Josh Larsen

Still a fantasy, though a less mealymouthed one than The Devil Wears Prada, this follow-up to the 2006 Meryl Streep-Anne Hathaway buddy fashion comedy nods to the real world in interesting ways—fast fashion, corporate restructuring, the implosion of journalism—while still remaining charmingly light on its Gucci-clad feet.

A collage of religio-goth gestures, Mother Mary never adds up to quite as much as it promises. But the movie has a somnambulant pull, thanks to its woozy imagery and cloistered, two-hander structure, in which Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel circle each other like figures in a hazy dream.

In The Drama, it never feels as if the two main characters are in conflict with each other as much as they’re in conflict with the film’s form and screenplay.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) manage a coherent tone of genial wonder, while also offering some stunning, color-soaked space visuals, as well as a witty camera.

Shelley scholars will likely have much to quibble with here, but for Buckley admirers, The Bride! is a must.

“This is not your mother’s Wuthering Heights!” the movie howls back at the wind whipping over those moors. But it’s enough of Bronte’s.

Writer-director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan) does more veering that navigating, but stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson (the latter nominated for Best Actress) connect on such a genuinely exhilarating level in the music scenes (especially the early ones, where they’re refining their act) that you end up rooting for them and, by default, their movie.

A gory, violent consideration of end-times theology, the absence of God, and demonology, Bone Temple moves the franchise from the zombie genre into something closer to religious horror.

F1: The Movie is a corporate conglomerate on cinematic wheels.

Reinsve and Skarsgard work repressed magic in each scene they share—exploding on occasion, but still never directly confronting the deeper issues involved.

Predators lost credibility with me well before its stunt ending.

Pandora—the stunningly imagined planet of James Cameron’s Avatar enterprise—has been populated by something unexpected and extraordinary: compelling characters.

Moura captivates as the quietly seething central figure, while Filho’s use of saturated colors and lively diegetic music make The Secret Agent a sumptuously unsettling experience.

At once a time-capsule snapshot of the economic despair of American youth and a larger, existential consideration of how to find meaning in a seemingly callous universe, Boys Go to Jupiter is sharp, knowing, realistic, and yet somehow uplifting.

The result is a sci-fi fantasy that’s part Fantastic Planet and part Miyazaki.

The filmmaking is hypnotic, thanks partly to Kangding Ray’s thumping score but also to the early long takes of revelers in motion, as well as later, mesmerizing images of vans rolling across vast landscapes and open roads.

Some might balk at the literary Easter eggs, but thanks to the fierceness of the lead performances and Zhao’s equal commitment behind the camera, I always experienced this as human story first and Shakespeare fanfic second.

It’s like watching the problems of a pillow. Adam Sandler, as Jay’s manager, delivers the most interestingly human performance in the film, but he’s not given nearly enough to do. If the movie had been equally weighted between them, Jay Kelly might have been somebody.

The movie vacillates between a metaphorical meditation on the debilitating demands of motherhood in general and a reality-based drama about dealing with a particular child eating disorder, yet Byrne gives a performance that’s game for both.

Like Marty, the movie wants to impress us. And like Marty, there’s something about it I don’t trust.

When experimenting with his own techniques—Shackleton gets ingenious mileage out of slow zooms and pans in those location shots—Zodiac Killer Project works as a provocative, meta consideration of the genre’s form. When dumping on other films and the genre in general, the movie comes across as a bit hypocritical and smug.

Stunning on every account, however, is the cinematography by Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Saint Omer). Working with an autumnal setting, Mathon manages to give each tree its own light, while also allowing the dark, mysterious undergrowth to add an unsettling darkness. Such shots are the most troublingly beautiful element of the movie.

Good Boy is a harrowing experience for dog lovers—or possibly anyone who’s noticed an animal staring at something you can’t quite perceive—yet the movie never quite unearths the subterranean chills of the most potent horror.

It’s gutsy and largely works, though something about the theatricality of it all kept me at a distance.

