Josh Larsen

Apollo 10 ½ is so adept at making the mundane magical that it almost doesn’t need the conceit that gives the movie its title.

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.

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

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

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.

As a narrative, Thunder Road doesn’t entirely cohere—various plot strands involve Jim’s ex-wife, his daughter, and his partner on the force—yet Cummings remains riveting, never letting you get an easy fix on this troubled, troubling character.

Garner gives a remarkable performance, especially considering she has very little dialogue with which to work.

Koepp’s fairly straightforward screenplay doesn’t take us in many surprising directions, so the film’s pleasures lie in Kravitz’s jittery performance (she’s working in a similar vein to Claire Foy in Soderbergh’s other recent psychological thriller, Unsane) and the experimental filmmaking that’s usually going on in the corners of a Soderbergh production.

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

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.

The movie is a collection of ghoulish creative impulses (some of them gorily sadistic, as when a character is trapped in a room of barbed wire) rather than a coherent story.

Shiva Baby has a comic claustrophobia that almost makes you choke, so intense is its depiction of familial/traditional walls closing in on its main character.

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.

The Painter and the Thief tells a remarkable story of artistic understanding, one which Rees gives a clever, two-part structure.

Kaufman’s last film as director, the stop-motion Anomalisa, was a meditation on misery that comforted viewers, if not itself, with its astonishing artistry. i’m thinking of ending things, while arresting in its own way, offers no such consolation. It’s depressing in form and function.

Writer-director Alex Russell, making his feature debut, offers a creepy, Talented Mr. Ripley-style character study that doubles as a meditation on celebrity and authenticity.

Considering this is a remake of a superior 1997 Norwegian film, director Christopher Nolan doesn’t create anything nearly as inventive as his Memento, but at least Insomnia is expertly conventional.

At its best, the movie is a destabilizing look at family as a big con. Yet the chemistry between Rodriguez and Wood never sings, which becomes a problem as the movie shifts to focus more on their relationship.

Plan 9 from Outer Space may not be pure bliss to watch, but you certainly can feel the bliss that writer-director Edward D. Wood Jr. must have experienced while making it.

Just when I was about to nod off, Top Gun: Maverick jostled me awake with a fresh approach to the sort of blockbuster entertainment that the original movie managed so expertly. Faint praise? Maybe. But also higher praise than I ever expected to be giving.

This is one of [Hitchcock's] significant works, accented by wickedly effective insert shots and a handful of strong performances.

This ranks among the most mercilessly creepy children’s films I’ve seen.

In the end, After Yang is less interested in excitedly speculating on the inner life of its title character than it is interested in what we homo sapiens do with the lives we’ve been given.

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.

A tender miracle, Tender Mercies presents itself as a parable—though one of those tricky ones where you’re not quite sure of the takeaway. The biblical allusion is apt, because the movie is faith-soaked, yet not sopped. Immersed in religion, it nevertheless resists pandering to either touchy religious audiences or scoffing irreligious ones.

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.

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.

McCraney has a background as a playwright, which may explain why High Flying Bird mostly consists of a series of zippy conversations. Each one is overstuffed with so many ideas—not just about sports, but also sexuality, faith, economics, and history—that the characters don’t quite register as flesh-and-blood figures.

With The Card Counter, Schrader offers another self-flagellating portrait of a man who’s experienced—and enacted—great sin, struggling to perceive anything akin to divine grace.

Near Dark boasts one of the horror genre’s most unique milieus.

Whatever ineffable thing Wong Wong Kar-wai does—let’s call it despondent extravagance—he distilled it into its purest form with Chungking Express.

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.

I could watch Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck whisper while staring deeply into each other’s eyes for ages, yet Spellbound still registers as a talky exploration of psychoanalysis, something director Alfred Hitchcock would later examine with more insinuating subtext in his masterpieces of the 1950s and ’60s.

Endgame provides something truly satisfying: a sense of closure.

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.

I defy anyone to resist the pair’s commitment to their bits, many of which involve hidden-camera work on the streets of Toronto—or above them.

Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher was noxiously obsessed with the miseries of life in a 1970s Glasgow housing complex, finds a locus in Morvern’s stunned grief. Morvern Callar is equally bleak, but to a purpose.

Blue Moon is a portrait of a man on the precipice of an artistic and personal cliff (we learn in the opening sequence that Hart would die within the year, at the age of 48). Mostly, though, the movie is about Hawke talking.

The techniques ultimately reveal the way art can foster the sort of emotional connection that is vital to the human experience.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is, in essence, a masterpiece of ingeniously edited reaction shots.

Honest, incisive, and deeply sympathetic, Beach Rats is an intimate portrait of the cost that is paid when a teenager feels societal pressure to remain closeted.

As for the two leads, they have charm to spare, and it’s startling to see Hepburn bring bitterness to bear on her trademark wit, but the relationship and all its foibles still feel prescribed by the overall structure, not borne of real life.

