Keith Watson

More conspicuous than its rote melodrama is the way the film elides the concurrent genocide of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman forces.

The film in effect positions young jihadis less as fervid, bloodthirsty psychopaths and more as dumb kids at summer camp.

Unlike One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’s similar ode to low-budget resourcefulness often rings false.

The ham-handed allegorical construction, generically titled characters, and self-serious tone in its final third drains the story of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive critique of the perils of perfectionism.

Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.

The film is a clunky, overwritten attempt to pack as many tortured subplots and pre-chewed sociological insights as can possibly fit into a two-hour runtime.

The film is premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.

The film rarely presents a clear analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's victories, reducing her work to empty slogans.

The film's problem isn't so much the grossness of its humor as the laziness with which it's executed.

Hustle doesn’t really seem to know who its characters are, much less how they fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.

Daniela Thomas seems stymied by her own images, unable to extract the turmoil and violence suggested by her story for fear of upsetting the austere surface harmony of her visuals.

Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary characters feel as if they've been air-dropped into a universe where they don't belong.

Mariama Diallo’s film never seems to fully buy into its horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as avatars for multiple grievances.

Dominic Cooke’s film is content to regurgitate some of the more tired artistic tropes about the Cold War.

Maika Monroe’s engaging performance serves only to highlight how feeble and unconvincing the rest of the film is.

Tim Burton manages to put his stamp on this clunky behemoth of a film, but in the end, the Mouse always wins.

The grace notes are crowded out by the screenplay’s plot machinations and emotional manipulations.

Endeavoring to give us a post-mumblecore spin on Annie Hall, writer-director Sophie Brooks seemingly fails to understand what made Woody Allen's film so appealing: its rich, multi-faceted characterizations.

The film minimizes the tragedy of the human race’s near-complete annihilation by positioning it as the backdrop for the world’s most grandiose deadbeat-dad redemption arc.

Everything here wraps up as tidily as it does in your average Hallmark Channel movie.

The film’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.

The film barely even scratches the surface of the animating force of Cézanne and Zola's lives: their art.

As Nicolai Fuglsig doesn't allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around his characters, 12 Strong inevitably proceeds as a jaunty imperial adventure through the wilds of northern Afghanistan.

SuperFly is a slicked-up, tricked-out revamp that dispenses with any pretense of verisimilitude in favor of rap-video extravagance and mob-movie bloodshed.

The film attempts a tone of tragic understatement that registers instead as flat, plodding, and underfelt.

Yes, deep down, even brutal war criminals like the one played by Ben Kingsley are people too.

There's an appealingly shaggy buddy comedy hidden somewhere inside of The Spy Who Dumped Me, but good luck finding it amid all the desperate poop jokes, lifeless action sequences, and lazy plot mechanics.

The animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm rather than a human director with a personal vision.

Its scenes wildly escalate to a fever pitch at the drop of a hat, before then ending, more often than not, with abrupt violence.

Director Joe Berlinger essentially allows his subject to hijack the film for his own end.

The film’s vision of Christmas is so insipid and lifeless, it’s hard to see why the Grinch would even bother to steal it.

Christopher Plummer brings a twinkly eyed insouciance to his character, but there's only so many times Jack can make a joke about, say, his adult diapers before it becomes thin and hollow.

The unvaried register of the filmmaking leads the narrative to feel aimless and dramatically inert.

Carol Morley’s film wants to blow our minds, but it succeeds only at rousing our boredom.

The screenplay quickly loses this moral clarity as the plot twists pile up and the power balances shift.

Jonas Åkerlund’s breezy approach to this material not only cheapens the music, but also has the effect of downplaying the severity of the scene’s truly unsavory politics.

Just as David Gordon Green seems to have finally unshackled his legacyquel trilogy from the dead weight of the past, the film loses the courage of its convictions.

Tommy Wirkola’s film squanders an evocative premise in favor of rote gun-fu carnage.

Alice plays as an inadvertent parody of contemporary liberalism’s fascination with and fetishization of ‘70s black radicalism.

Fernando Trueba fails to probe the political implications of The Queen of Spain's period milieu, which is particularly confounding given the filmmaker’s evident anti-fascist sympathies.

No matter how likable Sutherland and Mirren are, they're still stuck in little more than an upbeat wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Power Rangers is so concerned with launching a mature teen-targeted franchise that it often forgets to have some fun.

Lasse Hallström's gooey film exists only to offer comforting reassurances about dogs' natural servility.

James McTeigue's Breaking In is the sort of incompetently constructed thriller that gives B movies a bad name.

Director Timothy Reckart's The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids' movie.

The Female Brain never seems quite sure whether it wants to probe the depths of its title subject or just make us laugh. And given the shallowness of its quasi-scientific blather and the tepidness of its comedy, it ultimately does neither.

Given the sheer amount of comic material here, some of the jokes are bound to fall flat, but the hit-to-miss ratio is depressingly low.

Ultimately, the only truly retro thing about this weirdly reactionary potboiler is its politics.

It's content to be the sort of film parents can throw on an iPad to ensure 90 minutes' worth of relative peace and quiet away from their antic children.

Visually plain and ploddingly paced, My Little Pony: The Movie suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.

Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.

The film is ostensibly about the war for the soul of a house, but it couldn’t feel less lived in.

The film veers almost at random from ghost story to family drama to erotic thriller to black comedy.

The film is peppered with interesting true-life details, but these are overwhelmed by frantic comedic sequences.

Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov offers nothing new to the cinematic lexicon of the chariot race.

Over-stuffed and under-conceived, Fist Fight is a clumsy mélange of clashing comedic perspectives.

A constant sense of motion can’t obscure how stale, secondhand, and spiritless this entire endeavor feels.

Though it may clear the low bar set by the first film, The Nut Job 2 still suffers from many of the same problems.

The film is confused in conception, dreary in execution, and completely lacking in forward momentum.

The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a deeply miscalculated mix of incoherent social commentary and over-the-top gore.

This grimly self-serious tale of violent destiny is consistently drowned out by Vicente Amorim’s overreaching visual style.

Schmaltzy, manipulative, and tonally schizophrenic, The Book of Henry is such a monumentally misguided venture that it ends up being oddly, if unintentionally, compelling.

The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.

It feels like Sheldon Wilson tossed a bunch of third-hand scares in a blender and set it to puree, resulting in a gray, flavorless sludge.

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.

The grim Australian biker drama Outlaws is little more than an endless stream of brooding, yelling, and “badass” posturing broken up by grisly violence and gratuitous sex scenes.

For a film about such a singular profession, Life on the Line offers surprisingly little insight into linemen's day-to-day labor.