Josh Larsen

Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) lets the racial tension largely simmer beneath the surface (Terry is Black), leaning into his trademark, straight-ahead propulsive style.

Educational, intimate, and transcendent, Dahomey is a minor treasure of its own.

There’s a beating heart to the film, but it’s faint.

Even as the movie itself unnecessarily spirals further into madness and attendant plot holes—perhaps inspired by the wackadoo escalations of recent horror such as Malignant, Barbarian, and Longlegs—Grant makes for a genially deranged host.

Anora is a tale of two shots: its first and its last.

Unfortunately, as nuanced as writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ script is about sibling relationships and impending morality, it never allows this cast to break out of these types that are established in the opening scene.

Blitz gets a little preachy at times (perhaps another Dickens influence), but there is also a stark honesty about the dread and difficulty of living as a civilian under siege—as a person of color or not. And of course McQueen manages instances of jaw-dropping imagery.

This is a movie that has the courage of its own convictions, but also the playfulness to wear them lightly on its ridiculously embroidered sleeves.

There’s a fleshiness to the material that you can almost feel, as if you were stroking your own face.

There is no doubt the material is elevated by the interplay between Fey and Poehler.

It’s the performances that ultimately carry the film.

I imagine Rosemary’s Baby purists will be upset with the various references and connections Apartment 7A makes to the first film, a few of which are clumsy, but nothing was egregious enough to trip me up—including the final sequence, once again involving dance, which I found to be rather brilliant.

I was most drawn to the simpler, early sequences, where Roz finds meaning not in proving her worth through work, but in genuine relationship.

Only Driver seems comfortable—indeed, invigorated—by the apparently improvisational atmosphere and haphazardly operatic material.

Unfortunately, Folie à Deux fails to take full advantage of the musical format. Returning director Todd Phillips—who showed a surprising command of cinematic language in the first film—fails to bring a coherent formal strategy to this new genre.

Once Wolfs leaves the hotel the charm begins to thin (though Austin Abrams has a giddily dizzy monologue as a third wheel they pick up along the way), while a last-act attempt to inject a moral dilemma into the proceedings feels false. Yet for a dad—and, let’s face it, mom—movie, Wolfs could have been way worse.

Overall, this is genuinely moving and instructive, though I do wish it was a wee bit funnier, considering the onscreen talent and the fact that director Josh Greenbaum guided the sublimely silly Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

It’s a lot, and only becomes more so, but something about the movie’s central idea—as well as the black streak of humor Fargeat brings to the proceedings—kept me hooked.

The screenplay, by the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, is at once overstuffed—in this it resembles Burton’s Dark Shadows—and full of missed opportunities.

Much of The Instigators feels a little lost somewhere between Ocean’s Eleven and The Town, but the movie—starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as desperate strangers who get paired up for an ill-fated heist in Boston—has enough camaraderie between the leads, as well as a sharply comic supporting turn from Hong Chau, to make for a breezy crime farce.

Daughters centers on a real-life event that is emotional catnip—a dance for daughters and their incarcerated fathers—but the documentary, like the men it features, earns its way to that overwhelming moment.

While I may not particularly care for where things go in the final moments, I’m impressed by the movie’s audacity. Indeed, it’s another horror play—a bonkers big swing that’s less reminiscent of the other Alien films and more akin to recent gonzo fright flicks like Barbarian and Malignant.

Good One is a crafty feature debut from writer-director India Donaldson, in that its unassuming air and “small” story create little ripples that eventually coalesce into something shattering.

Hitchcock diluted by De Palma diluted by mid-tier M. Night Shyamalan leaves you with, well, bottom-tier Shyamalan.

For a based-on-fact drama about incarcerated men finding hope via a prison theater group, Sing Sing presses gently on the inspirational pedal. This is due partly to the behind-the-scenes talent—screenwriter Clint Bentley has fashioned a tender, mostly restrained screenplay, while writer-director Greg Kwedar establishes a crucially authentic sense of place—but largely due to the cast.

