Chuck Bowen

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

Takashi Miike's film is a work of robust genre craftsmanship that's informed with a sly sense of self-interrogation.

Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.

The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.

Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.

Watching Lifeforce now is to be reminded that even big-budget films were once allowed to be adventurous and idiosyncratic, even in the 1980s, and that American horror movies were once capable of being fun, sexy, and subversively empathetic.

Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.

The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.

Jacques Doillon's shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief, allowing stray moments to suddenly crystallize unexpressed yearnings.

Miguel Gomes's formal talents, which include a flair for close-ups of elegantly smooth or weathered faces, transcend his soft spot for the didactic.

A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.

These shorts follow female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts.

The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.

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

Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.

A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.

Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.

Steven Soderbergh’s signature formal gamesmanship enlivens what could have been a stodgy scenario.

The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.

Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.

The film has been executed with a sense of formally stylish and thematically symmetric panache.