Chuck Bowen

Committed horror nerds and conspiracy-minded liberals alike will find fleeting suggestions of the canny parable that nearly manages to surface.

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

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

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

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

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

A fawning tribute to the cult legend, enriched by a subtle current of sadness that prevents the documentary from turning into a glorified DVD supplement.

The opening credits immediately insist that director Paul Schrader isn’t interested in merely reprising your grandparents’ beloved version of Cat People, the 1942 horror film memorably directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton. Set to the background of a profoundly bright brick red, which is soon revealed to be a desert jungle-scape, Giorgio Moroder’s primal synth score prepares us for an erotic blowout that overtly literalizes the Cat People conceit for the sake of a little soft porn fun.

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

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

The film is a quiet, tender triumph that leaves you feeling as if you've been embraced without you feeling had.

The film revels in a hushed and lucid expressionist naturalism that’s reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

For all its hip ludicrousness, The Little Hours has a point: to almost earnestly riff on how atheism has taken hold of 21st-century America, by rooting our nation’s moors in a time of great austerity, sexism, classism, and persecution.

Andrei Konchalovsky's film is more than an exercise, as pitiless moments accumulate with enraged relentlessness.

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

The Cage Fighter isn't sentimental about the notion of an aging sports hero who needs one more day in the proverbial sun, recognizing that desire as macho folly.

The film has a wandering, lonely purity. We feel as if we've been allowed to fleetingly swim through Andy Goldsworthy's psyche.

Steve Hoover's documentary affords one an unusually intimate glance at the collapsed infrastructure of the former Soviet Union.

The heroes may be teenagers, but The Blob, though generally a goofy and enjoyable B-programmer ideal for watching while loaded in the middle of the night, is still one of the most pointedly reactionary of the 1950s’ alien-invasion movies.

The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.

Rebecca Thomas's debut feature is a sensible and humane exploration of youthful curiosity.

Álex de la Iglesia's film is an explosion of kitsch, an intensely formalized mixture of farce and tragedy.

It offers lively and layered images that reveal the chefs both as individuals and components of a larger social organism.

Leyla Bouzid successfully dramatizes how young people eroticize peril and risk due to a lack of experience.

It captures the frustration and the longing of forever wanting more and better at the expense of casualness of being.

In The Third Murder, as in his other films, Hirokazu Kore-eda informs tragedy with a distinctive kind of qualified humor that's realistic of how people process atrocity.

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.

The plaintive plain-spokenness of the interviewees, the way they matter-of-factly speak of atrocity, is transcendent and intensely haunting.

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

After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.

Ted Geoghegan's Mohawk is a survival-of-the-fittest film that's charged with a thunderous urgency.

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

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.

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

Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.

This rough, lurid, pointedly un-preachy work of macho outlaw cinema, one of the best of the many John Dillinger movies, deserves to be better known.

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

Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.

Errol Morris films Dorfman and her work with a rapt attentiveness that maps the nostalgic and regretful stirrings of her soul.

Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.

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

Takashi Miike's film is a work of robust genre craftsmanship that's informed with a sly sense of self-interrogation.

Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.

The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.

Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.

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.

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

The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.

Jacques Doillon's shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief, allowing stray moments to suddenly crystallize unexpressed yearnings.

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.

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

These shorts follow female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts.

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

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

Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.

A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.

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

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

The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.

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

The film has been executed with a sense of formally stylish and thematically symmetric panache.