Jake Cole

The final act's full-tilt embrace of action effectively undermines Tom Hardy's flashes of actorly idiosyncrasy.

The documentary often struggles to extract deeper thoughts from its subject about her wild career as a pioneering rock feminist.

Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.

The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.

Neil Jordan’s deft control of pace and tone elevates Greta past mere gimmickry, resulting in a comic thriller whose goofy humor only compounds its mastery of suspense.

Peter Farrelly manages to respect the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship, a delicate balancing act that credibly makes a feel-good, effervescent comedy out of its thorny subject matter without ever sanitizing it.

Vox Lux sets up its main character as a beneficiary of tragedy, opening up a compellingly macabre narrative about how school shootings are becoming so commonplace that they can effectively serve as launchpads for stardom. But that idea goes nowhere, as Vox Lux proceeds to play Celeste's experience in the music industry mostly straight.

Fahrenheit 11/9 represents a sincerely bold attempt to capture the overwhelming civic decay that led to our current political crisis, but Michel Moore’s circus-showman duplicity is as crass and abhorrently self-promoting as that of Donald Trump.

Jonah Hill constantly falls back on providing vague justification for his characters' behaviors, along with spoonfuls of sentiment to let the more dour moments go down easier.

Richard E. Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with Melissa McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.

For all its flaws, Widows is McQueen’s most fascinating, bracing feature to date, a demonstration of the filmmaker embracing his commercial instincts instead of trying to pass them off as weighty and important.

Peterloo so simply recounts the details of its subject matter that its culminating horror unsettlingly feels like little more than a cathartic inevitability.

Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.

By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.

Even an act of noble sacrifice late in the film has a faintly goofy tone to it, reflective of Shane Black's streak of puckish nihilism. That attitude makes him a perfect fit for this franchise, which lost its thematic viciousness after the anti-imperialist original.

Jonathan and Josh Baker's Kin, a feature that comprises little more than an extended introduction to its characters, resembles a TV pilot that's been released into theaters as a standalone property.

When Mark Wahlberg's Silva isn't wielding run-on sentences as military-grade weapons, he barks out derivative commands and asinine statements that make him sound like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty.

It reduces the domestication of wolves to a series of simplistic interactions that don’t exactly convey the difficulties of a wild animal overcoming millennia of instinct.

The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.

It boasts such confident performances and choreography that it feels as much like a final draft of the 2008 film as a continuation of it.

The film has the tone and look of a direct-to-video feature, and some shots of Keanu Reeves are so waxen that the actor almost looks rotoscoped.

Ebulliently funny, visually inventive, and above all passionately committed to the idea that heroism isn't a burden but an uplifting realization of our best qualities.

Deadpool 2 muddies the distinction between parodying comic-book-movie conventions and perfunctorily adhering to them.

Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.

Even the depiction of how both men waver during the Wimbledon final — of Borg losing his cool while McEnroe avoids succumbing to petulance — fails to tie into the larger portrait of their rivalry.

Submergence's globetrotting only succeeds at exposing the hollowness of the characters at the film's center.

In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.

The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.