Chuck Bowen

With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.

This gnarly gem of 1980s-era punk horror still looks and sounds a little rough, but the film and the supplements justify the plunge.

Kim Longinotto is so eager to celebrate her hero that she also glides past thornier portions of Letizia Battaglia’s life.

Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.

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

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.

Like Me is exhilarating because of Robert Mockler’s willingness to deviate from his satire so as to surprise himself with seemingly spontaneous emotional textures and tangents.

With his latest, S. Craig Zahler doubles down on the best and worst elements of the pulp film.

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

Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.

It ambitiously parodies and mourns the implications of the one coherent message that mass media manages to convey to all of its consumers in all its endlessly proliferating, ever-shifting permutations.

Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.

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

Writer-director Bernard Rose effectively conjoures an atompshere of poetic stoned-1960s British rebellion, a feeling of woozy, intoxicating possibility that will not-so-eventually be squashed.

Any real zombie fan knows that political parable and decomposing cannibal corpse gore go together like peanut butter and jelly, but Day of the Dead found the subgenre’s reigning master and poet-in-residence mismanaging the proper ratios a bit.

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

At its most beguiling, director Glen Keane’s animated film Over the Moon mixes the unbridled free-association of playtime with an undercurrent of barbed satire.

Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.

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

Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence.

The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.

Rebecca Thomas's debut feature is a sensible and humane exploration of youthful curiosity.

It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.

Every moment in Jones’s film is so precisely textured that it becomes fantastical.

Writer-director Brian Taylor's Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy.

The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.

The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.

A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.

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.

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's film is ultimately a genre item that operates on alternately prestigious and campy autopilot.

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

The Dead ultimately doesn't have much of a pulse, as it fails to transcend the banality of its inevitable theme.

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

Abel Ferrara doesn’t require traditional dream logic, as his grasp of the nitty-gritty quotidian of longing is inherently uncanny.

Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.

The documentary is briskly paced, often compelling, but a little soft, as it succumbs to hero worship.

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

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

For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.

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

This rough, lurid, pointedly un-preachy work of macho outlaw cinema, one of the best of the many John Dillinger movies, deserves to be better known.

Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.

Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.

Where Bonnie and Clyde is gloriously tragic, The Highwaymen is blunt and anti-climactically savage, fulfilling as well as somewhat critiquing former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer’s bloodlust.

The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.

Raymond De Felitta’s film offers a sampler course of formulas, which creates a strangely unfulfilling tension.

The heroes may be teenagers, but The Blob, though generally a goofy and enjoyable B-programmer ideal for watching while loaded in the middle of the night, is still one of the most pointedly reactionary of the 1950s’ alien-invasion movies.

The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.

The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

Hello Lonesome isn't really that much of a movie, but it has something that a number of more polished pictures in the same vein don't: human decency. Sadly, that's noteworthy.

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.

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

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

The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who's ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.

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

In Powaqqatsi, Reggio addresses the impoverished inhabitants of the southern hemisphere that are exploited in order to power the Metropolis-like nightmare that he made of American society in Koyaanisqatsi, and it has a stunning opening.

The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.

There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.

The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.

There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.

The film allows that we are complicit in privilege for our fascination and envy.

The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.

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.

France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as a symbol of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.

In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.

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

With Blaze, a fractured story of country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, director Ethan Hawke admirably battles the clichés of the musical biopic.

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

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.

It transforms itself from a meek lo-fi indie stalker thriller in the key of May to a hysterically sexist and homophobic revenge film.

The film's mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is experimentally disingenuous at best.

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.

The title is apropos, but it's also an understatement.

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

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

Benicio Del Toro's performance is showy, a great actor's parade of indulgences that occasionally sets the deranged camp tone that should have been the narrative's starting point.

As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.

Committed horror nerds and conspiracy-minded liberals alike will find fleeting suggestions of the canny parable that nearly manages to surface.

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

Like most of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.

In French Exit’s best passages, sadness and curt, resonant comedy exist side by side unceremoniously.

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

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

David Gordon Green stages even fleeting tonal palate cleansers with a self-consciousness that parallels Al Pacino's acting.

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.

A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.

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

The film's subtitle is apropos, as this is a decidedly locked-down and lead-footed talk-o-rama.

God Told Me To is one of the key American horror films from the 1970s to mine the internally sexual, racial quandaries of a nation beset by one great civil rights catastrophe after another.

Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.

Despite a few undeniably intense and lurid moments, the film lacks the pulsating fury of a significant genre work.

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.

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

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

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.

52 Pick-Up loses its sense of social texture in the last third when everyone begins to die by decree of formulaic three-act screenwriting, and its indifference to the plight of Harry’s wife (Ann-Margret) is unseemly, but the film is an often nightmarish gem awaiting rediscovery.

Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's Bushwick is a genre film with a refreshing sense of political infrastructure.

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.

Unhinged even for Takashi Miike, Ichi the Killer suggests a bloody and ejaculate-stained Rorschach inkblot, reveling in ultraviolence that can be interpreted to flatter any adventurous audience's sensibilities.

In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.

Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.

Director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland can’t seem to figure out if Psycho II should resemble a film from the 1950s or the 1980s, so they split the difference, and the result is a bland, meandering movie with no real look or tone at all.

Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.

The absence here of a joke is meant to be hilarious, or to at least congratulate the audience for willfully submitting to a denial of pleasure. Every element of the film is studiously, painstakingly random.

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

Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.

Down the Shore suggests what might happen if TBS and Bruce Springsteen were to collaborate on a sitcom set in hell.

Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.

The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.

The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.

Peter Strickland charges full-tilt into the objectifying whims of his fantasies in order to somehow reach the other end of perception, which acknowledges the ultimate empathetic limitations of said fantasies.

The film seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.

Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.

To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.

Viewed charitably, Logan Marshall-Green’s sketchy protagonist and vague atmosphere are meant to achieve the effect of a parable.

The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.

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

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

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

Say what you will about Burning Man, but writer-director Jonathan Teplitsky can't be accused of spoon-feeding his audience.

Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.

It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.

Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.

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

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.

Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.

The film is a quiet, tender triumph that leaves you feeling as if you've been embraced without you feeling had.

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

Only Michel Shannon’s off-kilter timing brings The Quarry to sporadic life.

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.

Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Roxanne Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction.

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

The film ultimately doesn't live up to this early potential, as Keanu Reeves loses his way in the third act with too many false climaxes.

The film essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Ted Bundy’s admirers.

Pang Ho-cheung can't help but humanize Vulgaria's characters, which is a kiss of death for what's meant to be a farce of escalating obscenity.

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

Andrei Konchalovsky's film is more than an exercise, as pitiless moments accumulate with enraged relentlessness.

One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.

Even by the woeful standards of decades-too-late comedy sequels, Coming 2 America is desperate, belabored, and thin.

A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.

The film ultimately leaves you feeling as if you're stuck watching your cousin's boring slideshow of his trip to Palookaville.

Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.

Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.

Christopher Felver is too reverent to properly convey the invigoratingly profane, angry messiness of the sense of community that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his peers too briefly brought to life.

It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.

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.

As a character, Catherine Weldon suffers the same fate as Sitting Bull, having been reduced to a signifier of the filmmakers' retroactive political correctness.

The film is ultimately more concerned with Caveh Zahedi's attempts to pursue a variety of dull passing fancies than with any larger agenda.

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.

Arnaud Desplechin evinces a glancing touch with showing how social tension and need inform law and crime.

Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

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

A mediocre, quasi-diverting B movie.

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.

Unlike Malcom & Marie, Daniel Brühl’s feature-length directorial debut proves to be authentically self-castigating.

An almost offensively "tasteful" dud that remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters' motivations.

The film understands that money is a defining element of art-making, whether or not we wish to admit it.

The director diligently keeps her heroine's ego in check, and that's awfully principled of her, but her audience may feel as if they've inadvertently booked a trip with no destination.

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

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

Christian Papierniak manages to get a tricky tonal balance more or less right, capturing the false sense of superiority that Izzy projects over her environment without allowing the film itself to revel in said superiority.

Gregg Araki's film suggests a hothouse melodrama that's been drained of the hothouse, the melodrama, and any other discernably dramatic stakes.

This remake proffers the sort of cinematic nowhere place that's all too common of an increasingly corporate, globalized cinema.

Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.

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

Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators.

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

After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.

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.

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

It evinces a qualified kind of courage in its anonymous convictions, parodying a world that barely ever existed by barely existing itself.

The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.

Watching Lifeforce now is to be reminded that even big-budget films were once allowed to be adventurous and idiosyncratic, even in the 1980s, and that American horror movies were once capable of being fun, sexy, and subversively empathetic.

Terry Gilliam has imposed a mix tape of his greatest hits, whose greatness was debatable to begin with, on a whiff of a story that might've flourished under the maxim "less is more."

The film comes to concern a selfless martyr before morphing, most absurdly, into a disease-of-the-week tearjerker.

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

We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.

That plot gives you an idea of how casually insane this movie is, but if you’re able to radically suspend your disbelief (the story is an illogical shambles), the film offers a number of modest pleasures.

Society never entirely decides whether it’s a plot-centric horror-mystery or an imagistic fantasy; the film’s self-conscious emptiness drains the incestuous conceit of its shock value, defanging a nervy gross-out.

