Jake Cole

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The film proves again that the modern-day veneration of Jane Austen as the patron saint of the rom-com is also an act of simplification.

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

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 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.

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

The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.

Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.

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 Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.

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

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.

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

Terminator Genisys feels like being trapped in a conversation with a child breathlessly recounting the highlights of the preceding movies.

The only way that this film could be any more racist is if the Dwyer family holed up with Lillian Gish and waited for the Klan to save them.

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

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

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

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

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.

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.

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

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

And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.

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

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.

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

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

The film’s toothless showbiz satire mostly comes down to teasing its characters for their entitlement and self-importance.

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

The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is.

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.

The film sprints past its targets, dealing glancing blows to subjects that have already been obliterated by decades’ worth of Tinseltown parodies.

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

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.

Madame Web grinds to a halt as it gets bogged down in scene after scene of characters, both good and bad, standing around explaining their backgrounds, hang-ups, and desires.

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

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.

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

The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.