Josh Larsen

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.

Lean stages the events with an expert sense of suspense, then leaves us wondering what to make of the mythologizing that came before. Was all that whistling really the sound of legendary British resolve, or were those soldiers only whistling past their own graveyard?

A model for breezy, bantering filmmaking of the criminal kind, To Catch a Thief has the feel of being made while on a getaway vacation.

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

In so many monster movies, the pieces show. This creature is seamless.

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

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

This is handsomely made (cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth lights the reunion as if it were already part of some magical realm), but what lingers about the movie are the quieter, actorly moments.

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

It’s another astounding assemblage of dryly humorous, immaculately designed, fixed-camera vignettes, if an even more morose collection than the previous ones.

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.

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

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

Deliverance is a harsh film asking harsh questions, less a thrilling adventure movie than an ecological, existential nightmare.

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.

There is a lot of joy in Faces—John Cassavetes’ second real “Cassavetes” film, 10 years after Shadows—and there is also a lot of anger. Often there’s a drunken combination of the two. But no matter what emotion dominates, the movie itself has the same edge, the same itchiness. It’s constantly scratching its own skin.

If both Ma and Levee are ultimately sympathetic, it’s due to the layered performances and the full stories that Wilson gives the characters.

Perhaps director Martin Scorsese had to make five other mobster movies before he could make one as wise, reflective, and mournful as The Irishman.

Boden and Fleck do deliver a crackerjack, climactic comic-book sequence that stands as one of my favorite moments in all of the MCU.

All of these sequences have an unshowy effortlessness that represents the pinnacle of Hollywood glamour.

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

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

Jezebel is populated almost entirely by unsavory characters, foremost among them the woman of the title.

For all the bullets that are spent, The Killer spends just as much time ruminating on the likes of honor, friendship and even the allure of guns themselves. “Easy to pick up,” Chow observes at one point, “difficult to put down.” The Killer is hardly a cautionary tale, but contrary to what its blunt title implies, it is a complicated one.

Sure, this is mostly propaganda, a self-described memorial to the men who sacrificed their lives in World War I, but at the same time it’s honest enough to include a scene—60 years before Born on the Fourth of July—in which a returning soldier makes a tearful confession to the family of a lost pilot.

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.

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.

The Heartbreak Kid is a war of the sexes comedy that leaves no side unscathed, thanks largely to the combined sensibilities of screenwriter Neil Simon and director Elaine May.

Ash Is Purest White starts as a crackerjack, Bonnie and Clyde-style crime movie, then slows down into something more akin to Antonioni’s L’Avventura. It eventually ends as a mesmerizing mood piece about personal alienation and national dislocation. That’s quite a shift, but writer-director Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart) finesses it effortlessly.

Like Shinkai’s metaphysical body-switching fantasia Your Name, Weathering with You works on multiple levels: as eco-fable, social commentary, and teen romance.

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.”

This is either the worst time for a movie like Jojo Rabbit or the best time. I lean toward the latter. I’m perfectly willing to concede that the film may come across as gauche in the coming years, but in November 2019—as an irreverently comic middle finger to idiotic, irrational tribalism—wow, does it feel good.

Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette).

The Secret of Roan Inish is mostly a story about storytelling, and how folk tales and real life can intermingle.

Reggae music is a through line in almost all five installments of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, but in Alex Wheatle, it’s a lifeline.

Barry Lyndon is a costume epic that pokes fun of other costume epics even as it outdoes them.

Witheringly funny and willing to explore her own (her character’s?) flaws, Blank brings a vibrant brand of comic honesty to the screen.

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.

The widescreen Tohoscope compositions offer ample opportunities for dramatically staged standoffs, yet Kurosawa also employs them for laughs.

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

By making Frank the quiet focus of the movie, Mangrove becomes a document of both history and humanity—the story of a man rightly radicalized by the institutions oppressing him.

With Zama, Martel no longer hints at that past, but actively exhumes it, unleashing ghosts in the process.

By its bittersweet ending, Nomadland delicately suggests that Fern’s experience is a choice, but one born out of hardship. The “choice” represents the potential of the United States. The “hardship” is the nation’s capitalist curse.

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.

So familiarity is certainly part of my outsized affection for this 1989 Joe Dante satire of suburban America. But I also think the movie has wider significance in the way it presents suburban expansion as a cheerier version of manifest destiny—an unstoppable force that gobbles up land and then quickly sets about circling the wagons.

Moss shifts into another gear for the truly disturbing finale, when those eyes flicker with thoughts of revenge and events unfold in a way that remind us that Whannell’s big break was as the screenwriter of Saw. The Invisible Man ends on a nasty note, but then again the 1933 film was nasty too. Given the omnipotent power of invisibility, humans apparently do their worst.

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.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is less a deromanticized Western than an emasculated one. It’s a de-pantsing, really, of the strong, silent men who have long dominated the genre. Drop a stronger, louder woman into their midst, and they’re done.

