Jake Cole

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.

Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.

Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.

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.