Josh Larsen

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is not a love letter to the magic of the movies. It’s a nice note to more tactile matters of craft—how to thread a reel of film into a projector, for instance. And yet, in the process of paying attention to such details, The Fabelmans manages something even more specific than love: a deeply personal ardency for both how and why movies are made.

Director Otto Preminger emphasizes the lurid whenever he can – the neon signs, the smoky interiors, the insinuating bass on the soundtrack – so that the movie plays like a blurry, bleary night-on-its-way-to-morning. Only Sinatra’s talent is clear.

This is Mulligan’s show. Her risky, raw performance is the life force of an otherwise muted film.

David Oyelowo plays King, and there’s no denying he brings a charismatic forcefulness to the part. This is particularly true in his speeches, which begin calmly, rooted in reason, and then whip up into a righteous fury that he struggles to contain and barely – just barely – does.

Working with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, editor Nicholas Monsour, and composer Michael Abels, Peele has once again constructed a movie experience that functions first and foremost on the level of sheer terror. From the drops of doom on the soundtrack to a POV camera that frequently puts us face to face with horror, Us turns identity politics into the stuff of nightmares.

There are unknown, uncontrollable, and perhaps even metaphysical forces at work in that water. Watching Atlantics harness them in the name of justice is a spooky thrill.

Dark—with a black wit to match—this serial-killer thriller from director Bong Joon-Ho functions clinically as a genre exercise, while also holding persuasive power as a stark meditation on police corruption.

Nearly every frame of Shaft is intent on doing one thing: establishing its hero – private detective John Shaft – as a powerful, independent, innately good yet still devilish man in complete control of his own destiny.

Right out of the gate—and even working within the modern Hong Kong gangster genre—Wong Kar-wai burst onto the screen as a strikingly unique talent. This is clearly a filmmaker less interested in plot and dialogue than he is in movement, music, and color—no matter the time, place, or story.

During the production numbers, Spielberg’s camera is almost always on the move, but not in a distracting way. Usually it’s trying to keep up with the dancers and give them as much of the frame as they need; at other times it winds its way among them, increasing our sense of exhilaration and intimacy.

Jaundiced and judicious, deeply cynical yet not quite ready to leap into the abyss, Joker is a provocatively toxic time capsule for an era of misguided rage. It’s galling, and pretty great.

Fiction, I’d argue, best captures the universal, while documentary—like journalism—details the specific. If Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a singular achievement, it’s in the way the movie manages to do a little bit of both.

This is another sad-sack Anderson movie, with perhaps the saddest collection of actors we’ve seen. And yet, this being Anderson, The French Dispatch is also absolutely delightful.

In Miss Bala, sexism doesn’t take sides, but is rather a harrowing, pervasive, dehumanizing force that even turns fashion into a weapon.

There is a soft sadness that permeates the film and steadily spreads, until it gradually devours each of the main characters. It may devour you.

As the hapless students flounder about, putting all their foibles on display, Booksmart always maintains a kind and understanding gaze. It’s a movie that wants to be there for its subjects.

With its epic setting and visual grace, The Hidden Fortress also is a precursor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Watching the movie, though, you’ll be struck less by its influence than by an awesome artistry that’s all its own.

It will restore your faith in grace, goodness, and maybe—just maybe—even in humanity.

In a sense, the film only works because, in the real world, the system is rigged against someone like Axel Foley. Yet when Murphy seizes the screen, all bets are off, resulting in a work of racial subversion that’s both hilarious and cathartic.

Full of nuance and understanding, C’mon C’mon meets a family in crisis and proceeds to hold them in its gentle hands.

Scales glisten, legs scuttle, antennae unfurl, all in a symphony of exquisite shapes and inhuman motion. Watching the movie is like peering into a living kaleidoscope.

A stylish, saucy entry in the “stepford wife” subgenre, Don’t Worry Darling treads familiar ground while wearing a killer pair of pumps. The movie won’t surprise you (although I found its “reveal” to be timely and perhaps even prescient), but it sure looks great while not doing it.

At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal.

The documentary displays such winsome artistry that you also leave feeling energized. It’s an invigorating act of creative defiance in the face of Alzheimer’s disease.

No matter where the film leaves us narratively, however, its evocation of estrangement—even, perhaps especially, as part of an Internet where we can talk to anyone at anytime—is both emotionally palpable and cinematically potent.

You can argue with the movie in your head, even while you admit—say, when Dick and Jo dance their way across a stream by lightly stepping onto a floating raft—that your heart is having all sorts of fun.

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.

