Keith Watson

If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, Brendon Cronenberg is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.