Chuck Bowen

Fetishism, parody, and various registers of violence propel a livewire thriller that mines the free-floating hostility existing between genders.

It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.

Ultimately, Anders Thomas Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which his protagonist viscerally annihilates a violent gang.

Strickland’s film is another fetish object that rues the perils of fetishism.

It masterfully sustains a sense of “wrongness” that will be felt even by those unfamiliar with Argentina’s history.

A sluggish, obvious fusion of a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with a comedic family crime romp that abounds in stiflingly over-emphasized Boston-crime-movie details.

Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.

Aarón Fernández captures one of the most heartening elements of sex: that it doesn't always oblige our rules or expectations.

It infuses an outdoorsy survival tale and a coming-of-age story of friendship with Taika Waititi's penchant for distaff flakiness.

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.

Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.

A zig-zagging, free-associational genre item that's mostly concerned with stretching the generally narrow tonal rules of what a thriller can be.

Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.

Above all, Destry Rides Again is fun, with a variety of stars and character actors utilizing their charisma with an expert sense of ease and offhandedness.

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

An immersive drama that bridges real-life details with the catharses of parables with expressionistic on-the-fly camerawork, a blend of the textural and the poetic that’s hallucinatory and profound.

Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.

It grows increasingly hopeless as it contrasts the alien paradise of the opening with the wastelands that resemble corporate dump sites.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.

Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary is a spry and inventive account of extraordinary transcendence.

The film’s awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one’s conception of identity.

Hong Sang-soo simultaneously positions filmmaking as the ultimate act of atonement and evasion, eviscerating himself so that he may live to stage several more films about the futility of getting hammered and worshipping and bedding gorgeous young women.

As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.

Albert Maysles's portrait of Iris Apfel gradually emerges with cathartic clarity without compromising her inherent mystery.

Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.

In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.

John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.