational, avant garde style.

Everything in 1BR is over-exposed, often literally thanks to the movie’s basic camera set-ups and general emphasis on naturally and/or harshly front-lit close-ups, or medium shots of brown stucco walls.

What’s really wrong with Richard is that he’s a boring monster.

Loro feels like the work of a more mature artist. Sorrentino knows exactly who his Berlusconi is, and, with the help of Servillo — who delivers a characteristically impressive performance — manages to make the former Prime Minister’s total lack of introspection seem ironically revealing. Ecco Silvio: pathetic, alone, indestructible.

Unfortunately, Afflicted is as emotionally involving as a really accomplished special-effects sizzle reel.

I was also so disturbed by this film that I felt I had to rewatch certain scenes just to confirm that the emotional exhaustion I experienced while watching it wasn't just a personal preference, but rather a problem I had with what Iwai and his collaborators do in the film.

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.

Queer writer-director Mitchell Lichtenstein (the mind behind the vagina dentata horror-comedy Teeth) and an impressive team of collaborators inspire laughs and/or terror out of the libidinal hang-ups of frail stay-at-home mom Constance (Jena Malone) and her unfulfilled spouse, Joseph (Ed Stoppard).

While casting Glover as a reluctant everyman takes admirable chutzpah, there’s not much to “Mr. K” beyond its second-hand surrealism and strained counter-mythmaking.

Thankfully, Jodo’s latest is also way too weird to be hagiographic. It’s indulgent, absurd, frustrating, and more than a little gross. It’s also idiosyncratic and funny enough, and in ways that Jodo’s fans will probably love.

The turgid revenge thriller The Foreigner is an all-around lousy movie.

There’s a chintzy silver lining tacked onto every potentially dark cloud in the cloying French World War II drama A Bag of Marbles, a pseudo-inspiring adaptation of Jewish World War II survivor Joseph Joffo’s partly fictionalized memoir.

An uneven but satisfying hostage crisis thriller that is also a perfect example of the type of late-period films martial arts star Jackie Chan has decided to make after entering middle age.

There's something off about Beyond the Clouds, a beautiful but obnoxious Indian-set drama.

Piers McGrail's nuanced, moody cinematography brings out the best in writer-director Ivan Kavanagh's over-mannered but effectively creepy ghost story.

An unbearably preachy post-financial-crisis civics lesson in heist movie drag.

The filmmakers fall over themselves trying to respect Man's outlook on life, and this makes their subject seem more like a hyper-disciplined saint than a world-reknowned, ass-kicking hermit.

There's nothing specific, thoughtful or emotionally involving about Election Night beyond a basic need to push buttons, and get a rise out of viewers. The good guys are actually bad, and the bad guys are too indistinct to be hateful. Vote with your wallets, and go see something else.

This might have been a better movie if its creators embraced their fitful bloodthirst. Instead, they seem to hope that you like these stock characters enough that you’ll gasp when their friends and enemies inevitably bite the dust. A machine to kill vague people, “Whistle” never delivers on its frightful promise.

That kind of gallow’s humor defines the surface tone of Arkansas, which often feels like a riff on “Breaking Bad,” only now it’s more about how sad it is to be poor white trash.

The film will only work for you if you expect it not to make sense, and enjoy jokes that go on and on and then suddenly (and repeatedly) jack-knife off a cliff or two.

Yakusho's breathless, riveting performance grounds The World of Kanako even as it threatens to devolve into an unbearable series of nihilistic plot twists and gory set pieces.

Tusk is bearable thanks in no small part to its game cast, particularly character actor Michael Parks's Vincent Price-esque baddy.

Most of the documents that Lapa quotes from are, as presented, unrevealing — even offensive.

What's most arresting is the way Mizgirev's vision of 1860s Russia shines through in the perspiration on Champagne goblets, the flicker of candlelight on faces, and the sheen of polished-steel dueling pistols.

I want to recommend Nelson's film in spite of how misconceived it is simply because it asks interesting questions, albeit in some of the most banal ways imaginable.

The kind of childish genre movie that gives genre movies a bad reputation.

The most frustrating thing about the British prenatal horror movie Kindred is not that it’s impersonal, but rather that it’s not personal enough.

There’s not enough cold sweat ambience here, and that makes it even harder to root for a modestly budgeted chiller whose creators clearly started their project from a place of cinephilic affection. Even sympathetic genre fans will have trouble finding something new about such old hat material.

Unfortunately, the movie’s unexpected plot twist violently re-directs its treacly uplift narrative for the sake of a Hail Mary conclusion that’s almost ridiculous enough to be campy fun. It’s not though, since the twist in question feels like a last-ditch effort to convince viewers that the movie’s otherwise plain story, credited to Vera Herbert (series writer on “This Is Us”), has more depth than it does.

The exceptionally fun martial arts beat-em-up Kickboxer: Retaliation is a very dumb, and very satisfying throwback to a simpler time when American action films were as predictable as they were formulaic.

As a performer, Fischbach’s frantic performance can sometimes be distractingly monotonous, but as a filmmaker, he has an impressive eye not only for compositional details, but also for how his images cut and flow together.

Puncture's story only moves forward thanks to Evans's charm. But a good lead performance can't single-handedly save thin material.

The sheer too-much-ness of Alienoid could have easily been wearying, given its many tangents and supporting characters. Thankfully, writer/director Choi Dong-hoon confirms his hitmaker reputation by balancing over-inflated set pieces with disarming screwball comedy and delightful character actor performances.

Thor: The Dark World's characters are often very charming, but they're only so much fun when they're stuck going through the motions.

A spectacularly miscalculated historical epic.