Watson is reliably sturdy in the lead role—you can see her panicked conscience in her eyes—but it’s Franciosi who grabs the film by its shoulders and turns it into a searing, singular experience.

Detractors might call it navel-gazing, but to me The Souvenir: Part II is introspection to adroit, therapeutic purpose.

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

This is a work that thrums equally with Dada despair and do-the-right-thing agitprop, while somehow still managing to culminate in liberating exuberance. If American Utopia paints a doomsday scenario of the state of the union, it also offers joyous hope for a national rebirth.

At its worst, Pigeon and its predecessors seem to say, life is cruel. At its best, life is meaningless. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a laugh.

Intricate blocking keeps these early scenes visually engaging, but there’s no doubt High and Low takes off once the exec agrees to pay and we’re treated to an elaborate money-drop sequence, with the kidnapper staying one step ahead of the police.

It’s a thrill to watch Stanwyck go to work and assert her dominance.

Perhaps my preference is best explained this way: I’d rather live in the world of You, the Living. Songs from the Second Floor is the one I’d rather watch.

Slate gives Marcel a bit of wit along with that gentleness (I love when he teases Dean), but it’s the openness of heart you hear in the voice that defines the character—without ever making him mawkish.

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.

It’s not just the historical footage that makes the documentary special, however; it’s also what Questlove and his filmmaking team do with it.

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

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

Shoplifters definitely goes after your heartstrings, yet especially after some third-act revelations put this family in a larger social context, the movie earns any tears it gets.

The Deer King offers the personal touch of a hero’s journey alongside a more expansive vision of how to live in community. It’s a stunner.

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.

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.

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.

If you can get on its moodily monstrous wavelength, the movie will have you asking why we let some animals sleep on our beds and put others in pens.

With Chi-Raq, Spike Lee is vital again. This isn’t to say I agree with all of the movie’s politics or that he’s made a perfect film. What I mean is that he’s once again brought something necessary to the screen in a way that no other director could.

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.

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.

As a director, Jia constructs sparsely edited scenes built upon long, single takes—nothing showy, just patient, uninterrupted attention given to the characters in a way that feels empathetic and mournful.

It’s the moral imperative of the found-footage formalism that sets REC apart, transforming Angela’s camera from a visceral instrument of voyeurism into a tragic, last-gasp tool of truth and justice.

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.

Ballooning. Biking. Swimming. Parachuting. The Great Muppet Caper represented a giant leap for Muppetkind, in only their second big-screen outing.

Already, the younger Panahi has a firm command of the (largely) fixed camera; an eye for incorporating dramatic landscapes into the mise en scene (the family’s goodbye, a long shot against drifting clouds, is a heartbreaking stunner); a penchant for stylistic flourishes (including a magical flight into the stars); and an affinity for performance.

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.

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

This is a movie that’s honest about night coming on, but it also reminds us of the small things that will get you through that night, until the morning dawns.

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.

Splendor in the Grass may seem quaint, even silly. But anyone who’s thrown – or endured – a teenager’s temper tantrum will recognize the anger and confusion on the screen as genuine. In that sense, Splendor will never be out of touch.

Rex, meanwhile—an actor and former VJ with a brief early stint in adult entertainment—delivers an unequivocally great comic performance. Simultaneously sweet and icky, he gives the character a light, even gentle spirit that’s at odds with the materialist manner with which he thinks about and engages in sex.

Sophie delivers three “confessions” over the course of the film, each delivered by Streep with what can only be called a commanding fragility.

Sure, Risky Business is partially an adolescent fantasy, but it’s even more about how the prosperity pressures placed upon Joel Goodsen have frayed his nerves to the point that he can’t even bring his erotic dreams to fruition.

After a bumpy, Mr. Mom-style start, director Robert Benton settles the film into a quietly observed depiction of the challenges and rewards of single parenting, anchored by a Hoffman performance that mostly shakes off his gesticulating instincts in favor of a relational rootedness (he’s particularly good with young Justin Henry as the boy).

Just Mercy is a testament to what talented actors can do with material that might otherwise be stifling.

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.

Turner and Douglas have great chemistry—in their best moments, they recall Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable on the road in It Happened One Night—helped by the fact that Douglas is willing to be undercut by both Turner and the screenplay.

As 1917 goes on and the pair face a series of logistical challenges (navigating a collapsing bunker, crossing a bombed-out bridge), the film’s form begins to resemble that of a video game—only without the user interaction that makes games so compelling.

The movie is, mostly, interested in Adele’s interior life more than her exterior features. And in those moments where the reverse is true (they’re there), Exarchopoulos rightly refocuses the attention with an extraordinarily evocative performance of a confused, conflicted teen.

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.

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.

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

James and the Giant Peach is a wondrous interpretation of Dahl’s book that revives the magical possibilities of film while liberating our own imaginations as well.

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.

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.

An efficient thriller with eco-political ambitions.

There are laughs aplenty in this lawless, arbitrary, mythological Old West, but a feel-good yarn it ain’t.

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