Keith Watson

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.