Keith Watson

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.

If all this wackiness is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny—the ‘80s references feel particularly played out—it’s nonetheless executed with good-natured breeziness.

Even if Long Way North's narrative makes for a bland frame, there’s no denying the beauty of the picture it holds.

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.

By the time the credits roll on the film, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths.

By partially demonstrating what a newer, fresher superhero movie might look like, Homecoming ultimately underlines its own genre-defined limitations.

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

When one finally puts together the pieces of the film’s scattered narrative puzzle, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.

The documentary provides little sense of intimacy with its subject, but it gives an in-depth look at the master chef's uniquely obsessive work habits.

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.

Robin Hood’s shameless silliness only takes it so far, as the film is frequently undermined by Otto Bathurst’s wobbly direction.

It goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting, as well as a host of other wildlife issues, including conservation, poaching, rhino farms, and the proper balance between man and nature.

After a while, the enigmatic nature of Rachel Weisz's character starts to feel less like an enticing mystery than a narrative trick.

The film is brightly colored, inventively designed, and constantly flirting with the outright psychedelic, but it's so packed full of incident that it rarely gives its jokes the space to land.

Director Saul Dibb has infused his adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play with a striking sense of urgency.

While it offers ample opportunity to admire Benson's body of work, it provides few aesthetic delights of its own.

A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, the film can also be bewildering in its juxtapositions.

A jazz-loving kid from a musical family, Williams has been breathing music since he could talk and, though open and forthcoming as he recalled his enduring career, he was clearly happiest when talking about the nuts and bolts of his craft.

Schilling and Healy never quite overcome the fact that Take Me is a suspense comedy that simply isn't very suspenseful or very funny and, just as importantly, never finds a thematic through line.

Though eerie and quietly deadpan, the film circles its grab bag of themes for so long that it also becomes tedious.

The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.