Jake Cole

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.

Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.

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

The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.

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.

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.

Terminator Genisys feels like being trapped in a conversation with a child breathlessly recounting the highlights of the preceding movies.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.