Chuck Bowen

Like its protagonist, Philippe Falardeau's film gets lost in a haze of incidental cacophony.

Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.

In The Third Murder, as in his other films, Hirokazu Kore-eda informs tragedy with a distinctive kind of qualified humor that's realistic of how people process atrocity.

After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.

It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.

The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.

Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.

Lydia Tenaglia's direction is occasionally flashy and cluttered, but her empathy for Tower is evocative and poignant.

Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.

The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.

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

Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.

The film reveals Kôji Fukada to be playing a patient, very resonant long game, underscoring the struggle to wrest oneself out of social vices.

Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.

In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.

The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.

Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.

The film is ultimately enjoyable despite its faults, at least partially because it represents an earnest, honest attempt to empathize with struggling American working-class women.

Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.

Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.

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

There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.

Throughout, Judd Apatow dramatizes the ideal of community with an almost Eastwoodian sense of rapture.

A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.

Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.

Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.

The film poignantly reveals that the secret history of Hollywood is really an alternate history of America.

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.