Keith Watson

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.

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

Given that big-studio children’s animation so often feels like it was created by algorithm, it’s refreshing to see a kid’s cartoon like <em>The Last Wish</em> that’s filled with too many ideas rather than too few.

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

For a film about the crimes of a fascist military dictatorship that employed mass torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder as weapons of social control, Argentina, 1985 sure goes down smooth.

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.

The film drifts so far into weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.

A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Frederick Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins.

The film is too invested in treacly cinematic optimism for its character dynamics to feel sketched out beyond their basic narrative function.

Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s boldly restive biopic imagines Empress Elisabeth of Austria as a deeply restless soul chafing against the social limitations of her day.

Writer-director Ruben Östlund’s pessimism ultimately leads the film toward a self-negating dead end.

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

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are adept enough at setting up rich, evocative horror concepts, but they don’t always know what to do with them once they’re in place.

The film is a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats.

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.

Throughout the film, the quick-hit jokes from the show’s rich cast of oddballs serves to suggest a vibrant world outside of the Belchers.

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

Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women.

A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, the film can also be bewildering in its juxtapositions.

Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.

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

The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a deeply miscalculated mix of incoherent social commentary and over-the-top gore.

The solemnity of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s film is at odds with the gratuitousness of its violence.

The ham-handed allegorical construction, generically titled characters, and self-serious tone in its final third drains the story of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive critique of the perils of perfectionism.

Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s film ultimately proposes that survival is the greatest form of resistance.

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

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

Throughout The Humans, Stephen Karam orchestrates the highs and lows of a family reunion with Chekhovian subtlety.

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

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

Though eerie and quietly deadpan, the film circles its grab bag of themes for so long that it also becomes tedious.

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

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.

The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.

This grimly self-serious tale of violent destiny is consistently drowned out by Vicente Amorim’s overreaching visual style.

Candyman doesn’t merely note the connection between fear and remembrance, it also interrogates it from every possible angle.

When Jennifer Hudson is singing her heart out, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, the effect is transportive.

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.

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

Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas.

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

The film's rendering of the interplay of memory, identity, and grief is disappointingly vague.

Amalia Ulman’s film is a bittersweet comedy of human behavior observed with a relaxed yet intently focused eye.

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

After a while, it’s hard not to feel like Radu Jude is simply shooting fish in a barrel.

Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.

The film gets at the profound truth that our relationship with another person is, at its core, a collection of shared memories.

The film minimizes the tragedy of the human race’s near-complete annihilation by positioning it as the backdrop for the world’s most grandiose deadbeat-dad redemption arc.

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.

Too often, the film teases big, wild comedic set pieces that end up deflating almost instantly.

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

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.

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

Everything here wraps up as tidily as it does in your average Hallmark Channel movie.

The film ultimately depicts a world in which people are left with no other option but to devour their own.

The film makes the path to basketball glory and the road to personal redemption seem oddly effortless.

Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.

The film undermines Cunningham’s egalitarianism by linking him directly with the kind of elite snobbery and wealth fixation he abhorred.

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

By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers’ relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the scope of their abuse.

The Harder They Come’s greatest asset may still be its soundtrack, which makes such a stirring impact because it provides a cathartic release from the grim realities depicted on screen.

Daniel Scheinert’s film finds a very human vulnerability lurking beneath the strange and oafish behaviors of its male characters.

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

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

Only in its giddily gory finale does the outrageousness of the film's violence come close to matching that of its plot.

At heart, Victor Kossakovsky's Aquarela is a war film: a cacophonous survey of the global battle between man and water.

The film is a quietly radical attempt to view the world from a non-human perspective.

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

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

There are hints that the film will scale itself to the broader historical context of this era, but the screenplay never elaborates on the ethnic strife the undergirds the Cambodian genocide.

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

As in Laika’s other efforts, the humor in the film is more wry than gut-busting, but Chris Butler has developed some truly inventive comic characters.

The film is a clunky, overwritten attempt to pack as many tortured subplots and pre-chewed sociological insights as can possibly fit into a two-hour runtime.

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.

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

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

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

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

The film is a penetrating an indictment of the bureaucratic obstacles placed in front of refugees.