There’s a lot of invention here, but as a complete film Barbarian lacks coherence.

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.

The movie vacillates between a metaphorical meditation on the debilitating demands of motherhood in general and a reality-based drama about dealing with a particular child eating disorder, yet Byrne gives a performance that’s game for both.

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.

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.

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.

It’s often asked why battered women don’t “just leave.” Gaslight evokes the sort of psychological intimidation and cruel mind games that make it so much more complicated than that.

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 stunning set pieces take full advantage of animation’s unique mastery over time and space, so that we don’t just watch the characters’ daredevil exploits – we’re spinning and whirling right along with them. It’s as if we’ve mastered space and time ourselves.

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.

Anyone who’s seen Beau Travail knows that Denis is a master of color. Here she uses the ship’s lighting system to shift between cool, medical blues and warm, arousing reds. And in the “garden,” a lush conservatory space where the crew grows their food, the deep greens evoke a primordial Eden, a place where nakedness carried no shame. The goings-on in High Life—including two instances of sexual assault—are like a crash landing into the Fall.

Nosferatu feels unique compared to other Dracula variations in the way this world appears drained—of color, light, nearly life itself. It’s as if blood has been sucked from the very images.

This is largely Dickens as farce, which is occasionally fun—Peter Capaldi is a delightful Mr. Micawber, whose creditors are so insistent they try to yank his rug out from under his front door—but it often feels forced.

Ramsay has a gifted eye—the opening shot, of a boy twisting himself in a lacy curtain, is a stunner—and she establishes an undeniably vivid sense of place, yet there is a gravitation toward the tragic and repugnant that goes beyond description and toward a place of awed fascination.

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.

An original script from Arthur Miller, The Misfits turns on the playwright’s usual concern: that of the individual trying to maintain his identity in a changing world.

A Clockwork Orange ultimately asks: how deep is sin’s hold—on Alex, and on us? This being a Kubrick film—and considering that it leaves us with Beethoven’s Ninth triumphantly, transgressively ringing once more in Alex’s ears, after a fall from a window knocks the Ludovico out of him—the movie doesn’t seem to think humanity is worthy of an answer. To A Clockwork Orange, we’re all droogs at heart.

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

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

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

Considering the limited material, what we get from Washington and Zendaya is doubly impressive. There’s not enough in the text for them to form full characters, but wow do they nail individual moments, shifting from tenderness to cruelty to scorn to reluctant introspection (in this way the film comes across as a series of successful auditions).

Under the direction of Wyler, who is working from a novel by Jan Struther and won a Best Director Oscar for his efforts, this ultimately becomes a portrait of a community.

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.

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).

Part post-apocalyptic Western, part midnight motorcycle flick and part Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is, when you add it all up, a nutty, B-movie masterpiece.

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.

There has been debate over the graphic depiction of violence in the film, which is sickening and unblinking. Still, the explicitness undoubtedly forces you to face the brutal trauma that was inflicted upon women in this particular time and place—indeed, has been inflicted throughout history.

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

Soderbergh, who serves as editor, cinematographer, and director, gets significant mileage out of the visual conceit alone.

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.

Andersson catalogs misery of many kinds, and aside from the moments of humor in the film he offers no balm.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) manage a coherent tone of genial wonder, while also offering some stunning, color-soaked space visuals, as well as a witty camera.

Great horror movies are often built on guilt, and that’s the case with Relic. The film has creeping mold, strange sounds in the night, and gore to spare, but at heart it’s about the increasing shame a middle-aged woman feels for the distance she’s kept from her aging mother.

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.

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 your sense of humor leans heavily on wordplay and vaudevillian puns, you might even find the movie to be hilarious.

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.

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.

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

I counted at least five different movies in 28 Years Later, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland’s return to the zombie series they started with 28 Days Later back in 2002. Thankfully, each is brazenly, bizarrely, grotesquely compelling in its own way.

All Light, Everywhere is very smart and extremely meta (Anthony often films himself and his crew setting up a shot, to emphasize the observational point), though it can be a bit dry.

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.

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.

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.

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

This is too neat, tidy, and digestible of a take on such a wrenching topic—especially when we know the forces of injustice at work here were only temporarily stymied by this trial, and hardly defeated.

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.

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.

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.

With a mixture of cheeky stock footage (including, yes, Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments), ironic soundtrack choices, and abrupt edits that function as record-scratch exclamation points, Lane’s film breezily stays above the fray.

With After the Thin Man, the best thing about the series remains the playful, boozy, flirtatious repartee between Powell and Loy (even if Nick seems a bit bossier this time around).

A dizzying story told at a dizzying pace, Zola might register for some as a transgressive lark (it certainly has comic touches, including a montage of Stefani’s clients’ penises). My experience was more like a simmering panic attack; it’s “fun” in the same way Uncut Gems was fun.