Jacob Oller

Strange World’s embrace and rejection of both tradition and modernity can be confounding, despite the undeniable beauty it finds along the way.

Orienteering from an unsure script, Slumberland’s uninventive visual language dithers around in unreality while leaving its feet firmly planted in the saddest parts of the real world.

What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline great, is that it so deftly wins us to its cause anyway. It’s absolutely electric filmmaking.

Violence, political strife, marital problems—the world keeps on turning, but Before, Now & Then explores what’s needed to hold steady through it all.

Those unfortunate enough to populate Mr. Harrigan’s Phone must be as dumb as the movie thinks we are. This low opinion of its audience is apparent in every step of its narrative and in some of its stranger creative choices.

Bros says many of the right things, often loudly and directly, as it reblazes an already well-marked trail towards normative convention.

Its predictability is pleasingly colored by countless icky-fun, yokai-inspired curse-monsters.

A war epic between the people and the state, it sprints through a grassroots resistance movement like a brushfire: Blinding, dangerous, all-consuming.

Medieval’s best quality is that it might make you do your reading, but as a film about Jan Žižka and his exciting, catalytic moment in history, it’s less interesting than the dozen Wikipedia tabs it might cause you to open.

The look of Dragon Ball is changing, and Super Hero represents its growing pains. But it also represents a willingness to look its longevity in the face and, like all long-running serials, see what passing the torch once again really means.

While Plaza continues to make her case as a versatile A-lister capable of leading the more complex version of this kind of heist film, Emily the Criminal is a little like an initiation that never needed to happen. Her bonafides are proven. But it still stands as another showcase for her, as she shines even through its uninspired racket.

A small cadre of performers and a play-like production—split into three contained acts that leap decades and single-location settings—keep the indie charmingly subdued, but the movie is so literal when drawing attention to its own underdeveloped themes that it boldly challenges you to be ignorant of the genre’s most basic philosophical bullet points.

Writer/director Andrew Semans’ sophomore feature pulses with black-hearted humor and cruelties so odd as to be undeniably believable, but it’s Hall’s expressive transformation that drives the film’s blood into its final manic fever.

None of The Gray Man’s still-Bourne thrills are executed with the precise elegance of John Wick, the winking doggery of James Bond or the joyful craftsmanship of Mission: Impossible. Rather, its chaotic Grand Theft Auto filmmaking skates by with the sloppy sufficiency of its own protagonist.

Where the Crawdads Sing is shallow, predictable and just broad enough that you can understand why it sold so well as a half-lurid paperback. Newman’s work adapting it makes its derivative elements as obvious as a bad accent, but its chart-topping, tone-deaf mediocrity is faithfully replicated.

A delightful new-school deconstruction of old-school Romantic adventure that never compromises on the lushness of setting, color and emotion inherent in the latter, The Sea Beast rises to the front of Netflix’s animated offerings like a high tide.

Lightyear is a beautiful starship with precious genre cargo, functional and direct in its simple mission to carry on.

The Jurassic World franchise may have willingly chosen extinction with this final entry, but Dominion would’ve killed it off anyways.

Digging into the art world’s juicy guts and suturing it up as a compelling, ambitious sci-fi noir, Crimes of the Future thrills, even if it leaves a few stray narrative implements sewn into its scarred cavities.

The Valet parks itself squarely between the lines of established genre tropes, but with such precision and flair that you can’t help but be charmed.

Our Father’s failures aren’t in its lurid source material, but in its leering execution.

The road trip always has to end, but the excellent Hit the Road introduces an exciting filmmaker whose journey is just beginning.

As Rowling continues submerging her magical world into the same hellish and disreputable bog as her personal legacy, I wish she’d kept The Secrets of Dumbledore to herself.

Unfortunately, even though Moonshot aims high, its misfire falls all the way back down to humble terra firma.

An exceptional puberty comedy by way of Sanrio-branded Kafka, Turning Red’s truthful transformations are strikingly charming, surprisingly complex and satisfyingly heartfelt. And yes, so cute you might scream until you’re red in the face.

