Chuck Bowen

After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.

Unlike many [M. Night] Shyamalan films, which seem constructed out of Mad Libs, Come to Daddy retains an emotional consistency.

For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.

An admirably bizarre and beautiful genre mixtape, but Anders Thomas Jensen's empathy for his characters gradually impedes his imagination.

Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.

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.

Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.

The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.

The film communicates a sporadic sense of violation—of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.

Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.

With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.

This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.

Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.

The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.

Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

Everyone heals, or doesn't heal, on cue, and the initial pathos of the narrative is dulled by the architecture of its through lines.

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.

The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.

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.

If the film is mildly disappointing, it’s because it doesn’t go far enough. It confidently prepares us for a frenzy that never quite materializes.

Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.

Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.

My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.

Though the film strives to be audacious and galvanizing, it's easily shaken off as an exercise in stunted necrophilia erotica.

There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.