Keith Watson

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

James McTeigue's Breaking In is the sort of incompetently constructed thriller that gives B movies a bad name.

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

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

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.

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.

Yes, deep down, even brutal war criminals like the one played by Ben Kingsley are people too.

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.

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.

Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary characters feel as if they've been air-dropped into a universe where they don't belong.

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.

Endeavoring to give us a post-mumblecore spin on Annie Hall, writer-director Sophie Brooks seemingly fails to understand what made Woody Allen's film so appealing: its rich, multi-faceted characterizations.

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.

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.

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

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

Though it pretends to stick up for all the schmucks in the world, the film is really just laughing along with the assholes.

As Nicolai Fuglsig doesn't allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around his characters, 12 Strong inevitably proceeds as a jaunty imperial adventure through the wilds of northern Afghanistan.

No matter how likable Sutherland and Mirren are, they're still stuck in little more than an upbeat wish-fulfillment fantasy.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Director Timothy Reckart's The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids' movie.

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.

The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.

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

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

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

Visually plain and ploddingly paced, My Little Pony: The Movie suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Though it may clear the low bar set by the first film, The Nut Job 2 still suffers from many of the same problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Schmaltzy, manipulative, and tonally schizophrenic, The Book of Henry is such a monumentally misguided venture that it ends up being oddly, if unintentionally, compelling.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

The film's problem isn't so much the grossness of its humor as the laziness with which it's executed.

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.

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.

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

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.

The grace notes are crowded out by the screenplay’s plot machinations and emotional manipulations.

It's content to be the sort of film parents can throw on an iPad to ensure 90 minutes' worth of relative peace and quiet away from their antic children.

The film barely even scratches the surface of the animating force of Cézanne and Zola's lives: their art.

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

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

More conspicuous than its rote melodrama is the way the film elides the concurrent genocide of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman forces.

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.

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.

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

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.

Lasse Hallström's gooey film exists only to offer comforting reassurances about dogs' natural servility.

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

The film attempts a tone of tragic understatement that registers instead as flat, plodding, and underfelt.