Chuck Bowen

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.

In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest how our idea of Christmas is a river of memories real and imagined.

Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.

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.

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

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

There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.

The film is rich in compositions that seem to cut to the essence of the characters’ yearnings.

One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.

A wealth of contrasting stimulation gives the film a singular and intimate atmosphere, in which scenes can last little eternities while still leaving you feeling as if you’re struggling to keep up with a stream of secrets and in-jokes.

The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.

With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.

For Hong Sang-oo, In Our Day is a gesture toward recognizing the beautiful, awful, and uncanny.

Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Evil Does Not Exist is a turn away from the filmmaker’s empathy of his earlier work toward an aesthetic that’s jagged and chilly.

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

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.

Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.

Passion already finds Hamaguchi Ryûsuke to be a superb orchestrator of moods and tones.

Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.

Connoisseurs of Hong Sang-soo’s cinema will no doubt be fascinated by the transcendent minimalism of the film, which suggests Picasso knocking off a sketch on a piece of paper in a matter of seconds.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.

With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.

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

Birth/Rebirth serves as a perverse correction, recalibrating decades of dilution to reemphasize the moral weight and emotional anguish at the heart of Shelley’s novel.

Chloe Domont has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test.

Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.

Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.

2nd Chance a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn.