Chuck Bowen

It exhibits the spry subtlety of Jean and Luc Dardenne's films, and, consequently, it's possible that it will be similarly mistaken for a work of “naturalism.”

There are few modern filmmakers who possess Sofia Coppola’s gift for capturing how our idealized, movie-fed ideas of “night life” reflect our longing for adventure as well as our loneliness.

Writer-director Boo Junfeng casually reinvigorates the prison drama, boiling its elements down to their primal essence.

Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.

As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.

The film celebrates the thingness of things, as well as the assuring clarity and lucidity that can arise from devotion to knowledge.

Joe Swanberg's films have grown into a reliable relief from the competitive, dehumanizing freneticism of much of American culture, marked by an affirming and understated sense of decency.

Miyazaki’s concerns with the fragility and wonder of our less tangible surroundings haunt the picture without overpowering it.

This profound film reveals that nothing is below the purview of existential contemplation, even all matters of flatulence, and words as simple as “Good morning” are revealed to contain fathomless multitudes.

A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.

As with most Hong Sang-soo films, it engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos.

It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.

The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.

Albert Maysles's portrait of Iris Apfel gradually emerges with cathartic clarity without compromising her inherent mystery.

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

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.

A great horror film about a weak man who, gazing into a vibrant pool of freshly spilled blood, learns just how little he ultimately knows.

Redford ultimately holds Downhill Racer together with the performance of his career.

The film communicates a sporadic sense of violation—of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.

Every moment in Jones’s film is so precisely textured that it becomes fantastical.

The Honeymoon Killers is an intense, terrifying portrait of repression and instability.

Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.

The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.

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.

Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.

Eliza Hittman's film captures the exclusive properties of sex with a degree of intimacy and empathy that, at times, feels authentically revelatory.

The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.

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.

Throughout, artists intermingle in scenes that have been rendered with an Altman-esque sense of personal panorama.

Coming Home is a film in which everyone's dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.

Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.

Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.

Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.

The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.

Herzog’s idiosyncratic horror classic remains a vital conversation between two distinct generations of brilliant German filmmakers.

One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films.

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

Steven Soderbergh’s film considers modern media as a vehicle for revising white patriarchal capitalism.

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

Pakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.

The Mummy is one of Hammer’s classics, cleverly fusing the human pathos of the original Universal film with the creature-centric physicality of the sequels the latter inevitably yielded.

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

With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate.

There's an artisanal scruffiness to Win It All that testifies to Joe Swanberg’s quiet fluidity as a filmmaker.

God Told Me To is one of the key American horror films from the 1970s to mine the internally sexual, racial quandaries of a nation beset by one great civil rights catastrophe after another.

The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.

Aarón Fernández captures one of the most heartening elements of sex: that it doesn't always oblige our rules or expectations.

In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.

Director Tom DiCillo ingeniously structures the film as a trio of overlapping shorts that cumulatively suggest ripples emanating from a stone tossed in a pond.

Sanjuro is still a lesson from a master in mounting choreography and sustaining momentum, though it remains more of an exercise rather than a work of flesh and blood.

Any real zombie fan knows that political parable and decomposing cannibal corpse gore go together like peanut butter and jelly, but Day of the Dead found the subgenre’s reigning master and poet-in-residence mismanaging the proper ratios a bit.

Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.

Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.

Chinonye Chukwu’s film is a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia.

Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.

Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators.

Fetishism, parody, and various registers of violence propel a livewire thriller that mines the free-floating hostility existing between genders.

One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.

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.

Nicole Holofcener's The Land of Steady Habits often suggests the film that American Beauty might have been if the latter had been pruned of its smug hysteria.

This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.

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

Alison Bagnall and her talented leads appear to effortlessly achieve a tone that's tricky to sustain, one that abounds equally in absurdism and empathy.

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

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

This gnarly gem of 1980s-era punk horror still looks and sounds a little rough, but the film and the supplements justify the plunge.

Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.

Like Me is exhilarating because of Robert Mockler’s willingness to deviate from his satire so as to surprise himself with seemingly spontaneous emotional textures and tangents.

Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.

The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.

Hong Sang-soo simultaneously positions filmmaking as the ultimate act of atonement and evasion, eviscerating himself so that he may live to stage several more films about the futility of getting hammered and worshipping and bedding gorgeous young women.

It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.

Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.

When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.

It compellingly captures a family wrestling mightily with the riddles and contradictions of a culture that promotes achievement at all costs with little thought as to what that actually means.

Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.

Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Brandon Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Christopher Nolan.

The film is in part an exceedingly black comedy that parodies proper society's eager, self-righteous naïveté on the subject of its children.

First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Takashi Miike film in throwaway clothing.

Zodiac Killer Project is a wicked embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the media itself being the message.

Like a number of cult directors to emerge in the 1970s, Henry Jaglom values a party atmosphere at the expense of narrative cohesion.

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

Each of the six vignettes that make up this unusually energetic anthology pertains to the methods of calculated mass dehumanization that are (barely) hidden beneath the practices of social institutions.

Noah Buschel shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.

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

The Brazilian animated feature offers relief from the impersonal assault of contemporary pop culture.

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.

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.

Shot through with darkly existentialist humor, the film finds Aubrey Plaza throwing a gauntlet to filmmakers who have typecast her in the past.

It grounds us so effectively in Joplin's emotional realm as to partially rekindle the social transcendence that her voice must have represented for its owner.

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

The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.

Wiktor Ericsson emphasizes one of the strongest and most distinctive features of Joseph Sarno's aesthetic: his concentration on female pleasure.

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