Chuck Bowen

Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.

Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.

Rodrigo García’s film is fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.

After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.

As is typically the case with Joe Wright's films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interested in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.

Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.

France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as a symbol of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.

Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.

The film doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.

Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.

The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.

Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.

The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.

The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.

In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.

Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.

Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.

Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.

David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.

The filmmakers don’t examine the psychological terror, the bitterness, and lust that gave rise to many of the works they cherish.

Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.

Only Michel Shannon’s off-kilter timing brings The Quarry to sporadic life.

Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.

The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.

Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

Like most of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.

The Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points.

The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.

Nia DaCosta indulges one of rural quasi-thriller’s most tiresome gambits: humorlessness as a mark of high seriousness.

Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

Where Bonnie and Clyde is gloriously tragic, The Highwaymen is blunt and anti-climactically savage, fulfilling as well as somewhat critiquing former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer’s bloodlust.

The film quickly settles into a holding pattern of repetitive porno-movie hijinks and increasingly listless murder scenes.

With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.

Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.

Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.

For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.

This remake proffers the sort of cinematic nowhere place that's all too common of an increasingly corporate, globalized cinema.

Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.

In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.

Jake Meginsky's documentary is insular, precious, and too pleased with its unwillingness to reach out to the unconverted.

Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.

As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.

Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.

The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.

The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.

The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.

One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.

Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.

The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.

In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.

The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.

Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.

Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.

Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.

Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.

Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.

Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.

Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.

Jay Baruchel's Goon: Last of the Enforcers faces an uphill climb that's inherent to retreads, as it's almost impossible for the film to honor its predecessor without lapsing into contrived and preordained formula.

The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.

Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.

The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.

Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.

Frédéric Mermoud's film makes an elaborate pretense of honoring the traditions of the observational procedural.

The film simplifies Winston Churchill's legacy for the dubious purposes of narrative momentum and emotional lift.

Writer-director David Michôd's film renders existential crises of American entitlement dull and tedious.

Like its protagonist, Philippe Falardeau's film gets lost in a haze of incidental cacophony.

Salt and Fire is a doodle, suggesting an assemblage of ecological riffs and fantasias that Werner Herzog may have entertained while making Into the Inferno.

The pacing is so humorless and funereal that it squelches the possibility of heat or conflict arising between the characters.

The film's characters are stock types without enough satirical texture to fulfill their function in the narrative.

Bart Freundlich alternates somewhat arbitrarily between his various plots, leaving a lot of loose ends in the process.

The film is in love with the tropes it ridicules, and it doesn't take long for that love to dwarf any possibility of critique.

It collapses into repetition and unintended self-parody, as it's devoid of the subtext and empathetic audacity.

Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.

The film blends the Bard with National Geographic, failing to make a case for the inexplicability of their union.

The film occasionally and promisingly suggests an obsessive and free-associative paean to regret.

The film fails to lift off from this sturdy aesthetic launching pad; it never allows the characters, however stock, to evolve in their respective dealings with one another, which is the primary source of tension and escalation for a thriller set in a confined place.

Its openly mercenary ethos initially scan as a bracing lack of pretense in a market crammed to the gills with insidious faux-sentimentality, but its overstuffed relentlessness proves almost equally tedious.

Chad Archibald doesn't quite land Bite's transition over from claustrophobic character study into full-blown monster movie.

The film is ultimately stultifying because the disconnection between the various characters is so immediately accepted as such a foregone conclusion that nothing ever seems to be at stake, and the heavily horizontal imagery, though accomplished and evocative, if fussy, only evokes two states of mind: loneliness and disconnection.

The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.

The film is taken with comfy gags that celebrate these men's ownership of pop culture, filtering them through a lens of unrevealing caricature.

The film's aesthetic is striking, but feels almost intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.

The film is ultimately devoted to formula, as Nick Simon discards his jumbled meta-media conceit at around the halfway mark.

The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it's ultimately just as hollow.

The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.

The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.

Standoff isn’t quite inspired, but it coasts on unexpected modesty of professionalism.

Too much of Noma is composed of gorgeous pillow shots, which grow static and fussy, appearing to exist almost apart from the subject matter.

The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story's central wolves wiggle out of the trap they've potentially set for themselves.