Unless you’ve seen every Archers’ film, you’ll come away with at least two you’ll want to track down immediately after watching Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. And you’ll want to revisit Scorsese titles like Raging Bull and The Age of Innocence to fully appreciate how their work directly influenced his.

In addition to the requisite action and excitement, there’s a painterliness to Twisters that I didn’t expect.

Fly Me to the Moon, a breezily farcical variation on Apollo 11 history in which the truth prevails, is a time-capsule curiosity—marking a movie landscape that’s slowly fading, alongside our ability to tell fact from fiction in media of all kinds.

There’s a vulnerability to A Quiet Place: Day One that’s rare in big, would-be blockbusters.

Plemons roots each scenario in an individual reality. He rises above the movie’s rigidness to remind us that each of his characters is not just a sour joke or an intellectual conceit, but an unknowable, yet relatable, human.

Beneath all the formal sophistication and dark humor, there is a roiling anger that defines Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

MaXXXine gestures toward themes that have been explored throughout the trilogy—namely the lengths one will go to for fame, as well as religious hysteria—but without much conviction. Take away the endless Hollywood references and 1980s signposts (yes, there’s a New Coke gag) and there’s not much else going on here.

In Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins establishes a strong enough sense of mood and atmosphere to absorb a DEFCON-2 level Nicolas Cage performance

This is as much Looney Tunes as Chaplin or Keaton—what with the manic pacing and animated flourishes, like question marks over characters’ heads—but in truth it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

In their hands, and with Pusić’s guidance, Tuesday registers as a magical metaphor for how we process death—and particularly how that might play out in this mother-daughter relationship.

This prequel—drawn from the novel by series creator Suzanne Collins—retains the hard edge that made most of those movies register as piercing satires of our reality-television age, rather than hypocritical exploitation flicks.

What’s missing, in comparison to Nichols’ other movies, is an internalized angst.

This is a sad film, if beautifully observed, about a young girl learning that she won’t always be able to have her mom to herself—that, in fact, she never really had her in the first place.

Wise and witty, Inside Out 2 continues the Pixar tradition in the ways that matter most.

It’s become a crutch for critics to say that this or that movie is so generic that it must have been generated by AI. I’ve resisted, but I’m finally going to play that card in regard to Wish. Thanks to a banal familiarity mixed with a dose of inhuman idiosyncrasy, the movie feels as if someone fed the opening Disney logo sequence — of fireworks bursting over a fairytale castle — to an AI program and asked it to spit out a 95-minute animated musical in the mode of the studio’s classics.

There isn’t a boring frame in the film, even when the scenes involve little more than long conversations between two people.

It becomes more interesting as it goes along (and gets slightly darker), even if it never entirely works as a cohesive project.

The Ross brothers—who handle the cinematography and editing in addition to directing duties—manage some indelible images, even as they stay as inconspicuous as possible.

Brilliant in terms of its overall structure, Kuritzkes’ script also manages crackerjack individual scenes that stack up one upon the other, like little chamber dramas within a larger opus.

If Fury Road wound its way, through much pain and violence, to a vision of a new “green place,” Furiosa leaves us in a place of tension, one caught between mercy and wrath, hope and despair. It’s the rare prequel that nearly feels necessary.

Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter with Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor. Her performance is one of the movie’s strengths.

While pop culture will never replace our need for genuine connection—for a relationship that both gives and receives—a movie like this, with a welcoming weirdness that communicates in a subliminal way, offers sustenance to anyone who has felt misunderstood, ostracized, and unsure of themselves. Even amidst the movie’s horror, there’s a glow here that feels warm.

The Fall Guy isn’t perfect, but as a crowd-pleasing, romantic action comedy, driven by the magnetism of its stars, it feels like an increasingly rare treat.

If not a cohesive whole, then, Evil Does Not Exist still has its captivating moments as a modestly scaled eco-parable.

