Chuck Bowen

Julio Medem's film has enough hanky-courting plot mechanics for three remakes of Beaches.

Even the film's lapses inform it with a free-associative sense of portent, evoking the stupid things we inexplicably do in our most personal nightmares.

Steve Hoover's documentary affords one an unusually intimate glance at the collapsed infrastructure of the former Soviet Union.

This enterprise is so listless that one can't even work up a proper head of self-righteous steam over the spooky Native American clichés that drive the plot.

Throughout Alex and Benjamin Brewer's film, Nicolas Cage holds the screen with his distinct timing and expressive force of being.

When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.

Chad Archibald doesn't quite land Bite's transition over from claustrophobic character study into full-blown monster movie.

It inspires retrospective gratitude for the empty yet slick craftsmanship of someone like James Wan.

The film is ultimately stultifying because the disconnection between the various characters is so immediately accepted as such a foregone conclusion that nothing ever seems to be at stake, and the heavily horizontal imagery, though accomplished and evocative, if fussy, only evokes two states of mind: loneliness and disconnection.

Ricky Gervais's film hopscotches through a variety of premises, looking for jokes that never arrive.

The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.

The film is taken with comfy gags that celebrate these men's ownership of pop culture, filtering them through a lens of unrevealing caricature.

An admirably bizarre and beautiful genre mixtape, but Anders Thomas Jensen's empathy for his characters gradually impedes his imagination.

Matteo Garrone returns the fairy tale to its roots in cautionary horror grounded in deep, contradictory, neurotic relationships with gender and patriarchy.

Álex de la Iglesia's film is an explosion of kitsch, an intensely formalized mixture of farce and tragedy.

Denys Arcand fashions a commandingly leisurely pace that allows us to follow these people who walk a tightrope separating ecstasy from misery.

Jerzy Skolimowski's formal control over the material is so masterful that the textual particulars are revealed to be beside the point.

It has a bouncy sense of lunacy, wearing its derivative junkiness on its sleeve with surprising lightness of authority.

The film's aesthetic is striking, but feels almost intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.

The film is ultimately devoted to formula, as Nick Simon discards his jumbled meta-media conceit at around the halfway mark.

Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.

The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it's ultimately just as hollow.

As preachy and repetitive as The Little Prince can be, it offers enough moments of poetry to keep it flirting with greatness, or at least goodness.

Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis.

The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.

The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.

A curiously unsentimental director of romantic comedies, Julie Delpy sees romance for the work that it primarily is.

The imagery fails to express either the characters' or the filmmakers' obsessions or synchronicities.