Jake Cole

Jaume Collet-Serra’s deft touches elevate what otherwise feels like another formulaic contemporary Disney blockbuster.

Where Kandahar is most intriguing is in the oddly even-handed depiction of both American and Middle-Eastern characters as largely exasperated professionals going about their grisly work because they’re too old to pivot to a different job.

It arrives prepackaged with suggested comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat that it never earns because of its dreary literal-mindedness.

Thelma's transition into a paranormal thriller doesn’t complicate its initially potent character study.

Unfortunately, the care with which the filmmakers set up Them That Follow’s context and their characters crumbles in the final act.

The film is never more compelling than when relying on footage of the real radical DREAMer group the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.

A Private War ultimately sides with the late journalist’s assertion that the whos and whys of war matter far less in journalism than finding the right human-interest angle to hook an audience.

Steven S. DeKnight's film lacks for Guillermo del Toro's visual acumen, but it makes up for that with an energetic sense of chaos throughout its front-and-center skirmishes, and in the end hedges closer to the nightmarish intensity of such inspirational texts as Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Aaron Henry is prone to pulling back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale.

On paper, anime master Hosoda Mamoru’s Scarlet sounds positively electrifying.

By never committing to neo-screwball antics nor a more serious analysis of codependency, the film ends up stranded in emotional ambiguity.

Of course, when the action gets underway, Bay unleashes that flashy id of his, and all of his flaws as a titan of blockbuster filmmaking come to the fore.

The only element that significantly differentiates this documentary from its peers is Louis Theroux's good-natured cheekiness.

This is an engaging, no-frills entertainment that still fails to justify its reason for being.

The film juggles a “follow the money” procedural with corporate espionage thriller, producing two competing tones that never reconcile into one fluid narrative.

Tony Stone’s avoidance of emotional manipulation in dramatizing Ted Kaczynski’s terror campaign is admirable, but only up to a point.

As the film explodes into numerous subplots that rapidly move far apart from one another, it necessitates constant leaps between characters and locations that only further disrupt the narrative flow of the proceedings.

The protracted rubbernecking at Elvis’s inexorable decline epitomizes a film that regularly backs away from its keenest observations about the icon to merely, and superficially, bask in his star power.

Not even Alvin Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as his work itself.

Only in the film’s climax, when the heroes are in the same confined area and can thus better calibrate their constant shifts in position, does the action attain a logical sense of movement and timing.

If the rest of it had been as driven by such a ferocious sense of purpose as its final act, Havoc would be one of the finest action movies of the decade so far.

This is a rare case of a film that’s stronger when it colors inside the lines than radically traces outside of them.

Though its lugubrious and plodding narrative spins its wheels ahead of someone coming along to fill T’Challa’s shoes, Wakanda Forever does stand out for its depictions of grief.

As in Destin Daniel Cretton’s previous feature, Short Term 12, the oscillations between sociological horror and misty-eyed sentimentality call attention to how meticulously the film arranges its emotional punches.

The juxtapositions between backroom politicking, intimate family drama, and the occasional lurches into action often give the impression of a TV season’s worth of content crammed into two hours.

By resolving its story around a mano-a-mano, the film narrows its understanding of a system in which exploitation is privatized.

The only saving grace of the film's mostly recycled horrors is how they deepen Michael Fassbender's android David.

The documentary often struggles to extract deeper thoughts from its subject about her wild career as a pioneering rock feminist.