Keith Watson

A surprisingly nuanced, if at times woefully dated, attempt to depict the complexities of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified as the problem of the 20th century: the color line.

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

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.

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

Radu Jude’s film is a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia.

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

The film ultimately depicts a world in which people are left with no other option but to devour their own.

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.

La Piscine is, more than anything else, a work of vivid sensory delights.

There’s a haunting beauty to Tatiana Huezo’s depiction of the gradual cross-contamination of childhood innocence and criminal aggression.

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

The film is a penetrating an indictment of the bureaucratic obstacles placed in front of refugees.

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.

Luke Fowler allows us to access some of the intimate details of Bartlett’s life in intriguingly indirect ways.

Daniel Scheinert’s film finds a very human vulnerability lurking beneath the strange and oafish behaviors of its male characters.

The film is a comedy that depicts the difficult period of transition from mourning back into normal life.

The film is packed with mirthful pranksterism, a vigorous anti-authoritarian streak, and literal potty humor.

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

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.

Bas Devos’s film is a street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep.

At heart, Victor Kossakovsky's Aquarela is a war film: a cacophonous survey of the global battle between man and water.

Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.

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.

A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Frederick Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins.

Lynn Shelton's film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.

Throughout, the subtle glimpses of a couple’s lingering affection for one another complicate the bitterness of their separation.

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

Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.

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

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.

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

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

If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness.

Throughout The Humans, Stephen Karam orchestrates the highs and lows of a family reunion with Chekhovian subtlety.

The film is a quietly radical attempt to view the world from a non-human perspective.

In essence, Truth or Dare is less of a concert film than an elaborately constructed exegesis on pop mythmaking and the construction of identity.

The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.

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.

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.

With its elegantly restrained cinematography, exquisitely understated performances, and quietly sumptuous production design, Azor embodies the same well-mannered urbanity as its protagonist.

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.

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.

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

Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.

Throughout Get Out, Jordan Peele incisively probes the connection between liberal racism and good old-fashioned white supremacy.

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.

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

Candyman doesn’t merely note the connection between fear and remembrance, it also interrogates it from every possible angle.

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

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.

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

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.

The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.

The film drifts so far into weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.

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

While Clio Barnard so masterfully limns her protagonist’s tortured soul, the brother-sister drama at the center of the film remains frustratingly hazy.

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

Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas.

C’mon C’mon admirably doesn’t indulge in heartstring-tugging pathos, but the film suffers from a certain shapelessness.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 dispenses with sensationalism, engaging with Chris Burden's most notorious work on its own terms.

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.

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.

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.

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

The film gets at the profound truth that our relationship with another person is, at its core, a collection of shared memories.

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

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

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

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

After a while, it’s hard not to feel like Radu Jude is simply shooting fish in a barrel.

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

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

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.

It's difficult to begrudge a film that has the good sense to put so much stock in Ben Kingsley's hammy theatrics.

Despite all its confoundments, 9 Fingers works as a unified whole thanks to F.J. Ossang's playful sense of humor.

Kimberly Reed's approach is too bloodless to make us feel the full weight of the injustices her film identifies.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

It's emotionally manipulative, but its two leads find a core of humanity even in the most calculating plot machinations.

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.

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.