Chuck Bowen

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Slant Magazine
For 830 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 43% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Chuck Bowen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Basket Case
Lowest review score: 0 The Eyes of My Mother
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 531 out of 830
  2. Mixed: 150 out of 830
  3. Negative: 149 out of 830
830 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Zeros and Ones
    Zeros and Ones is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for his badness.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Cam2Cam
    Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Fatman
    If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    The Sentence
    Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Triple Frontier
    J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    28 Hotel Rooms
    We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Hungry Hearts
    Throughout, Saverio Costanzo hypocritically drapes his scenes in a cloak of faux-empathy.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    Christopher Felver is too reverent to properly convey the invigoratingly profane, angry messiness of the sense of community that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his peers too briefly brought to life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Paddleton
    The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    A Vigilante
    It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    A Long Way Down
    An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Proud Mary
    Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Born to be Blue
    Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Everly
    Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    Any pretense of satire collapses by the film's midpoint, leaving only the contempt.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    The Assignment
    Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Chuck Bowen
    Sushi: The Global Catch
    The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Unforgivable
    The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Every Thing Will Be Fine
    The premise, of a terrible event unleavened by the easy out of someone being at fault, should be prime fodder for Wim Wenders's brand of poetic regret.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    American Heist
    The film offers a veritable smorgasbord of dated, only-in-the-movies clichés about the debt-ridden working class.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Wish Me Away
    The film is ultimately too concerned with courting the singer's fans to deliver anything more than a theatrical release of a very special episode of VH1's Behind the Music.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Miss Minoes
    After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Finding Joe
    Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Supercapitalist
    Ultimately plodding and resolutely old-fashioned, a corporate thriller for folks too square to indulge the possible existence of hungers so strong they must be satisfied at any cost.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Mute
    Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Falling Overnight
    Falling Overnight recalls some of the more annoying entries in the mumblecore subgenre that erroneously believe that every indiscriminate moment in a person's life is worthy of a film regardless of subtext.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Rupture
    It attempts to dress up torture-porn tropes with a late-inning switch to science fiction that spectacularly backfires.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Serena
    The film can't reconcile Ron Rash's apocalyptic tenderness with its own eagerness to revel in romantic star allure.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Devil All the Time
    Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Inescapable
    The film spins its wheels for almost an hour until collapsing under the weight of exposition that renders the mystery nearly besides the point.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Proxy
    It transforms itself from a meek lo-fi indie stalker thriller in the key of May to a hysterically sexist and homophobic revenge film.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Sheik and I
    The film is ultimately more concerned with Caveh Zahedi's attempts to pursue a variety of dull passing fancies than with any larger agenda.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Last Knights
    Another macho celebration of fighting for "freedom" because someone else told you to, devoid of any acknowledgement of the inherent irony of that ideology.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Diablo
    It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Frozen Ground
    Taste and good intentions are only going to get one so far with a script this tone deaf and direction this ugly and monotonous.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Seducing Charlie Barker
    Charlie is a stereotype who doesn't know it--basically your typical broke dude in a near midlife crisis who thinks he's the first to have his dull problems.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Unhinged
    Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Prey
    Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Inside Hana's Suitcase
    A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Friend Request
    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.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Reasonable Doubt
    You may feel as if you're watching two or three abbreviated episodes of Law & Order in quick succession rather than a fully realized movie.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Rifkin's Festival
    As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Nancy
    There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from a fetishizing of "keeping it real."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Haunting of Helena
    Yet another ghost story that insists there's nothing more chilling than a professional woman charged with raising a child on her own.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Crazy and Thief
    It's eventually obvious that Cory McAbee mistakenly believes that his characters' resolutely dull adventures speak for themselves.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Mojave
    With the film, director William Monahan offers audiences a bundle of fetishes dressed up as an existentialist thriller about the class system.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Police Story: Lockdown
    The film's subtitle is apropos, as this is a decidedly locked-down and lead-footed talk-o-rama.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Loosies
    Loosies never establishes a consistent tone; it feels made up as it went along, and not in the electrifyingly free-wheeling fashion of, say, a Godard or Altman film.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Dark Places
    The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    This is less a movie than a dutiful renewal of a recognizable title's licensing rights.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    From the Land of the Moon
    The film is so humorless and in love with its own obviousness that it grows laughable.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Cabin Fever
    Travis Zariwny detachedly regards the material as shtick to be waded through with quotation marks.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Perfect
    Eddie Alcazar’s film is a purposefully inscrutable, wandering, disconnected, symbolic, and highly precious mood bath.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Burying the Ex
    It alternates awkwardly between shrill, borderline misogynistic sex farce and desperately gory, pun-rife creature feature.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Last Ride
    A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Apollo 18
    A nasty, cleverly revealed monster might have redeemed some of the monotony of the first (seemingly endless) hour, but the beasty here manages to be ludicrous, dull, and unoriginal somehow all at once, compromising the marginal hope you may have been holding out for the film.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Hollow Point
