Jake Cole

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.

The film is initially distinguished by its poetic understatement, only for it to eventually succumb to staleness.

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.

There’s no attempt to hide that the film is pure fan service, a greatest-hits mashup of Spider-Man’s cinematic legacy.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Portraying Tubman above all else as a vessel for a higher power ironically only makes her appear less tangible.

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.

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 film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.

On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.

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

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.

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

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.