Chuck Bowen

Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.

The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.

Time and again, the film shortchanges the human elements of its stories for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.

As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.

The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.

At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.

The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.

Jerrod Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.

Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.

Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.

Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.

The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.

Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.

The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.

Jamie Dornan is a stiff whom Jon Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why the film is so tedious and unsatisfying.

Steven Soderbergh’s signature formal gamesmanship enlivens what could have been a stodgy scenario.

Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.

Shot through with darkly existentialist humor, the film finds Aubrey Plaza throwing a gauntlet to filmmakers who have typecast her in the past.

The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.

In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.

If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.

The film's most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.

This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.

Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.

The film’s purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.

In French Exit’s best passages, sadness and curt, resonant comedy exist side by side unceremoniously.