Jake Cole

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.