Jake Cole

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

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.

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

The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.

Throughout the film, James Gunn renders the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad with delightfully bloody abandon.

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

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

The tired, tasteless gimmick at the center of the film inadvertently reveals its entire problem of perspective.

As soon as LeBron and Dom are sucked into computer space, A New Legacy largely abandons its underlying criticism of soulless corporate regurgitation of art-as-product and instead becomes an exhausting tour through the Warner Bros. catalog.

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.

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

The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.

Throughout her directorial debut, Suzanne Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of her protagonist’s feelings of estrangement.

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

The documentary’s aesthetics strikingly channel the euphoric feelings induced by Ethopia’s top cash crop.

Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide is a work of unmistakable horror, one predicated on such ineffable dread that the impact of climate change becomes a sort of Lovecraftian force.

In spite of its occasionally engaging displays of gnarly brutality, the film too often feels like an adaptation of a player select screen.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.

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.

Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.

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

The film unites its seemingly disparate strands of somber drama and deadpan comedy into a surprisingly cohesive whole.

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

There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.

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

The film may leave you wondering what purpose this franchise serves if not to give expression to Michael Bay's nationalist, racist, and misogynistic instincts.

This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.

For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.

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

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

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

It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.

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

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

Motherless Brooklyn feels altogether too tidy, a film that revives many of the touchstones of noir, but never that throbbing unease that courses through the classics of the genre.

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.

In the film, a man's individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.

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

In the film, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of conveying the reestablishment of emotional bonds.

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

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.

In a time when awareness and acknowledgement of racial bias and extrajudicial measures by law enforcement in America is at its most widespread, such scenes feel condescendingly pitched to an unconverted audience of the imagination.

The film falls back on a reductive rumination on the balance between maternal obligation and career aspiration.

At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.

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

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

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 film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.

The Kitchen’s inability to criticize its characters without falling back on mild endorsement for their warped empowerment cheapens the film’s moments of reflection, turning them into perfunctory scenes of mild protest.

The film’s action is the most extreme encapsulation yet of Dwayne Johnson’s bombastic blockbuster work.

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

Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves.

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

Jon Watts deftly weaves the epic and the mundane aspects of Spider-Man’s existence throughout the film.

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

The film is an all-too-fitting whimper of a conclusion to a franchise that never remotely fulfilled its potential.

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

Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake is content to trace the original’s narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.

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

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

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

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.

The Mexico of this film is merely a place of abject lawlessness, whose hellishness exists only to stoke our fascination for how the protagonist grows as a person by drawing on her inner strength.

The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.

The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy.

With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.

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.

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.

The anti-P.C. scorn that establishes a white boy's nervous entry into rap gradually becomes a sincere, if hilarious, treatise on the impossibility of reducing art to value judgments.

Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.

Patrick Wang's particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles.

The final act's full-tilt embrace of action effectively undermines Tom Hardy's flashes of actorly idiosyncrasy.

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

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.

The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.

Neil Jordan’s deft control of pace and tone elevates Greta past mere gimmickry, resulting in a comic thriller whose goofy humor only compounds its mastery of suspense.

Peter Farrelly manages to respect the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship, a delicate balancing act that credibly makes a feel-good, effervescent comedy out of its thorny subject matter without ever sanitizing it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For all its flaws, Widows is McQueen’s most fascinating, bracing feature to date, a demonstration of the filmmaker embracing his commercial instincts instead of trying to pass them off as weighty and important.

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

Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.

By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.

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.

Jonathan and Josh Baker's Kin, a feature that comprises little more than an extended introduction to its characters, resembles a TV pilot that's been released into theaters as a standalone property.

When Mark Wahlberg's Silva isn't wielding run-on sentences as military-grade weapons, he barks out derivative commands and asinine statements that make him sound like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty.

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.