Chuck Bowen

For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.

Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.

Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.

Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.

The film's mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is experimentally disingenuous at best.

Before I Wake's images have a pleasing straightforwardness that parallels the openness of the young protagonist's longing for love.

The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.

In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.

Scott Cooper's film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.

Gilles Paquet-Brenner's film is ultimately a genre item that operates on alternately prestigious and campy autopilot.

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

The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.

Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.

Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.

Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.

Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.

Erik Nelson's film straddles a fine and admirable line between lurid sensationalism and sober humanism.

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

In its visceral purity, Jairus McLeary's film drags male toxicity up into the light, offering it as a cure for itself.

Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.

Zak Hilditch's 1922 informs Steven King's pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force.

Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.

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

Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.

The Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.

Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.