Jake Cole

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Slant Magazine
For 321 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 30% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 65% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jake Cole's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 A Hard Day's Night
Lowest review score: 0 No Escape
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 173 out of 321
  2. Mixed: 46 out of 321
  3. Negative: 102 out of 321
321 movie reviews
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    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Cole
    Proxima
    The film falls back on a reductive rumination on the balance between maternal obligation and career aspiration.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jake Cole
    Vitalina Varela
    At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    Beanpole
    Kantemir Balagov depicts pain in blunt terms, but he traces the aftershocks of coping and collapse with delicate subtlety.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    The Traitor
    It’s at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility with displays of narcissism.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    The Load
    Chromatically, The Load makes Saving Private Ryan look like The Band Wagon. Yet Glavonic still manages to convey the devastation and numbness that results from atrocity without resorting to exploitation. Trauma is approached obliquely, more a subliminal fact of life than a single psychological rupture to be confronted and mended.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Jake Cole
    Angel Has Fallen
    The film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Cole
    The Kitchen
    The Kitchen’s inability to criticize its characters without falling back on mild endorsement for their warped empowerment cheapens the film’s moments of reflection, turning them into perfunctory scenes of mild protest.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The film’s action is the most extreme encapsulation yet of Dwayne Johnson’s bombastic blockbuster work.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Cole
    Them That Follow
    Unfortunately, the care with which the filmmakers set up Them That Follow’s context and their characters crumbles in the final act.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    Genèse (Genesis)
    Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Cole
    Into the Ashes
    Aaron Henry is prone to pulling back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    Spider-Man: Far from Home
    Jon Watts deftly weaves the epic and the mundane aspects of Spider-Man’s existence throughout the film.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Jake Cole
    Late Night
    The film lacks for the more lacerating, freely parodic energy of The Larry Sanders Show and 30 Rock.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Jake Cole
    Dark Phoenix
    The film is an all-too-fitting whimper of a conclusion to a franchise that never remotely fulfilled its potential.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    The film is frustrating in the end for reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Jake Cole
    Aladdin
    Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake is content to trace the original’s narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    Diamantino
    The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    The film is a reminder of the potential of these films before they became weighed down by blockbuster-ready excesses.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    Shazam!
    Shazam! sees DC combining the golden-age optimism espoused by Wonder Woman and the jubilant, self-aware silliness of Aquaman into a satisfying whole.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 38 Jake Cole
    Gloria Bell
    The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    If the film sometimes feels too small in comparison to its predecessors, it manages to make the most of its quietest moments.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Jake Cole
    Alita: Battle Angel
    Battle Angel is by some distance the most entertaining of the recent crop of would-be franchise starters, exciting on its own merits while leaving just enough of its world tantalizingly unexplored to actually fuel our interest in wanting to see where its characters go from here.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 12 Jake Cole
    Miss Bala
    The Mexico of this film is merely a place of abject lawlessness, whose hellishness exists only to stoke our fascination for how the protagonist grows as a person by drawing on her inner strength.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Jake Cole
    Serenity
    The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Jake Cole
    Replicas
    The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Jake Cole
    A Private War
    A Private War ultimately sides with the late journalist’s assertion that the whos and whys of war matter far less in journalism than finding the right human-interest angle to hook an audience.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Jake Cole
    The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    One may wish that the entire film had restaged the entirely of Tchaikovsky's ballet rather than reimagine it as an ultimately lifeless epic fantasy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jake Cole
    Bodied
    The anti-P.C. scorn that establishes a white boy's nervous entry into rap gradually becomes a sincere, if hilarious, treatise on the impossibility of reducing art to value judgments.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Jake Cole
    A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.
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