Jake Cole

It operates in an ambiguous register, suggesting that a woman is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation.

The structure of Wildfire’s narrative doesn’t emerge out of a simplistic progression from strife to reconciliation, as writer-director Cathy Brady has her characters follow a realistically erratic trajectory.

When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.

As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.

The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.

It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.

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

The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.

The film unites its seemingly disparate strands of somber drama and deadpan comedy into a surprisingly cohesive whole.

The film is never more compelling than when relying on footage of the real radical DREAMer group the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.

There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.

The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.

The film may leave you wondering what purpose this franchise serves if not to give expression to Michael Bay's nationalist, racist, and misogynistic instincts.

This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.

For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.

As a suspense film, it’s so sluggishly structured that it borders on the avant-garde.

The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.

For a spell, Melina Matsoukas’s film exudes the concision of an old B movie.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.

Portraying Tubman above all else as a vessel for a higher power ironically only makes her appear less tangible.

This is a rare case of a film that’s stronger when it colors inside the lines than radically traces outside of them.

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.

At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, James Mangold’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.

In the film, a man's individual tragedy illuminates the emptiness of the systems that define him.

The film is a vivid depiction of how a confrontation with the unknown can so easily shatter the fragile bonds that hold us together.

In the film, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of conveying the reestablishment of emotional bonds.

In Alma Har’el’s film, Shia LaBeouf’s plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy.

The actors’ hammy performances only compound the amusement of watching a dynasty propped up by largesse fall to pieces at the very thought of actually having to earn their way in life.