Keith Watson

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.