Jake Cole

Gradually, Van Peebles turns stereotypical images of postwar bourgeois prosperity against themselves, leading to a denouement that feels oddly empowering in its total alienation from the status quo.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Walter Hill’s 1984 film combines everything from seedy bars, street fights, motorcycles, beefy heavies, and tough dames in a smorgasbord of tawdry, moral-flouting clichés that distills decades of imagery that represents youth in cinema.

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.

Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.

Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.

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

The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Russell’s wild style and shameless exhibitionism places it on a par with the contemporary work of Brian De Palma in terms of its vicious satire of ‘80s kitsch and repression.

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The film fails to build on the whimsical foundation of the first film in any way.

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.

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.

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

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

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.