Keith Watson

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.