Chuck Bowen

Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.

The accumulating effect of this airy and resonant film’s formal devices is that of a heartbroken artist learning to reengage with society.

Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.

With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.

The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.

After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.

There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.

As is typically the case with Joe Wright's films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interested in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.

Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.

The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.

Zeros and Ones is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for his badness.

Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.

Jacob Gentry’s film punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror.

At their best, writer-director Mario Furloni and Kate McLean evince a masterful grasp of storytelling that’s subtle and rich in innuendo.

The film is a ghost story as well as a story of transference, which Pedro Almodóvar understands to be one in the same.

The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.

Robert Greene’s gaze is an attempt to accord his subjects the dignity of attention, utilizing cinema as a form of emotional due process.

France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as a symbol of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.

Wife of a Spy could use a streak of live-wire, huckster crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner.

Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present.

The film hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem.

Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that’s more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.

In Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.

At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.

Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.

The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.

The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.

Mama Weed is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, but it doesn’t challenge Isabelle Huppert or the audience.