Chuck Bowen

Albert Birney knows that fantasy is a potent force, that it can lead you deep into the worst parts of yourself, or, with the right influences, lead you back to life.

In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest how our idea of Christmas is a river of memories real and imagined.

Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.

Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, and Hong Sang-soo is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen.

Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void.

The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.

There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.

The film is rich in compositions that seem to cut to the essence of the characters’ yearnings.

One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.

A wealth of contrasting stimulation gives the film a singular and intimate atmosphere, in which scenes can last little eternities while still leaving you feeling as if you’re struggling to keep up with a stream of secrets and in-jokes.

The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.

With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.

For Hong Sang-oo, In Our Day is a gesture toward recognizing the beautiful, awful, and uncanny.

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Evil Does Not Exist is a turn away from the filmmaker’s empathy of his earlier work toward an aesthetic that’s jagged and chilly.

The film somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

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

Passion already finds Hamaguchi Ryûsuke to be a superb orchestrator of moods and tones.

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

Connoisseurs of Hong Sang-soo’s cinema will no doubt be fascinated by the transcendent minimalism of the film, which suggests Picasso knocking off a sketch on a piece of paper in a matter of seconds.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.

With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.

The film has a free-floating, nearly intangible sense of unease that greatly serves it.

Birth/Rebirth serves as a perverse correction, recalibrating decades of dilution to reemphasize the moral weight and emotional anguish at the heart of Shelley’s novel.

Chloe Domont has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test.

Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.

Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.

2nd Chance a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn.

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

For Paul Schrader, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.

With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.

Throughout the film, one often feels the plot machinations working against Park Chan-wook’s poetry, though in a few cases poetry wins out.

EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.

Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.

Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.

The accumulating effect of this airy and resonant film’s formal devices is that of a heartbroken artist learning to reengage with society.

Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.

With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.

The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.

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

There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.

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.

The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.

Zeros and Ones is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for his badness.

Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.

Jacob Gentry’s film punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror.

At their best, writer-director Mario Furloni and Kate McLean evince a masterful grasp of storytelling that’s subtle and rich in innuendo.

The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.

The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.

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

Wife of a Spy could use a streak of live-wire, huckster crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner.

Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present.

The film hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem.

Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that’s more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.

In Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.

At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.

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

The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.

The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.

Mama Weed is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, but it doesn’t challenge Isabelle Huppert or the audience.

Nicolas Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, caging his brand of operatic hysteria.

With One Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh mixes an old-school 1950s noir with a modern sense of social self-consciousness.

Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.

The film becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch.

It’s Morgan Neville’s impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life.

With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.

The characters don’t exist solely to affirm the film’s various themes, and as a result, their humanity gets under your skin.

Throughout, it’s difficult to sort the contrivances that writer-director Jason William Lee is parodying from those he’s indulging.

Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.

The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.

The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.

Theo Anthony’s film is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds.

Ultimately, Anders Thomas Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which his protagonist viscerally annihilates a violent gang.

Cacophony eventually takes over Wrath of Man, stranding the actors in the process. Except, that is, for Jason Statham, who’s by now a master of presiding over Guy Ritchie’s gleeful chaos.

At its best, Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room.

A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula.

Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary is a spry and inventive account of extraordinary transcendence.

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

Writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos barely capitalizes on the luridly sacrilegious implications of the film’s premise.

Sam Claflin is best in show, but his performance is undercut by the film’s inability to escalate or explore the ramifications of its premise.

The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.

The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.

The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Alonso Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession.

Unlike Malcom & Marie, Daniel Brühl’s feature-length directorial debut proves to be authentically self-castigating.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.

The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.

Even by the woeful standards of decades-too-late comedy sequels, Coming 2 America is desperate, belabored, and thin.

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

The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.

Time and again, the film shortchanges the human elements of its stories for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.

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

At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.

Jerrod Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.