Simon Abrams

It’s not hard to see the appeal of “The Roundup: Punishment” given the technical polish and formulaic conventions that keep this series chugging along. But Lee still deserves better dialogue—“I made someone a promise. To punish you.”—and better jokes, too.

The makers of “Boy Kills World” don’t trust their audience enough to let us just feel a feeling, nor do they encourage their enthusiastic cast members enough to deliver fully-developed performances.

Art College 1994 is unassumingly sweet because it’s about young people and their eternal quest for freedom and self-expression, mostly inside their own navels.

More is often less in “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver,” not only when it comes to the movie’s sweaty, vein-activating performances, but also its over-exaggerated and under-choreographed action scenes.

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

It’s not badly made, just uninspired and played out. If you like B-movies made with a budget and are specifically looking for an undemanding time, “Abigail” might be for you. “Abigail” might also disappoint you, especially if you’re hoping for more than what’s advertised.

Dupieux’s latest will either annoy or charm you depending on how much you appreciate being led around by the nose by a filmmaker and a cast of characters who seem pretty committed to jerking you around.

Besson’s extra-schlocky sensibilities seem ideally suited to his star, but he never gives Jones anything worth showing off.

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

It’s the quasi-gothic scenario that’s amusing here, and it’s as fraught as it is straight-forward. That and a perverse sense of humor puts “Amelia’s Children” over the top, though it’s never quite ha-ha hard enough to be satirical, nor sincere enough to be campy.

Deliver Us stands out because its creators have struck the ideal balance of lull-inducing silences to daft genre trope punctuation. It doesn’t make much sense, or flow smoothly from one scene to the next. But boy, Deliver Us sure does what it does.

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

Khufiya isn’t a deconstruction of the spy thriller, but it does blatantly re-orient viewers to what’s often missing or downplayed in stories about spies, many of whom are presented as solitary little wheels who work for big organizations that could stop needing them at a moment’s notice.

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

Fighter never strays far from the path that other movies like it have previously charted, but it still delivers most of what it promises.

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.

A couple of pedal-to-the-floor melodramatic twists suggest that “Founders Days” might’ve been a bolder or just meaner genre movie, but its toothless satire, like its timid horror drama, sadly doesn’t cut it.

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.

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.

There’s no question that Neel’s the key to Salaar’s success, so it’s hard to get too upset for his reminding us with every italicized, bolded, and underlined flourish.

“Rebel Moon” often looks more like an animated pitch for a movie than an actual movie with human characters, urgent drama, emotional stakes, and so forth.

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

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.

Some people might enjoy a solitary clip from a Henry Rollins interview, as well as occasional anecdotes from “Rescue Dawn” star Christian Bale (another Batman!). Others might wonder why we’re watching a chaotic docu-salute to Herzog when we could be watching a Herzog movie instead.

Yamazaki’s style, like his movie’s politics, only looks conservative when compared to his predecessors. He made a good Godzilla movie, if not a great one.

Thankfully, while “Monster” depends on dramatic irony and revelatory twists, it’s also a showcase for director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose knack for collaboration brings out the best in his actors, especially his younger cast members.

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

You still might get what you want from Tiger 3 during the action and musical scenes, which have their moments.