Jake Cole

My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.

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.

Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.

Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.

The film exemplifies Lois Patiño’s ongoing efforts to complicate docufiction approaches with otherworldly reveries meant to communicate states beyond our immediate reality.

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.

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

If Ken Loach has always erred on making his political views impossible to misconstrue, he also knows how to keep his dramas from spiraling too far outside of plausibility.

Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.

Madame Web grinds to a halt as it gets bogged down in scene after scene of characters, both good and bad, standing around explaining their backgrounds, hang-ups, and desires.

And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.

The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is.

Only in the film’s climax, when the heroes are in the same confined area and can thus better calibrate their constant shifts in position, does the action attain a logical sense of movement and timing.

The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.

The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.

In its own way, the film is as suitable a final work as a culminating magnum opus.

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.

The film is a gentle evocation of contemporary Japanese life in its pleasures and frustrations.

In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone.

The protagonist may feel cut off from the world, but the film is deeply in harmony with it.

For better and worse, Nolan has often turned to practical and scientific means to demystify his films’ subjects, be it dreams, magic, or the impossible antics of one particularly traumatized billionaire orphan. His best work (The Prestige, Interstellar) ultimately resists the comedown that can accompany such explication as the material retains some fundamental sense of wonder.

The Out-Laws shines when it spotlights the committed performances of its cast.

The action consistently snaps the film into focus, but it also further illustrates how badly the decision to split this narrative into two parts throws off the delicate rhythm that’s made Mission: Impossible arguably the most consistently entertaining American action franchise of all time.

Where Kandahar is most intriguing is in the oddly even-handed depiction of both American and Middle-Eastern characters as largely exasperated professionals going about their grisly work because they’re too old to pivot to a different job.

The film sprints past its targets, dealing glancing blows to subjects that have already been obliterated by decades’ worth of Tinseltown parodies.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.

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