Chuck Bowen

Richmond

Writing about movies, books, TV. Interviews. Bylines: @Slant_Magazine. @Guardian. @TheAtlantic. @TheAVClub. @Fandor. @Modern_Luxury. @vulture.

Articles

Double Fantasy

6 days ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

In “Sinners,” writer-director Ryan Coogler blows a horror-movie template up into a rich fantasia of music and passion and parable and atrocity. It is an enormous, exhilaratingly ambitious and overwhelming undertaking. Buckle up. We’ve got ourselves a juicy, horny, funny, violent and volatile blockbuster, with brains and brio and style. It is 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the Devil for his powers with the guitar.
Love and Mercy

1 week ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

Carson Lund’s “Eephus” captures the spirit of baseball: how it can be boring and poignant at once, especially for someone, like me, who prefers the idea of the game to the reality. Lund drops us into the final game to be played at Soldier’s Field, a public spot in a small New England town in the 1990s that’s about to be razed for the construction of a school.
The Criterion Collection

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Chuck Bowen

Mizoguchi Kenji’s staggering Ugetsu is a film of many riddles and paradoxes that unfolds with the illusory simplicity of a fable. Its initial straightforwardness, as a parable against the pitfalls of human greed, is a misdirection that leads us into a void in which objectivity and subjectivity intermingle, hopelessly and invigoratingly clouding rationality. The narrative begins on the shore of Japan’s Lake Biwa in the 16th century, when the country was engulfed in civil war.
Teenage Dream

2 weeks ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Freaky Tales” is another hit of nostalgia porn for uncertain times: a shout out to Oakland’s underground culture in 1987 with folks like Too $hort and Sleepy Floyd as supporting characters.
Early Spring Streaming

3 weeks ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

Alan Scott Neal’s “Last Straw” is a lean and surprising thriller that means it. It doesn’t hide behind a veneer of smug cleverness, such as recent genre movies like “Strange Darling” and “Companion,” and the carnage when it arrives is disturbing and taken seriously by the filmmakers. In the old days, this is the sort of thing that you would roam the aisles in the video store hoping to find. Nancy (Jessica Belkin) is a waitress in a 1950s-era diner somewhere in rural Nowheresville.
Dream On

1 month ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

Elijah Bynum’s “Magazine Dreams” opens on images of a man in on a runaway as his barely-clothed body is embraced by light. It’s a warm yet lonely image, and that contradiction invests it with tension. The image is a fantasy of success and transcendence, as Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) wants desperately to be Mr. Olympia, gracing magazines as the next bodybuilder phenomenon. But we know early on that we are not watching a movie about success.
Fun and Games

1 month ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

In this age of decadent pop cinema, in which movies with no style or point run for 300 minutes each, the razor-sharp sleekness of Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” is an act of rebellion. It’s a call for movies with flair, rather than movies that are indistinguishable from streaming TV eyesores, and for movies that know precisely what they are here to do, entertain, with no half-baked sociopolitical preaching or posturing. Do not take it for granted.
Nonsense and Sensibility

1 month ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” is another of the filmmaker’s satirical sci-fi whatsits, in the tradition of “Snowpiercer” and “Okja.” The tone is garish and random-feeling, the concept is high, and visiting celebrities are encouraged to discard any lessons they may have learned as to the art of understatement. If you liked “Snowpiercer” and “Okja,” you may enjoy “Mickey 17,” though that’s not a given. If you didn’t, beware at all costs.
Sifting the Stream

1 month ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

If I may be permitted a crib from Ferris Bueller, streaming culture moves pretty fast, and if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. Over the last few weeks alone, a number of movies have become available to stream, most of them after blink-and-miss theater engagements. So, let’s pause to take stock of a handful of the most noteworthy releases.
The Criterion Collection

2 months ago | slantmagazine.com | Chuck Bowen

A thin line exists in Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish-language trilogy between exaltation and blasphemy and damnation and transcendence. Over the course of Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth, characters scurry to justify their wants with religious and political ideology, laundering their wills and longings through cultural precedent. Lost in these machinations is an elemental sense of morality, which the supernatural cathartically returns to the fore.