Chuck Bowen

Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.

The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.

The film is unavoidably slight, but there's a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.

It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.

It offers lively and layered images that reveal the chefs both as individuals and components of a larger social organism.

The film suggests that Bill and Ted’s dreams of stardom, which have evolved into dreams of acceptance and expression, aren’t so stupid after all.

The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.

When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.

The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.

Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.

It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.

It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.

It waffles between dramatizing youthful self-absorption and succumbing to it, and this tonal instability comes to effectively mirror the domestic discord that's revealed to be its real subject.

Director Jason Lei Howden has a flair for punchlines that are funny for reasons that are essentially impossible to describe.

Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.

The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.

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.

In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.

Scott Cooper's film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.

In the film, Joshua Marston leaches the narrative of nearly all the social texture that infused and empowered “Heretics,” the 2005 episode of the This American Life podcast that inspired this biopic.

Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.

Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.

In her understandable fury, Vivian Qu almost valorizes suffering, embracing it as a substantial signifier of identity.

In the film's best scenes, Jeff Grace displays a delicate understanding of various modes of male fragility.

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

New York, New York, like most Martin Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.

These shorts follow female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts.