Chuck Bowen

Director Tom DiCillo ingeniously structures the film as a trio of overlapping shorts that cumulatively suggest ripples emanating from a stone tossed in a pond.

Sanjuro is still a lesson from a master in mounting choreography and sustaining momentum, though it remains more of an exercise rather than a work of flesh and blood.

Any real zombie fan knows that political parable and decomposing cannibal corpse gore go together like peanut butter and jelly, but Day of the Dead found the subgenre’s reigning master and poet-in-residence mismanaging the proper ratios a bit.

Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.

Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.

Chinonye Chukwu’s film is a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia.

Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.

Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators.

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

One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.

Albert Birney knows that fantasy is a potent force, that it can lead you deep into the worst parts of yourself, or, with the right influences, lead you back to life.

Nicole Holofcener's The Land of Steady Habits often suggests the film that American Beauty might have been if the latter had been pruned of its smug hysteria.

This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.

Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.

Alison Bagnall and her talented leads appear to effortlessly achieve a tone that's tricky to sustain, one that abounds equally in absurdism and empathy.

Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.

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

This gnarly gem of 1980s-era punk horror still looks and sounds a little rough, but the film and the supplements justify the plunge.

Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.

Like Me is exhilarating because of Robert Mockler’s willingness to deviate from his satire so as to surprise himself with seemingly spontaneous emotional textures and tangents.

Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.

The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.

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.

It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.

Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.

When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.