Chuck Bowen

Bruno Dumont's formalism is presently charged with a spark of simultaneously controlled and spontaneous mystery.

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

The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.

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

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.

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

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

Say what you will about Burning Man, but writer-director Jonathan Teplitsky can't be accused of spoon-feeding his audience.

Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.

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.

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

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

Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.

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

In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.

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

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

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

There's a sense throughout of Steve James rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.

At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.

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

After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.

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

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 documentary is briskly paced, often compelling, but a little soft, as it succumbs to hero worship.

The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who's ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.

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.

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

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

The "male gaze" that often despicably and hypocritically surfaces in these kinds of films is pointedly absent throughout.

Ariel Kleiman fashions an erotic atmosphere of dusty sensuality that complicates our judgement of this world, but he takes shortcuts.

Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.

The film is beautiful and occasionally quite moving, but its subject matter deserves more than art-house irresolution.

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.

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

Director Jason Lei Howden has a flair for punchlines that are funny for reasons that are essentially impossible to describe.

David Hackl often shoots his bear in fashions that accent its lumbering, powerful grace, even during its death rattle.

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.

Ken Loach's staging is so calm and sober that it turns his story into an expertly photographed yet weirdly remote rebellion tale.

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

Despite a few undeniably intense and lurid moments, the film lacks the pulsating fury of a significant genre work.

The lack of ambiguity reflects Benoît Jacquot's treatment of the text, which is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.

The filmmakers maintain a tone that's mostly ideal for the contemporary equivalent of a drive-in movie: of reverent, parodic irreverence.

The film’s skittishness is particularly maddening considering that Woody Allen has nothing to artistically to prove.

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

The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.

Kim Longinotto is so eager to celebrate her hero that she also glides past thornier portions of Letizia Battaglia’s life.

The film is unavoidably slight, but there's a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.

It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.

There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.

Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.

Ana Lily Amirpour has learned a few lessons from QT about the disreputable joys of blending kitsch and ultraviolence.

The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.

What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.

At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.

The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.

The film’s early scenes turn the stuff of paying bills and managing kids into manna for an unsettlingly intimate domestic thriller.

At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.

The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.

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

This film’s pleasures are extremely mild, but they’re discernable for the curious fan of retro redneck horror, or, far more likely, for the genre critic looking to finish their dissertation pertaining to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s vast influence on the 1970s and 1980s grindhouse movie’s vision of gleeful small-town Americana hypocrisy.

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 doesn't quite earn Jones's performance, but it engenders considerable goodwill for allowing him to give it.

A curiously unsentimental director of romantic comedies, Julie Delpy sees romance for the work that it primarily is.

The film is seemingly terrified of boring us, offering one elaborate montage of catch and release (or of survey and flee) after another.

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

Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.

The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.

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

One sees a film called 100 Bloody Acres expecting the requisite allusions to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but an homage to the best scene in Melvin and Howard comes as something of a shock.

The film is ultimately enjoyable despite its faults, at least partially because it represents an earnest, honest attempt to empathize with struggling American working-class women.

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

Camilla Luddington refuses to predictably foreground her character's escalating fear, allowing us instead to see that fear as being at war with her inquisitive intelligence.

Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.

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.

This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.

At its most beguiling, director Glen Keane’s animated film Over the Moon mixes the unbridled free-association of playtime with an undercurrent of barbed satire.

A potential barroom joke blossoms into a surprisingly poignant portrait of three aging men wrestling with how to shed their mortal coil.

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.

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.

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

Asthma inevitably becomes another film about a man airing out his traumas and hitting all the requisite marks on his path to healing.

The film attains a chilly existential quality as Matt Johnson's character discerns the weight of his actions.

The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, but the various detours coalesce into an amusing wannabe-cult curio.

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.

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

The Resident Evil films are so unconcerned with traditional character and narrative that they suggest either abstract art or the fevered brainstorming of a child at play.

The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.

At times, Cameron Yates appears to be too protective of his subjects, which somewhat neuters the drama of the narrative.

Simon Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.

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.

Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.

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

Everyone heals, or doesn't heal, on cue, and the initial pathos of the narrative is dulled by the architecture of its through lines.

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

If the film is mildly disappointing, it’s because it doesn’t go far enough. It confidently prepares us for a frenzy that never quite materializes.