Jake Cole

When the film's tone slides so firmly back into the murk, it's hard not to see DC's notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.

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.

Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.

Don’t Worry Darling has the swing-for-the-fences ambition that should have at least made it a noble and compelling folly, but its repetitiveness frustratingly undercuts its grandiosity.

The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.

Fahrenheit 11/9 represents a sincerely bold attempt to capture the overwhelming civic decay that led to our current political crisis, but Michel Moore’s circus-showman duplicity is as crass and abhorrently self-promoting as that of Donald Trump.

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

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.

Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.

Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.

In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.

The film should have been a cautionary tale, but in Peter Berg's hands, it's a hollow account of the resilience of the human spirit.

The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.

This is a left-footed and clumsily insistent work, exposing the worst aspects inherent to the Dardennes' style.

By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.

The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.

The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.

There's nothing at the center of Live by Night, no foundation of drama to ground the convoluted mash-up of so many genre tropes.

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.

Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.

The film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.

The film fails to use its millennial characters to investigate contemporary attitudes about the possibility of world annihilation.

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.

The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.

The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film.

The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret

The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.