Keith Watson

For a film about the crimes of a fascist military dictatorship that employed mass torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder as weapons of social control, Argentina, 1985 sure goes down smooth.

The film drifts so far into weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.

A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Frederick Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins.

Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s boldly restive biopic imagines Empress Elisabeth of Austria as a deeply restless soul chafing against the social limitations of her day.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film is one of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability.

Throughout the film, the quick-hit jokes from the show’s rich cast of oddballs serves to suggest a vibrant world outside of the Belchers.

A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, the film can also be bewildering in its juxtapositions.

Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s film ultimately proposes that survival is the greatest form of resistance.

Throughout The Humans, Stephen Karam orchestrates the highs and lows of a family reunion with Chekhovian subtlety.

C’mon C’mon admirably doesn’t indulge in heartstring-tugging pathos, but the film suffers from a certain shapelessness.

There’s a haunting beauty to Tatiana Huezo’s depiction of the gradual cross-contamination of childhood innocence and criminal aggression.

The film effectively immerses us in the wrenching details of Amin’s story, but it keeps us just a bit too far removed from the man himself.

The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.

Candyman doesn’t merely note the connection between fear and remembrance, it also interrogates it from every possible angle.

When Jennifer Hudson is singing her heart out, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, the effect is transportive.

A methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of its main character’s psyche, the film smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of its source material.

In the moments when Old works, it’s because M. Night Shyamalan embraces the inherent weirdness of his material.

Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas.

Amalia Ulman’s film is a bittersweet comedy of human behavior observed with a relaxed yet intently focused eye.

After a while, it’s hard not to feel like Radu Jude is simply shooting fish in a barrel.

Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.

The film gets at the profound truth that our relationship with another person is, at its core, a collection of shared memories.

The film is brightly colored, inventively designed, and constantly flirting with the outright psychedelic, but it's so packed full of incident that it rarely gives its jokes the space to land.

Too often, the film teases big, wild comedic set pieces that end up deflating almost instantly.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.

By the time the credits roll on the film, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths.

Bas Devos’s film is a street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep.

The film ultimately depicts a world in which people are left with no other option but to devour their own.

The film makes the path to basketball glory and the road to personal redemption seem oddly effortless.

The Harder They Come’s greatest asset may still be its soundtrack, which makes such a stirring impact because it provides a cathartic release from the grim realities depicted on screen.

Daniel Scheinert’s film finds a very human vulnerability lurking beneath the strange and oafish behaviors of its male characters.

Throughout, the subtle glimpses of a couple’s lingering affection for one another complicate the bitterness of their separation.

Only in its giddily gory finale does the outrageousness of the film's violence come close to matching that of its plot.

At heart, Victor Kossakovsky's Aquarela is a war film: a cacophonous survey of the global battle between man and water.

The film is a quietly radical attempt to view the world from a non-human perspective.

Radu Jude’s film is a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia.

There are hints that the film will scale itself to the broader historical context of this era, but the screenplay never elaborates on the ethnic strife the undergirds the Cambodian genocide.

As in Laika’s other efforts, the humor in the film is more wry than gut-busting, but Chris Butler has developed some truly inventive comic characters.

As the world continues to suffer ever-increasing mass die-offs of honeybee colonies, Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s film reminds us that there’s indeed a better way to interact with our planet—one rooted in patience, tradition, and a true respect for our surroundings.

The film is a penetrating an indictment of the bureaucratic obstacles placed in front of refugees.

It’s this carefully managed equilibrium between the inherent preposterousness of its mystical milieu and the convincing emotional reality of Laura’s journey that ultimately makes The Changeover, for all its muddled mythos, a lively and engaging excursion into an unusually naturalistic world of magic.

The documentary is uniquely attuned to the fickle whims of history, politics, and biographical circumstance.

The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.

Kaku Arakawa's documentary is a candid snapshot of a great artist as an old man.

Luke Fowler allows us to access some of the intimate details of Bartlett’s life in intriguingly indirect ways.

Robin Hood’s shameless silliness only takes it so far, as the film is frequently undermined by Otto Bathurst’s wobbly direction.

Despite all its confoundments, 9 Fingers works as a unified whole thanks to F.J. Ossang's playful sense of humor.

According tot he film, truly courageous artists aren't necessarily the ones who tackle the state head-on, but rather the ones who stay true to themselves even when no one likes what they have to say.

The Guilty is a taut chamber thriller dominated by the flinty yet highly emotive visage of actor Jakob Cedergren.

Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath's Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a spastic, Mad magazine-style parody of comic-book movies for the age of superhero overload.

Kimberly Reed's approach is too bloodless to make us feel the full weight of the injustices her film identifies.

Uncle Drew, the old-school streetballer played by NBA all-star Kyrie Irving, is a cheerfully scruffy creation, and so is the film that bears his name.

While Clio Barnard so masterfully limns her protagonist’s tortured soul, the brother-sister drama at the center of the film remains frustratingly hazy.

