Chuck Bowen

John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.

Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.

The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.

First They Killed My Father is less interested in global politics than in offering an intensely experiential tapestry of war and invasion as witnessed by a child.

It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.

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.

Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.

With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.

Jay Baruchel's Goon: Last of the Enforcers faces an uphill climb that's inherent to retreads, as it's almost impossible for the film to honor its predecessor without lapsing into contrived and preordained formula.

Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's Bushwick is a genre film with a refreshing sense of political infrastructure.

Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.

Mapping the intersection between history and emotion, Michael Almereyda finds himself in Alain Resnais terrain.

Sunao Katabuchi displays a vivid, shattering awareness of how domestic routines can spiritually ground one during a time of demoralizing chaos.

The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.

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

There’s a tough and mysterious film within Strange Weather, though it doesn’t quite escape the strictures of a busy and studiously weird narrative that’s governed by formula screenwriting.

The film is so humorless and in love with its own obviousness that it grows laughable.

This is history that Americans should know, and the filmmaker approach Rumble as an introductory survey course.

A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.

Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.

One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.

The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.

By design, the film is intensely preachy. And this preachiness serves a therapeutic purpose, offering jolting possibilities for empathy.

Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.

Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.

For all its hip ludicrousness, The Little Hours has a point: to almost earnestly riff on how atheism has taken hold of 21st-century America, by rooting our nation’s moors in a time of great austerity, sexism, classism, and persecution.

The film revels in a hushed and lucid expressionist naturalism that’s reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

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