Chuck Bowen

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

Marc Maron’s commanding aura of regret gives the film, despite its missed opportunities, an emotional center.

The film ably plumbs the fears of a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.

The anthology justifies Mick Garris’s passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project’s liabilities.

In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.

Martin Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another.

The documentary proves that the history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself.

Despite a few undeniably intense and lurid moments, the film lacks the pulsating fury of a significant genre work.

Beautiful loneliness, as the film suggestively reveals, is a texture that Frank knows all too well.

Eddie Alcazar’s film is a purposefully inscrutable, wandering, disconnected, symbolic, and highly precious mood bath.

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.

The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.

The film seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered.

The film is often quite moving in spite of its evasions, suggesting a real-life Charlotte’s Web, but one wonders what an artist with a bit more distance might’ve made of such rich material.

The film essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Ted Bundy’s admirers.

Unlike many [M. Night] Shyamalan films, which seem constructed out of Mad Libs, Come to Daddy retains an emotional consistency.

Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Roxanne Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction.

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

While the film offers an appealingly nostalgic trance-out, it’s often short on detail, especially in terms of Stephen Herchen’s struggle to create the instant film technology, which director Willem Baptist reduces to exchanges of jargon in atmospheric laboratories.

Nia DaCosta indulges one of rural quasi-thriller’s most tiresome gambits: humorlessness as a mark of high seriousness.

Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

The film’s refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional and eventually tiresome declaration of Qui Sheng’s arthouse bona fides.

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.

It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.

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

Like most biopics, The Dirt crams so many events into its narrative as to compromise the sense that these are real characters in the here and now.

With his latest, S. Craig Zahler doubles down on the best and worst elements of the pulp film.

It would appear that some of Buddy’s humans have indeed written off their fellow people. Does this matter? Honigmann’s film doesn’t plumb this potentially resonant question, as it’s hesitant to look a gift dog in the mou

J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.

The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

The film quickly settles into a holding pattern of repetitive porno-movie hijinks and increasingly listless murder scenes.

Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.

The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.

The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.

The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.

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

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

With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.

If the film is mildly disappointing, it’s because it doesn’t go far enough. It confidently prepares us for a frenzy that never quite materializes.

The film’s horniness and amorality, a slap in the face of fanatically cautious contemporary mores, might’ve been more shocking if it weren’t placed so firmly in quotation marks.

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

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

Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.

Bridey Elliott avoids the smug pitfalls of narratives concerned with privileged people drinking themselves into a stupor.

Sebastián Silva never indulges platitude, and so the qualified hope of the film’s ending isn’t merely affirming but also miraculous.

The film is determinedly unclassifiable, blurring genres with a fervor that grows tedious.

It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.

At its best, Stan & Ollie shows how the private and personal dimensions of art are achingly inseparable.

At times, Cameron Yates appears to be too protective of his subjects, which somewhat neuters the drama of the narrative.

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.

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

The film understands that money is a defining element of art-making, whether or not we wish to admit it.

The absence here of a joke is meant to be hilarious, or to at least congratulate the audience for willfully submitting to a denial of pleasure. Every element of the film is studiously, painstakingly random.

Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.

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

For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.

The documentary nurtures our sympathy for Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager without shortchanging their hypocrisies.

Hold the Dark's ludicrous seriousness comes to feel like a mask for what's essentially a genre story of murder and mayhem.

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.

Sasha Waters Freyer forges a poignant portrait of an artist attempting to transcend the limitations of his art by refusing to see the process through.

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.

Panos Cosmatos's film is a profoundly violent and weirdly moving poem of male alienation.

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

With Blaze, a fractured story of country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, director Ethan Hawke admirably battles the clichés of the musical biopic.

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.

The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western.

Like Happy Hour, Asako I & II is a parable of the grace — and, yes, happiness — that spring from resignation.

In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.