Chuck Bowen

Takashi Miike's film is a work of robust genre craftsmanship that's informed with a sly sense of self-interrogation.

Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.

For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.

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.

Johnny Ma's Old Stone is a lean, nasty entry in a subgenre that could be termed the bureaucratic noir.

Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.

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.

Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.

This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.

As with most Hong Sang-soo films, it engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos.

A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.

Marc Bauder's documentary quietly detonates the conservative notion that our largest corporations should be allowed to duke it out in metaphorical no-holds-barred cage matches.

Sebastián Silva never indulges platitude, and so the qualified hope of the film’s ending isn’t merely affirming but also miraculous.

Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.

Alice Lowe evinces a knack for locating society’s most awkward pressure points, and a willingness to punch them.

Erika Frankel’s documentary is finally revealed to be a story of prolonged adjustment to retirement, and a poignant illustration of sublimated redemption.

At their best, writer-director Mario Furloni and Kate McLean evince a masterful grasp of storytelling that’s subtle and rich in innuendo.

Jacob Gentry’s film punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror.

If Hannah Emily Anderson's performance was as fully imagined as Brittany Allen's, then What Keeps You Alive might have attained the emotional dimensions of a robust psychodrama.

The documentary proves that the history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself.

Theo Who Lived is fascinating, and Theo Padnos is an exacting storyteller, but the film pushes through one story point to the next, occasionally prizing velocity over texture.

The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.

Nicole Holofcener's The Land of Steady Habits often suggests the film that American Beauty might have been if the latter had been pruned of its smug hysteria.

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

Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.

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