Chuck Bowen

The Honeymoon Killers is an intense, terrifying portrait of repression and instability.

Throughout, direcgor Bill Morrison mixes documentarian detail with an ecstatic sense of poetry.

The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.

There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.

Swing Time has some of Astaire and Rogers’s mightiest set pieces, which are intertwined to reflect their characters’ evolving relationship.

Eliza Hittman's film captures the exclusive properties of sex with a degree of intimacy and empathy that, at times, feels authentically revelatory.

The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.

Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.

Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, and Hong Sang-soo is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen.

Throughout, artists intermingle in scenes that have been rendered with an Altman-esque sense of personal panorama.

Coming Home is a film in which everyone's dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.

Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.

Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.

The film's thematic organization suggests the cinematic equivalent of a short-story collection, with haunting tangents and stray notes of poetry.

Stunningly, it isn’t even Altman’s best film (that would be McCabe & Mrs. Miller), but Nashville is still the movie that best embodies everything that was so freeing and generous and deceptively casual about Altman’s art, and it’s the film that best represents him as a uniquely American artist.

The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.

Herzog’s idiosyncratic horror classic remains a vital conversation between two distinct generations of brilliant German filmmakers.

One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films.

The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.

Steven Soderbergh’s film considers modern media as a vehicle for revising white patriarchal capitalism.

Theo Anthony’s film is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds.

Pakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.

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.

For Hong Sang-oo, In Our Day is a gesture toward recognizing the beautiful, awful, and uncanny.

With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate.

There's an artisanal scruffiness to Win It All that testifies to Joe Swanberg’s quiet fluidity as a filmmaker.

God Told Me To is one of the key American horror films from the 1970s to mine the internally sexual, racial quandaries of a nation beset by one great civil rights catastrophe after another.

The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.