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.