Chuck Bowen

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

Nicolas Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, caging his brand of operatic hysteria.

With One Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh mixes an old-school 1950s noir with a modern sense of social self-consciousness.

Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.

The film becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch.

It’s Morgan Neville’s impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life.

With The Amusement Park, George Romero holds a cracked (funhouse) mirror up to a callous and ultimately terrified society.

The characters don’t exist solely to affirm the film’s various themes, and as a result, their humanity gets under your skin.

Throughout, it’s difficult to sort the contrivances that writer-director Jason William Lee is parodying from those he’s indulging.

Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.

The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.

The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.

Theo Anthony’s film is a playful, enraging, free-associative cine-essay that both expands and eats itself alive as it proceeds.

Ultimately, Anders Thomas Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which his protagonist viscerally annihilates a violent gang.

Cacophony eventually takes over Wrath of Man, stranding the actors in the process. Except, that is, for Jason Statham, who’s by now a master of presiding over Guy Ritchie’s gleeful chaos.

At its best, Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room.

A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula.

Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary is a spry and inventive account of extraordinary transcendence.

The film doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.

Writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos barely capitalizes on the luridly sacrilegious implications of the film’s premise.

Sam Claflin is best in show, but his performance is undercut by the film’s inability to escalate or explore the ramifications of its premise.

The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.

The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.

The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Alonso Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession.

Unlike Malcom & Marie, Daniel Brühl’s feature-length directorial debut proves to be authentically self-castigating.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film is an alternately scathing, erotic, terrifying, and affirming fable of the primordial power of storytelling.

The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.