The Ugly Stepsister has macabre fun with what some women will do to make a shoe fit. It’s The Substance by way of the Brothers Grimm.

Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark.

It’s ugly and tuneless, with characters whose actions are so arbitrary as to render any consideration of what it means to be “good” or “wicked” meaningless.

O’Connor (Challengers, The Mastermind) gives a remarkable performance, tapping into Father Jud’s spiritual struggle while also nimbly managing the movie’s sense of humor.

I point this out not to exonerate Lorincz in any way—goodness knows that the sheriff’s investigation in the doc’s final third gives her outrageously more leeway than a Black suspect would receive. Still in monsterizing her in this way, The Perfect Neighbor lets viewers off the hook.

O’Connor balances an outer reticence with an inner confidence throughout, then slyly brings the two qualities together as the film proceeds (notice how he fiddles with his wedding ring while otherwise effortlessly lying to a pair of detectives). J.B. isn’t an antihero, exactly, but something more fitting for a Kelly Reichardt film.

Bugonia has its creative “pleasures.” . . But mostly it feels like we’ve been here before, with the same faces.

Even though she’s playing a woman who is suffering, Lawrence brings a playfulness to the screen that leavens the depths of misery in which Ramsay’s movies tend to wallow.

Despite the casual quality of its title, It Was Just an Accident—the latest film from dissident Iranian director Jafar Panahi—carries serious moral weight.

Del Toro’s film is a gothic horror story, with gloomy settings and macabre dismemberments, yet it also holds, within its central Creature, a heart that yearns for an ecstatic life.

Hoss (so riveting in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix) gives the strongest performance, arriving at the party with a goddess-like superiority that Hedda tragically chips away at as the night proceeds. Though not without a riveting fight.

Blue Moon is a portrait of a man on the precipice of an artistic and personal cliff (we learn in the opening sequence that Hart would die within the year, at the age of 48). Mostly, though, the movie is about Hawke talking.

While the ensemble cast is laudable—Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee—there isn’t a Henry Fonda to anchor things.

This is a movie that’s not only singular to the filmmaker behind it, but to the moment it’s in.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey won’t work for everyone, but hearts of a certain shape may treasure it.

Standing out among the cast are Pierce Brosnan, clearly enjoying his scruffy beard and potbelly, and Helen Mirren, who threatens to turn this into something sexier and scarier at every moment. Chris Columbus keeps things on the straight and narrow, however, directing as if this were an adaptation of Harry Potter Book 78.

It’s no insult, though still true, to say that director Michael Pearce doesn’t quite have the Hitchcockian filmmaking chops to turn the silly into something sublime.

A bit muted, especially for a movie about songcraft, The History of Sound nevertheless quietly builds in import until it reaches a devastating finale, one that musically meditates on the impermanence of love and life

Colman and Cumberbatch easily keep up—they’re comic talents too—yet the best parts of The Roses involve the two of them alone together, either happily or in detest, leaving dazzling trails of repartee as they zip along.

Writer-director Alex Russell, making his feature debut, offers a creepy, Talented Mr. Ripley-style character study that doubles as a meditation on celebrity and authenticity.

A mashup of Macbeth and the biblical chronicles of King David, all set in contemporary New York City, Highest 2 Lowest sees Spike Lee playing with classical narratives in order to explore a modern man’s artistic reawakening.

During the many fight sequences, the action has a brightness and clarity—in terms of line work and movement—that should be studied by anyone working on the effects side of American superhero movies. There is admittedly too much plotting; in fact, you could argue that a final-act twist isn’t even necessary.

If the movie, at times, feels exhausting, there are also painterly details to savor, like the flowing locks of a dragon or the shimmer of a seascape at sundown.

You might say that it’s inappropriate for a gory horror movie about missing children to nod toward such real-life tragedy. And I’d tend to agree. Yet I must admit that during Weapons’ bonkers climax—a darkly comic, insanely sustained sequence of violent comeuppance—I felt something closer to catharsis.

It’s a great conceit, with abundant potential. But the movie gets off to a shaky start by failing to flesh out, so to speak, the central couple.

The animated action in The Bad Guys 2 has the deftness and ingenuity of a Mission: Impossible movie, but in terms of storytelling, this follow-up to 2022’s The Bad Guys represents a step back.

Throughout human history, there has been something in our broken nature that resists community and seeks conflict. Eddington captures this, particularly the way it was fomented by the historical circumstances of 2020 America.

If Sunlight worked even a quarter as well as it does, the movie would still have been something of a miracle.

By the movie’s merciful end, you wonder what a nice guy like Superman is doing in a mean place like this.

Tell me that you have an expedition movie with clear objectives and unlikely odds, anchored by a compelling cast of characters, and you have my attention. Add dinosaurs and you have my money. Make it all work—especially within the context of the Jurassic franchise—and you have a miracle.

The result is a convoluted, overstuffed narrative that operates like two parallel movies until they converge for an extended climax.

Remarkably deft for a feature debut—in terms of construction, tone management, and performance—Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby defies definition.

Pure horror fans might object, but I found this model of M3gan, also directed by Gerard Johnstone, to be just as amusing as the prototype—with a firmer sense of what it wants to do.

I counted at least five different movies in 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s return to the zombie series they started with 28 Days Later back in 2002. Thankfully, each is brazenly, bizarrely, grotesquely compelling in its own way.

When it remains focused on Ruth’s subjective perspective, it offers something special, and tough.

A lot of fun, even if it could have been better if it had taken itself just a smidge more seriously.

What’s missing from Johnson can be found in abundance in two brief, supporting turns. Zoe Winters, as one of Lucy’s clients, and Louisa Jacobson, as a skittish bride, knock out their slim scenes by bringing a unique verve and vitality to every second. Their characters pop as interesting, complicated, compelling humans, whose stories we want to hear. If Song had cast one of them in the lead, Materialists might have really been something.

Certainly The Phoenician Scheme still fits within what I’ve come to call “Wes Anderson’s restoration cinema.” It just does so more plainly, less poetically.

The screenplay, by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, shows sophistication both in its characterizations and as a trauma narrative, although I was a bit unclear on the mechanics of Laura’s grand scheme, especially during the gonzo climax.

I’m not exactly sure what tone Friendship means to set, but the movie itself feels confident in its own skin. And that counts for a lot.

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning fumbles its own legacy, largely by believing it had one in the first place. With apologies to Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, this has never been a franchise powered by our emotional connections to its characters, much less any sort of overarching, thematically resonant narrative. The Final Reckoning belatedly attempts to conjure up such qualities, while skimping on what has always mattered most in the series: scintillating stunt work.

Before it strangely peters out, lost in its own conspiracies, The Shrouds registers as a mournful, if macabre, meditation on losing a loved one—as only writer-director David Cronenberg could manage.

Burge and Potrykus are both quite good—the director at one point even delivering a pitiable soliloquy/panic attack—but Vulcanizadora mostly unnerves due to the filmmaking.

While the baby Ochi is something of a Grogu-Gizmo hybrid, the use of puppetry and animatronics gives it an idiosyncratic scruffiness. It feels as if you’re encountering a new species, not watching a digitized fantasy film.

There is no denying that for most of its substantial running time (including a haunting post-credits sequence), Sinners sings.

One of Them Days is propulsively directed by music-video veteran Lawrence Lamont, who knows how to frame a punchline, from a sharp script by Syreeta Singleton, who wrote many episodes of HBO’s Insecure. The same mixture of hilarity and humanity is on display here.

The Fishing Place registers more as a calculated, intellectual exercise—particularly in the bold decision to break the fourth wall with 30 minutes left in the film and remain there, again via a single take.

Partly an impale-the-rich horror comedy, partly a fantasy monster movie, and partly a father-daughter trauma drama, Death of a Unicorn tackles more tones and ideas than a firmly established filmmaker could probably manage, so it’s no surprise that writer-director Alex Scharfman, making his feature debut, struggles to rein this in. But you have to admire the ambition and bonkers vision.

