Keith Watson

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.

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.

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

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

When one finally puts together the pieces of the film’s scattered narrative puzzle, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.

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.

It brims with empathy and righteous outrage at the treatment of trans people, but with only a vague organizational structure, it ultimately feels scattershot, passionately covering a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Writer-director Daniela Amavia fails to link the lives of her characters to any deeper sense of meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.

Over-stuffed and under-conceived, Fist Fight is a clumsy mélange of clashing comedic perspectives.

The unvaried register of the filmmaking leads the narrative to feel aimless and dramatically inert.

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.

Fernando Trueba fails to probe the political implications of The Queen of Spain's period milieu, which is particularly confounding given the filmmaker’s evident anti-fascist sympathies.

Tommy Wirkola’s film squanders an evocative premise in favor of rote gun-fu carnage.

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.

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.

Power Rangers is so concerned with launching a mature teen-targeted franchise that it often forgets to have some fun.

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 rarely presents a clear analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's victories, reducing her work to empty slogans.

Given the sheer amount of comic material here, some of the jokes are bound to fall flat, but the hit-to-miss ratio is depressingly low.

The animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm rather than a human director with a personal vision.

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

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

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

Tim Burton manages to put his stamp on this clunky behemoth of a film, but in the end, the Mouse always wins.

The Female Brain never seems quite sure whether it wants to probe the depths of its title subject or just make us laugh. And given the shallowness of its quasi-scientific blather and the tepidness of its comedy, it ultimately does neither.

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

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.

Christopher Plummer brings a twinkly eyed insouciance to his character, but there's only so many times Jack can make a joke about, say, his adult diapers before it becomes thin and hollow.

Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.

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

The film is peppered with interesting true-life details, but these are overwhelmed by frantic comedic sequences.

The film in effect positions young jihadis less as fervid, bloodthirsty psychopaths and more as dumb kids at summer camp.

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.

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

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.

Director Joe Berlinger essentially allows his subject to hijack the film for his own end.

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

Mariama Diallo’s film never seems to fully buy into its horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as avatars for multiple grievances.

The screenplay quickly loses this moral clarity as the plot twists pile up and the power balances shift.