Chuck Bowen

Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.

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.

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

Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.

Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.

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

In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.

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.

Jake Meginsky's documentary is insular, precious, and too pleased with its unwillingness to reach out to the unconverted.

Dominique Rocher reinvigorates the zombie film only to succumb to the strictures of the coming-of-age romance.

In Leave No Trace, director Debra Granik continues to refine a style of tranquil intensity. The film's images have a rapt and pared-down power, with emphases that are never quite where you expect them to be.

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

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.

As a character, Catherine Weldon suffers the same fate as Sitting Bull, having been reduced to a signifier of the filmmakers' retroactive political correctness.

Custody is concerned with the failure of process to discern human need and perversion, and Xavier Legrand rather ironically follows in the footsteps of bureaucracy by reducing people to statistics.

Christian Papierniak manages to get a tricky tonal balance more or less right, capturing the false sense of superiority that Izzy projects over her environment without allowing the film itself to revel in said superiority.

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.

As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.

There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from a fetishizing of "keeping it real."

The film relegates Nicolas Cage to a supporting player and crowds him with considerably less charismatic performers.

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

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.

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

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

As with most Hong Sang-soo films, it engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos.

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

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

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

The film comes to concern a selfless martyr before morphing, most absurdly, into a disease-of-the-week tearjerker.

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

Deon Taylor seems uncomfortable with the escalating relentlessness of a siege film, eventually splitting Traffik off into a variety of other tangents and genres, diluting the potent subtext at the film's center.

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.

The Devil and Father Amorth is a flimsy stunt, but in his blunt, slapdash way, William Friedkin locates the intersection existing between religion and pop culture—a fusion that insidiously steers political currents.

Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.

In the film, Joshua Marston leaches the narrative of nearly all the social texture that infused and empowered “Heretics,” the 2005 episode of the This American Life podcast that inspired this biopic.

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

The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.

Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.

With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre's evocative loneliness.

The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.

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.

The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.

Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.

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

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

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

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

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

Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.

The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.

One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.

Mark Pellington's Nostalgia is less a living, breathing film than a presentation of sentiments revolving around a pat question: Are the objects of our lives merely detritus, or are they vital to our identities?

One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.

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

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.

Like Me is exhilarating because of Robert Mockler’s willingness to deviate from his satire so as to surprise himself with seemingly spontaneous emotional textures and tangents.

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

For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.

Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.

Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.

Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.

The film's mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is experimentally disingenuous at best.

Before I Wake's images have a pleasing straightforwardness that parallels the openness of the young protagonist's longing for love.

The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.

In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.

Scott Cooper's film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's film is ultimately a genre item that operates on alternately prestigious and campy autopilot.

Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.

The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.

Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.

Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.

Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.

Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.

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

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

In its visceral purity, Jairus McLeary's film drags male toxicity up into the light, offering it as a cure for itself.

Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.

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

Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.

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

Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.

The Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.

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.

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

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.

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

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.

The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.

First They Killed My Father is less interested in global politics than in offering an intensely experiential tapestry of war and invasion as witnessed by a child.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.

Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.

With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.