Everything in Incredibles 2 is inexorably driven toward a big final blowout. That sequence is suitably grand and eye-popping, but haven’t we seen all of this before?

The documentary provides little sense of intimacy with its subject, but it gives an in-depth look at the master chef's uniquely obsessive work habits.

Director Baltasar Kormákur's film is a simple, acutely observed love story that also happens to be a rousingly stripped-down tale of survival.

As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.

The film captures the pictorial beauty of old-fashioned farm life, but director Xavier Beauvois is careful not to romanticize hard labor for its own sake.

The film flattens Maryla's personal story into hazy generalities about tolerance and the value of remembrance.

Nelson Carlo de Los Santos's first fiction feature is a dazzling collage of styles and approaches in which every scene feels different from the one that came before.

Lynn Shelton's film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.

Director Saul Dibb has infused his adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play with a striking sense of urgency.

Opening with the pulsing synth lines of Kim Wilde's “Kids in America,” Johannes Roberts's film announces itself as a looser, bouncier, more self-consciously frivolous effort than its now decade-old predecessor.

Cory Finley's screenplay is full of sharp, exactingly timed exchanges whose rat-a-tat rhythms exert a spellbinding pull, even if the dialogue at times comes off as artificial and mannered.

Icy absurdism and sorrowful ironies abound throughout Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot, whose laughs stick in your throat like the silent screams of its Job-like protagonist.

The film establishes coherent characters and drops them into a twisty mystery plot that’s tightly crafted enough to generate some real narrative momentum while never getting too bogged down in its own plot that it forgets to be funny.

The clash between prehistoric pastoralism and technological progress at the center of the film is laden with potential for biting comedy, but Nick Park flattens the conflict into a series of slobs-versus-snobs clichés.

Peter Rabbit plays like a country cousin to Paul King's Paddington films, similarly balancing slapstick, absurdism, and a touch of gross-out humor, though without King's transcendently oddball sensibility.

A wilder, weirder, funnier, more heartfelt and eye-popping, and, above all, more fully realized representation of director Paul King’s eccentric sensibility.

Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero's film is a phantasmagoria of impressionistic horror, at once despairing, beautiful, haunting, and surreal.

The film brings Pixar's customary emotional directness to a festive, reverent, and wide-ranging pastiche of Mexican culture.

Mark Webber's stripped-down approach renders the messy, unglamorous lives at the film's center with dignity.

Happy Death Day twists the inherent repetitiveness of slashers to its advantage by exaggerating it to an impossible degree.

It begins as a gleeful deadpan comedy and ends up as an exasperated cri de cœur against our current system of industrialized food production and distribution.

The banality of Marina Willer’s voiceover only goes to prove the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words.

It goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting, as well as a host of other wildlife issues, including conservation, poaching, rhino farms, and the proper balance between man and nature.

Like Lights out, David F. Sandberg's previous film, Annabelle: Creation is a haunted-house horror story that plays on our primeval fear of the dark.

Each brief glimpse of the creature’s fleshy, slithering mass imbues the character drama with an aching sexual desire and, as the violent potential of the entity becomes clear, a mounting sense of dread.

The ending cheapens its main character and weakens the film's firm commitment to the importance of workplace organizing.

By partially demonstrating what a newer, fresher superhero movie might look like, Homecoming ultimately underlines its own genre-defined limitations.

If all this wackiness is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny—the ‘80s references feel particularly played out—it’s nonetheless executed with good-natured breeziness.

After a while, the enigmatic nature of Rachel Weisz's character starts to feel less like an enticing mystery than a narrative trick.

The film is packed with mirthful pranksterism, a vigorous anti-authoritarian streak, and literal potty humor.

Wonder Woman is a strong, at times even rousing, application of the superhero film formula, but it ultimately can’t transcend the constraints of the genre.

Adios may deepen our understanding of these musicians and their world, but it never quite stands on its own.

It combines the brooding intensity of a slow-burn thriller with the high-flown ornamentation of a gothic melodrama.

The film dispenses with sensationalism, engaging with Chris Burden's most notorious work on its own terms.

The film is a comedy that depicts the difficult period of transition from mourning back into normal life.

Though the film settles into a familiar coming-of-age trajectory, it's always enlivened by John Trengove's intimate, inquiring eye.

It's difficult to begrudge a film that has the good sense to put so much stock in Ben Kingsley's hammy theatrics.

Throughout Get Out, Jordan Peele incisively probes the connection between liberal racism and good old-fashioned white supremacy.

This is an often beautiful film, unmistakably the work of a great director but also a clearly compromised one.

Ceyda Torun’s Kedi is an open, tender-hearted meditation on the relationship between felines and humans.

Ryan Ross's Wheeler is at its strongest as a showcase for Stephen Dorff’s husky, lived-in performance.

This is cinema’s most comprehensive look at the gruesome business of necropsy since Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.

While it offers ample opportunity to admire Benson's body of work, it provides few aesthetic delights of its own.