Chuck Bowen

At its best, Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room.

A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.

Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.

Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.

The narrative derives much of its tension from the unsentimental ambivalence Jon Watts displays toward the story's two pre-teen boys.

Greatly cognizant of the revenge genre's penchant for hypocritical demagoguery, director Arnaud des Pallières unsettles the audience's usual feelings of vicarious blood lust.

A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula.

While the film offers an appealingly nostalgic trance-out, it’s often short on detail, especially in terms of Stephen Herchen’s struggle to create the instant film technology, which director Willem Baptist reduces to exchanges of jargon in atmospheric laboratories.

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

An ambitious monster movie that attempts to explore the metaphorical ghosts lingering over the atrocities committed by the residents of a small, noxiously chummy Southern town, and whose collective closets obviously symbolize the troubled historical legacy of the American South at large.

The film’s refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional and eventually tiresome declaration of Qui Sheng’s arthouse bona fides.

Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.

Wife of a Spy could use a streak of live-wire, huckster crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner.

A beautiful, gleefully weird vanity project that never quite coheres.

The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.

Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.

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.

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

A wonderful high concept is compromised for another story of lonely people learning to connect.

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

At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

Underneath the impersonal formal beauty and good acting is a familiar moral about self-imposed limitations.

This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.

The film offers an oxymoronic parable that’s been utilized countless times by cinema, in loose reiterations of A Christmas Carol: The protagonist must learn humility after learning that the world revolves around him.

One presumes that Michael Lerner's sense of emphasis is meant to humanize Shanté, defining her apart from the fame she achieved, but this stratagem backfires as Roxanne Roxanne mires itself in scenes of speechifying domestic strife.

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

The film, more likely to invite comparisons to the writings of Marcel Proust than the previous Ip Man films, is a gorgeous folly that never entirely emerges from its creator's head.