By title alone, Cosmoball sounds like you’re in for dull science fiction or novelty porn. For the record, the movie in question is sci-fi, but either way, it’s not something you’ll want to admit to watching.

As depicted in the Russian film Cosmoball, the future plays home to one of those sci-fi dichotomies where one environment is all super-high-tech and tricked-out, while the other dresses the populace in pieces of scavenged Tupperware. In the former, elite athletes play Cosmoball; in the latter, our unemployed teen scamp of a protagonist, Anton (Evgeniy Romantsov, free of charisma), waits in line for rationed water amid fellow commoners who appear to be doing Hook cosplay in the lobby of Rainforest Cafe — the one in Gurney Mills, Illinois, at that.

But back to the spectator sport of Cosmoball: Played in an indoor arena, the game is like soccer, except the players must have the power of teleportation. Also, only after five consecutive kicks does the opponent’s goal materialize. Also, it’s broadcast in the sky. Also, exploding balls of fire delight an all-alien audience only a Lucas could love. Also, a Rip Taylor-esque announcer pies himself in the face like a self-loathing clown whenever a goal is scored.

But other than that, just like soccer. Hell, even one player is named Pelé!

Because Anton needs money for his ailing mom’s Rx, because Anton crushes hard on Cosmoball star player Natasha (Viktoriya Agalakova) and because the team has an opening on the roster, it should surprise no one that Anton:
• can kick good!
• can teleport!
• will be recruited to join the team!
• will win Natasha’s heart!
• will be assigned a pet that looks like a tentacled ViewMaster!
• involuntarily teleports whenever he gets an unexpected boner!
• possesses a microscopic particle that the villain Cherno — who looks like a fist mated with Thanos — needs to complete a “protogene” that, once fully assembled, will grant Cherno power over the universe!
• will have his DNA attempt to be, um, “extracted” by a sexy waif (a WILF?) actually working for Cherno!

Okay, so maybe those last four fall under “Wait, wha-huh?” And for good reason: Director Dzhanik Fayziev and his writers’ room — repeat: writers’ room — pile one suffocating element atop another atop another, as if they’re world-building as they go … because they are, continuing the process until enough punishing minutes have passed that they risk using up the world’s entire supply of pixels if they don’t get to the climax. Folks, this isn’t storytelling; it’s rule-sharing.

With a cloying English dub and each frame green-screened into a cartoon artifice, it comes off possibly the most imbecilic family-friendly fantasy since that space-kangaroo movie a quarter-century ago. Somewhere, Soviet SF king Andrei Tarkovsky cries, “The fuck you say?” (Or, per Google Translate, “Какого хрена вы говорите?”) —Rod Lott

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I like the apocalypse and I love rock ’n’ roll, so the Japanese flick Burst City already has a lot going for it. Set in the decimated outskirts of Tokyo, here we find dystopian punkers fighting the dapper yakuza in a war of loud, noise-crunching guitars and repeating guns in a low-budget battle for … well, I’m not exactly sure — control of the nuclear power plant they live near, maybe?

Every night, sullen teens gather to hear the music of bands like The Stalin, The Roosters and so on, in a somewhat peaceful assembly of fans looking to tear shit up. When the yakuza comes around aiming to start trouble — as well as two Mad Max-like weirdos on a motorcycle — all hell breaks loose and something of a war is started, with the corrupt police coming in for a rip-’em-up finale.

Listed as a landmark in “cyberpunk cinema,” Burst City has not much of anything “cyber,” but there’s plenty of punk as these underground hooligans with soul-destroying glares whip chains and sling guitars in an epic showdown I imagine Japan, at the time, was craving.

Burst City is the cinematic debut from the director of the enjoyably insane Electric Dragon 80.000 V, Sogo Ishii, who kinetically manages to capture the manic aura the punk scene in Japan had at the time, with a setting far ahead of itself. It’s an unique stroke of filmmaking mishmash that America would try to copy with numerous films in the 1980s, none of them very good. —Louis Fowler

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For moviegoers who have longed to see Dwayne Johnson literally arguing with an albino gorilla via sign language, including one flip o’ the bird, Rampage answers your prayers. It also reunites Johnson with his San Andreas and Journey 2 director, Brad Peyton, officially making it a hat trick. Maybe you were praying for that, too?

Based on the semi-classic arcade game of giant monsters destroying buildings, Rampage indirectly acquires its big bads from the heavens when an Energyne corporation space station explodes, raining a trio of canisters across America. Since the jars contain a genetically edited pathogen that causes rapid growth and mutation, each is consumed by and/or exposed to a different animal — conveniently, those of the game: a wolf, a crocodile and that aforementioned ape.