The Batman is ambitious and dedicated to its vision, but despite some rather obvious clues, it can’t crack how to make the World’s Greatest Detective seem like one at all. Rather, we just have another passable Batman, not different enough to outrun his legacy’s ever-growing shadow.

As wacky as it all sounds (and there are certainly punchlines to appreciate), Escobar’s creation can be shockingly moving.

It’s best when it fully commits to its subtlety. Long passages without dialogue highlight the wavering music and Todd Chandler’s artful, sometimes wry editing.

Like its muddy multi-movie gamble, the ideas are there for Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. But like its characters, it’s happy to follow the path of least resistance.

Blessed/cursed with a charmingly unwieldy title (To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar comes to mind), Good Luck to You, Leo Grande can bobble the more dramatic elements of the pair’s professional and personal relationship, but its feel-good story satisfies to completion.

Watcher flourishes as it complicates its premise beyond the unknowable and faceless desires of a shadowy silhouette.

Half mock-doc, half sci-fi two-hander, all bone-dry L.A. satire, Something in the Dirt takes a bemused look at those all too happy to exploit phenomena and each other—with the typical small-scale charm of an Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson project.

Those looking for bleak, slow horror and who are willing to suspend plenty of disbelief might want to check it out, but it won’t rock the worlds of the rest of us.

While certainly not an epiphany like the original, Nighy makes Living worthwhile through sheer force of will. In the film’s picturesque, composed, nearly stagnant beauty, he finds something honest in repression.

If you’re blessed with matching taste, where you’ll put up with a bunch of over-literal, stiff-backed oddballs dealing with a clone crisis, you’ll find a rewarding and gut-busting film that’s lingering ideas are nearly as strong as its humorous, thoughtful construction.

It’s still a bit of a romp, but sacrificing both its logical plotting and dark humor with shortcuts (and not quite having an ending, just kind of stopping once it’s out of gas), cuts the legs out from under Fresh.

Diallo undoubtedly strikes at potent topics with skill and sets her collaborators up for success...but its storylines and characters don’t convincingly coalesce.

Corbin’s film is brutal and sad, thanks to its brutal and sad origins and the abilities of Boyega, but its wandering eye is just the latest to gloss over Brian Easley.

A Love Song’s a brief and pretty little thing—less than 90 minutes—with the warm melancholy of revisiting a memory or, yes, an old jukebox love song. Walker-Silverman displays a keen eye, a deep heart and a sense of humor just silly enough to sour the saccharine.

Emergency’s ensemble sustains its premise for far longer than it should be able to, maintaining the nuanced balance of commentary-thriller-comedy whenever the script becomes too interested in just one ingredient of its complex cocktail.

Prickly characters and a knack for mortifying situations strain to break free from When You Finish Saving the World’s limited and dispassionate plotting.

Iranian master Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero spirals out a good deed to all its messy conclusions, providing fertile ground for the filmmaker’s command of aesthetic realism and closeknit interpersonal dynamics.

It doesn’t always work, and it’s a little messy in its attempt, but the ambition to manipulate a cash-grab into something evolutionary—something many legacyquels wish for but almost never attempt so brazenly—makes this Matrix the rare resurrection resulting in more than a sad IP zombie.

After so long playing with the legacy and impact of Spider-Man, No Way Home finds its way back.

Shoot it loud and there’s music playing; shoot it soft and it’s almost like praying: Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story pumps the classic for exactly that, classicism, by milking the musical’s dynamics for maximum expressiveness. Its romance? At its most tender. Its dance? At its most invigorating and desperate. Its songs? As if “Maria” or “Tonight” needed another reason to stick in your head, they’re catchier than ever.

The Summit of the Gods’ complex storytelling and convincingly lovely vistas make its philosophical case well: Whether you’re risking it all to get to a peak, to get to the bottom of a mystery, or to create a painstaking piece of animation, you’re lucky enough to have something you love.

