Chuck Bowen

For Paul Schrader, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.

The "male gaze" that often despicably and hypocritically surfaces in these kinds of films is pointedly absent throughout.

Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.

Even the film's lapses inform it with a free-associative sense of portent, evoking the stupid things we inexplicably do in our most personal nightmares.

The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.

At times, Cameron Yates appears to be too protective of his subjects, which somewhat neuters the drama of the narrative.

The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.

One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.

Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"

The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.

Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy.

The film somehow feels tight, open and leisurely, and cloaked in dread all at once.

The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.

After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.

It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.

The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.

With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.

The film doesn't add up to much, but it's a diverting tour of Takashi Miike's anything-goes, splatter-paint sensibility.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.

The Mummy is one of Hammer’s classics, cleverly fusing the human pathos of the original Universal film with the creature-centric physicality of the sequels the latter inevitably yielded.

Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.

The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.

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

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

It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.