Jake Cole

Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.

For a story that seeks to champion the unpredictability and finite quality of life, Ares ultimately feels trapped by the inertia of working within the parameters set by its no less flimsy predecessors.

The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.

Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.

This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.

Madame Web grinds to a halt as it gets bogged down in scene after scene of characters, both good and bad, standing around explaining their backgrounds, hang-ups, and desires.

And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.

The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is.

The film sprints past its targets, dealing glancing blows to subjects that have already been obliterated by decades’ worth of Tinseltown parodies.

The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.

The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.

The film fails to build on the whimsical foundation of the first film in any way.

Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.

Don’t Worry Darling has the swing-for-the-fences ambition that should have at least made it a noble and compelling folly, but its repetitiveness frustratingly undercuts its grandiosity.

Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.

The film proves again that the modern-day veneration of Jane Austen as the patron saint of the rom-com is also an act of simplification.

Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.

Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.

The film’s toothless showbiz satire mostly comes down to teasing its characters for their entitlement and self-importance.

The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film.

The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.

The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.

Though flattering through and through, the film is ironically removed from the charms of the worshipped original.

The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.

On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.

The tired, tasteless gimmick at the center of the film inadvertently reveals its entire problem of perspective.

As soon as LeBron and Dom are sucked into computer space, A New Legacy largely abandons its underlying criticism of soulless corporate regurgitation of art-as-product and instead becomes an exhausting tour through the Warner Bros. catalog.

In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.

In spite of its occasionally engaging displays of gnarly brutality, the film too often feels like an adaptation of a player select screen.

Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.

The film fails to use its millennial characters to investigate contemporary attitudes about the possibility of world annihilation.

Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.

The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.

The film may leave you wondering what purpose this franchise serves if not to give expression to Michael Bay's nationalist, racist, and misogynistic instincts.

This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.

For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.

As a suspense film, it’s so sluggishly structured that it borders on the avant-garde.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.

Portraying Tubman above all else as a vessel for a higher power ironically only makes her appear less tangible.

Motherless Brooklyn feels altogether too tidy, a film that revives many of the touchstones of noir, but never that throbbing unease that courses through the classics of the genre.

The film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.

The film lacks for the more lacerating, freely parodic energy of The Larry Sanders Show and 30 Rock.

The film is an all-too-fitting whimper of a conclusion to a franchise that never remotely fulfilled its potential.

Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake is content to trace the original’s narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.

The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.

The Mexico of this film is merely a place of abject lawlessness, whose hellishness exists only to stoke our fascination for how the protagonist grows as a person by drawing on her inner strength.

The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.

The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy.

One may wish that the entire film had restaged the entirely of Tchaikovsky's ballet rather than reimagine it as an ultimately lifeless epic fantasy.

The final act's full-tilt embrace of action effectively undermines Tom Hardy's flashes of actorly idiosyncrasy.

The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.

Vox Lux sets up its main character as a beneficiary of tragedy, opening up a compellingly macabre narrative about how school shootings are becoming so commonplace that they can effectively serve as launchpads for stardom. But that idea goes nowhere, as Vox Lux proceeds to play Celeste's experience in the music industry mostly straight.

Fahrenheit 11/9 represents a sincerely bold attempt to capture the overwhelming civic decay that led to our current political crisis, but Michel Moore’s circus-showman duplicity is as crass and abhorrently self-promoting as that of Donald Trump.

Jonah Hill constantly falls back on providing vague justification for his characters' behaviors, along with spoonfuls of sentiment to let the more dour moments go down easier.

Peterloo so simply recounts the details of its subject matter that its culminating horror unsettlingly feels like little more than a cathartic inevitability.

By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.

Jonathan and Josh Baker's Kin, a feature that comprises little more than an extended introduction to its characters, resembles a TV pilot that's been released into theaters as a standalone property.

When Mark Wahlberg's Silva isn't wielding run-on sentences as military-grade weapons, he barks out derivative commands and asinine statements that make him sound like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty.

It reduces the domestication of wolves to a series of simplistic interactions that don’t exactly convey the difficulties of a wild animal overcoming millennia of instinct.

The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.

The film has the tone and look of a direct-to-video feature, and some shots of Keanu Reeves are so waxen that the actor almost looks rotoscoped.

Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.

Even the depiction of how both men waver during the Wimbledon final — of Borg losing his cool while McEnroe avoids succumbing to petulance — fails to tie into the larger portrait of their rivalry.

Submergence's globetrotting only succeeds at exposing the hollowness of the characters at the film's center.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

This isn’t an adaptation of a video game so much as an adaptation of a video game’s tutorial level.

At a time when Americans are constantly bombarded with reports of unpunished police brutality, the film suggests that the true problem with justice in our country is that law enforcement isn't violent enough.

When the film's tone slides so firmly back into the murk, it's hard not to see DC's notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.

The Snowman is missing so much basic connective tissue as to be rendered almost completely inexplicable.

The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret

The hollow grandeur of the film's action only gives the proceedings a glib undertone that also undermines the rare occasions of earnestness that the heroes exhibit toward fallen comrades.

There's a blank space at the core of Molly's Game that the protagonist cannot fill, unable as she is to represent anything beyond her esoteric narrative of unorthodox self-actualization.

The only thing that offsets the film's self-negating revisionism are the scenes involving Gillian Anderson vicereine.

The decade-long effort to bring the Dark Tower books to the screen looks like a cheap, unauthorized cash-in.

The tediously forestalled twists suck away time from what should be the film's focus—its action—and leaves only two scenes worthy of celebration.

In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.

The sensory overload of Michael Bay's hyperkinetic cinema is such that it eradicates any actual sense of place.

Johnny Depp’s perfunctory gestures and flailing pratfalls befit a film that brings the franchise’s theme-park roots full circle.

For all the attempts to update King Arthur to be cool and sexy, neither the character nor the film around him musters any spark.

The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.

Every creature here that's intended to burrow themselves into the audience’s nightmares are less wonders of imagination than of size.

There's nothing at the center of Live by Night, no foundation of drama to ground the convoluted mash-up of so many genre tropes.

It's impossible to even laugh at Inferno given how Ron Howard reduces the material to a dull spectacle of earnest puzzle-solving.

The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.

Ewan McGregor’s inert adaption smooths out the Philip Roth novel's eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.

This is a left-footed and clumsily insistent work, exposing the worst aspects inherent to the Dardennes' style.

The film should have been a cautionary tale, but in Peter Berg's hands, it's a hollow account of the resilience of the human spirit.

Like the recruited criminals themselves, the film longs to be bad, yet its forced by outside pressures to follow narrow, preset rules.

One of the more admirable traits of the original Bourne trilogy is how little pleasure it takes in its violence, but Jason Bourne revels in its vicious action sequences.

The film's action sequences are a jumble of movement and cuts that have no discernible relation to the actual motion of the characters.

The overriding despair of Winter's War's imagery calls into question who, exactly, the film is for.

The film is frequently guilty of the same obsolescence it accuses the characters of embodying.

As ever, Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists' wistfulness with grotesquerie.

It careens from carnage to group therapy so wildly that the action never gets to build and the conversations just repeat themselves.

The only way that this film could be any more racist is if the Dwyer family holed up with Lillian Gish and waited for the Klan to save them.