Jake Cole

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put a comedic spin on Andy Weir’s more straightforward 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, recasting the author’s hopeful vision of productive communication with extraterrestrials as an unlikely buddy comedy.

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.

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

The film's legible direction and steady escalation of tension makes for an enjoyably retro diversion.

Young Mothers is a welcome return to form for the Dardenne brothers, balancing social observation with character study.

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

In flinching at the end, The Running Man ultimately becomes akin to the very thing it criticizes: a hollow, mollifying image of empowerment that distracts from the logical conclusions of its nihilistic premise.

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain changes up its breezy account of a toddler’s growth with the occasional moment of slowed-down rumination.

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 careful balance of “stupid and clever” that solidified the legend of the first film is less steady in its much-belated sequel.

This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.

F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.

The film is a showcase for preposterous (and mostly practical) action and an unabashed sentimentality that Ethan feels for the makeshift family of spies he’s assembled over the course of the series.

Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.

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.

Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.

For all of its spiritedness, Freaky Tales wants for the sense of invention that defines the films that it references and whose moves it often falls back on borrowing.

The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.

Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.

Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.

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 star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics.

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.

Like so many latter-day Ridley Scott films, Gladiator II at once feels half-baked and overstuffed, and the lack of internal consistency robs its action of sustained tension and its comedy of bite.

As the film progresses, it consistently escalates the stakes and scale of its action, which doesn’t devolve into incomprehensible CG murk as it hurtles toward the climax.

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

The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.

Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.

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

Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.

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.

Fly Me to the Moon’s sudden shift toward the weighty throws off the pace of what had been a formulaic but charming rom-com, as the heavy-handed look at both Cole’s and Kelly’s past demons fails to mesh cohesively with the antic silliness that preceded it.

Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.

Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.

The film exemplifies Lois Patiño’s ongoing efforts to complicate docufiction approaches with otherworldly reveries meant to communicate states beyond our immediate reality.

By the time the demands of big-budget spectacle take over in the final act, a film that initially stands out from the pack in imagining a different perspective of the world ends up looking all too disappointingly like everything else in the current mega-budget cinema landscape.

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

If Ken Loach has always erred on making his political views impossible to misconstrue, he also knows how to keep his dramas from spiraling too far outside of plausibility.

Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.

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.

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.

The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.

The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.

In its own way, the film is as suitable a final work as a culminating magnum opus.

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.

The film is a gentle evocation of contemporary Japanese life in its pleasures and frustrations.

In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.

The protagonist may feel cut off from the world, but the film is deeply in harmony with it.

For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.

The Out-Laws shines when it spotlights the committed performances of its cast.

The action consistently snaps the film into focus, but it also further illustrates how badly the decision to split this narrative into two parts throws off the delicate rhythm that’s made Mission: Impossible arguably the most consistently entertaining American action franchise of all time.

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.

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

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

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.

The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.

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

The film takes its time delving into its characters' headspaces, to the point that it becomes less of a thriller than an unorthodox character study, especially as its expertly deployed use of flashback slowly forms the emotional core of the story.

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

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.

The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.

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.

With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

Day Shift’s first half is an unexpectedly focused, consistent pleasure, while the second sags under the weight of recycled set pieces.

Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

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.

The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.

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.

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

The film is initially distinguished by its poetic understatement, only for it to eventually succumb to staleness.

The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.

For all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships.

At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.

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 film stands apart for thoughtfully suggesting that Batman might actually one day make Gotham a better place, and not merely a safer one

The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.

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.

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

To see the old-timers pass the torch to their acolytes cements the improbable importance of Jackass in American pop culture.

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

There’s no attempt to hide that the film is pure fan service, a greatest-hits mashup of Spider-Man’s cinematic legacy.

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.

Like all Aaron Sorkin-penned characters, this film’s version of Lucille Ball is a mouthpiece for his brand of smarmy, know-it-all sarcasm.

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

At once bloated and rushed, Eternals suffers from frequent lurches in tempo that dispel its occasional moments of tranquil thoughtfulness.

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.

One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.

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

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

The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.