Ultimately, for all its wildly entertaining elements, Kalki 2898 AD feels like too much of a good thing, resembling the sort of lavish buffet meal that leaves you feeling overstuffed and exhausted. But fans of this particular style of cinema are not likely to mind.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever never quite lands its most poignant moments because Imogen and her siblings remain stubbornly at a distance.

Fun is banished from Aja’s latest, which starts out mildly intriguing and chalks up a few bracing jump scares before running out of juice.

If his new movie feels 25 years too late, it’s also a reminder of what made the original so special in its day. Those who manage to discover The Killer through this serviceable remake would be better off revisiting the one that started it all.

If the film teeters unsteadily between sci-fi and psychology, it nonetheless confirms Clapin’s visual talents, which are backed by a dreamy score from Dan Levy, who also scored I Lost My Body. In its best moments, Meanwhile on Earth takes us beyond our desolate everyday lives to a place we can indeed dream of — and also witness on screen.

The film yearns to capture the stages of this emotional exhumation, but a clunky screenplay makes for a less affecting watch.

This violent first feature is carried more by leads Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan than by its dour storytelling.

Chew-Bose’s screenplay doesn’t explore the characters deeply enough to replace the book’s jaw-dropping quality with any psychological depth.

Despite bursts of intelligence, especially when it comes to conveying the fractured quality of trauma narratives, Without Blood’s vagueness ends up blunting many of its lessons.

Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts.

Vigalondo’s film has a compelling premise, but the story (he also wrote the screenplay) gets away from him, resulting in a film that never quite hits its stride.

Is it all poetry or just a put-on? Again, Baby Invasion is a bit of both, and viewers are likely to either vibe out or tune out.

Had all those assets been funneled into a movie with some tonal consistency and a script that built credible relationships, the result might have been a nasty bit of fun. Instead, it wobbles awkwardly between creeping mob menace and scrappy sitcom, inching toward a violent climax that still doesn’t acquire cohesion.

For a movie that aspires to antic comedy, it brings way too much casting firepower to a slim plot and even sketchier character development. Whether a streaming audience will even notice the mis-calibration is probably irrelevant, as long as they remember the mismatched brothers.

Devara: Part 1 is ambitious, exhausting and so high-decibel that when it’s finished, after nearly three hours, you might need to pause and reorient to reality. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing.

Derrickson offers a handful of memorable shots and genuine jump scares, but the director’s attempts to build dread in these moments come too late to have their intended impact. With so much of the film dedicated to establishing Levi and Drasa’s backstory and their romance, The Gorge is slow to get going on the action.

Director Campbell clearly knows his way around this sort of material, resulting in some tense, well-staged action sequences that make Cleaner reasonably diverting for its concise running time. But the film never achieves the heights of the classic actioners that clearly inspired it, and its overuse of familiar genre tropes (for once, can’t the main villain be uncharismatic, like so many in real life?) soon becomes wearisome.

Despite solid performances from Edebiri and Malkovich, Opus never takes off. It mostly meanders, relying on leaden expository monologues to move the plot, and rarely delivers on the promised horror of its atmosphere.

Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap has a creepy sense of dread, striking images of invasive nature and an intriguing baseline about the otherworldly properties of sound, making it a somewhat promising debut feature.

Despite its shadowy visuals and insidious soundscape, it’s neither frightening enough to play like full-fledged horror, nor complex or curious enough to pack much weight as psychological drama.

Gates offers an incredibly compelling premise, shedding light on the scale of military propaganda in the United States, but in taking on so much, her film ends up not saying enough.

With Game Changer (which this critic saw dubbed in in Hindi), Shankar’s signature maximalist storytelling instincts have gone into overdrive. Every beat is heightened. Every expression is exaggerated. Every emotion is drilled into our brains. For two hours and 45 minutes, this film veers between ridiculous and even more ridiculous.

Taking place in real time, Mercy mercifully moves along fairly briskly. But after it’s over you’ll definitely feel the need for a digital detox.

As riveting as she is, Roberts ultimately is ill-served by a film so studiously cryptic that it ends up just frustrating. To be fair, there are several electric confrontations, distributed evenly enough to ensure that After the Hunt remains absorbing. But even so, this is a date movie to be used in relationship sabotage maneuvers.

I wish I could say I found Hot Milk affecting, but it’s continually dragged down by inertia, by a writer-director whose approach is too intellectual to give space to emotion.

My problem with The Age of Disclosure isn’t the lack of opposing voices. It’s that there couldn’t be experts debunking anything here. Nothing is proven, and thus nothing can be refuted.

The problems with The Rivals of Amziah King emerge in the stitching, when Patterson (working with editor Patrick J. Smith) must turn a series of fine vignettes and memorable musical interludes into a coherent narrative.

The film is the sort of mindless, glossy entertainment tailor-made for streaming, even if its large-scale action sequences and exciting locations would look great on the big screen.