Chuck Bowen

Jody Lee Lipes shapes the footage into an intimate symphony of poetically shaped bodies that contrast poignantly with uncertain faces.

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

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

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.

With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.

Zak Hilditch's 1922 informs Steven King's pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force.

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

In this time of peril and chaos, Elizabeth Carroll’s documentary is a balm for the soul.

Paul Lacoste's almost purely observational approach allows him to come about as close to documenting the process of creation as anyone ever has.

Terror gradually leaks into the narrative, transforming Where Is Kyra? into a haunting non-traditional thriller.

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

The tactility of earlier Hirokazu Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.

Peter Wiedensmith's methods aren't as cinematic as they could be, but even this seems to ably mirror Marilyn Sewell's humility.

Mazursky finds the politics in the wrinkles of human behavior, rather than contriving behavior to suit his politics.

Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.

Bridey Elliott avoids the smug pitfalls of narratives concerned with privileged people drinking themselves into a stupor.

Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, like The Hunt, is ultimately a parable about breaking a social contract.

Thatcherism yielded results that are arguably typical of conservative ideology: high-class flourishing at the expense of the lower class proletariat, who’re left underpaid (at best), over-taxed, adrift, and profoundly resentful of their limited opportunities. My Beautiful Laundrette is a moving, tonally elastic study of this environment’s socio-political ground floor.

This is a confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.

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.

True to the implications of its title, the devotional insularity of Madeline's Madeline is suffocating, which is appropriate for a film about a mentally imbalanced teenage artist but suffocating nonetheless.

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

In Deerskin, Quentin Dupieux mines the absurdism that is his signature with newfound forcefulness.

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

Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.

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.

The film poignantly reveals that the secret history of Hollywood is really an alternate history of America.

Like Happy Hour, Asako I & II is a parable of the grace — and, yes, happiness — that spring from resignation.