Josh Larsen

There is pleasure and poignancy in that adventure, even as it grows, but I was content to immerse myself in the seemingly hand-sketched, watercolor-hued opening sections.

I had no trouble believing all of the fantastic imagery that The Creator puts up on the screen; it’s the story I couldn’t quite invest in.

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

If Carney had wanted to dive into the darkness of this drama—and Hewson has the heavy eyelids to do it—he might have enabled her to give a powerhouse performance. This perhaps isn’t the great Flora and Son we might have wanted, but it’s the pretty good one we’ve got.

As a storyteller adept at evoking both the mundane and the metaphysical, Nyoni is a talent to watch.

Bottoms—which puts a queer spin on teen sex comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, American Pie, Superbad, and (the partially queer) Booksmart—is at its best when it is at its most anarchic.

The Little Mermaid mostly takes place in an uncanny valley between imaginative invention and relatable live action. When we can see what’s on the screen, it tends to look like a cheapie commercial for Royal Caribbean Cruises.

The possession scenes are the calling card for the Philippous as filmmakers, whose 360-degree camera captures both the unsettling otherworldliness of the ritual and the giddy naivete of the teens.

By the time Oppenheimer ends, it becomes more about the interpersonal problems of two miniscule men—miniscule, at least, against the backdrop of the cataclysmic, world-destroying questions and implications it had been exploring.

Earth Mama taps into a primal understanding of motherhood that’s true for Gia, whether she is a “good” mother or not. The movie captures what it means to be a mother of any kind, faced with watching your children being torn from their roots.

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.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is stingy with the stunts—though it only feels that way because the movie, in keeping with its bloated title, runs nearly three hours.

Crystal Skull (which I liked) didn’t really feel like a proper goodbye, however. Dial of Destiny does, allowing Indy to nobly, creakily hang up his hat and whip, leaving the rest of us in an increasingly exhausted multiverse of capes and cowls.

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).

Asteroid City might be Anderson’s bleakest film, bordering, at times, on nihilistic. His comedies have always had a mordant edge—both The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited directly address suicide and grief—yet they usually employ despair as a starting point, from which the characters move toward healing of some kind. In contrast, Asteroid City—like the rumbling reverberations of those atomic explosions—quivers with disquietude throughout.

The unsung hero behind the best Pixar films is the story—the nuanced, inventive, resonant-for-all-ages narrative that provides a foundation for the indelible characters and dazzling animation. Elemental feels like a Pixar first draft, in story terms.

There is nothing like nostalgia here, but in the quiet consideration of how these days actually passed—what was dear about them, what was dangerous, and what has been irrevocably lost since then—A Brighter Summer Day gives early teen life, in all its complexity, a burnished reverence.

Led by directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, the animators lend clarity and excitement to the action, humanity to the characterizations, and—above all—a distinct vision for each of the worlds we visit.

I’m sure there’s a definitive explanation, but Enys Men strikes me as a puzzle that’s more enthralled with its individual pieces than any picture they might complete.

Bait functions on a subliminal level. A concoction of illogical insert shots, mismatched sound, and nonlinear edits, it has little regard for a cinematically conventional sense of time and space.

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.

A minor miracle.

A charitable reading of Master Gardener would be to say that it feels unfinished and unformed—that there might be something here with another pass at the script or a different cast.

Shinkai’s recent films have all been wildly ambitious in terms of their imagination and scope; Suzume might be the most impressive in terms of connecting that to a powerful emotional core.

A light delight, even if you have no experience with the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes its fantasy world seriously, but not itself.

Much of Vol. 3 feels like a combination of those exploitative ads from animal shelters and the Japanese body-horror endurance test Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Aside from that, the movie offers about 3,000 subplots and 2,000 supporting characters.

The movie, for its part, is fairly lively. Especially arresting, from a visual standpoint, is an extended sequence in which Beau encounters members of an interactive theater troupe in a forest.

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) paints a communal portrait with a large cast of characters, which makes the film feel a bit wandering and amorphous at times. Yet there are arresting, individual moments.

Showing Up is an argument for valuing the artistic process over the art—and each other, above all else.

An efficient thriller with eco-political ambitions.

Thrumming with energy—thanks to vivacious filmmaking from director Lola Quivoron and a ferocious lead performance by newcomer Julie Ledru—Rodeo takes place within the world of underground motocross in the suburbs of Paris.

Adonis’ motivations are less compelling here than they were in Creed—especially in the way they sideline his relationship with the pregnant Bianca. In the end, he does what he does so that there can be a Creed II, nothing more, nothing less.

Majors is easily the best thing in this third Rocky offshoot.

There’s an intriguing idea and an incredible sequence in Scream VI—which is just enough to justify this follow-up to 2022’s Scream (which itself was just clever enough to justify reheating the series 11 years after Scream 4).

The clarity and imagination of the world-building carried me through, as well as the fountain of charm that is Paul Rudd.

The undercurrent of economic insecurity is gone, replaced by a generic, “get-the-band-back-together” plot, but this sequel to Magic Mike still shines as a movie musical.

