Simon Abrams

Pegg and Temple’s responsive, well-attuned performances are actually the most frustrating things about Lost Transmissions since they’re good enough to make you want to care, even when their characters don’t seem to be worth caring about.

Almost everything that’s enjoyable about Escape From Pretoria is a variation on stuff you’ve probably seen in superior prison movies, though Radcliffe’s haunted performance is exceptionally compelling.

There’s not much to Porumboiu’s latest beyond a surplus of plot twists and double crosses.

Established “My Hero Academia” fans will probably enjoy Class 1-A’s typically endearing group dynamic, even if none of the jokes in the movie are that great. And their big fight with Nine is genuinely well-staged and climactic, thanks to some impressive computer graphics and director Kenji Nagasaki’s thoughtful staging and choreography.

Greed is never the sum of its best parts since other actors — especially Jamie Blackley, who, playing young McCreadie in a series of flashbacks, is fine but relatively disappointing — can’t pull off the movie’s delicate balance of broad humor and po-faced drama.

Guns Akimbo may be too mild to be memorable, but it is a mostly satisfying time-waster.

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.

Sonic the Hedgehog is the worst kind of bad movie: it's too inoffensive to be hated and too wretched to be enjoyable.

The Nowhere Inn . . . is a collection of comedic and musical sketches that are not funny, weird or thoughtful enough to sell its creators’ insistent, but mostly trite and undeveloped, ideas about the performative nature of self-fashioning and creative authenticity.

The sprawling scope of The Traitor is a big part of its dryly funny (though never in a ha-ha kind of way) appeal, and that takes some getting used to.

The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity.

Weathering With You, Shinkai’s latest animated romantic-fantasy to be released in America, has the same spark of ingenuity and consistency of vision as his earlier work.

There’s ultimately too much strained seriousness in The Song of Names' dramatically flimsy and symbolically heavy episodic narrative, making Girard and Caine’s already dated feel-good historical drama seem especially tacky.

The sturdy but shallow martial arts melodrama Ip Man 4: The Finale isn’t much more than what fans have already gotten from the popular action franchise.

Sappy, slow, and mostly effective.

There are a lot of promising ideas here, but none are developed so much that this remake feels essential.

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

The predictably loud and shockingly boring action caper 6 Underground is one-man-brand director Michael Bay’s answer to the “Fast & Furious” series.

The best thing I can say about Daniel Isn’t Real is that it’s a promising early feature made by young artists who haven’t yet worked out how to express and/or synthesize what they like about their favorite artists and their work. It’s all style and very little substance.

Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make In Fabric as mesmerizing as its subject: salesmanship as a sinister, inescapable form of hypnosis.

There’s a significant difference in quality between the mediocre scenario (and dialogue) and thrilling production design (and direction) in White Snake.

Shooting the Mafia is, if nothing else, a decent introduction to Battaglia’s work, even if the rest of Loginotto’s primer doesn’t tell us much about who Battaglia is, or how to appreciate what she does.

Warrior Queen is not the first movie about this subject to be helmed by a woman — “Manikarnika” was co-directed by star Kangana Ranaut — nor does it feature a stand-out performance like those other movies do (Ranaut is very good in “Manikarnika”). So while I suppose you could do worse than The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, I know you could do better.

Granted, the movie does feature a few endearingly goofy scenes where Cage acts like Humphrey Bogart, with sweat on his brow, a stogie in his mouth, and a haughty putdown for anybody who makes eye contact with him. But he basically already did that in Paul Schrader’s underwhelming 2016 Ed Bunker adaptation “Dog Eat Dog.”

Gender inequality may be a potentially complicating factor when it comes to sexual trauma (i.e., men can also be abused by women), but that provocative conceit isn’t considered with much care or intelligence.

Stevens slowly and subtly unpacks that heady, provocative conceit with care and in a way that makes his directorial debut feel like the arrival of a major new talent.

The Elephant Queen may not suit every adult viewers’ taste, but it is exceptionally sensitive and consistently thoughtful, especially when it’s concerned with the sorts of facts of life of which younger kids are probably already vaguely aware.

A spectacularly disjointed comedy that’s only superficially about two foul-mouthed, but well-meaning dopes who light and pass the proverbial torch to the next generation of slackers. “Reboot” is more of an ego trip for Smith, an amiable, creatively frustrated pop artist who survived a major health crisis — one that even he knows he can’t shut up about.