The film, like Oakland itself, is forever evolving, always becoming some new thing just when it at last seems to have revealed its full self

All that lashing wind and rain, and Fuqua’s sometimes haphazard storytelling, deny us the grim pleasures of Denzel’s methodical slayings, which often take clever advantage of whatever tools happen to be handy

… Eating Animals proves persuasive mostly in its diagnosis of what has gone wrong, and in its account of how it went wrong on such a massive scale (through thumbnail histories of KFC, Tyson, and Chicken McNuggets)

Shock and Awe is a 90-minute liberal told-you-so, a polemic that, like a long Rachel Maddow segment, is more cheery than thunderous, even as it names the names that must be named

Skyscraper is a family-bonding adventure film starring Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell and two elementary-aged children who are as good at appearing darling (in the early scenes) as they are at playacting the role of traumatized hostages (in the later scenes)

When’s the last time you saw a narrative feature with a genre that was so shrewdly unfixed that you genuinely had no idea what would — or could — happen next?

The film is about being overwhelmed by Los Angeles, its sprawling indifference, but also about finding your place in it – and even, at times, its welcoming warmth

Like the shows she’s considering, Bolin soon expands out from comely corpses to survey a wider world, in this case many of her pop obsessions …

For all its jittery heist drama, American Animals is, above all else, an accidental study in just how much white kids can get away with and still be welcomed back into society

Like 2004’s The Raspberry Reich, a satire of what LaBruce has called “terrorist chic,” The Misandrists soaks audiences in the doings (and I do mean doings) of a radical cell of sexual dissenters

… Much like a paper by a student who has read the wiki but not the work, Mary Shelley marshals its evidence without revealing more, without connecting to the soul of the matter.

That elfin wit Rash plays Bernard, the schlemiel-ish old college pal/rival of David Koechner’s carousing Huey, a one-man sexual Sherman’s March blazing from the Hudson to the East River

The story, loosely adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of the monster within, finds Gequil transformed into a murderous electric sylph after lightning strikes the high school’s laboratory

Simply put, the clockwork heist that Ocean’s 8 promises (and, by its end, dazzles with) limits the film’s ability to offer what you might actually want from it: the chance to relish this cast

The morality-tale obviousness of First Reformed’s plotting at times proves at odds with its sensitive detailing of its characters’ inner and spiritual lives

Teeming with abandoned buildings full of thugs to be dispatched, ruled over by shadow corporations and wicked artificial intelligence, Whannell’s film plays like the smarter-than-you’d-think 2018 version of some 1988 kill-’em-all VHS cheapie

Michael Mayer’s sunnily bleak all-star film, I fear, squirms through the first acts of Chekhov’s masterpiece the way a cast member’s 8-year-old cousin might in a theater seat

This is what it’s like to be 27 and kind of a mess and totally sleepy and kind of miserable and suffering a headache and not sure who you are or who you should trust

Don’t let the title fool you. Despite 20 or so bookending minutes in which photographer and artist Peter Beard reflects over old photos and some alluring footage about the innocent days when Montauk drew celebrities like Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger rather than mere kabillionaires, That Summer could more helpfully…

Grisebach surveys her incidents (river work, bar nights, outdoor parties, horseback reveries, confrontations between townies and outsiders) from various vantage points, honoring the perspectives of all parties

Like Rogue One, the other standalone Disney Star Wars film that suffered a famously troubled production, Solo has a just-finish-the-movie quality to it, an uncertainty about the pacing and seriousness of developments in its own story

Here’s what you need to know: This is less Deadpool 2 than Deadpool Squared, a studio and its star (Reynolds is credited as co-writer) committing to hyper-violent self-referential comic-book buffoonery