Chuck Bowen

Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.

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.

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

One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.

It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.

Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.

The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.

As preachy and repetitive as The Little Prince can be, it offers enough moments of poetry to keep it flirting with greatness, or at least goodness.

The film too often suggests an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.

Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.

Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.

It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.

The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.

Scott Thurman captures not only the fear and anti-intellectual resentment and insecurity that govern the dictations of the far right, but also the rampant unchecked egotism.

Marc Maron’s commanding aura of regret gives the film, despite its missed opportunities, an emotional center.

The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.

The King benefits from a quality that's usually a liability in nonfiction films: Its scattershot structure gets at the truth of pop culture as an ineffable chimera that defines much of the world.

Hold the Dark's ludicrous seriousness comes to feel like a mask for what's essentially a genre story of murder and mayhem.

As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.

Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.

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

The documentary nurtures our sympathy for Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager without shortchanging their hypocrisies.

John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.

The film quickly settles into a holding pattern of repetitive porno-movie hijinks and increasingly listless murder scenes.

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

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.

The film’s horniness and amorality, a slap in the face of fanatically cautious contemporary mores, might’ve been more shocking if it weren’t placed so firmly in quotation marks.

The film is determinedly unclassifiable, blurring genres with a fervor that grows tedious.