Chuck Bowen

The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.

The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.

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

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

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

Horror is said to be driven by a fear of death when the genre is often more viscerally concerned with rejection and loneliness. Henenlotter feels these emotions in his bones.

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

With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.

It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.

Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.

It routinely alternating between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.

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

The filmmakers astutely reveal how a culture can eat another alive and somehow live with itself.

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

Thatcherism yielded results that are arguably typical of conservative ideology: high-class flourishing at the expense of the lower class proletariat, who’re left underpaid (at best), over-taxed, adrift, and profoundly resentful of their limited opportunities. My Beautiful Laundrette is a moving, tonally elastic study of this environment’s socio-political ground floor.

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

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.

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

In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.

A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.

One may wonder if Night School's most revealing material has been left on the cutting room floor, so as to offer the sort of uplift that inadvertently marginalizes the very inequalities that drive the film.

A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.

In terms of formal orchestration, Creepy is as sublime as any prior Kiyoshi Kurosawa film.

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

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

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

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

You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.

It's informed with a subtle but disquieting subtext that insists on the pitfalls of allowing ideology to steer you away from common sense.

Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.

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

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

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

Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

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.

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

The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.

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

The busy-ness of its conceit grounds Werner Herzog in a documentary procedural form that's surprisingly conventional by his standards.

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

One of the most ambiguous, neurotic, and disturbing of all American films.

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.

One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread.

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

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

Michael Winterbottom and his gifted actors still haven't quite solved the riddle of portraying social disconnection in a manner that's anything other than sporadically involving.

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

Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.

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

Throughout the documentary, the undisguised regret and longing of David Lynch's reminiscences are often startling.

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

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

The film blends the Bard with National Geographic, failing to make a case for the inexplicability of their union.

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.

At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

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

It movingly posits acting as a metaphor for the search for connection, through visceral texture rather than platitude.

Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.

In Okja, a transporting protest fantasy becomes another shrill dust-up in the waging of the culture wars.

Jody Lee Lipes shapes the footage into an intimate symphony of poetically shaped bodies that contrast poignantly with uncertain faces.

The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.

78/52 comes to life when riffing on the psychosexual perversity of Psycho, which changed cinema's relationship with sex and violence.

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.

Jerrod Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.

The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.

Fake It So Real has been made with considerable more polish than other do-it-yourself documentaries such as "Total Badass," but the sensibility is similar.

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.”

Unhinged even for Takashi Miike, Ichi the Killer suggests a bloody and ejaculate-stained Rorschach inkblot, reveling in ultraviolence that can be interpreted to flatter any adventurous audience's sensibilities.

2nd Chance a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn.

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

Erik Nelson's film straddles a fine and admirable line between lurid sensationalism and sober humanism.

Lost in Paris abounds in whimsy that, for the most part, isn't irritatingly precious—a feat that's harder to pull off than it appears.

The film often suggests a less defiant cover of The Defiant Ones, yet it's a must-see for Viggo Mortensen's characteristically wonderful performance.

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

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

The narrative has a gambit that steers Beast into the terrain of a horror film, offsetting the sentimentality of the audience-flattering romance.

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

The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.

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.

This is history that Americans should know, and the filmmaker approach Rumble as an introductory survey course.

The pacing is so humorless and funereal that it squelches the possibility of heat or conflict arising between the characters.

Tony Zierra interviews Leon Vitali at length, and he’s a commanding camera object with an obvious wellspring of longing and pain.

Chloe Domont has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test.

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

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.

It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.

Sollers Point is a moving and elusive blend of naturalism and melodrama, less a character study than an analysis of a community.

Steve James is clearly positioning the film as a rallying cry, and its weaknesses as art might bolster its strength as reformatory theater.

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