Keith Watson

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov offers nothing new to the cinematic lexicon of the chariot race.

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

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 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 premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.

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.

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.

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

For a film about such a singular profession, Life on the Line offers surprisingly little insight into linemen's day-to-day labor.

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.

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.

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

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

The film veers almost at random from ghost story to family drama to erotic thriller to black comedy.

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.

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

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

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

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

The film is confused in conception, dreary in execution, and completely lacking in forward momentum.

It feels like Sheldon Wilson tossed a bunch of third-hand scares in a blender and set it to puree, resulting in a gray, flavorless sludge.

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.