Simon Abrams

A sleepy, but pleasantly surprising action-adventure, Ragnarok is the rare Spielberg clone that feels like it was made by people that not only know what they like about Spielberg's films, but are capable of evoking them.

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

Aat some point, every character in Youth falls out of love with the way of seeing the world. That kind of anti-epiphany is major—not on a universal, but rather a personal scale.

As gory as it is corrosively cynical, a supernatural mood piece that's equally influenced by the arthouse horror movies of David Lynch and Roman Polanski, and the grindhouse-ready Satanic Panic films of the '70s, like "To the Devil a Daughter," and "The Devil Rides out."

Padmaavat is a rare work of pop art that is both powerful and repugnant.

Ride Your Wave moves without a great sense of urgency, but only because Hinako’s emotional turmoil isn’t a great conflict or a tragedy. It is, however, as real as the private heartaches that we self-consciously wear on our sleeves.

It's an anti-romantic biography about a great artist, one whose central themes are basic, but whose energy and execution is irresistible.

If you’re watching “Leo,” it should be to see Vijay show off in between animal attacks, car flips, and celebrity cameos. And even if you don’t expect much from “Leo,” it still might give you exactly what you need.

Watching Douglas behave like a narcissistic scumbag is an absolute pleasure, one in which viewers of action-adventure Beyond the Reach can happily indulge.

It's an unsettling, and sometimes high-concept doodle, but it's awfully hard to resist a film that marries Atomic Age paranoia and optimism with Kurosawa's signature post-modern, atmosphere-intensive style.

The movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect.

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.

The Beasts may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

The funniest thing about “Daaaaalí!” is how often Dupieux succeeds at tricking you into thinking that he’s about to zig when he’s clearly ready to zag. It’s not a sophisticated bit, but Dupieux’s commitment to illogical anti-humor remains pretty disarming.

So if you're wondering if you should see He Never Died or not, consider how much time you want to spend in Rollins's company. He proves himself to be as charming as a younger Arnold Schwarzenegger, but his appeal is just as limited.

The Green Inferno is not exactly a feel-good film, but it gets a very particular job done.

More about ambience than narrative progress, so if you don't like these kinds of characters (ie: hippy-dippy aesthetes), the film will drive you up a wall.

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.

This movie's makers haven't met a formula cliché that they don't like.

Here, finally, is the movie that you likely wanted to see in the first place, replete with fantastic beasts, computer-generated spells, and other supernatural attractions. If you embrace this superior sequel for what it is, you’ll find a lot to like in “Creation of the Gods II: Demon Force.”

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.

Thankfully, Studio 4°C’s sumptuous animation and sound design still make “All You Need is Kill” a vivid and worthwhile do-over.

There's so much detail and such a clear sense of dramatic proportion that it almost doesn't matter that the movie doesn't resolve itself traditionally or with a full stop. You can still get a clear sense of how time moves for the workers in Zhili in "Youth (Homecoming)" without necessarily knowing what comes next.

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

Without Charlize Theron, the spy adventure Atomic Blonde would only be clever. She makes it insightful. The actress gives emotional depth to the highly mannered behavior of the film’s heroine.

Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is also probably the best comic book adaptation you’ll see this year, featuring a murderer’s row of Hong Kong stars like Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok and Sammo Hung, and featuring the sort of intricate maximalist production design that puts most other blockbusters to shame.

"Bird on a Wire" is a time capsule of a specific period in Cohen's career. But it also neatly illustrates the singer's personality in an accessible and compelling way. It's that rare concert doc that isn't for established fans only.

Just watch 11 Minutes like you're channel-surfing, only you don't have the remote and the roar of static between stations is steadily growing louder as the channels switch back-and-forth, faster and faster.