Chuck Bowen

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.

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

The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.

Jamie Dornan is a stiff whom Jon Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why the film is so tedious and unsatisfying.

Steven Soderbergh’s signature formal gamesmanship enlivens what could have been a stodgy scenario.

Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.

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

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.

If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.

The film's most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.

This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.

Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.

The film’s purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.

In French Exit’s best passages, sadness and curt, resonant comedy exist side by side unceremoniously.

At its most beguiling, director Glen Keane’s animated film Over the Moon mixes the unbridled free-association of playtime with an undercurrent of barbed satire.

Writer-director Jim Cummings reinvigorates an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.

At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.

Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.

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

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.

Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, like The Hunt, is ultimately a parable about breaking a social contract.

The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.

Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.

Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.

Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.

John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.

The film has a weird, ghostly, even beautiful pull, but it functions mostly on theoretical terms because Charlie Kaufman has thought it to death.

The film suggests that Bill and Ted’s dreams of stardom, which have evolved into dreams of acceptance and expression, aren’t so stupid after all.

A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is a bottomless yearning for wonder.

Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.

Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.

Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.

A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.

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.

Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.

Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.

Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.

Filmmaker Cara Jones offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.

With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.

David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.

Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.

Throughout, Judd Apatow dramatizes the ideal of community with an almost Eastwoodian sense of rapture.

Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.

Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.

Director AndrePatterson never breaks the film's incantatory spell with pointless freneticism, patiently savoring the great thrill of genre stories: anticipation.

Throughout the documentary, Benjamin Ree upsets conventions, offering a moving portrait of two lost souls.

Simon Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.

In this time of peril and chaos, Elizabeth Carroll’s documentary is a balm for the soul.

Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.

The film offers a refuge of idealism and intellectuality in an age that’s actively hostile to both of those qualities.

The film’s early scenes turn the stuff of paying bills and managing kids into manna for an unsettlingly intimate domestic thriller.

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.

In Deerskin, Quentin Dupieux mines the absurdism that is his signature with newfound forcefulness.

The film allows that we are complicit in privilege for our fascination and envy.

Abel Ferrara doesn’t require traditional dream logic, as his grasp of the nitty-gritty quotidian of longing is inherently uncanny.

Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.

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.

What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.

Robertson’s sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction was more fulsomely evoked by The Last Waltz.

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

The film’s awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one’s conception of identity.

Contemporary outrage could’ve potentially counterpointed the film’s increasingly mawkish tendencies.

Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.

The film’s skittishness is particularly maddening considering that Woody Allen has nothing to artistically to prove.

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

The documentary is enjoyable, but one suspects that its subject may have found it soft.

Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.

It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.

Strickland’s film is another fetish object that rues the perils of fetishism.

Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence.

Kim Longinotto is so eager to celebrate her hero that she also glides past thornier portions of Letizia Battaglia’s life.

The film too often suggests an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.

Viewed charitably, Logan Marshall-Green’s sketchy protagonist and vague atmosphere are meant to achieve the effect of a parable.

Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

After its promising first act, Craig Brewer’s film becomes a series of fleeting bits, allowing questions to pile up.

For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.

The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.

With the filmmakers unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.

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

Vincenzo Natali’s film divests itself of stakes in the name of total meaninglessness.

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

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

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

Arnaud Desplechin evinces a glancing touch with showing how social tension and need inform law and crime.

A wonderful high concept is compromised for another story of lonely people learning to connect.

The tactility of earlier Hirokazu Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.

The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.

Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.

The film is beautiful and occasionally quite moving, but its subject matter deserves more than art-house irresolution.

The film is about a mystery that isn’t solved, and how that inconclusiveness spotlights the insidious functions of society.