Keith Watson

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.

For a film so interested in the public's malleability, The Take isn't particularly good at controlling its own audience.

The film’s careful attention to detail in the animation is continuously undermined by a formulaic plot and anxious pandering to contemporary sensibilities.

Rather than pointing the finger at society for inducing insecurity in women, I Feel Pretty suggests the onus is on women to change their attitudes.

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

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.

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.

Tommy Wirkola’s film squanders an evocative premise in favor of rote gun-fu carnage.

Alice plays as an inadvertent parody of contemporary liberalism’s fascination with and fetishization of ‘70s black radicalism.

It doesn't suggest documentary footage found in the woods so much as a haunted-house version of Hardcore Henry.

The film evinces a clear-eyed sense of the limits that a capitalistic society places on its working class.

Fernando Trueba fails to probe the political implications of The Queen of Spain's period milieu, which is particularly confounding given the filmmaker’s evident anti-fascist sympathies.

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

The mother-daughter relationship ostensibly at the film’s heart is largely reduced to tired jokes about how moms can be overprotective and don’t understand how to use Facebook.

Power Rangers is so concerned with launching a mature teen-targeted franchise that it often forgets to have some fun.

Lasse Hallström's gooey film exists only to offer comforting reassurances about dogs' natural servility.

This is an often beautiful film, unmistakably the work of a great director but also a clearly compromised one.

James McTeigue's Breaking In is the sort of incompetently constructed thriller that gives B movies a bad name.

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

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.

Given the sheer amount of comic material here, some of the jokes are bound to fall flat, but the hit-to-miss ratio is depressingly low.

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

It's content to be the sort of film parents can throw on an iPad to ensure 90 minutes' worth of relative peace and quiet away from their antic children.

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.

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.

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

The film veers almost at random from ghost story to family drama to erotic thriller to black comedy.

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