Chuck Bowen

Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.

Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.

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

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

The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

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

New York, New York, like most Martin Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.

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

Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.

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

After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.

Unlike many [M. Night] Shyamalan films, which seem constructed out of Mad Libs, Come to Daddy retains an emotional consistency.

For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.

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

Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.

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.

Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.

The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.

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

Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.

With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.

This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.

Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.

The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.

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

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

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

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.

The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.

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.

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.

Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.

Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.

My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.

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

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.

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

The film lacks the manic fly-by-night invention of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or even the ripe erotic ambiguity of something like Avatar.

For Paul Schrader, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.

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

Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.

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 film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.

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

The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.

One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.

Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"

The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.

Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy.

The film somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once.

The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.

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

It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.

The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.

With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.

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

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.

The Mummy is one of Hammer’s classics, cleverly fusing the human pathos of the original Universal film with the creature-centric physicality of the sequels the latter inevitably yielded.

Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.

The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.

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

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

It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.

It fails to go deep enough, suggesting an appetizer offered as an opening to an ultimately unserved meal.

Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.

The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.

Robertson’s sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction was more fulsomely evoked by The Last Waltz.

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

J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.

Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.

The opening credits immediately insist that director Paul Schrader isn’t interested in merely reprising your grandparents’ beloved version of Cat People, the 1942 horror film memorably directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton. Set to the background of a profoundly bright brick red, which is soon revealed to be a desert jungle-scape, Giorgio Moroder’s primal synth score prepares us for an erotic blowout that overtly literalizes the Cat People conceit for the sake of a little soft porn fun.

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

The filmmakers don’t examine the psychological terror, the bitterness, and lust that gave rise to many of the works they cherish.

Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.

The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.

Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.

Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.