This is a movie I was somewhat dreading—its premise just seems too possible in these fractious days—yet Garland managed to imbue Civil War with a solemnity and maturity that made me grateful for it. Let’s hope it remains a warning, not a weather vane.

If the movie’s straightforward dramatic and dialogue scenes don’t have the same delicacy as its more poetic gestures—especially once increasing crime, police harassment, and discriminatory housing policies close in on these two families—the film still stirs the soul as a counter-document to alarmist history.

The People’s Joker feels less like the work of someone who wants to watch the Batman burn and more like a refashioning of a modern myth for personal purposes. It’s the ultimate kill-the-author gesture, one that ironically gives birth to another author. No, even better: a community of authors, working together to create something wholly new and true.

Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.

Kudos to her and her team for finding a way—through imaginative production design and backup dancers who essentially serve as supporting characters—to make her music feel both intimate and anthemic, something like a diary entry meant not to be hidden under a bed, but chanted by the masses.

Kong brings the personality, Godzilla brings the power, and we get to have the fun.

Bad in ways that are similar to 1989’s Road House—namely, an uneven handle on how seriously to take its silly premise.

This is scruffy around the edges, especially with the awkward insertion of its politics, but there is no denying the movie’s potency as a metaphor for alcoholism.

There are moments when Godzilla: King of the Monsters resembles a fantasy version of a National Geographic documentary—except those tend to deliver far more stunning visuals without any special effects whatsoever.

Skull Island circles around a number of intriguing ideas—about American arrogance and the post-war military-industrial complex, to name just two—but never quite coheres into anything particularly incisive. The movie gives good Kong though.

Little context beyond that narration is provided, a wise choice that provides the sort of self-imposed restrictions that a good biopic—fictional or documentary—needs.

The Tuba Thieves doesn’t quite have the mastery of the collage form you’ll find in somewhat similar experiments like Leviathan or Cameraperson, so that some of its ideas and images can feel scattershot, yet it undeniably subverts the tools of cinema in a uniquely compelling way.

Love Lives Bleeding has a grimy verve all its own. It’s a nightmare metaphor for how hard some people have to fight for love, especially when it’s not approved of.

To its credit, the movie gently questions Nyad’s compulsion—especially as it relates to her treatment of Bonnie—but it’s too eager to sweep all that under the rug when it comes time for the triumphant final swim.

The movie’s dark magic occurs when the stop-motion story and the narrative proper bleed into each other (often literally), with goopy puppets invading Ella’s space while she—perhaps psychologically, perhaps in reality—finds herself trapped in theirs.

In Drive-Away Dolls, almost every line is squeezed a bit too hard for cleverness, while the acts of violence frequently cross over into callousness. And although Qualley’s verbal dexterity is impressive (even if it owes a lot to Holly Hunter’s Edwina in Raising Arizona), her performance mostly made me eager to see what she might do in the future, with stronger comic material.

You’ll have to look for a spirited defense of the movie’s snowballing narrative, as well as the complicated character motivations driving it, elsewhere. I’m here to tell you to set much of that aside, breathe in the precious spice that has brought warring parties to the desert planet of Arrakis, and simply take the trip.

Thanks in part to McKenna-Bruce’s performance, How to Have Sex never feels exploitative. She gives Tara a sharp emotional intelligence.

The brilliance of the screenplay, which Wenders wrote with Takuma Takasaki, is the way it doesn’t inflate the interruptions to Hiryama’s happiness (a pushy coworker, the appearance of an estranged sister) into contrived drama.

You watch the film feeling as if life is precious—that every moment holds the chance for great wonder or great tragedy, even if, on most days, we live somewhere in between.

Rustin is a dutiful history-lesson movie of the type that usually fails to stir me, yet in recent years I’ve come to put more value on such efforts. If any acknowledgment of the difficult, “inconvenient” periods of America’s past are going to be banned from libraries and schools, then let art do what it can to fill in the gaps.

