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.

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.