Chuck Bowen

Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.

The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.

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.

Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.

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.

Above all, Destry Rides Again is fun, with a variety of stars and character actors utilizing their charisma with an expert sense of ease and offhandedness.

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.

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

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

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.

The film is rich in compositions that seem to cut to the essence of the characters’ yearnings.

The Killers redux packs one lasting, significant, retrospective jolt of perversity that far eclipses any possible artistic intentions on the part of its creators though: the sight of future American President Ronald Reagan playing a baddie in his last film role before entering politics.

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.

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

Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.

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

Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.

With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre's evocative loneliness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The accumulating effect of this airy and resonant film’s formal devices is that of a heartbroken artist learning to reengage with society.

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

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.