Keith Watson

Sam Elliott’s calmly affecting performance is overwhelmed by a doggedly conventional screenplay that often plays like end-of-life wish-fulfillment fantasy.

By fitting Cori, Tayla, and Blessin's lives into a predetermined narrative arc, Step reduces the girls to plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps archetypes.

Just as the director seems to be settling in to tackle some heady ideas, the screenplay’s stale narrative complications instead overtake the film.

The film lays out the complexities of contemporary race relations with a deliberateness that frequently edges over into didacticism.

In the film, the Battle of Midway suggests something out of a photorealistic animated film.

Though initially compelling, Peter Nick's documentary is fundamentally without a clear perspective on its subject.

The film's rendering of the interplay of memory, identity, and grief is disappointingly vague.

Restless, at times even chaotic, the film often seems to be replicating the experience of having a manic episode.

A jazz-loving kid from a musical family, Williams has been breathing music since he could talk and, though open and forthcoming as he recalled his enduring career, he was clearly happiest when talking about the nuts and bolts of his craft.

Lukas Dhont isn't really concerned with Lara's journey to find peace and balance, as he's interested only in her downward spiral of crisis.

The film is too invested in treacly cinematic optimism for its character dynamics to feel sketched out beyond their basic narrative function.

The solemnity of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s film is at odds with the gratuitousness of its violence.

Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women.

Viswanathan, Newton, and Adlon generate a bit of chemistry throughout, but it's undermined by the fundamentally mechanistic nature of Brian and Jim Kehoe's screenplay, which ultimately forces these girls' experiences into neat little scenarios that are constructed every bit as didactically as a workplace training video.

The film undermines Cunningham’s egalitarianism by linking him directly with the kind of elite snobbery and wealth fixation he abhorred.

By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers’ relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the scope of their abuse.

Though eerie and quietly deadpan, the film circles its grab bag of themes for so long that it also becomes tedious.

The film has an almost pathological need to ensure that everything turns out well for every single character, while at the same time eliding any truly difficult issues.

Onur Tukel attempts to connect Ashley and Veronica’s barbarity to the broader callousness of American life, but the satire is too blunt to really stick.

Doug Liman may effectively maintain a madcap energy through to the end, but unlike Adam McKay or Martin Scorsese, he isn't all that interested in explicating the complex inner workings of vast criminal enterprises.

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are adept enough at setting up rich, evocative horror concepts, but they don’t always know what to do with them once they’re in place.

In many ways, Toshirô Mifune the man remains just as mysterious after watching Steven Okazaki's film as he was before.

The documentary's focus on elite solutionism effectively erases the role of popular agitation in formulating social change.

Writer-director Ruben Östlund’s pessimism ultimately leads the film toward a self-negating dead end.

Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.

The film is a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats.

Cars 3 doesn't seem to care about defining the contours of its universe or exploring the possibilities of an all-car world.

Anthony Bryne's high-flown style only serves to highlight the film's icky way of exploiting real-world tragedy for kicks.

The film is a slow, directionless anti-thriller that never manages to build tension or establish any stakes.

Schilling and Healy never quite overcome the fact that Take Me is a suspense comedy that simply isn't very suspenseful or very funny and, just as importantly, never finds a thematic through line.

The film is most affecting in its simpler moments, particularly those revolving around food.

Writer-director Bryan Buckley's film is ultimately more interested in the journalist than his story.

It’s been said that casting is 90% of directing, and it seems to be 90% of the writing in Bill Holderman's film.

The film apes the style that James Wan established with the original Conjuring without establishing any real identity of its own.

In the film, hardly any fact about cystic fibrosis is raised without being doubly, even triply, underlined for viewers.

Unimaginatively directed and indifferently shot, the film never establishes a distinctive voice for itself.

The film’s funny and shocking gore too often plays second fiddle to meandering comedic bits revolving around the band’s recording sessions.

The film's bloated action-comedy machinery prevents any real chemistry from forming between Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville.

Dakota Fanning's Wendy is less a truly thought-through character than a compendium of quirks.

Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.

Daniel Y-Li Grove adeptly creates an icy, über-hip atmosphere of sleek clubs, pulsating synths, and woozy opium trips, a style which has the unfortunate effect of draining much of the cultural specificity from his story.

For a film so interested in the public's malleability, The Take isn't particularly good at controlling its own audience.

The film’s careful attention to detail in the animation is continuously undermined by a formulaic plot and anxious pandering to contemporary sensibilities.

Rather than pointing the finger at society for inducing insecurity in women, I Feel Pretty suggests the onus is on women to change their attitudes.

It doesn't suggest documentary footage found in the woods so much as a haunted-house version of Hardcore Henry.

The mother-daughter relationship ostensibly at the film’s heart is largely reduced to tired jokes about how moms can be overprotective and don’t understand how to use Facebook.

In terms of body objectification, Baywatch is an equal-opportunity exploiter, but when it comes to comedy, it's a total boys' club.

The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.

Slacker that it is, the film never seems willing to put in the necessary work to live up to its potential.