Simon Abrams

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.