Chuck Bowen

Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.

Nothing hinders surrealism more than the sense that its creators are actively working for it, though Koko-di Koko-da is nonetheless difficult to dismiss.

Mama Weed is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, but it doesn’t challenge Isabelle Huppert or the audience.

Farhadi navigates his complicated narrative thicket with an apparent ease that confirms yet again that he's an amazing talent, but here he isn't able to blend the brushstrokes as he has in prior films.

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

The film preaches resolutely to the choir, and cinephiles in sync with the film's politics may still blanch at how snugly their interests are courted.

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

The film is an ultra-violent parody of unearned self-entitlement, of people who feel tricked into a lifestyle they refuse to challenge for the comforts it still offers.

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

Writer-director Andy Gillies's film is extremely self-conscious, but in a fashion that generally serves the material.

The film ably plumbs the fears of a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.

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

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

Cacophony eventually takes over Wrath of Man, stranding the actors in the process. Except, that is, for Jason Statham, who’s by now a master of presiding over Guy Ritchie’s gleeful chaos.

Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.

The anthology justifies Mick Garris’s passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project’s liabilities.

Filmmaker Cara Jones offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.

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.

The Legend of Hell House is a regrettably just-competent adaptation of a great American horror novel.

Like most biopics, The Dirt crams so many events into its narrative as to compromise the sense that these are real characters in the here and now.

The film never really goes soft, as Jordan Roberts never loses sight of the fact that these toxic nincompoops are authentically bad for one another.

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

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

A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is a bottomless yearning for wonder.

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

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

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.

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.

Dominique Rocher reinvigorates the zombie film only to succumb to the strictures of the coming-of-age romance.

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

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

The film has a weird, ghostly, even beautiful pull, but it functions mostly on theoretical terms because Charlie Kaufman has thought it to death.

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

Chris Messina is eventually a little too indifferent to the machinations of the plot, but the film, however inescapably sentimental, is a romantic daydream that casts a lovely spell.

Kumaré has a premise that could've been the launching point for one of Sascha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles's satirical outrages.

Demons is a coffee-table book of a horror movie, reveling in a purity of transcendent revulsion that marks it as something that’s really only suitable for the truest and most devoted of aficionados. It’s a snob’s objet d’art, disguised as a blood offering.

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

Dolls is still ultimately minor-key Gordon, exhibiting nowhere near the level of ambition or invention of many of his hot-house splatter classics, but it has been rendered with an artisanal level of craftsmanship that distinguishes it as an almost-hidden horror gem, ready for rediscovery.

The film hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem.

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

A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.

Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.

Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.

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

Greatly cognizant of the revenge genre's penchant for hypocritical demagoguery, director Arnaud des Pallières unsettles the audience's usual feelings of vicarious blood lust.

A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula.

While the film offers an appealingly nostalgic trance-out, it’s often short on detail, especially in terms of Stephen Herchen’s struggle to create the instant film technology, which director Willem Baptist reduces to exchanges of jargon in atmospheric laboratories.

In her understandable fury, Vivian Qu almost valorizes suffering, embracing it as a substantial signifier of identity.

An ambitious monster movie that attempts to explore the metaphorical ghosts lingering over the atrocities committed by the residents of a small, noxiously chummy Southern town, and whose collective closets obviously symbolize the troubled historical legacy of the American South at large.

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.

Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.

Wife of a Spy could use a streak of live-wire, huckster crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner.

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

The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.

Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.

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.

Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.

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

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

At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

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

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

The film offers an oxymoronic parable that’s been utilized countless times by cinema, in loose reiterations of A Christmas Carol: The protagonist must learn humility after learning that the world revolves around him.

One presumes that Michael Lerner's sense of emphasis is meant to humanize Shanté, defining her apart from the fame she achieved, but this stratagem backfires as Roxanne Roxanne mires itself in scenes of speechifying domestic strife.

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

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.

The film is ultimately, and disappointingly, revealed to be a contraption that's less concerned with mental portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.

It has a problem that's familiar to competently made, sporadically involving crime procedurals: It's just good enough to inspire wishes that it were better.