Jacob Oller

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.