Chuck Bowen

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.

The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.

The film seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered.

The film is often quite moving in spite of its evasions, suggesting a real-life Charlotte’s Web, but one wonders what an artist with a bit more distance might’ve made of such rich material.

The film essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Ted Bundy’s admirers.

Unlike many [M. Night] Shyamalan films, which seem constructed out of Mad Libs, Come to Daddy retains an emotional consistency.

Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Roxanne Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction.

The film celebrates the thingness of things, as well as the assuring clarity and lucidity that can arise from devotion to knowledge.

While the film offers an appealingly nostalgic trance-out, it’s often short on detail, especially in terms of Stephen Herchen’s struggle to create the instant film technology, which director Willem Baptist reduces to exchanges of jargon in atmospheric laboratories.

Nia DaCosta indulges one of rural quasi-thriller’s most tiresome gambits: humorlessness as a mark of high seriousness.

Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.

The film’s refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional and eventually tiresome declaration of Qui Sheng’s arthouse bona fides.

Where Bonnie and Clyde is gloriously tragic, The Highwaymen is blunt and anti-climactically savage, fulfilling as well as somewhat critiquing former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer’s bloodlust.

It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.

Every moment in Jones’s film is so precisely textured that it becomes fantastical.

Like most biopics, The Dirt crams so many events into its narrative as to compromise the sense that these are real characters in the here and now.

With his latest, S. Craig Zahler doubles down on the best and worst elements of the pulp film.

It would appear that some of Buddy’s humans have indeed written off their fellow people. Does this matter? Honigmann’s film doesn’t plumb this potentially resonant question, as it’s hesitant to look a gift dog in the mou

J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.

The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.

The film quickly settles into a holding pattern of repetitive porno-movie hijinks and increasingly listless murder scenes.

Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.

The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.

The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.

The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.

The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.

Steven Soderbergh’s film considers modern media as a vehicle for revising white patriarchal capitalism.

With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.