Dom Sinacola

White Elephant too often proceeds as dull and dreamy, an occasionally violent eulogy for a life of crime for which we have little context.

The context, however much of it there is, affects little, and the whole film begins to resemble a fetish object more than an adaptation. In a bad way.

Bad Boys for Life is better than it should be—the audience at my screening clapped when it ended—but not quite up to being what it must: a reminder that, you know what, a thousand years from now, Bad Boys will still fucking be here.

It doesn’t necessarily matter—nothing matters, really—but Dark Fate is so self-serious, so expositionally overwhelming, that its tendency to tell rather than show bleeds into its every aspect.

The sequel feels compromised, lumped with easy lessons about family and community, piecemeal and cobbled together from bigger ideas and the ever-nagging intuition that the sell-by date on the franchise has long expired.

Do not let anyone tell you that Joker captures our specific time, represents our specific society, both births and defines our specific zeitgeist, grabs ahold of our specific faces and breathes smoke down our throats. It doesn’t. Joker is, more than anything, fine. And we, more than anything, are not.

Compared to the eight films preceding it, the mindlessness of Hobbs & Shaw isn’t a sign of humble poptimist genius, just of something less than what it could have been.

Dark Phoenix was always destined to fail. Limiting the sprawling story to one main arc severely debilitates the original’s emotional resonance, but avoiding Apocalypse’s swollen plot and stakes-less character narratives means reigning in an essentially big saga and cutting all of its awe down to some rote CGI. To make this work in one movie is to deny the essence of the source text.

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot is an exquisitely boring movie, a promise of high-concept adventure that only delivers a stiflingly melancholy ode to the unknown soldier.

For some, Piercing may be a sign of an exceptionally talented filmmaker still finding his stride, this expertly handled erotic thriller an imaginative, stylized headache. For others, Piercing may be all those things, but ultimately not worth the punishment.

For every overgeneralization Macdonald leans into or too-obvious historic parallels he lets fly, there is a corresponding performance, ebullient and transcendent—a purity Macdonald, and his viewers for that matter, can’t help but sour.

Lawrence (and his star, Jennifer Lawrence) want to leave no doubt that this is the lurid, infuriating stuff of the adult-minded, drenched in sophistication and pain—much like Lawrence’s dystopic vision for The Hunger Games, only anchored in the hyperreal world of the New Cold War we may be starting to realize isn’t “new” at all.

None of it ever escalates past a baseline of digestible insanity, which isn’t really all that insane when the pasts of Cage and Taylor are littered with the skeletons of seedier films and more preposterous premises.

Den of Thieves is such a dumb misunderstanding of the genres in which it plays, such a loud, interminable shart of unmitigated machismo, such a heavy-handed rip-off of Heat and The Usual Suspects and even Ocean’s Eleven (and maybe even The Fast and the Furious, but for scumbags) that it feels anachronistic on arrival, the kind of melodramatic, pulpy studio action flick that doesn’t get made anymore because it shouldn’t.