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

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)

By foregoing sensationalism, The Citizen becomes both sweeter, in its conjuring of a first kiss and a surprise romance, and also by the end more devastating

White’s drama, a historical tête-à-tête about a “New York liberal” portrait artist (Jessica Chastain) who decamps to Dakota territory in the 1880s on a mission to paint Sitting Bull (Michael Greyeyes), unfolds in no hurry …

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

Bruce LaBruce’s latest spirited provocation marks the cult director’s second literalization of the sexual revolution. 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. In this…

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

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

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

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

This epic, the first of two final Avengers films, finds the Class of ‘12 — the core Avengers — getting together for one last rager, joined by select newbies and spazzes from the ranks of sophomores and freshmen

Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre

Brad Anderson’s talky-smartish thriller Beirut, like the first half of Million Dollar Arm, sets Hamm’s sharpie loose in a country — in this case a fractious Lebanon — where the rules aren’t his

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

Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes

… This first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzi (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia …

An episodic ensemble drama organized around the logic of theme rather than of traditional narrative, the film concerns above all else accumulation and dispersal, in the American vein

It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show