It’s this carefully managed equilibrium between the inherent preposterousness of its mystical milieu and the convincing emotional reality of Laura’s journey that ultimately makes The Changeover, for all its muddled mythos, a lively and engaging excursion into an unusually naturalistic world of magic.

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.

The documentary is uniquely attuned to the fickle whims of history, politics, and biographical circumstance.

The grim Australian biker drama Outlaws is little more than an endless stream of brooding, yelling, and “badass” posturing broken up by grisly violence and gratuitous sex scenes.

The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.

The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.

Kaku Arakawa's documentary is a candid snapshot of a great artist as an old man.

Luke Fowler allows us to access some of the intimate details of Bartlett’s life in intriguingly indirect ways.

Robin Hood’s shameless silliness only takes it so far, as the film is frequently undermined by Otto Bathurst’s wobbly direction.

Lukas Dhont isn't really concerned with Lara's journey to find peace and balance, as he's interested only in her downward spiral of crisis.

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.

Despite all its confoundments, 9 Fingers works as a unified whole thanks to F.J. Ossang's playful sense of humor.

According tot he film, truly courageous artists aren't necessarily the ones who tackle the state head-on, but rather the ones who stay true to themselves even when no one likes what they have to say.

The film is a slow, directionless anti-thriller that never manages to build tension or establish any stakes.

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

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

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.

Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath's Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a spastic, Mad magazine-style parody of comic-book movies for the age of superhero overload.

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

Kimberly Reed's approach is too bloodless to make us feel the full weight of the injustices her film identifies.

Uncle Drew, the old-school streetballer played by NBA all-star Kyrie Irving, is a cheerfully scruffy creation, and so is the film that bears his name.

While Clio Barnard so masterfully limns her protagonist’s tortured soul, the brother-sister drama at the center of the film remains frustratingly hazy.

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.

Everything in Incredibles 2 is inexorably driven toward a big final blowout. That sequence is suitably grand and eye-popping, but haven’t we seen all of this before?

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 documentary provides little sense of intimacy with its subject, but it gives an in-depth look at the master chef's uniquely obsessive work habits.

Director Baltasar Kormákur's film is a simple, acutely observed love story that also happens to be a rousingly stripped-down tale of survival.

As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.

Anthony Bryne's high-flown style only serves to highlight the film's icky way of exploiting real-world tragedy for kicks.

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

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

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 rarely presents a clear analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's victories, reducing her work to empty slogans.

The film flattens Maryla's personal story into hazy generalities about tolerance and the value of remembrance.

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.

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.

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

Viswanathan, Newton, and Adlon generate a bit of chemistry throughout, but it's undermined by the fundamentally mechanistic nature of Brian and Jim Kehoe's screenplay, which ultimately forces these girls' experiences into neat little scenarios that are constructed every bit as didactically as a workplace training video.

Nelson Carlo de Los Santos's first fiction feature is a dazzling collage of styles and approaches in which every scene feels different from the one that came before.

Lynn Shelton's film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.

Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary characters feel as if they've been air-dropped into a universe where they don't belong.

Director Saul Dibb has infused his adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play with a striking sense of urgency.

Opening with the pulsing synth lines of Kim Wilde's “Kids in America,” Johannes Roberts's film announces itself as a looser, bouncier, more self-consciously frivolous effort than its now decade-old predecessor.

Cory Finley's screenplay is full of sharp, exactingly timed exchanges whose rat-a-tat rhythms exert a spellbinding pull, even if the dialogue at times comes off as artificial and mannered.

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.

The film establishes coherent characters and drops them into a twisty mystery plot that’s tightly crafted enough to generate some real narrative momentum while never getting too bogged down in its own plot that it forgets to be funny.

The clash between prehistoric pastoralism and technological progress at the center of the film is laden with potential for biting comedy, but Nick Park flattens the conflict into a series of slobs-versus-snobs clichés.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Though it pretends to stick up for all the schmucks in the world, the film is really just laughing along with the assholes.

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.

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

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

Daniela Thomas seems stymied by her own images, unable to extract the turmoil and violence suggested by her story for fear of upsetting the austere surface harmony of her visuals.

Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero's film is a phantasmagoria of impressionistic horror, at once despairing, beautiful, haunting, and surreal.

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

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

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

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

The film has an almost pathological need to ensure that everything turns out well for every single character, while at the same time eliding any truly difficult issues.

