Jake Cole

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put a comedic spin on Andy Weir’s more straightforward 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, recasting the author’s hopeful vision of productive communication with extraterrestrials as an unlikely buddy comedy.

In the Blink of an Eye feels less like a film than a commercial for life insurance that got out of hand, or perhaps more accurately one for the kind of hollow Silicon Valley tech optimism that has been thoroughly exposed as a sham by now.

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

The film's legible direction and steady escalation of tension makes for an enjoyably retro diversion.

Young Mothers is a welcome return to form for the Dardenne brothers, balancing social observation with character study.

On paper, anime master Hosoda Mamoru’s Scarlet sounds positively electrifying.

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.

Little Amélie or the Character of Rain changes up its breezy account of a toddler’s growth with the occasional moment of slowed-down rumination.

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.

The careful balance of “stupid and clever” that solidified the legend of the first film is less steady in its much-belated sequel.

This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.

F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.

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.

Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.

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.

Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.

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.

The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.

Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.

Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.

As the film explodes into numerous subplots that rapidly move far apart from one another, it necessitates constant leaps between characters and locations that only further disrupt the narrative flow of the proceedings.

The star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics.

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.

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.

As the film progresses, it consistently escalates the stakes and scale of its action, which doesn’t devolve into incomprehensible CG murk as it hurtles toward the climax.

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

The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.

Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.