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.