Keith Watson

By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers’ relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the scope of their abuse.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 is ostensibly about the war for the soul of a house, but it couldn’t feel less lived in.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s this carefully managed equilibrium between the inherent preposterousness of its mystical milieu and the convincing emotional reality of Laura’s journey that ultimately makes The Changeover, for all its muddled mythos, a lively and engaging excursion into an unusually naturalistic world of magic.

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.

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

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

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

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

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