Simon Abrams

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

Doomsdays is winsome because it embraces its narcissistic subjects without asking viewers to forget that they've just befriended a couple of selfish dillholes.

Bitterly funny gambling comedy Mississippi Grind transcends its generic lovable-losers-on-a-bender plot by foregrounding exceptionally well-developed skid-row protagonists and weirdly charming dive-bar ambiance.

Viewers must ultimately draw their own conclusions about Chan's identity, making Chan Is Missing a classic, albeit unsolvable, brainteaser.

Come for the gory swordplay, stay for the half-serious melodrama.

The most impressive thing about “Barbarian” is that Cregger keeps developing his twisty plot well after he sets everything up. Messing with viewers seems to be his guiding dramatic principal, from playful camerawork to unpredictable plot twists. Bless ‘im.

Yeon's patient direction and clever plot twists make Seok-woo's transformation from selfish antihero into brave caregiver consistently compelling.

Sunada's critical distance makes Kingdom of Dreams and Madness the clear-eyed celebration that Ghibli's artists deserve.

You may have seen parts of The Age of Shadows before, but they're rarely this well assembled.

An emotionally generous and expansively detailed romantic fantasy.

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.

Monster Hunt 2 is charming enough on a scene-to-scene basis that its success is worth noting.

So while not everything works in Black Christmas, the stuff that does is ultimately what matters most.

Last Bullet puts a decisive capper on the previous movies’ action-intensive gearhead-cop saga, though it’s hard to say how much closure one might need from these characters. They’re charming enough thanks to a committed ensemble cast, but nothing about the movie’s by-the-numbers narcotics cops vs. dirty cops story demands further extension.

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

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

It’s time in a bottle and a pleasure to soak up.

Woo and Tjahjanto not only share a half-cynical, half-romantic view of violence but also likely some of the same influences. What sets them apart as filmmakers isn’t where or how much they’ve swiped but how well they synthesize their apparent pulp fiction love into something new and cinematic.

Love may not always be enjoyable, but it leaves an abiding mark.

In many ways, Zhang’s latest is the coldest film that he’s made in a while, though it might also be his most alluring.

This is a sports melodrama played like a Billy Joel concert, with enough well-honed showmanship and passion to make even its cheesiest qualities seem like an unpretentious celebration of Patton’s everyman.

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.

Watching The Apology, one gets the sense that Locke and her team got to tell the exact story they wanted to and on their terms. Their drama has unusual integrity since it's (mostly) not about canned answers to complex questions.

Vesper doesn’t just ask viewers to root for one more hopeless case as she struggles to triumph over adverse living conditions. Instead, it asks us to spend time with a young protagonist who thinks she’s on the verge of a breakthrough and leads us to constantly worry that she might be wrong.

This is a film noir that is, despite some jittery, Tony Scott-esque action sequences, so cool, that you will leave it begging for a sequel.

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

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.

South Korean horror-mystery hybrid The Wailing crosses that line several times, but somehow remains effectively atmospheric.