Chuck Bowen

The film is still one of the most glorious testaments to the frustrations and exhilarations of chasing an unvarnished truth.

Yet another ghost story that insists there's nothing more chilling than a professional woman charged with raising a child on her own.

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.

There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.

Too many films these days trivialize poverty as an ironically, tastelessly over-produced pageant to earn kudos. The Grapes of Wrath is flawed, but it captures that shiver of panic that grips anyone for whom the money for the next meal is unknown. The film remains a vital document of the perversion and torment of the fantasy most commonly known as the American Dream.

One of the greatest and most mercenary of all American comedies.

It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.

Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.

In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty.

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.

Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.

Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.

Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.

Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.

With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.

Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.

Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.

Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.

Martin Scorsese captures the exquisite agony and pleasure of passion that’s forced to remain theoretical.

Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.

Redford ultimately holds Downhill Racer together with the performance of his career.

A great horror film about a weak man who, gazing into a vibrant pool of freshly spilled blood, learns just how little he ultimately knows.

The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.

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.

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.

Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.

Strangers on a Train is also simply a great thriller, yet another illustration of Hitchcock’s awe-inspiring ability to convey more with a single image than most directors can with minutes upon minutes of belabored set pieces.

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.

In Leave No Trace, director Debra Granik continues to refine a style of tranquil intensity. The film's images have a rapt and pared-down power, with emphases that are never quite where you expect them to be.

The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.

The film, as a whole, isn’t quite up to the phenomenal dexterity of its lead’s exertions. But there’s a legitimate reason people love this movie so much: Pollack syphoned Hoffman’s ecstatic electricity off into a popular and old-fashioned romantic-comedy formula, bringing it back to life. Tootsie is a remarkably gentle and human pop movie that informs the term “escapism” with an almost cleansing sense of decency.

Aquarius is a critique of a daydream that has the imaginative daring to live that very dream anyway.

This profound film reveals that nothing is below the purview of existential contemplation, even all matters of flatulence, and words as simple as “Good morning” are revealed to contain fathomless multitudes.

The Awful Truth is a perfect farce, devoid of any fat, in which Lucy and Jerry’s fantasies and schemes topple after one another like figurative dominoes.

Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.

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

With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.

Martin Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another.

Asghar Farhadi's sensibility embodies a combination of empathy and paranoia that's striking considering that the latter is normally driven by self-absorption.

Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.

There's a sense throughout of Steve James rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.

The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.

The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western.

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.

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.

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

We're simply presented a person in trouble, and we're allowed to recognize his problems as extreme embodiments of universal issues of terror, confusion, and loneliness.

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.

Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.

A key film in Alfred Hitchcock’s evolution as a master explorer of sexual neuroses.

A pointed simplicity governs Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle, one that’s traditional of many survival tales.

One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.

Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley viscerally understands the lurid appeal of carnivals and acts of illusion.

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.

Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.

The plaintive plain-spokenness of the interviewees, the way they matter-of-factly speak of atrocity, is transcendent and intensely haunting.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.

The Last Detail is so perfectly tailored to the star that it could’ve been mapped out from a Pythagorean theorem.

Despite its elaborate meta-game-playing, which has had a pronounced and unquantifiable influence on film culture, Persona remains intensely alive and intimate.

Bob Rafelson directs in an exploratory manner that naturally syncs up with Nicholson’s intuitive performance, his formalism suggesting a fusion of vérité and expressionism.

Asghar Farhadi's film yields a tonal and emotional friction that's simultaneously tragic, transcendent, and comic.

The film revels in a hushed and lucid expressionist naturalism that’s reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosing of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed.

This subtle, glancing trust in our ability to read the true story between the lines is pivotal to Cat People’s sense of being simultaneously vague and explicit, succinct yet freighted with baggage.

The Fabulous Baker Boys ultimately soars on the strength of its three perfectly cast stars, who collectively wed studies of glamour (Jeff Bridges and Pfeiffer) with ruminations on the pain of life as an everyman among stars (Beau Bridges).

The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.

In Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.

Unforgiven brought the revisionist revenge film into the 1990s and, by extension, the 21st century

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.

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

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

Throughout the film, one often feels the plot machinations working against Park Chan-wook’s poetry, though in a few cases poetry wins out.

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.

The Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.

This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.

With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.

EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.

In its visceral purity, Jairus McLeary's film drags male toxicity up into the light, offering it as a cure for itself.

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

Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirô Ozu.

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

Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.

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

Director AndrePatterson never breaks the film's incantatory spell with pointless freneticism, patiently savoring the great thrill of genre stories: anticipation.

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.

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

Custody is concerned with the failure of process to discern human need and perversion, and Xavier Legrand rather ironically follows in the footsteps of bureaucracy by reducing people to statistics.

A wealth of contrasting stimulation gives the film a singular and intimate atmosphere, in which scenes can last little eternities while still leaving you feeling as if you’re struggling to keep up with a stream of secrets and in-jokes.

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.

Panos Cosmatos's film is a profoundly violent and weirdly moving poem of male alienation.

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Evil Does Not Exist is a turn away from the filmmaker’s empathy of his earlier work toward an aesthetic that’s jagged and chilly.

Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.

It displays an intimate chemical understanding of the exhausting and unrelentingly impotent agony of failure.

Sanjuro is still a lesson from a master in mounting choreography and sustaining momentum, though it remains more of an exercise rather than a work of flesh and blood.

One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.

The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.

The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.

The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.