Chuck Bowen

The tactility of earlier Hirokazu Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.

One of the most ambiguous, neurotic, and disturbing of all American films.

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.

One of the subtlest and most extraordinarily fluid of American horror films, Kaufman crafts textured scenes, rich in emotional and object-centric tactility, that cause our heads to casually spin with expectation and dread.

With Blaze, a fractured story of country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, director Ethan Hawke admirably battles the clichés of the musical biopic.

Beautiful loneliness, as the film suggestively reveals, is a texture that Frank knows all too well.

Michael Winterbottom and his gifted actors still haven't quite solved the riddle of portraying social disconnection in a manner that's anything other than sporadically involving.

At its best, Stan & Ollie shows how the private and personal dimensions of art are achingly inseparable.

Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.

The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.

Throughout the documentary, the undisguised regret and longing of David Lynch's reminiscences are often startling.

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

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

The film blends the Bard with National Geographic, failing to make a case for the inexplicability of their union.

The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.

It movingly posits acting as a metaphor for the search for connection, through visceral texture rather than platitude.

Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.

In Okja, a transporting protest fantasy becomes another shrill dust-up in the waging of the culture wars.

Jody Lee Lipes shapes the footage into an intimate symphony of poetically shaped bodies that contrast poignantly with uncertain faces.

The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.

78/52 comes to life when riffing on the psychosexual perversity of Psycho, which changed cinema's relationship with sex and violence.

It grounds us so effectively in Joplin's emotional realm as to partially rekindle the social transcendence that her voice must have represented for its owner.

Jerrod Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.

The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.

Fake It So Real has been made with considerable more polish than other do-it-yourself documentaries such as "Total Badass," but the sensibility is similar.

It exhibits the spry subtlety of Jean and Luc Dardenne's films, and, consequently, it's possible that it will be similarly mistaken for a work of “naturalism.”