Keith Watson

Throughout, the subtle glimpses of a couple’s lingering affection for one another complicate the bitterness of their separation.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film is one of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability.

Bas Devos’s film is a street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep.

The film effectively immerses us in the wrenching details of Amin’s story, but it keeps us just a bit too far removed from the man himself.

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.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.

A surprisingly nuanced, if at times woefully dated, attempt to depict the complexities of what W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified as the problem of the 20th century: the color line.

With its elegantly restrained cinematography, exquisitely understated performances, and quietly sumptuous production design, Azor embodies the same well-mannered urbanity as its protagonist.

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

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.

If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, Brendon Cronenberg is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.

A methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of its main character’s psyche, the film smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of its source material.

Throughout Get Out, Jordan Peele incisively probes the connection between liberal racism and good old-fashioned white supremacy.

As the world continues to suffer ever-increasing mass die-offs of honeybee colonies, Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska’s film reminds us that there’s indeed a better way to interact with our planet—one rooted in patience, tradition, and a true respect for our surroundings.

Sam Elliott’s calmly affecting performance is overwhelmed by a doggedly conventional screenplay that often plays like end-of-life wish-fulfillment fantasy.

The Guilty is a taut chamber thriller dominated by the flinty yet highly emotive visage of actor Jakob Cedergren.

There’s a haunting beauty to Tatiana Huezo’s depiction of the gradual cross-contamination of childhood innocence and criminal aggression.

C’mon C’mon admirably doesn’t indulge in heartstring-tugging pathos, but the film suffers from a certain shapelessness.

By fitting Cori, Tayla, and Blessin's lives into a predetermined narrative arc, Step reduces the girls to plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps archetypes.

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

Radu Jude’s film is a bitterly comic essay on nationalist mythologies and historical amnesia.

Just as the director seems to be settling in to tackle some heady ideas, the screenplay’s stale narrative complications instead overtake the film.

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

The film lays out the complexities of contemporary race relations with a deliberateness that frequently edges over into didacticism.

The film captures the pictorial beauty of old-fashioned farm life, but director Xavier Beauvois is careful not to romanticize hard labor for its own sake.

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.

In the film, the Battle of Midway suggests something out of a photorealistic animated film.

Though the film settles into a familiar coming-of-age trajectory, it's always enlivened by John Trengove's intimate, inquiring eye.