Keith Watson

Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary characters feel as if they've been air-dropped into a universe where they don't belong.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Endeavoring to give us a post-mumblecore spin on Annie Hall, writer-director Sophie Brooks seemingly fails to understand what made Woody Allen's film so appealing: its rich, multi-faceted characterizations.

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.

The Female Brain never seems quite sure whether it wants to probe the depths of its title subject or just make us laugh. And given the shallowness of its quasi-scientific blather and the tepidness of its comedy, it ultimately does neither.

The animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm rather than a human director with a personal vision.

Dakota Fanning's Wendy is less a truly thought-through character than a compendium of quirks.

Though it pretends to stick up for all the schmucks in the world, the film is really just laughing along with the assholes.

As Nicolai Fuglsig doesn't allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around his characters, 12 Strong inevitably proceeds as a jaunty imperial adventure through the wilds of northern Afghanistan.

No matter how likable Sutherland and Mirren are, they're still stuck in little more than an upbeat wish-fulfillment fantasy.

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

Daniela Thomas seems stymied by her own images, unable to extract the turmoil and violence suggested by her story for fear of upsetting the austere surface harmony of her visuals.

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

Writer-director Bryan Buckley's film is ultimately more interested in the journalist than his story.

The unvaried register of the filmmaking leads the narrative to feel aimless and dramatically inert.

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

Director Timothy Reckart's The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids' movie.

The film has an almost pathological need to ensure that everything turns out well for every single character, while at the same time eliding any truly difficult issues.

The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.

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

Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.

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

Visually plain and ploddingly paced, My Little Pony: The Movie suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.