Josh Larsen

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.

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

An amusing and heartfelt exercise in boots-on-the-ground feminism, Support the Girls takes place in an unlikely location for such an endeavor.

Cat People is a lot talkier and less evocative than its reputation would suggest, yet it’s still a startling, psychosexual horror picture – especially for its time.

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.

A very particular sort of camera is at work in Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It peers from unconventional angles, lingers on images longer than they at first seem to deserve, and generally offers a perspective that is at once unremarkable, given the everyday subject matter, and revealing.

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.

Passing is an impressionistic experience, much like the Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou piano piece that composer Devonté Hynes incorporates into the score, a portrait of an identity that refuses to be pinned down, for better and for worse.

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.

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.

It takes a special sort of confidence to make a quiet movie, and that’s exactly what director Fernanda Valadez displays in her debut feature, Identifying Features.

Like much of the filmmaker’s work (not to mention Bergman’s), The Sacrifice is haunted by the gap between human yearning and ultimate understanding, between the way things are and the way we long for them to be.

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

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.

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.

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.

A goggling miserabilism defines Beanpole, making it hard to connect with the film on anything other than an aesthetic level.

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

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.

Black Is King—like the offstage sequences of Homecoming or the soft-glow segments of Lemonade—is ultimately a project of image cultivation. African history, African-American experience, Timon and Pumbaa—all bend in service of a staggeringly talented star. It’s an astral projection that nearly functions as an eclipse.

There are enough issues here for three films by a perennial provoker like Lee, and critics will undoubtedly accuse him of throwing too much fuel on the fire. But this time, aided by Reggie Rock Bythewood’s thoughtful script, Lee’s ambition pays off. With 15 men squeezed together on a single bus, issues such as racism, homophobia and responsibility are tackled as they would be in real life: fitfully, passionately, derisively and, above all, hilariously.

As a document of some of the top musical talent of the 1970s, The Last Waltz has a time-capsule quality that’s off the charts.

A minor miracle.

The Truffle Hunters has a great subject—aging Italian foragers and their dogs, carrying on the storied tradition of searching forests for the rare fungi—but its true strength is in its compositions.

This is history, but it’s also alive. It’s the story of a weasel caught—and complicit in—a crossroads, one that leads directly to where we find ourselves today.

Broadcast News would be nearly perfect, except for its final few minutes.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a twilight film in more ways than one.

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

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.

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.

In only 80 minutes, Red, White and Blue tries to tackle a lot of Logan’s life (his relationships with his parents, his wife, colleagues, and wayward kids on the beat) and as such can feel a bit scattered. It’s the only Small Axe installment that feels like it might have worked better as its own series.

It’s less impressionistic than Great Expectations and more starkly insistent—fitting for a work that doubles as a social tract about the mistreatment of children in England in the early 1800s. John Howard Davies, as Oliver, has a heartbreakingly fresh face, one that’s increasingly bewildered by the cruelty continually visited upon him.

Director Wayne Wang and his dreadful cast – the performances are almost across-the-board atrocious – had no chance.

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.

This has little of the insinuating nature of the best film noir, as Lana Turner and John Garfield go from 0 to 60 in their first scene together.

A pileup of technology, population movement, and dehumanization, traffic is a natural subject for writer-director-star Jacques Tati, whose perceptive pratfall comedies are often concerned with how our humanity gets lost in the particulars of “progress.”

The deeper American Beauty tries to get, the shallower it reveals itself to be.

In Forman’s hands, McMurphy becomes more than a rebel in this specific time and place. He becomes mythic—a symbol for irrepressible Life.

The ingeniousness of screenwriter William Goldman and director Alan J. Pakula’s film is that it’s framed as a detective mystery.

No, Toy Story 4 isn’t necessary. Yes, Toy Story 4 is fun. Does it end in a way that’s worthy of the series, and Woody in particular? We’ll get there.

If In the Heights is packed with enough bold choices to invite both effusive praise and endless nitpicking, that comes with the genre.

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.

Even here, in a calling-card genre exercise, the Coens are clearly interested in existential, quasi-spiritual concerns about guilt, justice, revenge, and violence. All that good Old Testament stuff.

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 less Close Encounters of the Third Kind and more like a special episode of The Twilight Zone, starring The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. Which is to say, pretty fun.

Widows largely works...not as a character study but as a consideration of corruption on a larger, societal scale.

Boys State is a thoroughly depressing portrait of American teen masculinity, Texas politics, and the overall state of democracy.

Gosling excels at an open sort of stoicism, a way of keeping us at a distance on the surface while also giving us a peek inside. And so he’s a good fit for this take on Armstrong.

Those nightmares we’ve all had about being chased by some relentless, unstoppable monster? This is the movie adaptation.

The performances are sweltering...This isn’t a good thing. Yes, it’s fitting for the setting – a humid, suffocating Louisiana mansion where the family of an ailing tycoon (Burl Ives) connives to inherit his fortune – but the overall result is like watching a melodrama in a sauna. It’s just too much.

