Keith Watson

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.

Daniela Thomas’s presentation of her story is so impassive, so doggedly unemphatic, that it makes little impact.

The 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.

Throughout, everything blurs together into a frenzy of outrageous emotions and hysterical behavior.

Coco 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 reinforces the idea that it’s the job of those with disabilities to inspire the jerks of the word to be nicer.

Daddy’s Home 2 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.

It suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.

It passionately covers a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.

Doug Liman’s American Made largely eschews any sense of verisimilitude in favor of wacky comedy bits.

The film ends up as a cri de cœur against our current system of industrialized food production and distribution.