Chuck Bowen

The filmmakers astutely reveal how a culture can eat another alive and somehow live with itself.

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

The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.

The film's images have a loose, rough, textured liveliness that honors the spirit of Chinatown Fair.

Writer-director Jim Cummings reinvigorates an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.

The film provides a crisp, succinct answer to a question that nags most Americans: What the hell happened?

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

Throughout the documentary, Benjamin Ree upsets conventions, offering a moving portrait of two lost souls.

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

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.

The film’s awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one’s conception of identity.

Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.

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

My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.

Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.

Convento is an unusual experimental film that conjures the free-floating aura of a dream, only without the stylized, hyper-symbolic imagery that we generally associate with films attempting to convey dream states.

Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.

Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson have extraordinary chemistry, painting a cumulative portrait of the fragility and rareness of being truly in sync with a partner.

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.

While the film lacks the feverish, autocritical neuroses of Hitchcock’s mid- and late-period masterpieces, it often superbly plumbs notions of guilt and vulnerability, all the while cheekily satirizing Scotland Yard as a swayable arbiter of justice.

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.

2nd Chance a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn.

It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.

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

In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.

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

The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.

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