    Gonzalo López-Gallego's direction isn't confident enough to allow us to ignore The Hollow Point's contrivances.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Every Breath You Take
    Sam Claflin is best in show, but his performance is undercut by the film’s inability to escalate or explore the ramifications of its premise.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Drive Hard
    Drive Hard is the action-film equivalent of one of those folks who relentlessly speak of having it tough all over as they plan their third yearly vacation.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Prisoners of the Ghostland
    The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    The Darkness
    This enterprise is so listless that one can't even work up a proper head of self-righteous steam over the spooky Native American clichés that drive the plot.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    ma ma
    Julio Medem's film has enough hanky-courting plot mechanics for three remakes of Beaches.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Marlowe
    Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Rings
    Rings is unsure as to whether it’s a sequel to the other entries in the series or a contemporary reboot.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Yogawoman
    It's less a film than an unimaginatively assembled series of talking heads.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Festival of Lights
    Fifteen minutes into Festival of Lights you come to the discouraging realization that you know every infuriating plot beat that will follow.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Unlocked
    With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 25 Chuck Bowen
    Small Town Murder Songs
    So intent on being "art" that it's seemingly indifferent to providing simple niceties such as compelling performance, plot, and an atmosphere that isn't predictably oppressive.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Inside Out
    Inside Out should be wild and violent, playing on the soap-operatic mood swings that drive televised wrestling; instead it's one or two murders away from being a Lifetime movie of the week.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Ex-Girlfriends
    The romantic quest that's meant to drive the film is meaningless because Alexander Poe has extended empathy to no one besides himself.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Crave
    The film's method of admitting its own hypocrisy so as to enable it to further indulge said hypocrisy grows more grating than if it were merely indifferently conceived junk like Falling Down.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Some Velvet Morning
    To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Absence
    The tension almost immediately leaks out of the narrative once we realize we're watching a found-footage horror movie.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    211
    The film relegates Nicolas Cage to a supporting player and crowds him with considerably less charismatic performers.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Vehicle 19
    As one incoherent action scene follows another, one's left staring at a film with nothing to respond to, waiting for it all to be over.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    The Canyons
    Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Jason and Shirley
    Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    The Cobbler
    Thomas McCarthy evinces no interest in the people who come into Max's store and wind up as fodder for his increasingly violent and self-absorbed escapades. Not a shred.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Leatherface
    Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Coming 2 America
    Even by the woeful standards of decades-too-late comedy sequels, Coming 2 America is desperate, belabored, and thin.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Dying of the Light
    Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.
    • 14 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    The Offering
    It inspires retrospective gratitude for the empty yet slick craftsmanship of someone like James Wan.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Eloise
    Robert Legato's film is lifelessly composed of the usual tropes of horror films set in mental asylums.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    Dragon Blade
    Slacker and even less involving than the similarly terrible global kill-fest Last Knights, but easier to watch for the inadvertent camp value of two of the prominent performances.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 12 Chuck Bowen
    The Voices
    For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    The Eyes of My Mother
    Though the film strives to be audacious and galvanizing, it's easily shaken off as an exercise in stunted necrophilia erotica.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Least Among Saints
    As a portrait of a self-pitying drunk's wet dream of inexplicable atonement, it's fairly effective, but as a story meant to take place on some rational version of planet Earth, it's utterly hopeless.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    One Fall
    One Fall is a bafflingly lame assemblage of self-help platitudes, the sort of film in which every narrative detail is specifically placed to pave the way for a pat moral you've grasped before the opening credits have barely concluded.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Accidental Love
    So flimsily constructed, visually and narratively, that it resembles a middle-school play that's been hastily filmed on an antique camcorder.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    The Victim
    Not much happens in The Victim, but the events that do manage to transpire consistently support a reading of the film as an older man's fantasy of virility.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    The Identical
    The film's so preoccupied with being "inspirational" that it disastrously fails to evoke the allure of rock n' roll, particularly in America in the 1950s, when it represented an erosion of racial and sexual barriers.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Queen of the Desert
    Throughout Queen of the Desert's narrative, there's no sense of danger, of texture, or even of a rudimentary idea of what's truly driving Gertrude Bell.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Good for Nothing
    The title is apropos, but it's also an understatement.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Golf in the Kingdom
    The film, for all its trite lessons, forgets that people mainly play golf because they enjoy it.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    33 Postcards
    Pauline Chan's film is a jumbled mixture of redemptive uplift and genre hijinks.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    Laredoans Speak is bad in a special kind of way that inspires the obviously piteous description of "well-intentioned."
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
    • 5 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    Tom Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than "The Human Centipede II."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Knockdown
    The film is a tedious narrative shambles that's almost hilariously unaware of its racism and sexism.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Last Will and Embezzlement
    The doc is so obnoxiously simplistic that you find yourself strangely unsympathetic to its objectively inarguable aim to promote greater standards of elder care.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Skin Trade
    There's no beauty to this film, little rhythm, none of the physical grace that action-film fans crave even if they don't know they do.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 0 Chuck Bowen
    Independence Day: Resurgence
    Emmerich rewards our patience with an impersonally massive set piece involving the usual generic stew of mass CGI-imagined demolition. The insensitivity displayed toward human life in these sequences would be galling even by Emmerich's standards, if this pitiful albatross of corporate capitalism could work up enough energy to be offensive.
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