It's a comedy concerned with myopia that doesn't succumb to the self-obsessed pitfalls of that subject.

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.

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

Rodrigo García’s film is fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.

At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.

As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.

It makes an occasionally spirited pretense of injecting the tensions of the United States's educational system into a familiar zombie-siege scenario.

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

The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.

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.

Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.

Jay Baruchel's Goon: Last of the Enforcers faces an uphill climb that's inherent to retreads, as it's almost impossible for the film to honor its predecessor without lapsing into contrived and preordained formula.

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

Throughout, Saverio Costanzo hypocritically drapes his scenes in a cloak of faux-empathy.

Charlie is a stereotype who doesn't know it--basically your typical broke dude in a near midlife crisis who thinks he's the first to have his dull problems.

It's less a film than an unimaginatively assembled series of talking heads.

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

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

Like a number of cult directors to emerge in the 1970s, Henry Jaglom values a party atmosphere at the expense of narrative cohesion.

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.

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

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

Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.

Mark Pellington's Nostalgia is less a living, breathing film than a presentation of sentiments revolving around a pat question: Are the objects of our lives merely detritus, or are they vital to our identities?

It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.

The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.

Vincenzo Natali’s film divests itself of stakes in the name of total meaninglessness.

David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.

With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.

Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.

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.

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

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.

The filmmakers maintain a tone that's mostly ideal for the contemporary equivalent of a drive-in movie: of reverent, parodic irreverence.

The film doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.

The Devil and Father Amorth is a flimsy stunt, but in his blunt, slapdash way, William Friedkin locates the intersection existing between religion and pop culture—a fusion that insidiously steers political currents.

Craig William Macneill's film is a sporadically frightening slow burn with a fatally overlong fuse.

Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.

A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.

At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.

Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.

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

Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.

Frontloaded with a surprising amount of plot, the film takes forever to get going, but it's the filmmakers' hypocrisy that really grates.

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.

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

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

House has a superb premise that begs for a more ambitious framework, both formally and psychologically.

The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.

Sadly, Douglas Tirola's documentary doesn't follow its subjects' advice regarding the refinement of technique.

There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.

As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.

It could have used far more of King's mordant humor, which might have imbued the metaphorical autumnal proceedings with a much-needed jolt of pop anarchy, or even pathos.

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

David Hackl often shoots his bear in fashions that accent its lumbering, powerful grace, even during its death rattle.

A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.

Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.

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

Even the director’s most rabid fans will find Cronenberg’s debut to be a tough sit.

Jamie Dornan is a stiff whom Jon Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why the film is so tedious and unsatisfying.

Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.

Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.

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

Atom Egoyan is a much better director when he drops the art-film fanciness and wrestles directly with his inner voyeuristic weirdo.

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

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.

With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.

The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.

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

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

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.

Time and again, the film shortchanges the human elements of its stories for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

Slacker and even less involving than the similarly terrible global kill-fest Last Knights, but easier to watch for the inadvertent camp value of two of the prominent performances.

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.

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

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

The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.

A sexily chaotic parody of entitlement becomes just another tale of a white dude learning that there are worse things in life than essentially having no problems.

If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.

Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.

The film may take the notion of implication over illustration a bit too far.

Tony Zierra interviews Leon Vitali at length, and he’s a commanding camera object with an obvious wellspring of longing and pain.

Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.

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.

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

Falling Overnight recalls some of the more annoying entries in the mumblecore subgenre that erroneously believe that every indiscriminate moment in a person's life is worthy of a film regardless of subtext.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.

The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.

Jacques Doillon's shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief, allowing stray moments to suddenly crystallize unexpressed yearnings.

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.

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

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

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

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

There's no beauty to this film, little rhythm, none of the physical grace that action-film fans crave even if they don't know they do.

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.

In the end, it feels unavoidably dull, as there isn't much thematic ambiguity to be found in the assertion that humans deserve life that's defined by more than indentured servitude.

One Fall is a bafflingly lame assemblage of self-help platitudes, the sort of film in which every narrative detail is specifically placed to pave the way for a pat moral you've grasped before the opening credits have barely concluded.

The film’s skittishness is particularly maddening considering that Woody Allen has nothing to artistically to prove.

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

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

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

Deon Taylor seems uncomfortable with the escalating relentlessness of a siege film, eventually splitting Traffik off into a variety of other tangents and genres, diluting the potent subtext at the film's center.

Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.

The film spins its wheels for almost an hour until collapsing under the weight of exposition that renders the mystery nearly besides the point.

It alternates awkwardly between shrill, borderline misogynistic sex farce and desperately gory, pun-rife creature feature.

Camilla Luddington refuses to predictably foreground her character's escalating fear, allowing us instead to see that fear as being at war with her inquisitive intelligence.

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.