Keith Watson

Kay Cannon’s Blockers approaches the randiness of her female characters with unvarnished frankness.

The film is a dazzling collage of styles and approaches in which every scene feels different from the one 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.

Like the play, it makes something so viable, tense, and compelling out of the anxious boredom of trench warfare.

The Strangers: Prey at Night is content to deliver a few jumpy thrills before slinking away into the night like one of its murderous marauders.

Thoroughbreds is about the disastrous perils of too little empathy, but it never evinces much of its own.

Coco receives an expectedly resplendent home-video treatment, sporting a demo-ready A/V transfer befitting the film’s visual and musical splendor.

Icy absurdism and sorrowful ironies abound throughout Foxtrot, whose laughs stick in the throat like silent screams.

Mark Perez’s screenplay maintains just enough plausibility to prevent the film from veering into sheer absurdity.

Nick Park’s talents often serve only to highlight the fundamental lack of inspiration at Early Man’s core.

Sophie Brooks seemingly fails to understand what made Annie Hall so appealing: its rich, multi-faceted characterizations.

Will Gluck’s Peter Rabbit is mercifully light on the soppy sentimentality that often weighs down most kiddie flicks.

Whitney Cummings’s film never seems quite sure whether it wants to probe the depths of its title subject or just make us laugh.

Bilal: A New Breed of Hero’s animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm.

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.

Nicolai Fuglsig’s 12 Strong doesn’t allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around its characters.

Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren are likeable here, but they’re stuck in little more than an upbeat wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Paddington 2 stands out for its atmosphere of homey cheer and profound belief in the harmonizing power of warmth, politeness, and the absurd.