Chuck Bowen

Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.

After its promising first act, Craig Brewer’s film becomes a series of fleeting bits, allowing questions to pile up.

For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.

The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.

With the filmmakers unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.

Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.

Vincenzo Natali’s film divests itself of stakes in the name of total meaninglessness.

First Love reveals itself to be an elegant and haunting Takashi Miike film in throwaway clothing.

Like most of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.

The Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points.

Arnaud Desplechin evinces a glancing touch with showing how social tension and need inform law and crime.

A wonderful high concept is compromised for another story of lonely people learning to connect.

The tactility of earlier Hirokazu Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.

The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.

Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.

The film is beautiful and occasionally quite moving, but its subject matter deserves more than art-house irresolution.

The film is about a mystery that isn’t solved, and how that inconclusiveness spotlights the insidious functions of society.

Rich in intimate detail, the film attains a more epic power as it burrows deeper into the effects of China’s one-child policy.

Raymond De Felitta’s film offers a sampler course of formulas, which creates a strangely unfulfilling tension.

It masterfully sustains a sense of “wrongness” that will be felt even by those unfamiliar with Argentina’s history.

Marc Maron’s commanding aura of regret gives the film, despite its missed opportunities, an emotional center.

The film ably plumbs the fears of a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.

The anthology justifies Mick Garris’s passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project’s liabilities.

In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.

Martin Scorsese culls various images together to offer a startlingly intense vision of America as place that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, essentially believes in nothing, following one demoralizing crisis after another.

The documentary proves that the history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself.

Despite a few undeniably intense and lurid moments, the film lacks the pulsating fury of a significant genre work.