Ford dials up the smarm of Han Solo and the hubris of Indiana Jones to portray a man who’s just smart, capable, and charming enough to be dangerous—to himself, his family, and the villagers.

Weerasethakul casts spells, and this is a particularly auditory one, the weaving of a liminal soundspace.

If Beale Street Could Talk is less interested in railing against systemic racism than lamenting the everyday goodness that is lost when racism carries the day.

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

Writer-director Steve Kloves (who would go on to write the screenplays for all the Harry Potter films) takes three gripping characters who could each anchor their own movie, and crafts a film that honors all of them.

Mosese’s camera is dispassionate, but deeply attentive.

Reds is about the personal and the political and the intermingling of the two—what it meant for Reed and Bryant as a couple and, for Bryant particularly, separately. Both performances support the movie’s overall project: to demonstrate that these “reds” were real people, with good intentions, brave convictions, naive expectations, and—first and foremost—complicated hearts.

You Hurt My Feelings bursts out of the gate with four or five big laughs, then only adds emotional layers and dramatic complications from there.

Writing and directing her first feature, which she adapted from an Elena Ferrante novel, Maggie Gyllenhaal employs an intensely intimate camera, one that’s so tight on Colman’s face that at times her features are a blur.

White Heat is smart enough to give nearly every audience member whatever they could possibly want.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who would remake the movie in 1956 with James Stewart, invests each scene with a blithe sense of fun.

Rather than take a histrionic approach, Lee trusts his four-hour running time, allowing the evidence of governmental indifference and incompetence to quietly pile up until it becomes cumulatively enraging.

A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.

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.

The bold cinematic techniques Welles employed in Citizen Kane are put to even more sophisticated use here.

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.

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.

Deep, dark forests; thorny thickets; spiraling castle stairs – every detail seems to envelop us. And then there is Maleficent, voiced by Eleanor Audley and undoubtedly one of the great Disney villainesses. Her transformation into a roaring dragon in the finale is so triumphant you almost want her to win.

Unlike his last two films, Song to Song and Knight of Cups, which dithered in a metaphysical malaise, this thrums with a spiritual vigor.

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.

Wild is a relative term for Wong Kar-wai, the master of cinematic languor. You can feel the tension in his second film between genre excitement (there are jarring bursts of violence) and the languid sort of yearning that would become his trademark. These Days of Being Wild are both electric and exhausted.

If this works at all it’s because of the sound design: the cacophony of squawks and flapping over the opening credits, followed by incessant tapping, screeching, chirping, fluttering – sometimes in scenes where no birds are present. And then the occasional shock of silence, which is eerier still.

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.

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

A work of astonishing tactility, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt reminds us that what we remember—what might matter most as corporeal beings—is not word or even story, but touch.

We observe family dynamics that could take place in any home, at any time; as Noriko and Shukichi tentatively negotiate the future of their family, they’re enacting a story that’s both distinct to post-war Japan and straight from the pages of Jane Austen.

Nimbly and unassumingly, this relatively straightforward anthropological study blossoms into both a socioeconomic commentary on the dangers of globalization and a biblically resonant parable about our relationship with the environment.

Incredibles 2, written and directed by original filmmaker Brad Bird, consists of two parallel narratives.... Together, they add up to a joyous and cathartic riff on working parenthood in this multitasking millennium.

The fabulous 1970s fashions don’t hold up too well, but what still resonates is the movie’s empathetic attention to what it’s like if your sexual identity doesn’t neatly fit into traditional norms.

Featuring a pair of novice performances that will either make the actors stars or preserve them in cinematic amber as these exact characters, the 1973-set Licorice Pizza marks an ambling, deceptively breezy, and incredibly sweet effort from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson.

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.).

Reinsve gives Julie both a hard edge and soft center, so that we root for her even when she makes decisions with which we disagree.

The long, seemingly monotonous shots in Skinamarink will be trying for some, yet there are rewards if you have the patience: occasional, eerie beauty (that night-light evokes a twinkling star dangling in space) and clever filmmaking.

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.

Like each of del Toro’s nastier pictures, Nightmare Alley closes in on you with a hellish elegance.

As Yusuke Kafuku, the theater director, Hidetoshi Nishijima delivers a master class in withholding, while still giving the audience everything we need. He’s both stoic and seething.

Broker marks another minor miracle from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, featuring another one of his makeshift families.

The visual design is a trip, combining a comic-book aesthetic (not just the use of panels and dialogue balloons, but also digital tricks that mimic the hand drawing and paper printing of an actual comic) with the dynamism of state-of-the-art animation.

Hardly a flattering portrait of the military machine, Paths of Glory suggests a soldier’s best hope often is to survive the chaos that his or her own army causes.

