Keith Watson

A constant sense of motion can’t obscure how stale, secondhand, and spiritless this entire endeavor feels.

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

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

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.

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

Just as David Gordon Green seems to have finally unshackled his legacyquel trilogy from the dead weight of the past, the film loses the courage of its convictions.

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.

Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.

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

The film is peppered with interesting true-life details, but these are overwhelmed by frantic comedic sequences.

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

Hustle doesn’t really seem to know who its characters are, much less how they fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.

The film is so toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.

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.

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

Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.

Mariama Diallo’s film never seems to fully buy into its horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as avatars for multiple grievances.

The screenplay quickly loses this moral clarity as the plot twists pile up and the power balances shift.

The grace notes are crowded out by the screenplay’s plot machinations and emotional manipulations.

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

Though it may clear the low bar set by the first film, The Nut Job 2 still suffers from many of the same problems.

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

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

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.

The film's problem isn't so much the grossness of its humor as the laziness with which it's executed.

Dominic Cooke’s film is content to regurgitate some of the more tired artistic tropes about the Cold War.

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

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