Jake Cole

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.