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.