Chuck Bowen

Writer-director Bernard Rose effectively conjoures an atompshere of poetic stoned-1960s British rebellion, a feeling of woozy, intoxicating possibility that will not-so-eventually be squashed.

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.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

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

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.

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

One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.

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

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

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

The film is content as it is to run clever one-liners and 19th-century pop-cultural references into the same comedic whirlpool.

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

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

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

There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.

As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.

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

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

It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.

The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.

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

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

After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.

The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.

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

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

Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.

There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.

The main character is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency.

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

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

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

It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.

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

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

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

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

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.

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

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

There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.

The film lacks the manic fly-by-night invention of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or even the ripe erotic ambiguity of something like Avatar.

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

Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"

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

It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.

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.

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

Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.

Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.

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

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

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 Dead ultimately doesn't have much of a pulse, as it fails to transcend the banality of its inevitable theme.

Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.

Hello Lonesome isn't really that much of a movie, but it has something that a number of more polished pictures in the same vein don't: human decency. Sadly, that's noteworthy.

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

There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.

There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.

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

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

A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.

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.

52 Pick-Up loses its sense of social texture in the last third when everyone begins to die by decree of formulaic three-act screenwriting, and its indifference to the plight of Harry’s wife (Ann-Margret) is unseemly, but the film is an often nightmarish gem awaiting rediscovery.

Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.

Director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland can’t seem to figure out if Psycho II should resemble a film from the 1950s or the 1980s, so they split the difference, and the result is a bland, meandering movie with no real look or tone at all.

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.

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

The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.

The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.