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 so toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.

Given that big-studio children’s animation so often feels like it was created by algorithm, it’s refreshing to see a kid’s cartoon like <em>The Last Wish</em> that’s filled with too many ideas rather than too few.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

Everything here wraps up as tidily as it does in your average Hallmark Channel movie.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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’s vision of Christmas is so insipid and lifeless, it’s hard to see why the Grinch would even bother to steal it.

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

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

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

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.

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.