Chuck Bowen

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

Mapping the intersection between history and emotion, Michael Almereyda finds himself in Alain Resnais terrain.

This is a confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.

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.

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.

Blow-Up is moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides.

True to the implications of its title, the devotional insularity of Madeline's Madeline is suffocating, which is appropriate for a film about a mentally imbalanced teenage artist but suffocating nonetheless.

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

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.

Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn't manufactured.

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.

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

Miguel Gomes's formal talents, which include a flair for close-ups of elegantly smooth or weathered faces, transcend his soft spot for the didactic.

Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.

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

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

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.

The doc is so obnoxiously simplistic that you find yourself strangely unsympathetic to its objectively inarguable aim to promote greater standards of elder care.

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

Throughout Raw, Julia Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that’s reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg.

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

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

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.

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

It masterfully sustains a sense of “wrongness” that will be felt even by those unfamiliar with Argentina’s history.

A sluggish, obvious fusion of a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with a comedic family crime romp that abounds in stiflingly over-emphasized Boston-crime-movie details.

Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.

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

It infuses an outdoorsy survival tale and a coming-of-age story of friendship with Taika Waititi's penchant for distaff flakiness.

Few films have so exquisitely captured how straight American men reveal their affections and insecurities to one another, as well as how they’re both threatened and awed by each other.

Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.

A zig-zagging, free-associational genre item that's mostly concerned with stretching the generally narrow tonal rules of what a thriller can be.

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

Above all, Destry Rides Again is fun, with a variety of stars and character actors utilizing their charisma with an expert sense of ease and offhandedness.

Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis.

An immersive drama that bridges real-life details with the catharses of parables with expressionistic on-the-fly camerawork, a blend of the textural and the poetic that’s hallucinatory and profound.

Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.

It grows increasingly hopeless as it contrasts the alien paradise of the opening with the wastelands that resemble corporate dump sites.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.

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

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

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.

As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.

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

Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.

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.

John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.

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

On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.

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

The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.

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.

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.

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

The Other Side of the Wind isn't a novelty item, but a work of anguished art that's worthy of its creator.

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

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

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

Mazursky finds the politics in the wrinkles of human behavior, rather than contriving behavior to suit his politics.

Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.

After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.

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

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.

A story of a poet, Hotel by the River comes to resemble a poetry collection itself, abounding in emotional currents and grace notes that are bracingly allowed to hang, free of reductive explication.

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

One presumes that Michael Lerner's sense of emphasis is meant to humanize Shanté, defining her apart from the fame she achieved, but this stratagem backfires as Roxanne Roxanne mires itself in scenes of speechifying domestic strife.

Watching Lifeforce now is to be reminded that even big-budget films were once allowed to be adventurous and idiosyncratic, even in the 1980s, and that American horror movies were once capable of being fun, sexy, and subversively empathetic.

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.

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.

Danzel Washington honors the manna of the play's being: the micro of romantic longing, self-loathing, and nostalgia.

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

The Rosses share David Byrne’s interest in the minutiae of habitats and the comforting enclosure they provide along with the discomfiting constriction of anonymity.

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

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

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

In her understandable fury, Vivian Qu almost valorizes suffering, embracing it as a substantial signifier of identity.

Tom Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than "The Human Centipede II."

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.

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

Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.

Morgan Neville understands Orson Welles's art to pivot on an ongoing quest to bring about self-destruction so as to contrive to transcend it.

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.

Every beautiful, resonant image in writer-director Alex Ross Perry's film is fraught with neurotic, diaphanous riddles.

The film has a calming and inevitable quality, and a leisurely sense of pacing that favors image and sound over narrative propulsion, that slows our own biorhythms, fostering our sensorial empathy with the passengers.

In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

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.

On Body and Soul's fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.

One watches the film with an escalating sense of disbelief and horror, as Warren Jeffs is steadily revealed to be an even greater monster than we initially take him for.