Simon Abrams

Jana Nayagan assaults viewers with AI animation throughout, not only in big set pieces, but interstitial scenes featuring AI extras and even some AI-enhanced versions of the main cast members. This environmentally destructive and aesthetically displeasing technology enables many of the filmmakers’ worst ideas, which are only big in scale. And if AI art is the rancid icing on “Jana Nayagan”’s proverbial cake, it can’t be scraped off without taking most of the flavor and texture with it.

Kore-eda’s animating curiosity makes his latest feature more compelling than not, but you’ll still have to make your own leap of faith in order to accept the movie’s limited terms and conditions.

And while it’s sometimes fun to shout at the screen—don’t drink that tea!—the speed with which the filmmakers dangle and then defuse various loaded scenarios eventually creates its own frustrating pattern. So while “The Truthers” isn’t a deconstruction of the genre, it does repeatedly deny viewers the formulaic pleasures that it promises.

Among other things, “Drunken Noodles” is a rich and often thrilling trip into writer/director Lucio Castro’s personal understanding of how queer romance, sexual pleasure, and mind-expanding art can only flourish when we have enough room and receptivity to feel that everything inside us is either naturally or instinctively related.

Other, better movies will inevitably come to mind as you watch “Kraken”—not because it’s so bad, but rather because it might have been as good as you hoped.

Watching seasoned older comedians target the young for caring too much is bad enough, but seeing them miss even their softest targets makes Scary Movie the most embarrassing movie spoof since Scary Movie.

Another World may not check off all of your boxes, but it largely succeeds on its own terms.

While Power Ballad is sometimes a good enough hang, especially during its opening half, its sitcom humor never rises to its stars’ level.

Corporate Retreat might be the worst movie of the year, not because it’s unpleasant, cliched, and gory, too, but because its filmmakers seem to have as little regard for their audience as they do for their craft.

Sure, Mortal Kombat II has enough fight scenes and gore to deliver exactly what fans of the games expect from these movies. Then again, the makers of this new franchise-booster don’t seem to know how to fill the rest of their movie’s 116-minute runtime. They tie up loose ends from the last movie whenever they’re not nudging their new protagonists through the motions of another patchwork action-fantasy that’s too hip to be sincere and too hacky to be moving.