Chuck Bowen

The film insufficiently connects the book's prophecy with its present-day, real-world forms of realization.

The film covers "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.

Emmerich rewards our patience with an impersonally massive set piece involving the usual generic stew of mass CGI-imagined demolition. The insensitivity displayed toward human life in these sequences would be galling even by Emmerich's standards, if this pitiful albatross of corporate capitalism could work up enough energy to be offensive.

It infuses an outdoorsy survival tale and a coming-of-age story of friendship with Taika Waititi's penchant for distaff flakiness.

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

Jon Watts does nothing with the scarily funny notion of a respectable professional who suddenly refuses to shuck a party costume.

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

Its openly mercenary ethos initially scan as a bracing lack of pretense in a market crammed to the gills with insidious faux-sentimentality, but its overstuffed relentlessness proves almost equally tedious.

Like Hitchcock, De Palma reveals himself to be guided by an unusual mixture of intuition and intellectualization.

Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.

Julio Medem's film has enough hanky-courting plot mechanics for three remakes of Beaches.

Even the film's lapses inform it with a free-associative sense of portent, evoking the stupid things we inexplicably do in our most personal nightmares.

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

This enterprise is so listless that one can't even work up a proper head of self-righteous steam over the spooky Native American clichés that drive the plot.

Throughout Alex and Benjamin Brewer's film, Nicolas Cage holds the screen with his distinct timing and expressive force of being.

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

Chad Archibald doesn't quite land Bite's transition over from claustrophobic character study into full-blown monster movie.

It inspires retrospective gratitude for the empty yet slick craftsmanship of someone like James Wan.

The film is ultimately stultifying because the disconnection between the various characters is so immediately accepted as such a foregone conclusion that nothing ever seems to be at stake, and the heavily horizontal imagery, though accomplished and evocative, if fussy, only evokes two states of mind: loneliness and disconnection.

Ricky Gervais's film hopscotches through a variety of premises, looking for jokes that never arrive.

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

The film is taken with comfy gags that celebrate these men's ownership of pop culture, filtering them through a lens of unrevealing caricature.

An admirably bizarre and beautiful genre mixtape, but Anders Thomas Jensen's empathy for his characters gradually impedes his imagination.

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

Álex de la Iglesia's film is an explosion of kitsch, an intensely formalized mixture of farce and tragedy.

Denys Arcand fashions a commandingly leisurely pace that allows us to follow these people who walk a tightrope separating ecstasy from misery.

Jerzy Skolimowski's formal control over the material is so masterful that the textual particulars are revealed to be beside the point.

It has a bouncy sense of lunacy, wearing its derivative junkiness on its sleeve with surprising lightness of authority.

The film's aesthetic is striking, but feels almost intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.

The film is ultimately devoted to formula, as Nick Simon discards his jumbled meta-media conceit at around the halfway mark.

Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.

The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it's ultimately just as hollow.

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.

Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis.

The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.

The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.

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

The imagery fails to express either the characters' or the filmmakers' obsessions or synchronicities.

Jordan Galland confidently perches the film right on the razor’s edge separating absurdist comedy from horror.

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

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

Travis Zariwny detachedly regards the material as shtick to be waded through with quotation marks.

Standoff isn’t quite inspired, but it coasts on unexpected modesty of professionalism.

Southbound is yet another contemporary horror film that belongs to seemingly every era but its own.

Every moment in writer-director Grímur Hákonarson's strange and wonderful film is imbued with mystery and revealing dignity.

It joins its American cousin in the scrapheap of family dramedies that no one watches, unless by default out of boredom on TBS or TNT.

Writer-director Jacob Gentry's film has the emotional fatuousness of uncertain softcore erotica.

With the film, director William Monahan offers audiences a bundle of fetishes dressed up as an existentialist thriller about the class system.

The film ultimately boils down to people bludgeoning one another in unimaginative close-ups.

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

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

It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.

The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.

Too much of Noma is composed of gorgeous pillow shots, which grow static and fussy, appearing to exist almost apart from the subject matter.

The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story's central wolves wiggle out of the trap they've potentially set for themselves.

The premise, of a terrible event unleavened by the easy out of someone being at fault, should be prime fodder for Wim Wenders's brand of poetic regret.

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

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.

It grounds us so effectively in Joplin's emotional realm as to partially rekindle the social transcendence that her voice must have represented for its owner.

A blunt satire of the dehumanization inherent in social media that also gets off on said detachment.

The actors have the showmanship to chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.

Alison Bagnall and her talented leads appear to effortlessly achieve a tone that's tricky to sustain, one that abounds equally in absurdism and empathy.

Heist is competently staged, but Scott Mann maintains audience interest with the preponderance of dissonant absurdities.

It captures the frustration and the longing of forever wanting more and better at the expense of casualness of being.

Time and again, the filmmaker cuts the money shot meant to theoretically cap a sequence.

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

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

Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.

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

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

There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.

One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.

The film doesn't add up to much, but it's a diverting tour of Takashi Miike's anything-goes, splatter-paint sensibility.

It exhibits the spry subtlety of Jean and Luc Dardenne's films, and, consequently, it's possible that it will be similarly mistaken for a work of “naturalism.”

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

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

Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn't manufactured.