Tokyo Story is a work of considerable restraint. And all the more affecting for it.

The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do.

If you gave Jordan Peele a list of random cultural ingredients—some songs, a few television shows, a film genre or two, a variety of actors—chances are he could concoct a smart, funny, thrilling filmgoing experience out of the randomness. Peele makes pop-culture smoothie movies that are nutritious and delicious.

These three form a fascinating trio—especially when Eddie inevitably begins to revert to the chaotic choices of his youth—but in truth, that camera is the story. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese doesn’t just offer an endless array of exciting movements and cuts. He also gives each one emotional heft and thematic purpose, evoking adrenaline, uncertainty, antagonism, anger, and hubris at just the right moments.

Children of Heaven is a simple film – it has bold, childlike colors and a narrative that turns on unremarkable, everyday events – yet Majidi and his young actors invest it with such basic truth about the inner lives of children that the movie feels as big as the universe.

By the movie’s end, the aching mixture of loneliness and desire transcends the immanent to embrace the metaphysical, a move that is a Weerasethakul signature.

Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto manage cinematic flourishes that tell us everything we need to know in a particular moment.

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.

Never underestimate what people will do for a beaver hat, a pail of milk, or a warm oily cake.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t perfect. There’s a bit too much exposition involving myths, history, and character backstory; that climax inevitably abandons the intimacy of the fight scenes for gargantuan CGI. Yet by that point the movie has earned too much goodwill to be affected much by such complaints. I’m sure there are plenty of punchplosions to come in the MCU, probably even delivered by Shang-Chi himself, but at least Ten Rings offers a momentary respite from the reverberations.

Song, a playwright, has fashioned an elegant script and displays a lovely feel for the camera, which unhurriedly finds its way to the places it needs to be. Yet Past Lives packs as much of a wallop as it does because of the intense connection of its leads (never mind that they’re physically disconnected in many of their scenes).

Rowlands takes the movie by the throat in the dramatic, onstage sequences, just as Brando would have done, yet she’s equally compelling in the film’s smaller moments.

Stewart, Wolfwalkers borrows something from werewolf mythology, another thing from Irish history, and more than a few things from the animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and emerges with a dazzling feature that ultimately establishes its own distinct pattern.

Works of art like these are more than creative endeavors. They function more as testaments: to the lives of their subjects, to the awfulness of death, and to the inspired ways we cling to the former, even in the face of the latter.

A gem, in that there’s really no other movie like it. A mixture of camp, parody, and full-throated sincerity, Moonstruck ultimately coalesces into a romantic comedy that’s tonally aberrant yet emotionally coherent.

A sequel that retains the gee-whiz geniality of the original while still going in interesting new directions.

This may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh.

It comes at you hard, bright, and fast. This is an angry, explicitly funny movie that refuses to conform to a three-act structure. Instead, it plays like a series of loosely connected skits riffing on the impossibility of black identity in a United States that’s hurtling toward classist, capitalistic implosion.

It’s not the sum of its parts, so much as it is the way De Niro and Grodin make almost every one of those parts glisten.

A Streetcar Named Desire works itself up into a hurricane of emotional chaos, yet ironically, as these final scenes give in to hysteria, Brando starts dialing down. Depending on your reading, that makes Stanley either remorseful or sinister. Either way, he’s riveting. If Brando is calm at the end of Streetcar, that’s because he’s the center of the storm.

Minding the Gap honors the pain of these young men’s lives so fully, it earns the right to conclude with the equivalent of a perfectly executed flip—audacious, improbable, and liberating.

At first glance it’s as if the masterful Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days had been remade as a piece of scruffy American neorealism. But then comes The Scene.

The genius is in the way the movie’s little details and character touches lead to an absolutely bonkers climax—after a shocking twist I won’t reveal—that nevertheless feels inevitable.

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.

Marlene Dietrich is in full plume in Shanghai Express, literally and figuratively.

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.

Put it all together, and it’s as if Gerwig had dumped all of her own complicated feelings about Barbie onto the screen. This Barbie isn’t a problem to solve, then, but an experience to share.

It’s fun, of course, but also a wittily verbose master class on the way voice can be employed in fiction.

Pain and Glory is one of Almodovar’s least exuberant productions. It’s also one of his best.

It never really mattered what loopy plot was devised to get Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together in their musicals – once they started dancing in each other’s arms, all contrivances fall to the wayside and you clearly see they were made for each other.

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

This is largely another of Malick’s impressionistic tales of paradise lost, but here the dreamy approach feels fresh and exciting.