Chuck Bowen

A key film in Alfred Hitchcock’s evolution as a master explorer of sexual neuroses.

Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.

Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.

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

Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.

Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.

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

It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.

The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.

Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.

Unforgiven brought the revisionist revenge film into the 1990s and, by extension, the 21st century

As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.

Blow-Up is moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides.

Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.

The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.

Low comedy walks hand and hand with tragedy and beauty throughout; the film is frothy one minute, nearly apocalyptic the next, and so you’re never fully allowed to gather your bearings.

Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.

Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.

The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western.

Too many films these days trivialize poverty as an ironically, tastelessly over-produced pageant to earn kudos. The Grapes of Wrath is flawed, but it captures that shiver of panic that grips anyone for whom the money for the next meal is unknown. The film remains a vital document of the perversion and torment of the fantasy most commonly known as the American Dream.

The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.

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

Asghar Farhadi's film yields a tonal and emotional friction that's simultaneously tragic, transcendent, and comic.

The film, as a whole, isn’t quite up to the phenomenal dexterity of its lead’s exertions. But there’s a legitimate reason people love this movie so much: Pollack syphoned Hoffman’s ecstatic electricity off into a popular and old-fashioned romantic-comedy formula, bringing it back to life. Tootsie is a remarkably gentle and human pop movie that informs the term “escapism” with an almost cleansing sense of decency.

Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.

Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.

Martin Scorsese captures the exquisite agony and pleasure of passion that’s forced to remain theoretical.