Chuck Bowen

6 days ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

The first 25 minutes of David Mamet’s “Henry Johnson” are gripping. They are perhaps right up there with his best work, whether we’re talking the stage or screen. This first act does the audience a disservice though, writing a check that the rest of Mamet’s film can’t cash. Your palette is primed for top shelf, yes-folks-he’s-still-got-it Mamet, and you’re left with an uneven failure that eventually borders on self parody.

1 week ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

The premise of “The Surfer” suggests that it’s going to be right up Nicolas Cage’s genre-heavy VOD alley, which, from me, is a compliment. Cage plays the surfer—it’s one of those movies where characters are assigned signifiers instead of names—who returns to a gorgeous Australian beach from his childhood with his teenage son (Finn Little) in tow. Trouble arises, but not quite how you’d expect. The surfer is on the verge of buying a house near the beach, which he says once belonged to his father.

2 weeks ago | slantmagazine.com | Chuck Bowen

True to its reputation, Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct is graphic and crass and revels in stereotypes about women and men alike. Those qualities, though, don’t distinguish the film from other erotic thrillers. What separates Basic Instinct from the pack is its audacious shamelessness, which skims the knife’s edge of self-parody. Basic Instinct doesn’t hide behind sops to morality. It doesn’t even necessarily want to turn you on, but rather rile you up.

3 weeks ago | styleweekly.com | Chuck Bowen

David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” opens on an elegant man named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) having lunch with a woman, whom he soon asks about darkness. Can she handle things dark? The line feels like a joke pitched at the filmmaker’s admirers, who have followed him down many twisted corridors, in movies that plumb anxieties of the blending of our bodies with our technology. Fusing high concepts with unforgettable gore, he’s become a hero to eggheads and horror hounds alike.

3 weeks 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.