At its best, Eric LaRue interrogates the rush to healing and forgiveness that can sometimes follow tragedy in Christian communities.

Gazer owes an enormous debt to a few obvious influences, but the movie has just enough vision and atmosphere of its own for the makings of an unnerving, lo-fi, neo-noir.

Written by David Koepp, who also penned Soderbergh’s Kimi and Presence, Black Bag displays the twists and intrigue you’d expect from a top-rate spy flick, along with some scintillating dialogue. But it’s the movie’s intellectual provocation and formal invention that marks it among Soderbergh’s best work.

Mickey 17 may not be my preferred mode of Bong Joon-Ho, but it’s the mode we need right now.

There is cuteness, to be sure, but also an honesty about dirty diapers, runny noses, and the sheer exasperation of the situation.

Sean Baker’s movies see people for their humanity first and their circumstances second, an approach that has never been more clear than in Starlet.

In Grand Theft Hamlet, high art collides with low expectations, resulting in something like a renewed faith in humanity.

In spite of the clinical approach the filmmakers bring to No Other Land, the activist documentary nevertheless enrages. It boggles the mind (and moral compass) to watch ludicrously overarmed Israeli forces repeatedly destroy the homes, schools, and water-supply systems of Palestinian families who have lived on the land in question since before the establishment of the state of Israel.

Directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, The Sisters Brothers), whose heart might be in the right place—the movie at least honors Emilia’s dysmorphia, rather than using it as a plot gimmick—but whose execution resembles something like community-theater Sicario, pulsed in an erratic blender.

Unlike its protagonist, Babygirl is too easily satisfied.

As someone with only a basic knowledge of Bob Dylan, I can’t say I came away from A Complete Unknown with much more of an understanding of the man, his music, or his cultural significance.

As for the werewolf effects, I appreciate that they appear to mostly rely on practical elements, but the end result still leaves you wanting: this wolf man is less rabid animal than angry burn victim.

Nickel Boys overflows with formal ingenuity and daring.

Soderbergh, who serves as editor, cinematographer, and director, gets significant mileage out of the visual conceit alone.

Nasty stuff—of the sort, lord knows, that I’ve praised plenty in my time. But in this case the return on icky investment just isn’t there.

The movie has a self-aware streak that isn’t too self-impressed, as well as an amusing flair for the absurd.

Torres gives a performance that gains strength even as Eunice increasingly trembles; this is no stoic, generic portrait of resilience, but one that’s always counting the cost.

You can feel the warm ocean breeze against your cheek while watching Moana 2, so supple and visceral is the animated artistry on display.

The Brutalist is a momentous movie, if not quite as momentous as it thinks it is.

The techniques ultimately reveal the way art can foster the sort of emotional connection that is vital to the human experience.

Nosferatu feels unique compared to other Dracula variations in the way this world appears drained—of color, light, nearly life itself. It’s as if blood has been sucked from the very images.

Much of what makes a great Pedro Almodovar film can be found in The Room Next Door: a layered narrative, a thoughtful color scheme, a focus on women, and an intense interest in sex and/or death. But a certain vitality is strangely missing, and not because of the subject matter.

Harrowing, certainly, but also a beautiful promise of renewal.

Plummer, so good in Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete (another horse movie of a sort), shines here, especially in one of those final shots that holds on an actor’s face and asks them to seal the movie’s deal. Plummer does, with flying colors.

A powder keg of movie-musical performances, Wicked balloons the Broadway sensation in unnecessary ways—this is only Part I, despite the fact that it runs nearly three hours—but I hardly minded thanks to the dynamic force of its two leads.

As long as the movie remains a lightly comic meditation on aging, relationships, and time—say, a junior Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—it’s fantastic and frequently moving. But large chunks veer into television-drama territory, where the movie operates in a more generic register.