Jake Cole

Like all Aaron Sorkin-penned characters, this film’s version of Lucille Ball is a mouthpiece for his brand of smarmy, know-it-all sarcasm.

Though flattering through and through, the film is ironically removed from the charms of the worshipped original.

At once bloated and rushed, Eternals suffers from frequent lurches in tempo that dispel its occasional moments of tranquil thoughtfulness.

The juxtapositions between backroom politicking, intimate family drama, and the occasional lurches into action often give the impression of a TV season’s worth of content crammed into two hours.

One Second is as much a tribute to the struggles of a man whose life has stolen from him as it is to a bygone way of looking at movies.

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

This is an engaging, no-frills entertainment that still fails to justify its reason for being.

The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.

Ali & Ava once again showcases Clio Barnard’s uncanny ability to capture the insoluble complexities of life.

The film thrillingly captures the social, economic, political, and material character of Rwanda in the age of global communication.

These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to the natural world exerts its pull on us all.

On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.

Dash Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise.

The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.

Throughout the film, James Gunn renders the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad with delightfully bloody abandon.

Jaume Collet-Serra’s deft touches elevate what otherwise feels like another formulaic contemporary Disney blockbuster.

Not even Alvin Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as his work itself.

The tired, tasteless gimmick at the center of the film inadvertently reveals its entire problem of perspective.

As soon as LeBron and Dom are sucked into computer space, A New Legacy largely abandons its underlying criticism of soulless corporate regurgitation of art-as-product and instead becomes an exhausting tour through the Warner Bros. catalog.

In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.

At its best, F9 delivers the most spatially coherent, dynamic car scenes in the series to date.

The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.

Throughout her directorial debut, Suzanne Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of her protagonist’s feelings of estrangement.

The film, lacking in conflict and danger, is guided by the poignant belief that there’s no end to the world.

The documentary’s aesthetics strikingly channel the euphoric feelings induced by Ethopia’s top cash crop.

Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide is a work of unmistakable horror, one predicated on such ineffable dread that the impact of climate change becomes a sort of Lovecraftian force.

In spite of its occasionally engaging displays of gnarly brutality, the film too often feels like an adaptation of a player select screen.

Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.