Jake Cole

The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.

By never committing to neo-screwball antics nor a more serious analysis of codependency, the film ends up stranded in emotional ambiguity.

The film takes its time delving into its characters' headspaces, to the point that it becomes less of a thriller than an unorthodox character study, especially as its expertly deployed use of flashback slowly forms the emotional core of the story.

Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.

Though its lugubrious and plodding narrative spins its wheels ahead of someone coming along to fill T’Challa’s shoes, Wakanda Forever does stand out for its depictions of grief.

The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.

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.

Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.

With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

Day Shift’s first half is an unexpectedly focused, consistent pleasure, while the second sags under the weight of recycled set pieces.

Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.

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.

Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.

The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.

The protracted rubbernecking at Elvis’s inexorable decline epitomizes a film that regularly backs away from its keenest observations about the icon to merely, and superficially, bask in his star power.

By resolving its story around a mano-a-mano, the film narrows its understanding of a system in which exploitation is privatized.

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

The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.

For all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships.

At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.

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

The film’s toothless showbiz satire mostly comes down to teasing its characters for their entitlement and self-importance.

The film stands apart for thoughtfully suggesting that Batman might actually one day make Gotham a better place, and not merely a safer one

The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.

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.

Tony Stone’s avoidance of emotional manipulation in dramatizing Ted Kaczynski’s terror campaign is admirable, but only up to a point.

To see the old-timers pass the torch to their acolytes cements the improbable importance of Jackass in American pop culture.

The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.