Chuck Bowen

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

Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.

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 effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves.

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

Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.

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

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

Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.

A Boy and His Dog is an unruly daydream capped with a surprisingly jet-black acknowledgment of humankind’s genetic destiny to ruin itself.

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

The filmmakers attempt to acknowledge the pain of warfare within the framework of a redemptive story that lends it an unforgivably patronizing sense of closure.

The documentary is enjoyable, but one suspects that its subject may have found it soft.

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

The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.

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

In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.

Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.

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

After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.

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

Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.

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.

After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.

It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.

The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.

Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.

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

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

The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.

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

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

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

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

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

The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.

Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.

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.

Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.

Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.

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

There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.

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

A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.

Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.

Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.

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

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.

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

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.

At its best, Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room.

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

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

The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.

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

Noah Buschel shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.

The narrative derives much of its tension from the unsentimental ambivalence Jon Watts displays toward the story's two pre-teen boys.

The film becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch.

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

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

A wonderful high concept is compromised for another story of lonely people learning to connect.

So intent on being "art" that it's seemingly indifferent to providing simple niceties such as compelling performance, plot, and an atmosphere that isn't predictably oppressive.

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

As is typically the case with Joe Wright's films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interested in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.

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

The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.

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.

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

The film is ultimately too concerned with courting the singer's fans to deliver anything more than a theatrical release of a very special episode of VH1's Behind the Music.

The main character is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency.

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.

Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.

Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.

The Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points.

One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films.

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

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

A beautiful, gleefully weird vanity project that never quite coheres.

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

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.

Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.

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

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

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

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

The film suggests that Bill and Ted’s dreams of stardom, which have evolved into dreams of acceptance and expression, aren’t so stupid after all.

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

When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.

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

Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.

It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.

It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.

It waffles between dramatizing youthful self-absorption and succumbing to it, and this tonal instability comes to effectively mirror the domestic discord that's revealed to be its real subject.

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

Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.

The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.

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.

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