Chuck Bowen

Miyazaki’s concerns with the fragility and wonder of our less tangible surroundings haunt the picture without overpowering it.

It’s Morgan Neville’s impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life.

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

Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present.

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

The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.

The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.

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

Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.

Morgan Neville understands Orson Welles's art to pivot on an ongoing quest to bring about self-destruction so as to contrive to transcend it.

One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.

Every beautiful, resonant image in writer-director Alex Ross Perry's film is fraught with neurotic, diaphanous riddles.

The film has a calming and inevitable quality, and a leisurely sense of pacing that favors image and sound over narrative propulsion, that slows our own biorhythms, fostering our sensorial empathy with the passengers.

In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

Each of the six vignettes that make up this unusually energetic anthology pertains to the methods of calculated mass dehumanization that are (barely) hidden beneath the practices of social institutions.

On Body and Soul's fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.

One watches the film with an escalating sense of disbelief and horror, as Warren Jeffs is steadily revealed to be an even greater monster than we initially take him for.

Errol Morris films Dorfman and her work with a rapt attentiveness that maps the nostalgic and regretful stirrings of her soul.

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

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

The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.

In this time of peril and chaos, Elizabeth Carroll’s documentary is a balm for the soul.

Writer-director Boo Junfeng casually reinvigorates the prison drama, boiling its elements down to their primal essence.

The film is in part an exceedingly black comedy that parodies proper society's eager, self-righteous naïveté on the subject of its children.

Horror is said to be driven by a fear of death when the genre is often more viscerally concerned with rejection and loneliness. Henenlotter feels these emotions in his bones.

First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Takashi Miike film in throwaway clothing.

With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.