Chuck Bowen

Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.

Mapping the intersection between history and emotion, Michael Almereyda finds himself in Alain Resnais terrain.

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

The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.

The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.

There’s a tough and mysterious film within Strange Weather, though it doesn’t quite escape the strictures of a busy and studiously weird narrative that’s governed by formula screenwriting.

The film is so humorless and in love with its own obviousness that it grows laughable.

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

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

Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.

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

The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.

By design, the film is intensely preachy. And this preachiness serves a therapeutic purpose, offering jolting possibilities for empathy.

Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.

Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.

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.

The film revels in a hushed and lucid expressionist naturalism that’s reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

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

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.

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

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.

Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirô Ozu.

Frédéric Mermoud's film makes an elaborate pretense of honoring the traditions of the observational procedural.

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.

Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.

The film simplifies Winston Churchill's legacy for the dubious purposes of narrative momentum and emotional lift.

Errol Morris films Dorfman and her work with a rapt attentiveness that maps the nostalgic and regretful stirrings of her soul.

Writer-director David Michôd's film renders existential crises of American entitlement dull and tedious.

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 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.

In the film's best scenes, Jeff Grace displays a delicate understanding of various modes of male fragility.

Like its protagonist, Philippe Falardeau's film gets lost in a haze of incidental cacophony.

The film is shrilly, luridly, dully, and unremittingly ugly, preaching to a choir that it also demonizes.

It attempts to dress up torture-porn tropes with a late-inning switch to science fiction that spectacularly backfires.

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

Lydia Tenaglia's direction is occasionally flashy and cluttered, but her empathy for Tower is evocative and poignant.

Throughout Queen of the Desert's narrative, there's no sense of danger, of texture, or even of a rudimentary idea of what's truly driving Gertrude Bell.

There's an artisanal scruffiness to Win It All that testifies to Joe Swanberg’s quiet fluidity as a filmmaker.

Salt and Fire is a doodle, suggesting an assemblage of ecological riffs and fantasias that Werner Herzog may have entertained while making Into the Inferno.

Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.

Oz Perkins exhibits a committed understanding of the cinematic value of silence and of vastly underpopulated compositions.

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

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

Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.

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

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

The film's characters are stock types without enough satirical texture to fulfill their function in the narrative.

Mike Ott and Nathan Silver's film has a ghostly, tremulous quality that eats under the skin.

Throughout Raw, Julia Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that’s reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg.

Bart Freundlich alternates somewhat arbitrarily between his various plots, leaving a lot of loose ends in the process.

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.

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

These shorts follow female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts.

Bits of editorializing dialogue throughout James Franco's In Dubious Battle suggest the resonant film that might’ve been.

What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films is Jack Fessenden's sense of quietness.

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

Rings is unsure as to whether it’s a sequel to the other entries in the series or a contemporary reboot.

Robert Legato's film is lifelessly composed of the usual tropes of horror films set in mental asylums.

The film is in love with the tropes it ridicules, and it doesn't take long for that love to dwarf any possibility of critique.

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.

Asghar Farhadi's film yields a tonal and emotional friction that's simultaneously tragic, transcendent, and comic.

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

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

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

Danzel Washington honors the manna of the play's being: the micro of romantic longing, self-loathing, and nostalgia.

Gonzalo López-Gallego's direction isn't confident enough to allow us to ignore The Hollow Point's contrivances.

The film occasionally benefits from the weird energy shared between Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots.

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

Though the film strives to be audacious and galvanizing, it's easily shaken off as an exercise in stunted necrophilia erotica.

The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.

The film has an eerily WTF arbitrariness that should be the domain of more films in the genre.

The plaintive plain-spokenness of the interviewees, the way they matter-of-factly speak of atrocity, is transcendent and intensely haunting.

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

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

It collapses into repetition and unintended self-parody, as it's devoid of the subtext and empathetic audacity.

The film communicates a sporadic sense of violation—of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.

With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.

Aquarius is a critique of a daydream that has the imaginative daring to live that very dream anyway.

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.

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.

The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.

Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.

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

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

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

It relies less on in-camera stunts than editing that renders vague gibberish of the altercations.

The film occasionally and promisingly suggests an obsessive and free-associative paean to regret.

Underneath the impersonal formal beauty and good acting is a familiar moral about self-imposed limitations.

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

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

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

The film shrewdly capitalizes on Mel Gibson's off-screen embarrassments and controversies.

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

It offers lively and layered images that reveal the chefs both as individuals and components of a larger social organism.

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

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

The film fails to lift off from this sturdy aesthetic launching pad; it never allows the characters, however stock, to evolve in their respective dealings with one another, which is the primary source of tension and escalation for a thriller set in a confined place.

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.