Simon Abrams

It’s nice to see that the Muscles from Brussels is not only self-aware, but also sharp enough whenever he has to take a baby step or two beyond his own shadow.

More often than not, Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins is a dire checklist of clichés that were already gathering moss back in the 1980s, when G.I. Joe was a popular children’s cartoon.

Human error—or uncertainty—is the biggest source of tension in this movie, and it goes a long way towards making this sequel (a little) more than the sum of its flashy parts. You may not need another Escape Room, but this new one is good enough to leave you wanting more.

While The Tomorrow War isn’t exactly good, it is often promising enough to convince you that at some point, it will reward your time and patience.

If you enjoy watching barrel-penned fish get got with a BB gun, you're bound to love Vicious Fun. Vicious Fun courts that kind of glib dismissal since so much of the movie reassures viewers that its creators are also addicted to the formulaic slasher movies that they kind of, sort of mock.

So while Enid’s investigation never goes anywhere noteworthy, Censor still fosters an increasingly desperate, anxiety-inducing effect.

There are a lot of fragmentary ideas in The Real Thing, but they’re not cohesive or worthwhile as they’re loosely formed into one grey 232-minute lump.

The action in Funhouse is consistently cheap and generally silly. That’s sort of the movie’s point, but it’s also sort of hard to care when everything else is so tacky.

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

You can either be sentimental or bitter about the movies, but you can rarely charm people by being both at once. Unfortunately, the people behind the Indian moviemaking comedy RK/RKAY took that risk, and wound up making a mawkish, inert fantasy about a filmmaker whose protagonist escapes his movie within the movie.

The Paper Tigers is still very much a martial arts movie that ends with a late-night rooftop fight, and then a celebratory dim sum meal. But if you already like this sort of lightweight crowdpleaser, you’re bound to find something worthwhile here.

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.

Bloodthirsty isn’t as deep or dark as it needs to be, and that’s way more frustrating than its general lack of werewolves.

Unfortunately, the quality of storytelling here often isn’t strong enough to hold one’s interest throughout such a diminutive runtime. Still, you might enjoy yourself if you don’t expect much character development, but do look forward to some creative uses of improvised weapons, like a hammer and a septic tank lid.

A light touch doesn’t suit the heavy themes in The Power, a horror psychodrama that’s specifically concerned with sexual misconduct and then more generally about the abuse of (you guessed it) power at a London hospital.

The director's gifted collaborators sometimes perk up this listless parable, but never enough to sell its second-hand fatalism.

The Vault is not, in other words, just derivative—it’s also flabby and bland.

And when the movie’s over, nothing is resolved that the filmmakers didn’t side-step or reduce to a few unconvincing symbols of hope for a more equitable future. You might like Enforcement if that’s a line you already want to buy; there’s otherwise not much here to change your mind.

Thankfully, despite its creators’ general fussiness, The Truffle Hunters is good enough, if only because guys like Carlo and Angelo are more charming than they are eccentric.

What makes The Vigil so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis.

Hovannisian's documentary would be much more convincing if he picked a single aspect of Tankian’s activism—or composing, or personality—and considered it in greater detail.

The ensemble cast members all dutifully perform their roles, but there’s not much for them to sink their teeth into.

This may be Goro Miyazaki’s most eccentric feature yet, but it’s also his least engaging. Earwig and the Witch doesn’t move the way it should, and that’s lethal when your last name is Miyazaki.

The unsettling mood and creeping pace of the Indonesian horror movie The Queen of Black Magic take some getting used to.

Watching Harlow struggle with the simultaneously impersonal and obviously prejudiced nature of his imprisonment is often enough to make Caged seem like more than the sum of its parts.

Psycho Goreman isn’t clever or lively enough to be more than fitfully fun, especially given how much time is spent mocking generic, but painstakingly recreated plot contrivances.

An ambitious black comedy that never goes far enough.

The movie version of The Reason I Jump does not, in other words, successfully illustrate what its title promises, but rather generalizes about a sensitive topic to the point of inadvertently making it seem more unapproachable.