Jake Cole

The film has the tone and look of a direct-to-video feature, and some shots of Keanu Reeves are so waxen that the actor almost looks rotoscoped.

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.

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

Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.

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.

Submergence's globetrotting only succeeds at exposing the hollowness of the characters at the film's center.

In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.

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

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

Valérie Massadian's Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film's overall sense of formal balance.

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.

This isn’t an adaptation of a video game so much as an adaptation of a video game’s tutorial level.

The film may involve the instant movement among unfathomable distances and the shattered limits of space and time, but it’s only Storm Reid's character who feels multidimensional.

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.

At a time when Americans are constantly bombarded with reports of unpunished police brutality, the film suggests that the true problem with justice in our country is that law enforcement isn't violent enough.

When the film's tone slides so firmly back into the murk, it's hard not to see DC's notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.

The Snowman is missing so much basic connective tissue as to be rendered almost completely inexplicable.

The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret

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

The hollow grandeur of the film's action only gives the proceedings a glib undertone that also undermines the rare occasions of earnestness that the heroes exhibit toward fallen comrades.

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.

The film is the finest balance yet of Martin McDonagh's bleak sense of humor and offbeat moral sincerity.

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.

The only thing that offsets the film's self-negating revisionism are the scenes involving Gillian Anderson vicereine.

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 decade-long effort to bring the Dark Tower books to the screen looks like a cheap, unauthorized cash-in.

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.

In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.

Baby Driver literalizes Edgar Wright’s fascination with people’s emotional overreliance on pop culture as a cover for arrested development.

The sensory overload of Michael Bay's hyperkinetic cinema is such that it eradicates any actual sense of place.

Too much is at stake throughout, leading to formulaic plot filler and exposition that snuff out the spark of the early scenes.

Johnny Depp’s perfunctory gestures and flailing pratfalls befit a film that brings the franchise’s theme-park roots full circle.

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

For all the attempts to update King Arthur to be cool and sexy, neither the character nor the film around him musters any spark.

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

The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.

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

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.

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

John Wick: Chapter 2 remarkably balances its predecessor’s spartan characterizations and plotting with a significant expansion of scale.

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

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

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.

There's nothing at the center of Live by Night, no foundation of drama to ground the convoluted mash-up of so many genre tropes.

Despite its energetic, intricately climax, Railroad Tigers is at its most entertaining when merely observing Chan’s smaller movements.

Compared to your average Disney princesses, Moana is neither selfishly rebellious nor simplistically innocent.

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

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

It's impossible to even laugh at Inferno given how Ron Howard reduces the material to a dull spectacle of earnest puzzle-solving.

The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.

Ewan McGregor’s inert adaption smooths out the Philip Roth novel's eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.

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

Paterson's sunny aesthetic and disposition marks a stylistic departure for writer-director Jim Jarmusch.

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

The film explores the extent to which Olivier Assayas’s characters have always found, and lost, their identities through the aid of their surroundings.

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.

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.

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.

Like the recruited criminals themselves, the film longs to be bad, yet its forced by outside pressures to follow narrow, preset rules.

One of the more admirable traits of the original Bourne trilogy is how little pleasure it takes in its violence, but Jason Bourne revels in its vicious action sequences.

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

The film's action sequences are a jumble of movement and cuts that have no discernible relation to the actual motion of the characters.

After its bracing opening, the film begins to indulge the worst impulses of well-meaning liberal cinema.

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

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

No Austen adaptation, even the most revisionist ones, have ever felt as vicious as Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship.

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

The overriding despair of Winter's War's imagery calls into question who, exactly, the film is for.

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

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

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

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.

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

One of the Ryan Coogler film's greatest traits is its reticence, its refusal to say 10 words when two will do, or to say one word when silence says it all.

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

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