Sam C. Mac

It exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.

The film's searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters' sense of imbalance and uncertainty.

It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.

The latest entrant in this now-Disney-owned franchise is largely content to further the themes and narrative strategies of J.J. Abrams's predecessor.

The issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that Bryan Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.

Twenty years on from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, we return with Wang Bing to the factory floor, but this time he doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future.

What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.

Rogue One is less the fetish object that The Force Awakens is because it at least has the ambitions to create its own character dynamics and plot routes rather than coast on existing ones.

No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.

Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.

Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.

It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.

Jon Favreau draws heavily on his film's animated predecessor for plot, characterizations, and more, but doesn't know how to fit these familiar elements into his own coherent vision.

It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.

The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.

Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.

Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.

In Jim Jarmusch’s film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.

Donnie Yen's performance is so good that it's a shame Wilson Yip's films have never strived to be more than briskly entertaining hagiography.

The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn's film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.

The film leaves the lasting impression of a story that takes place in its own elitist and hermetically sealed world.

Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.

Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.

The film is neatly organized around not only the changing of the seasons, but a Disney-branded "circle of life" ethos.

It isn't until its final moments that Lady Macbeth turns into the kind of meaningless, mean-spirited, and proudly irredeemable non-character study that likens it to, say, last year's emptily foreboding Childhood of a Leader.

Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.

Sleight never shows much interest in exploring how blackness can inform its genre's tropes.

An empty exercise in imitative long-take aestheticism, A Ghost Story fills its distractingly round-cornered frame with endless repetitions on a visual gag.