With that camerawork (the cinematography is by Jonathan Ricquebourg) and the elaborate, patiently detailed scenes of meal preparation, The Taste of Things easily deserves mention alongside the great food movies (Babette’s Feast, Big Night), while also being intensely erotic.

The movie’s most distinctive feature, especially as a family biopic, is the tragic nature of this story. The Iron Claw is a downer that ickily sticks with you.

The race itself is another of the movie’s astonishing set pieces; Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt give it a fresh sense of vroom, even if you think you’ve seen all the movie car races you’ll ever need.

Rye Lane may verge on corny at times in much of its humor and certainly its ending, but thanks to Jonsson and Oparah, you’re rooting for these two in every moment.

There are plenty of big laughs to be found in Theater Camp—Ayo Edibiri pops up to steal a few scenes—but it’s this ability to weave self-deprecation with theatrical passion that distinguishes the movie.

Maestro does manage an incredibly moving later section depicting Bernstein’s response to Felicia’s struggle with cancer (though much of these scenes owe their power to Mulligan), yet I ultimately came away feeling that the movie was more interested in Cooper as an artist than Bernstein.

Wonka may be more Paul King than Roald Dahl—it bears the clever kindness of Paddington and Paddington 2 far more than the clever cynicism of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author—but a worse fate could have befallen the iconic title character.

Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki and his team of effects artists bring a thrilling immediacy and tactility to the monster sequences, but what I loved most about Godzilla Minus One is the way it evokes the sense of loss and mourning of the granddaddy of these pictures, 1954’s Gojira (Godzilla in the U.S.).

More successful as a quiet, nuanced family drama than a broad social satire.

The best numbers in The Color Purple capture the anger and/or exultation of personal experience.

Devastation without manipulation. That’s the miracle pulled off by writer-director Andrew Haigh with All of Us Strangers, his supple adaptation of a novel by Taichi Yamada.

Ultimately, The Zone of Interest demonstrates what it means to have moral vision, to choose to see—or, in this case, hear.

It’s a signature achievement and utterly exhausting.

There’s only one word for the power games going on between the two main characters in May December: delicious.

There can sometimes be a significant gap between a great high concept for a movie and that concept’s execution. Such is the case with Dream Scenario.

It’s nearly an apotheosis, in that the movie synthesizes his greatest achievements into a stirring, standalone work of art.

Monster takes the long way around to get to the movie it ultimately wants to be, and I’m not sure the process is to its benefit.

The more avant-garde this becomes, the more interesting—aesthetically and thematically—Four Daughters is.

A shockingly raw combination of first-person reporting and personal video diary.

Emerald Fennell’s follow-up, as writer and director, to Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is another stylishly glib exercise, entertaining and engagingly acted until the bottom falls out.

The movie won’t change your world—but it’s nice watching two lost people experience a hopeful change in theirs.

It’s amusing, in a Barry Lyndon sort of way, but also feels a bit blinkered. Discounting Napoleon Bonaparte as a buffoon who merely benefitted from societal chaos does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, he left dead.

The Killer is a gorgeously sterile, de-romanticized riff on the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (which notably features a near-silent assassin) and countless other hit-man movies, peppered with sideswipes at capitalism.

If The Holdovers is about anything, it’s about the hard, hard work of small acts of kindness.

Thanks to Larson, Parris, and Vellani, The Marvels feels like a breath of fresh air.

It has an optimistic charm all its own, as well as strong performances throughout—especially from White and Buckley.

The two main characters in The Royal Hotel—young women abroad who take bartending jobs at a run-down resort in the Australian outback after they’ve run out of traveling funds—make so many ill-advised choices that you begin to wonder if director Kitty Green, who wrote the film with Oscar Redding, is conducting some sort of feminist litmus test.

Priscilla is one of Sofia Coppola’s “moments movies” — stories told not necessarily via plot, but via the textures, sounds, and accessories that combine to create an indelible 30 seconds or so, seconds which say as much about a character and their experience as endless pages of dialogue could.