Keith Watson

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.

The film is most affecting in its simpler moments, particularly those revolving around food.

In the moments when Old works, it’s because M. Night Shyamalan embraces the inherent weirdness of his material.

Trolls is a flashy, pre-fab product, but the animators are given just enough space to create moments of genuine artistry.

The film’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.

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

The film barely even scratches the surface of the animating force of Cézanne and Zola's lives: their art.

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.

It’s been said that casting is 90% of directing, and it seems to be 90% of the writing in Bill Holderman's film.

The film apes the style that James Wan established with the original Conjuring without establishing any real identity of its own.

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

SuperFly is a slicked-up, tricked-out revamp that dispenses with any pretense of verisimilitude in favor of rap-video extravagance and mob-movie bloodshed.

The film attempts a tone of tragic understatement that registers instead as flat, plodding, and underfelt.

Yes, deep down, even brutal war criminals like the one played by Ben Kingsley are people too.

There's an appealingly shaggy buddy comedy hidden somewhere inside of The Spy Who Dumped Me, but good luck finding it amid all the desperate poop jokes, lifeless action sequences, and lazy plot mechanics.

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

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

Director Joe Berlinger essentially allows his subject to hijack the film for his own end.

The film’s vision of Christmas is so insipid and lifeless, it’s hard to see why the Grinch would even bother to steal it.

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.

Unimaginatively directed and indifferently shot, the film never establishes a distinctive voice for itself.

The film’s funny and shocking gore too often plays second fiddle to meandering comedic bits revolving around the band’s recording sessions.

The film's bloated action-comedy machinery prevents any real chemistry from forming between Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville.

Writer-director Steven Caple Jr.'s social-realist tendencies run up against some unconvincing genre elements.

Christopher Plummer brings a twinkly eyed insouciance to his character, but there's only so many times Jack can make a joke about, say, his adult diapers before it becomes thin and hollow.

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

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

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