Chuck Bowen

After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.

Deon Taylor seems uncomfortable with the escalating relentlessness of a siege film, eventually splitting Traffik off into a variety of other tangents and genres, diluting the potent subtext at the film's center.

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.

The Devil and Father Amorth is a flimsy stunt, but in his blunt, slapdash way, William Friedkin locates the intersection existing between religion and pop culture—a fusion that insidiously steers political currents.

Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.

In the film, Joshua Marston leaches the narrative of nearly all the social texture that infused and empowered “Heretics,” the 2005 episode of the This American Life podcast that inspired this biopic.

Terror gradually leaks into the narrative, transforming Where Is Kyra? into a haunting non-traditional thriller.

The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.

Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.

With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre's evocative loneliness.

The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.

One presumes that Michael Lerner's sense of emphasis is meant to humanize Shanté, defining her apart from the fame she achieved, but this stratagem backfires as Roxanne Roxanne mires itself in scenes of speechifying domestic strife.

The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.

Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.

Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.

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

Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.

Ted Geoghegan's Mohawk is a survival-of-the-fittest film that's charged with a thunderous urgency.

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

Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.

The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.

One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.

Mark Pellington's Nostalgia is less a living, breathing film than a presentation of sentiments revolving around a pat question: Are the objects of our lives merely detritus, or are they vital to our identities?

One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.

Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.

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.

On Body and Soul's fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.

The Cage Fighter isn't sentimental about the notion of an aging sports hero who needs one more day in the proverbial sun, recognizing that desire as macho folly.