Keith Watson

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The film is at its sharpest when Chris Kelly hands scenes over to his main character's family and friends.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Trolls is a flashy, pre-fab product, but the animators are given just enough space to create moments of genuine artistry.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Writer-director Steven Caple Jr.'s social-realist tendencies run up against some unconvincing genre elements.

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.

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

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

Carol Morley’s film wants to blow our minds, but it succeeds only at rousing our boredom.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Alice plays as an inadvertent parody of contemporary liberalism’s fascination with and fetishization of ‘70s black radicalism.

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

The film evinces a clear-eyed sense of the limits that a capitalistic society places on its working class.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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