Chuck Bowen

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

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

It's a comedy concerned with myopia that doesn't succumb to the self-obsessed pitfalls of that subject.

In Powaqqatsi, Reggio addresses the impoverished inhabitants of the southern hemisphere that are exploited in order to power the Metropolis-like nightmare that he made of American society in Koyaanisqatsi, and it has a stunning opening.

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

Zak Hilditch's 1922 informs Steven King's pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force.

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

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

Paul Lacoste's almost purely observational approach allows him to come about as close to documenting the process of creation as anyone ever has.

Terror gradually leaks into the narrative, transforming Where Is Kyra? into a haunting non-traditional thriller.

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

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

Peter Wiedensmith's methods aren't as cinematic as they could be, but even this seems to ably mirror Marilyn Sewell's humility.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.

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.

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

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

Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.

Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.

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.

The film poignantly reveals that the secret history of Hollywood is really an alternate history of America.

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

The film reveals Kôji Fukada to be playing a patient, very resonant long game, underscoring the struggle to wrest oneself out of social vices.

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 characters don’t exist solely to affirm the film’s various themes, and as a result, their humanity gets under your skin.

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

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.

One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.

David Gordon Green stages even fleeting tonal palate cleansers with a self-consciousness that parallels Al Pacino's acting.

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.

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

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.

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.

Amos Nachoum has a vulnerability that he manages to locate in animals without diminishing their capacity for violence.

Denys Arcand fashions a commandingly leisurely pace that allows us to follow these people who walk a tightrope separating ecstasy from misery.

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

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

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

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.

Sweaty Betty is a reminder that poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, and that art ultimately dictates its own terms.

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

The Border is marvelously detailed. The script, by Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman, is peppered with lively obscenities and slights that communicate the debauched cynicism of this world.

Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Johnny Ma's Old Stone is a lean, nasty entry in a subgenre that could be termed the bureaucratic noir.

A pointed simplicity governs Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle, one that’s traditional of many survival tales.

Every moment in writer-director Grímur Hákonarson's strange and wonderful film is imbued with mystery and revealing dignity.

The King benefits from a quality that's usually a liability in nonfiction films: Its scattershot structure gets at the truth of pop culture as an ineffable chimera that defines much of the world.

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

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

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

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

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 images have a loose, rough, textured liveliness that honors the spirit of Chinatown Fair.

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

The film provides a crisp, succinct answer to a question that nags most Americans: What the hell happened?

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

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

Jerzy Skolimowski's formal control over the material is so masterful that the textual particulars are revealed to be beside the point.

Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.

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

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

EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.

My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.

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

Convento is an unusual experimental film that conjures the free-floating aura of a dream, only without the stylized, hyper-symbolic imagery that we generally associate with films attempting to convey dream states.

Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.

Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson have extraordinary chemistry, painting a cumulative portrait of the fragility and rareness of being truly in sync with a partner.

One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.

While the film lacks the feverish, autocritical neuroses of Hitchcock’s mid- and late-period masterpieces, it often superbly plumbs notions of guilt and vulnerability, all the while cheekily satirizing Scotland Yard as a swayable arbiter of justice.

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.

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

It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.

Writer-director Brian Taylor's Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy.

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.

Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy.

The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.

It displays an intimate chemical understanding of the exhausting and unrelentingly impotent agony of failure.

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

The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.

The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.

Erika Frankel’s documentary is finally revealed to be a story of prolonged adjustment to retirement, and a poignant illustration of sublimated redemption.

There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.

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

The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

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

Marc Bauder's documentary quietly detonates the conservative notion that our largest corporations should be allowed to duke it out in metaphorical no-holds-barred cage matches.