Jake Cole

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

Throughout, Joyce Chopra patiently and shrewdly observes the contradictions of human behavior that Laura Dern brilliantly conveys.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Joel and Ethan Coen's idiosyncrasies elevate the film above the level of a mere creative exercise.

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

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

Nothing that Marvel Studios has produced can compare to the visual splendor of Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange.

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

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

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.

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

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

The film shows how much Johnnie To still experiments with his form, especially as he continues to transition to digital cinema.

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

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

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.

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 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.

This tonal shift transforms Manon of the Spring from a caustic morality play into something more reflective, an elegy to a way of life whose residents did not fully appreciate until they themselves had helped to end it.

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

One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Long Riders takes more than a few cues from John Ford, favoring laconic characters whose projected confidence masks an inability to vocalize basic desires.

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

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

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

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

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.

Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a prescient vision of a modern world defined by media oversaturation and social media validation.

The film at one point offers the finest sustained act of emotional storytelling to grace a Marvel Studios production.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guillermo del Toro's fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.

What makes the film so remarkable is the extent to which Ferrara, even at the outset of his career, exploits sex and violence for their popular appeal even as he reflects on the effect of such subjects on both his own art and the culture at large.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Deadpool 2 muddies the distinction between parodying comic-book-movie conventions and perfunctorily adhering to them.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Even the depiction of how both men waver during the Wimbledon final — of Borg losing his cool while McEnroe avoids succumbing to petulance — fails to tie into the larger portrait of their rivalry.

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.

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

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

Every creature here that's intended to burrow themselves into the audience’s nightmares are less wonders of imagination than of size.

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

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