Chuck Bowen

There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.

Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.

Ana Lily Amirpour has learned a few lessons from QT about the disreputable joys of blending kitsch and ultraviolence.

The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.

What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.

At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.

The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.

The film’s early scenes turn the stuff of paying bills and managing kids into manna for an unsettlingly intimate domestic thriller.

At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.

The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.

John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.

This film’s pleasures are extremely mild, but they’re discernable for the curious fan of retro redneck horror, or, far more likely, for the genre critic looking to finish their dissertation pertaining to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s vast influence on the 1970s and 1980s grindhouse movie’s vision of gleeful small-town Americana hypocrisy.

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

The film doesn't quite earn Jones's performance, but it engenders considerable goodwill for allowing him to give it.

A curiously unsentimental director of romantic comedies, Julie Delpy sees romance for the work that it primarily is.

The film is seemingly terrified of boring us, offering one elaborate montage of catch and release (or of survey and flee) after another.

Fake It So Real has been made with considerable more polish than other do-it-yourself documentaries such as "Total Badass," but the sensibility is similar.

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

Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.

The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.

Steve James is clearly positioning the film as a rallying cry, and its weaknesses as art might bolster its strength as reformatory theater.

One sees a film called 100 Bloody Acres expecting the requisite allusions to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but an homage to the best scene in Melvin and Howard comes as something of a shock.

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.

For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.

Camilla Luddington refuses to predictably foreground her character's escalating fear, allowing us instead to see that fear as being at war with her inquisitive intelligence.

Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.

Christian Papierniak manages to get a tricky tonal balance more or less right, capturing the false sense of superiority that Izzy projects over her environment without allowing the film itself to revel in said superiority.

This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.