Though director Reinaldo Marcus Green finds winning performances away from his lead, the milquetoast script serves the tennis patriarch a soft lob—one without potential to inspire or excite, and one that’s constantly reminding us that we already know how it ends.

A forgettable sci-fi with standout elements—making the most of what he’s got left, even if it’s not enough.

At times, the throwback goofiness of Ron’s Gone Wrong can be amusingly quaint, but more often the film is humorless, sentimental tripe that couldn’t find its point if it had a dozen B-bots giving GPS directions.

The feverish Knocking puts together a fittingly upsetting portrait of lonely instability through its simple premise, visually inventive first-time director and physically invested star.

Bleak and crisp and cold as an Icelandic waterfall, Lamb is a movie with a sheepheaded toddler in great knitwear, the vague looming of something sinister and a filmmaker that can’t seem to wrangle it all.

While Chase, Taylor and Konner figure out a way to give us a half-assed rundown of the gangster rise-and-fall we saw again and again in the series, they couldn’t figure out how to make that into any kind of satisfying film—let alone one worth its references to the gangster canon and let alone one that has anything at all to say about the race relations in Newark during its setting.

I could dig into any number of the movie’s unfortunate choices, bad decisions or downright detestable elements—sprinkling in faint praise like, hey, the Tony-winning Platt might be acting through five layers of bullsh*t, but he can still sing—and I’d still never capture all the reasons Dear Evan Hansen fails.

The weary and plodding story putters along the redemption arc’s curve, losing faith even in itself along the way.

Eastwood’s been riding off into the sunset for decades now, and Cry Macho’s creaky, lackadaisical hat-wave is a feature-length parody of a golden oldie.

When it simply allows us to join the pulsing masses and empathize, eye-level, with the plights of the individuals that comprise them, A La Calle captures the power of the people.

Familiar pieces playing a familiar game to familiar ends won’t make Martyrs Lane anyone’s favorite horror movie, but it’s put together well enough to offer comfort and intrigue in small doses.

A story that could truly individualize a massive, era-defining tragedy. In this telling, however, you’ll follow the plot and shed some appropriate tears, but if you come away feeling cheap, you won’t be alone.

Together, from director Stephen Daldry and writer Dennis Kelly, succeeds by candidly approaching the subject head-on—literally, as its two-handed drama starring a couple played by James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan is a moving, sharp and charmingly black-humored film of direct address.

Ahmed’s intimate performance and Tariq’s intense framing lend Mogul Mowgli a raw power that’s heady, heavy and a little heavy-handed.

While the kills, perpetrated by a being mostly just seen in mirrors, are sometimes a bit too obfuscated by their gimmick to be viscerally satisfying, they slot in perfectly with the film’s themes and aesthetic even when they’re not dumping cascades of blood.

The main attractions for Marvel’s Ten Ring circus are better when freed from the MCU’s captivity.

A film about nostalgic escape play-acting an old-fashioned genre has plenty of meta potential to comment upon the entertainment industry’s IP obsession and monetization of arrested development. Reminiscence isn’t quite assured enough for either. Instead, it’s pulp that hasn’t been boiled hard enough, its ideas slowly replaced by machinery.

Despite a few moments of heightened bliss that remind us what kind of talent it has in front of the camera (and the operatic possibilities of Hong Kong action), Raging Fire’s dull discussion of policing never lights a fire.

Like the rest of Annette, the dry humor isn’t funny enough to fully sustain its cool-kid commentary and the filmmaking is never grand enough to fully sell the caricature.

Despite its important subject and impressive access, the surprisingly surface-level film doesn’t have much to say.

Nine Days marks Oda as one of our most exciting new directors, a filmmaker possessing an innovative cinematic mind with a heart to match.

Gunn and crew have made that vibe, alternating between inventive and bloody battle and ballbusting hang-out sesh, their delightful spandex hallmark—and The Suicide Squad’s intensification of it from the GotG films feels like it’s been let loose on a particularly rowdy vacation.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and his fully crewed vessel of writers never sink all the way to the bottom, but the very best they accomplish is keeping their heads above water.