Chuck Bowen

It offers a wonderful visual reprieve from the cumbersomely mechanized aesthetic of so much contemporary fantasy.

The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.

For all its hip ludicrousness, The Little Hours has a point: to almost earnestly riff on how atheism has taken hold of 21st-century America, by rooting our nation’s moors in a time of great austerity, sexism, classism, and persecution.

Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.

Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.

In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.

Wiktor Ericsson emphasizes one of the strongest and most distinctive features of Joseph Sarno's aesthetic: his concentration on female pleasure.

The film attains a chilly existential quality as Matt Johnson's character discerns the weight of his actions.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

Frédéric Mermoud's film makes an elaborate pretense of honoring the traditions of the observational procedural.

Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.

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.

The film effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves.

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

Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.

At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.

The film has an eerily WTF arbitrariness that should be the domain of more films in the genre.

Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.

A Boy and His Dog is an unruly daydream capped with a surprisingly jet-black acknowledgment of humankind’s genetic destiny to ruin itself.

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

The filmmakers attempt to acknowledge the pain of warfare within the framework of a redemptive story that lends it an unforgivably patronizing sense of closure.

The documentary is enjoyable, but one suspects that its subject may have found it soft.

The film is beautiful and occasionally quite moving, but its subject matter deserves more than art-house irresolution.

The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.

Oz Perkins exhibits a committed understanding of the cinematic value of silence and of vastly underpopulated compositions.

In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.

Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.