Keith Watson

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Ceyda Torun’s Kedi is an open, tender-hearted meditation on the relationship between felines and humans.

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.

The Harder They Come’s greatest asset may still be its soundtrack, which makes such a stirring impact because it provides a cathartic release from the grim realities depicted on screen.

The film's rendering of the interplay of memory, identity, and grief is disappointingly vague.

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.

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

It brims with empathy and righteous outrage at the treatment of trans people, but with only a vague organizational structure, it ultimately feels scattershot, passionately covering a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.

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

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.

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

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

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

The film in effect positions young jihadis less as fervid, bloodthirsty psychopaths and more as dumb kids at summer camp.

Unlike One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’s similar ode to low-budget resourcefulness often rings false.

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.

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.

The ham-handed allegorical construction, generically titled characters, and self-serious tone in its final third drains the story of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive critique of the perils of perfectionism.

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