Chuck Bowen

Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.

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

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

The film, more likely to invite comparisons to the writings of Marcel Proust than the previous Ip Man films, is a gorgeous folly that never entirely emerges from its creator's head.

Sword of Destiny has an appealingly inventive, unruly genre party streak running down its figurative back.

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

Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.

Álex de la Iglesia has a real flair for wild action sequences that remain exhilaratingly coherent and sensical.

Anocha Suwichakornpong earnestly and ambitiously attempts to redefine cinema’s conventional grasp of consciousness.

The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.

Sunao Katabuchi displays a vivid, shattering awareness of how domestic routines can spiritually ground one during a time of demoralizing chaos.

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

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

The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.

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

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

Zodiac Killer Project is a wicked embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the media itself being the message.

Matteo Garrone returns the fairy tale to its roots in cautionary horror grounded in deep, contradictory, neurotic relationships with gender and patriarchy.

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

The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.

One wishes that S. Craig Zahler had more explicitly faced the cultural demons lingering within his premise, attempting to exorcise them.

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

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.

There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.

Contemporary outrage could’ve potentially counterpointed the film’s increasingly mawkish tendencies.

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.

In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest how our idea of Christmas is a river of memories real and imagined.

With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.

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.

Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Brandon Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Christopher Nolan.

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

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.

For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.

The Killers redux packs one lasting, significant, retrospective jolt of perversity that far eclipses any possible artistic intentions on the part of its creators though: the sight of future American President Ronald Reagan playing a baddie in his last film role before entering politics.

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

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.

As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.

Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.

This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.

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

A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.

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.

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

Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.

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.

Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.

Alice Lowe evinces a knack for locating society’s most awkward pressure points, and a willingness to punch them.

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

At their best, writer-director Mario Furloni and Kate McLean evince a masterful grasp of storytelling that’s subtle and rich in innuendo.

Jacob Gentry’s film punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror.

If Hannah Emily Anderson's performance was as fully imagined as Brittany Allen's, then What Keeps You Alive might have attained the emotional dimensions of a robust psychodrama.

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

Theo Who Lived is fascinating, and Theo Padnos is an exacting storyteller, but the film pushes through one story point to the next, occasionally prizing velocity over texture.

The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.

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.

Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.

Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.

One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.

It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.

Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.

The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.

As preachy and repetitive as The Little Prince can be, it offers enough moments of poetry to keep it flirting with greatness, or at least goodness.

The film too often suggests an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.

Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.

Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.

It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.

The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.

Scott Thurman captures not only the fear and anti-intellectual resentment and insecurity that govern the dictations of the far right, but also the rampant unchecked egotism.

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

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

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.

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

As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.

Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.

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

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

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

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

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

Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.

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

Joe Swanberg's films have grown into a reliable relief from the competitive, dehumanizing freneticism of much of American culture, marked by an affirming and understated sense of decency.

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

It offers a wonderful visual reprieve from the cumbersomely mechanized aesthetic of so much contemporary fantasy.

The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.

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.

Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.

Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.

In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.

Wiktor Ericsson emphasizes one of the strongest and most distinctive features of Joseph Sarno's aesthetic: his concentration on female pleasure.