Scott Tobias

German director Christian Petzold adapts a 1944 Holocaust novel by setting it in the modern day. The result is a haunting and beguiling narrative of 21st-century displacement.

An evocative setting and a chewily fun performance from Timothy Spall as a mysterious and malevolent figure can't keep this New Zealand film from trafficking in tired tropes.

In this update of a 2000 Nancy Meyers hit, Taraji P. Henson is a sports agent who reads men's minds. But gender-flipping the original film weakens the premise — and the humor.

This British heist film, based on a true story, assembles Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent and other venerable actors but lacks the stylistic flourish that great caper movies demand.

Paraguay's Oscar submission to this year's best foreign film category is a tender, quietly magical gem about a middle-aged aristocrat forced to start over.

This flat attempt to map contemporary anxieties over the template of more grisly films like Saw only "recalls the mechanized horror trend while sanding off its serrated edges."

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly star as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in a film that struggles to keep its energy up as it follows the decline of two great film comedians.

Director Travis Knight takes over from Michael Bay, and sets about getting viewers to care about characters instead of assaulting our senses. The result is surprisingly watchable.

The first half is a tense, painfully real family drama about the lingering toll of opioid addiction; the second half lurches into thriller territory thick with stock types and cliches.

The debt John McPhail's tuneful horror comedy owes to Shaun of the Dead proves too deep to clamber out of, but the songs are fun and Ella Hunt's feisty lead performance is charming.

The sequel to Wreck-it Ralph is awash with jokes about cross-promotion, brand extension, comments sections and Disney clichés; it feels like the way we live now — with more heart.

The film follows Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) through his three-week presidential bid that fell victim to monkey business, but what director Jason Reitman brings to it is familiar — even quaint.

"It's juvenile. It's irritating. Yet it's also fiendishly clever in the way it anticipates and dismantles every argument that could be made against it," says critic Scott Tobias.

Documentarian Frederick Wiseman aims his camera at the daily rhythms of life in and around a small town — and holds his focus long enough to find something beyond media stereotypes.

Jonah Hill writes and directs this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a boy who embraces skater culture; the film faithfully documents the era, but offers no point of view.

Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti play a New York couple struggling to conceive in writer/director Tamara Jenkins' latest, which examines how infertility tests a relationship with humorous candor.

The exquisite atmosphere and sense of foreboding that made John Bellairs' 1973 book a children's classic gets discarded in favor of a relentless riot of jump-scares and visual noise.

A young man in Paris studies film and has a lot of sex and meandering, passionate conversations about the state of cinema in this "honest, reflective, a little pretentious" (and very French) movie.

Unlike the more allegorical Meet the Feebles or Team America: World Police, this latest excuse to make jokes about puppet-sex isn't interested in doing anything more than make jokes about puppet-sex.

Ken Marino directs this conventional if disjointed ensemble rom-com about disparate Los Angeles dog owners. The film finds its legs whenever it leans into its alt-comedy cast and cameos.