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

Mark Webber's stripped-down approach renders the messy, unglamorous lives at the film's center with dignity.

Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.

Happy Death Day twists the inherent repetitiveness of slashers to its advantage by exaggerating it to an impossible degree.

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.

Doug Liman may effectively maintain a madcap energy through to the end, but unlike Adam McKay or Martin Scorsese, he isn't all that interested in explicating the complex inner workings of vast criminal enterprises.

It begins as a gleeful deadpan comedy and ends up as an exasperated cri de cœur against our current system of industrialized food production and distribution.

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

Though initially compelling, Peter Nick's documentary is fundamentally without a clear perspective on its subject.

The banality of Marina Willer’s voiceover only goes to prove the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words.

It goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting, as well as a host of other wildlife issues, including conservation, poaching, rhino farms, and the proper balance between man and nature.

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

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

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.

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

Like Lights out, David F. Sandberg's previous film, Annabelle: Creation is a haunted-house horror story that plays on our primeval fear of the dark.

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

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

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.

Each brief glimpse of the creature’s fleshy, slithering mass imbues the character drama with an aching sexual desire and, as the violent potential of the entity becomes clear, a mounting sense of dread.

Daniel Y-Li Grove adeptly creates an icy, über-hip atmosphere of sleek clubs, pulsating synths, and woozy opium trips, a style which has the unfortunate effect of draining much of the cultural specificity from his story.

The ending cheapens its main character and weakens the film's firm commitment to the importance of workplace organizing.

By partially demonstrating what a newer, fresher superhero movie might look like, Homecoming ultimately underlines its own genre-defined limitations.

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.

Schmaltzy, manipulative, and tonally schizophrenic, The Book of Henry is such a monumentally misguided venture that it ends up being oddly, if unintentionally, compelling.

Cars 3 doesn't seem to care about defining the contours of its universe or exploring the possibilities of an all-car world.

After a while, the enigmatic nature of Rachel Weisz's character starts to feel less like an enticing mystery than a narrative trick.

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

The film is packed with mirthful pranksterism, a vigorous anti-authoritarian streak, and literal potty humor.

Wonder Woman is a strong, at times even rousing, application of the superhero film formula, but it ultimately can’t transcend the constraints of the genre.

Adios may deepen our understanding of these musicians and their world, but it never quite stands on its own.

In terms of body objectification, Baywatch is an equal-opportunity exploiter, but when it comes to comedy, it's a total boys' club.

It combines the brooding intensity of a slow-burn thriller with the high-flown ornamentation of a gothic melodrama.

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

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.

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.

Restless, at times even chaotic, the film often seems to be replicating the experience of having a manic episode.

The film dispenses with sensationalism, engaging with Chris Burden's most notorious work on its own terms.

The film is a comedy that depicts the difficult period of transition from mourning back into normal life.

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

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.

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

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

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

More conspicuous than its rote melodrama is the way the film elides the concurrent genocide of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman forces.

Onur Tukel attempts to connect Ashley and Veronica’s barbarity to the broader callousness of American life, but the satire is too blunt to really stick.

It's difficult to begrudge a film that has the good sense to put so much stock in Ben Kingsley's hammy theatrics.

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

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

Over-stuffed and under-conceived, Fist Fight is a clumsy mélange of clashing comedic perspectives.

Ceyda Torun’s Kedi is an open, tender-hearted meditation on the relationship between felines and humans.

Ryan Ross's Wheeler is at its strongest as a showcase for Stephen Dorff’s husky, lived-in performance.

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

The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.

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

This is cinema’s most comprehensive look at the gruesome business of necropsy since Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.

While it offers ample opportunity to admire Benson's body of work, it provides few aesthetic delights of its own.

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

In many ways, Toshirô Mifune the man remains just as mysterious after watching Steven Okazaki's film as he was before.

For a film about such a singular profession, Life on the Line offers surprisingly little insight into linemen's day-to-day labor.

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

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

Slacker that it is, the film never seems willing to put in the necessary work to live up to its potential.

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

It feels like Sheldon Wilson tossed a bunch of third-hand scares in a blender and set it to puree, resulting in a gray, flavorless sludge.

The documentary's focus on elite solutionism effectively erases the role of popular agitation in formulating social change.

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

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.