The latter lives at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary, where Davis Oyoke (Johnson) works as some kind of souped-up zookeeper. Because he has huge muscles that might also be the product of rapid growth and mutation, Oyoke is a shoo-in at saving the world — or at least the Windy City — when all three creatures converge on Chicago’s Energyne HQ, lured there by radio signals sent by the tech firm’s greedy CEO (Malin Akerman, 2009’s Watchmen) and her ineffectual brother (Obvious Child’s Jake Lacy, either overplaying dopiness or being the only one cognizant of the source material’s campiness).

Oyoke is assisted by Energyne’s former engineer/current whistleblower (Naomie Harris, Spectre), who explains just enough science behind her CRISPR research to make the exceedingly stupid premise plausible. What I didn’t know until after the film: “CRISPR” is actual DNA terminology and not some off-brand air fryer.

Porting his Jumanji-sm appeal straight to another family-friendly piece of IP, Johnson does what he does well, which is rely on his massive charm, even if he recognizes it only goes so far: to when the soullessness of CGI takes hold to render a triple-bout monster mash in that last third. Johnson can stare wide-eyed all he wants, but it doesn’t make the sequence fun. (A one-line exception: “Of course the wolf flies.”) An empty-calorie blockbuster that should play better, Rampage gives you no quarter. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Na-na-na-na-na-na-Bat … woman?

On the not-so-sullen streets of Acapulco, a lone vigilante of the daylight stalks her chubby prey using a sporty convertible, a few police pals and, best of all, a lucha libre alter ego with the exact same name: the Batwoman.

When fellow wrestlers are found dead on the beach, she’s called in to help solve these crafty crimes in her very sleek and hyper-sexy costume, which is basically a black bikini with a Batman cowl; if I saw her in real life, my knees would shake, too, but probably not out of fear.

The murderers are (somewhat) evil scientists and their middle-aged henchmen, lounging in lab coats on a luxury yacht near the beach. So powerful is their supposed reign of terror, that at one point the Batwoman shows up on a much smaller speedboat, only to be told to go home … and it works!

In between chasing down leads, of course the Batwoman tears up the mat, practicing wrestling moves and lucha throws, oddly enough in an even bulkier Bat-costume — think her superhero outfit, but as a sweatsuit instead. Still, the various bouts are a great way to stretch out this already thin superhero soup.

Maura Monti, as the Batwoman, is a defiantly sensual presence who does a good job of talking down baddies and clothespinning opponents alike. It’s a strong message The Batwoman should have really gone out on, but instead, it ends with her utterly afraid of a mouse while her police pals laugh at her expense. —Louis Fowler

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Whereas the directing duo’s first feature, Resolution, centered on drug withdrawal, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s fourth, Synchronic, enables and endorses a pharmaceutical bender. But, hey, as you’ll see, it’s for a good cause!

In New Orleans, word on the street is all about a new designer drug called Synchronic. Like DMT, it’s highly hallucinogenic, pummeling the user’s pineal gland into psychoactive submission. Side effects include venomous snakebites, sword stabbings and elevator-shaft dismemberments. That’s because the drug transports the user back in time — prehistoric, even — at seven-minute intervals with lasting real-world results.

As paramedics, best buds Steve (Anthony Mackie, Avengers’ Falcon) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan, Fifty Shades of Grey’s BDSM BMOC) have seen the worst of that damage. But when Dennis’ sullen teen daughter (Ally Ioannides, TV’s Into the Badlands) disappears after a dose and doesn’t come back? Steve starts experimenting to see if she can be retrieved. That’s when things get — in his words — “kangaroo-shit loony.”

Rich in New Orleans tradition and superstition, Synchronic‘s story is haunted by the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina. The filmmakers shoot the city as if in recovery — under a woozy, narcotized haze, with a camera that sometimes floats like a week-old helium balloon and the sky coated in an unnatural baby-aspirin orange. The sudden merging of time periods in a Bourbon Street slipstream gives the movie its strongest and most memorable visuals, as worlds collide with an unsettling weirdness as “off” as the mutated flora and fauna of Annihilation, to name another extraordinary modern film that doesn’t play by sci-fi’s standard rules. As a viewer accustomed to every templated move of the genre, I like not knowing quite where a film is headed.

Although initially a two-hander, Synchronic shifts focus to Steve and his time-travel tests, which Mackie is amiable enough to sell. You can’t help but like his deeply flawed character as over and over, he embarks on what increasingly looks to be a suicide mission, strictly out of brotherly love for his lifelong friend. That sidelines Dennis to cope and mourn — more or less offscreen — with his wife (Katie Aselton, 2015’s The Gift). Effectively hamstrung against Mackie’s magnetism, Dornan is a bit of a nonentity as Dennis, but in the works of Moorhead & Benson (as they now bill themselves, like a cigarette brand), the concept is the star. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.