Keith Watson

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

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

Even if Long Way North's narrative makes for a bland frame, there’s no denying the beauty of the picture it holds.

It's emotionally manipulative, but its two leads find a core of humanity even in the most calculating plot machinations.

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

Writer-director Daniela Amavia fails to link the lives of her characters to any deeper sense of meaning.

The film is confused in conception, dreary in execution, and completely lacking in forward momentum.

The film is at its sharpest when Chris Kelly hands scenes over to his main character's family and friends.

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

Ben-Hur director Timur Bekmambetov offers nothing new to the cinematic lexicon of the chariot race.

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

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

The film is premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.

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

La Piscine is, more than anything else, a work of vivid sensory delights.

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.

If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness.

In essence, Truth or Dare is less of a concert film than an elaborately constructed exegesis on pop mythmaking and the construction of identity.

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

When one finally puts together the pieces of the film’s scattered narrative puzzle, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.