Jake Cole

Not yet a master, Woo here nonetheless demonstrates far more than mere potential as he starts to lay the foundations for his breakout successes.

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

Good as the cameos are, however, the lasting draw of the film is its exceptional aesthetic. Gilliam keeps his camera low in a child’s perspective, and wide-angle lenses only exacerbate the magnified sense of scale that everything has.

Kantemir Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of coping and collapse with delicate subtlety.

Quibbles dissipate in the face of the giddiness of the action, which builds to such a relentless head that even the serious stakes of the film’s motivation give way to a largely pleasant vibe.

Cassavetes and Rowlands lend a screwball energy to this thriller, ably playing conflicting moods of suspense and silliness off each other to complicate an otherwise straightforward genre film.

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

Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.

Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.

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

Philippe Garrel's film uses its characters' stodgy, formal language to betray their self-consciousness.

These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to the natural world exerts its pull on us all.

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

It operates in an ambiguous register, suggesting that a woman is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation.

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

The film is a vivid depiction of how a confrontation with the unknown can so easily shatter the fragile bonds that hold us together.

Shane Black's The Nice Guys doesn't want for great exchanges, and even disposable conversations brim with acidic wit.

Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.

The Amma Asante film's broade sociopolitical overview is balanced by the intimate attention paid to the leads.

The film, lacking in conflict and danger, is guided by the poignant belief that there’s no end to the world.

James Franco's The Disaster Artist perfectly conveys the surreal hell of what the production of Tommy Wiseau's The Room must have been like.

Petra Epperlein's personal ties to the subject matter provides the documentary with a necessary anchor point.

The structure of Wildfire’s narrative doesn’t emerge out of a simplistic progression from strife to reconciliation, as writer-director Cathy Brady has her characters follow a realistically erratic trajectory.

The actors’ hammy performances only compound the amusement of watching a dynasty propped up by largesse fall to pieces at the very thought of actually having to earn their way in life.

As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.

Of all the ’70s road movies, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may be the only one in which the characters find themselves.

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

In Alma Har’el’s film, Shia LaBeouf’s plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy.

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.

The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.

Ebulliently funny, visually inventive, and above all passionately committed to the idea that heroism isn't a burden but an uplifting realization of our best qualities.

The film is an unbroken chain of one-liners, sight gags, and pop-culture references, and the hit-to-miss ratio is high.

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.

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

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

As with Sicario, the broad strokes of the film's Southwestern stereotypes gradually sharpen into focus as the story pivots to a look at the systemic forces that shape the characters.

Half-assed mentions of the Avengers, as well as a few cameo appearances sprinkled both within the feature and in its credits stingers, exude less shame than a crowd-pandering politico.

The film is frustrating in the end for reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance.

It’s at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility with displays of narcissism.

For a spell, Melina Matsoukas’s film exudes the concision of an old B movie.

At its best, F9 delivers the most spatially coherent, dynamic car scenes in the series to date.

It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.

If the film sometimes feels too small in comparison to its predecessors, it manages to make the most of its quietest moments.

Battle Angel is by some distance the most entertaining of the recent crop of would-be franchise starters, exciting on its own merits while leaving just enough of its world tantalizingly unexplored to actually fuel our interest in wanting to see where its characters go from here.

It boasts such confident performances and choreography that it feels as much like a final draft of the 2008 film as a continuation of it.

The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.

Shazam! sees DC combining the golden-age optimism espoused by Wonder Woman and the jubilant, self-aware silliness of Aquaman into a satisfying whole.

The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.

In the film, Robert Zemeckis brings to bear his pop-epic scope in what's otherwise a claustrophobic story.

It recognizes that the thinly veiled secret of Wolverine’s loner act is that he’s always been a cog of some kind.

When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.

When it's good, this new Ghostbusters is funny, driven, sometimes even a bit scary.

The film is a reminder of the potential of these films before they became weighed down by blockbuster-ready excesses.

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.

Dash Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise.

All of its revisionism centrally incorporates the history of the franchise, and the film both excels and suffers for frequently recalling its forbears.

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

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.

As passably entertaining as the film is, it never surrenders to the abandon of its action, and as such never feels like it shifts out of first gear.

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.

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

Richard E. Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with Melissa McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.

It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.

The undeniable fun of Civil War's action scenes only exacerbates the failure of the narrative to adequately contend with its own themes.

Befitting its image-conscious milieu, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has the aspartame fake-sweetness and zero-calorie comfort of its predecessor: It’s charming enough in the moment but you’ll be hungry again half an hour later.

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

At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, James Mangold’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.

As a writer and director, Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast's divergent styles.

Even an act of noble sacrifice late in the film has a faintly goofy tone to it, reflective of Shane Black's streak of puckish nihilism. That attitude makes him a perfect fit for this franchise, which lost its thematic viciousness after the anti-imperialist original.

Armando Iannucci satirizes the manner in which political power is accorded to those who can mask cutthroat ambition behind an outward projection of bland inoffensiveness.

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.

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.