If Knock at the Cabin is mid-tier Shyamalan, at best, it may be because I was more taken with these formal choices than the story, which riffs on the Book of Revelation in ways that feel fairly perfunctory. I did appreciate the final moments, though, which resist any sort of Shyamalan twist and instead rely on an emotional, diegetic needle drop that I won’t spoil here.

We should never become accustomed to the horrors of war, so for all its familiarity (morally and formally), the movie still feels necessary.

Watching Pearl, the first movie I thought of was The Wizard of Oz. This is as if Dorothy got sucked up by a tornado and dropped down in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—holding the chainsaw.

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.

White Noise is ultimately an absurdist comedy, with Gerwig and Driver as the victims/clowns at its center (he wears a suit of amusing denialism, while she floats about in a tragicomic state of daze).

Formally straightforward and heavily reliant on the perspective of the oldest sister, Jaclyn, Bad Axe (whose title comes from the name of the town) nevertheless serves as a reminder of how ugly things got during that crucial year—and how the American dream is an unjustly contingent one.

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

When it’s clicking—and it mostly clicks—Athena balances aesthetics with import, even interweaving the two into something that has the grave intimacy of Son of Saul and the political potency of The Battle of Algiers.

Whenever someone wants to downplay historical atrocities, Descendant suggests, it’s because they’re also trying to cover up injustice in the present day.

Women Talking reduces women to their words, as the title implies, a choice that is bold but limiting.

Overall, Corsage doesn’t reinvent the royal-as-trapped-canary subgenre (it also glorifies Elisabeth’s ultimate fate in a slightly uncomfortable way), but the film style and attitude, much like Krieps’ empress, make a scene.

It would be too dismissive to call Babylon—Damien Chazelle’s incessantly bravura period piece set during Hollywood’s transition to the sound era—a “giant swing at mediocrity” (to borrow a phrase the silent star played by Brad Pitt uses to describe one of his films). Babylon is better than that. But the swing still registers more strongly than the results.

It’s a miracle it all works—and it works wonderfully, thanks mostly to Mendes’ script and his casting of Olivia Colman.

Huntt is a talent to watch. Her psychic wounds now bared, it will be fascinating to see how she explores them, as well as things outside herself, in different cinematic formats.

Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations.

A work of blockbuster auteurism, Avatar: The Way of Water wildly, weirdly expends massive resources on a vision at once generic and bizarrely idiosyncratic, for better and for worse.

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.

Strange and vaporous, The Eternal Daughter confirms Hogg as a filmmaker who knows how to transmute her most intimate ruminations in cinematically provocative ways.

As with Knives Out, Johnson takes care to add a bit of political bite to the proceedings. This is a movie interested in unmasking killers, yes, but also emperors who wear no clothes.

As in the nature documentaries of Werner Herzog, there is grandeur and servility to be found here. Like the Kraffts, Fire of Love demonstrates a brazen humility.

The doc works best when Mitchell, who narrates, gets past the facts and lets his acutely observant critical voice merge with his memories, as when he recalls seeing Spook on the big screen with friends as a teenager in Detroit. His education then, is ours now.

It’s only when She Said opens up to consider Twohey and Kantor’s home lives, as well as the ruined lives of the Weinstein victims they interview, that the film exhibits some vigor.

Nanny stands as a promising feature debut for writer-director Nikyatu Jusu; I’d rather see an abundance of ambition in an emerging filmmaker, which is what we get here, than timidity.

The movie wants us to see how the butter is made, nothing more and nothing less.

To borrow a phrase from the movie itself, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a “terrible joy.”

Pinocchio manages enough charm, inventiveness, and—yes—technical innovation to be worth the effort.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever suffers from a giant, Chadwick Boseman-shaped hole that it can’t fill, no matter how many characters, storylines, and muddled, chaotic action sequences it tries to throw on the screen.

As Armageddon Time proceeded, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the way Johnny’s story only served to stoke Paul’s (and the movie’s) moral consciousness—to be ground zero for the film’s white guilt. Yes, in some ways Johnny is a supporting character much like any other, serving a particular purpose in the narrative. But the racial realities add a significant wrinkle.

As more of the pieces of the puzzle are revealed, the movie never exploits them. Instead, they fall into place the way memories do. Indeed, the way the best movies do: as revelations that are nevertheless mysterious.

In a Selick film, every object has a rich inner life; perhaps Wendell & Wild just has too many objects

I’d say the movie is a lot, but you’d need way more than those four letters to cover it.

While they’re enjoyable together, even Roberts on her own makes Ticket to Paradise worth watching; the movies have missed her ease on-screen, which is always tempered—just when it risks being flighty—with a quiet seriousness.

Triangle of Sadness—despite the madness of that dinner sequence—is too controlled. As meandering as the overall narrative is, each individual scene feels like it’s placing its characters into an inevitable vice.

If all of this skewed romance doesn’t hook you, Park’s filmmaking choices likely will, including inventive transitional techniques that make this two-hour-plus movie unfold like a fluid dream.

It’s Farrell who truly makes the dialogue sing, polishing off the punchlines (or responding to them) with facial reactions that add a few more laughs to every scene. Then, as the seriousness sets in, Farrell brings a deep sadness to the performance that’s staggering.