Chuck Bowen

Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.

The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.

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

There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.

Nicolas Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, caging his brand of operatic hysteria.

The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

The film is about a mystery that isn’t solved, and how that inconclusiveness spotlights the insidious functions of society.

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.

In terms of formal orchestration, Creepy is as sublime as any prior Kiyoshi Kurosawa film.

78/52 comes to life when riffing on the psychosexual perversity of Psycho, which changed cinema's relationship with sex and violence.

Bruno Dumont's formalism is presently charged with a spark of simultaneously controlled and spontaneous mystery.

Before I Wake's images have a pleasing straightforwardness that parallels the openness of the young protagonist's longing for love.

The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.

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

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.

After its promising first act, Craig Brewer’s film becomes a series of fleeting bits, allowing questions to pile up.

Contemporary outrage could’ve potentially counterpointed the film’s increasingly mawkish tendencies.

Say what you will about Burning Man, but writer-director Jonathan Teplitsky can't be accused of spoon-feeding his audience.

Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.

You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.

At its best, Stan & Ollie shows how the private and personal dimensions of art are achingly inseparable.

It would appear that some of Buddy’s humans have indeed written off their fellow people. Does this matter? Honigmann’s film doesn’t plumb this potentially resonant question, as it’s hesitant to look a gift dog in the mou

Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.

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 Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.

In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.

Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.

The narrative has a gambit that steers Beast into the terrain of a horror film, offsetting the sentimentality of the audience-flattering romance.