Chuck Bowen

It routinely alternating between episodes that contrast exhilaration with exploitation and damnation.

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

The filmmakers astutely reveal how a culture can eat another alive and somehow live with itself.

The film has a wandering, lonely purity. We feel as if we've been allowed to fleetingly swim through Andy Goldsworthy's psyche.

Thatcherism yielded results that are arguably typical of conservative ideology: high-class flourishing at the expense of the lower class proletariat, who’re left underpaid (at best), over-taxed, adrift, and profoundly resentful of their limited opportunities. My Beautiful Laundrette is a moving, tonally elastic study of this environment’s socio-political ground floor.

It would appear that some of Buddy’s humans have indeed written off their fellow people. Does this matter? Honigmann’s film doesn’t plumb this potentially resonant question, as it’s hesitant to look a gift dog in the mou

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.

After its promising first act, Craig Brewer’s film becomes a series of fleeting bits, allowing questions to pile up.

In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.

A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.

One may wonder if Night School's most revealing material has been left on the cutting room floor, so as to offer the sort of uplift that inadvertently marginalizes the very inequalities that drive the film.

A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.

In terms of formal orchestration, Creepy is as sublime as any prior Kiyoshi Kurosawa film.

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

Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void.

Alonso Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession.

The film understands that money is a defining element of art-making, whether or not we wish to admit it.

You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.

It's informed with a subtle but disquieting subtext that insists on the pitfalls of allowing ideology to steer you away from common sense.

Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.

The film has a free-floating, nearly intangible sense of unease that greatly serves it.

The Brazilian animated feature offers relief from the impersonal assault of contemporary pop culture.

With One Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh mixes an old-school 1950s noir with a modern sense of social self-consciousness.

Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.

Sasha Waters Freyer forges a poignant portrait of an artist attempting to transcend the limitations of his art by refusing to see the process through.

Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.

The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.