Chuck Bowen

The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.

The film’s purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.

We're simply presented a person in trouble, and we're allowed to recognize his problems as extreme embodiments of universal issues of terror, confusion, and loneliness.

The Other Side of the Wind isn't a novelty item, but a work of anguished art that's worthy of its creator.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

Few films have so exquisitely captured how straight American men reveal their affections and insecurities to one another, as well as how they’re both threatened and awed by each other.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.

Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.

House has a superb premise that begs for a more ambitious framework, both formally and psychologically.

Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.

With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.

This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosing of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed.

On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.

It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.

Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis.

This subtle, glancing trust in our ability to read the true story between the lines is pivotal to Cat People’s sense of being simultaneously vague and explicit, succinct yet freighted with baggage.

Peter Strickland charges full-tilt into the objectifying whims of his fantasies in order to somehow reach the other end of perception, which acknowledges the ultimate empathetic limitations of said fantasies.

A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.

The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.

With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.

The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

It routinely alternating between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.

Sollers Point is a moving and elusive blend of naturalism and melodrama, less a character study than an analysis of a community.

The Fabulous Baker Boys ultimately soars on the strength of its three perfectly cast stars, who collectively wed studies of glamour (Jeff Bridges and Pfeiffer) with ruminations on the pain of life as an everyman among stars (Beau Bridges).

One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread.

Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.

The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.