Mon Oncle zeroes on in the way we often use our homes as status symbols first, and places of care and comfort second.

This might be one of Bette Davis’ least sympathetic parts, which is saying something.

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.

Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench has more ambition than its talent can possibly live up to, but it’s an invigorating experience nonetheless.

Suspense mechanics and psychological horror don’t meld quite as seamlessly here as they do in the best Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, but The Wrong Man has more than its share of masterful moments.

If Local Hero is ultimately less complicated than its reputation might suggest, writer-director Bill Forsyth navigates the tale with a warmth and wry humor that wins you over, while the seaside vistas—captured by cinematographer Chris Menges—are ridiculously beautiful.

The Exorcist is provocation at its ugliest.

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.

It works itself up into a fine froth by the climax, and even manages to score some political points against the repressive Iranian regime in the process.

Yes, Vampire’s Kiss features one of Nicolas Cage’s most outlandish performances (which is saying something), but it’s also a dismal film, ugly and misogynistic in a particularly 1980s way.

From Gene Kelly’s forced grins to its boldly monochrome sets to the horn-heavy George Gershwin music that is the genesis for the picture, An American in Paris is an all-out assault on the senses. If Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, which would come a year later, revels in movie-musical joy, this effort’s defining trait is insistence.

Everything we see in Welcome to the Dollhouse is filtered through Dawn’s heightened perspective. There is one explicit fantasy sequence, but really the whole movie could be taken as a hormonal exaggeration. Solondz and Matarazzo may offer the cringiest middle-school experience imaginable, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

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.

Pixar’s 23rd animated feature is an exercise in psychedelic existentialism that astonishingly increases in inventiveness as it goes along. Then, before you’re overwhelmed, it shifts into a lower gear, eventually arriving as a stirring and relatively simple meditation on what it means to be alive.

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.

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.

Turning Red is a wonder in the way 13-year-old girls can be: monstrous one moment, heart-melting the next.

You can see the movie’s influence on everything from Forrest Gump to Idiocracy to Elf, all comedies with oblivious, world-changing simpletons at their center.

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.

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.

If Mel Brooks has a masterpiece, it’s this homage to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and ’40s.

Predators lost credibility with me well before its stunt ending.

As the parents of a busy family in an early 20th-century English hamlet, Donald Crisp and Anne Revere save this treacly family drama from choking on its own sentimentality.

Figuring everything out isn’t necessary to enjoying The Lighthouse; it’s staggering simply as an audiovisual feast.

One of Hollywood’s true curiosities. At times a charming, kiddie Western, this John Wayne vehicle also has a real nasty streak.

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.

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

In some ways, this second Bond film was already too self aware to remember to be itself.

There is something unseemly in its choice to document the Beales at all. It’s not exactly that mother and daughter are being unwittingly exploited (though one wonders what a psychologist would make of their mental states). It’s that Edith and Edie – who both pursued show-business careers at different points in their lives – are such eager subjects, so willing to let the camera roll with little thought to what, aside from their immediate selves, it might be capturing. If Grey Gardens doesn’t exactly exploit that, the documentary certainly takes dubious advantage.

One Night in Miami—adapted by Kemp Powers from his own play, as well as the directorial debut of actress Regina King—manages to elevate that conceit (and its obvious stage origins) with sharp performances and a bold directorial hand.

Hahn and Giamatti make for a great movie couple, in that the very way they stand near each other makes you believe they’ve already been through better and worse.

BlacKkKlansman is a joke that sticks in your throat, as well as a necessary examination of blight history (those shameful marks on the American record when “white history” and “black history” awfully intersect).

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.

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

A landmark in terms of science-fiction style and influence, The Day the Earth Stood Still boasts a wavering, theremin score (by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann), a shiny, disc-shaped spacecraft and even a robot named Gort. Yet it deals in these sci-fi cliches with an amazing artistry.

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

Keeping in mind that he was well aware of the presence of the camera—as was everyone during the cast recording session for the Broadway hit Company—lyricist-composer Stephen Sondheim comes off as the kindest, gentlest genius you can imagine in Original Cast Album: Company.

Just putting us in Maud’s head—even as grippingly as the filmmaking does here—is not the same as trying to empathize with her. Still, the movie marks Glass as a filmmaker to watch.

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.

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.

Palm Springs is fun, but long live the theatrical experience.

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.

This sounds a bit like Hitchcock, but Charade—written by Peter Stone and directed by Stanley Donen—isn’t nearly interested enough in humanity’s dark side to qualify. The movie just wants to have fun.

Part poetry slam, part dance performance, part survivalist nightmare, Night of Kings imagines narrative as a saving grace, even in the darkest place.

If Neptune Frost plays like a visual album rather than a traditional movie (even a movie musical), it offers more substance than that description suggests.

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

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.