Jake Cole

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.