Chuck Bowen

At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.

Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.

Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Brandon Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Christopher Nolan.

There are few modern filmmakers who possess Sofia Coppola’s gift for capturing how our idealized, movie-fed ideas of “night life” reflect our longing for adventure as well as our loneliness.

Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, like The Hunt, is ultimately a parable about breaking a social contract.

The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.

Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.

Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.

Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.

John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.

The film has a weird, ghostly, even beautiful pull, but it functions mostly on theoretical terms because Charlie Kaufman has thought it to death.

The film suggests that Bill and Ted’s dreams of stardom, which have evolved into dreams of acceptance and expression, aren’t so stupid after all.

A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is a bottomless yearning for wonder.

Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.

Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.

Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.

A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.

Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.

Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.

Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.

Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.

Filmmaker Cara Jones offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.

With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.

David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.

Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.

Throughout, Judd Apatow dramatizes the ideal of community with an almost Eastwoodian sense of rapture.

Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.

Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.