Josh Larsen

Unlike Daze and those other predecessors, Selah and the Spades never convincingly establishes its own stylized universe, resting somewhat uncomfortably between the real world and a fully realized, believably hermetic place.

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.

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

Wendy, director Benh Zeitlin’s follow-up film, works too—but just barely.

Onward may not rank among Pixar’s best, but the studio’s ability to gently tweak heartstrings, without overdoing it, remains intact.

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.

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

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed Margaret, deserves credit for the framework and dialogue he provides, but it’s Paquin who channels the roiling surges of that age with a startling combination of unpredictability and precision.

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

As long as Harley Quinn is on the screen, Birds of Prey has a propulsive, rollergirl energy. Unfortunately the screenplay, by Christina Hodson, unnecessarily complicates things in various ways.

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.

[Zellweger’s] unrecognizable, in appearance and level of conviction. Even with the gaps I have in her filmography, I feel safe saying this is a career-best performance.

Whenever the film settles on the two leads—who both melt into these real-world personas so thoroughly that Hannibal Lecter himself is soon forgotten—it becomes an intimate portrait of faith as a struggle, even for those at the very top.

I wouldn’t call Little a showcase for Issa Rae, who gets one of her first significant big-screen roles, but anyone who can bring this much life and intelligence to such tired material certainly deserves praise.

Erivo anchors even the hokiest scenes with exactly the qualities a faith-forward telling like this needs: conviction and fervency.

The reprieves are what elevate the film, including a mournful moment in the coda – I shouldn’t give it away – that was almost shocking in its starkness and bravery. Such thoughtful touches are far quieter than a dragon’s roar, but they speak volumes.

Yun’s portrayal of Mija has a novelistic richness to it, acutely observed in its details (the way she carries her purse), yet expansive enough to encompass the character’s long psychological journey.

The Turin Horse might befuddle you and it might bore you. But I guarantee you won’t forget some of the images, and more likely than not you’ll be left pondering their potential meaning.

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

As things go very, very dark in the last third, the tone control starts to slip, eventually sliding away in the final moments, when what had been a sly critique of toxic masculinity turns preachy.

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.

I could describe Uncut Gems for you, or you could try and hold your breath for a full minute and pretty much have the same experience.

The style is arresting and the leads are strong, but the story runs out of steam.

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

The film shouldn’t be snidely dismissed, despite its faults. With Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars limps to a close, but there’s still good in it.

A torturously convoluted extension of an already complicated narrative that can’t decide if it wants to be an origin story for snow queen Elsa, a romance for her sister Anna, a metaphor for living with grief and depression, or a parable about reparations due to indigineous peoples.

Haenel, who also appeared in Sciamma’s debut film, Water Lilies, is mesmerizing, conjuring a full person using little more than stillness and a direct stare.

During much of Black Mother, the top of the next frame can be seen peeking from the bottom of the current one. The effect is a certain cinema verite bleariness, but also the suggestion that the person upon whom the camera is focused has a story that not only matters in this moment, but will go on.

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 moral burden of wealth weighs heavily on Knives Out, a dexterously cunning, immensely entertaining whodunit that has more than catching the killer on its mind.

Writer-director Paul Harrill stages a gripping early investigation sequence—in which Shelia wanders the home alone at night, asking any supernatural presence to make itself known—but otherwise the film largely consists of long conversation scenes that verge on the inert.

Baumbach gets career-best performances from the leads.

Burning Cane doesn’t resolve things as much as it makes poetry of them, right from its opening shot of the radiant beams of the sun shining upon the drifting smoke of a smoldering sugarcane field. Sometimes it seems as if there’s no escape from the stain of sin.

The actor’s cadences and vocal register are different than the real Rogers (did I detect an illogical Southern accent here and there?), but he mostly embodies the lightness with which Rogers held the screen, the unhurried manner in which he spoke to people, and the way, while watching his show, the world stopped for a little while and you felt like someone deeply cared.

Ably mixing past and present sensibilities is no easy feat, but every person in Gerwig’s ensemble cast manages it.

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.

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.

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

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

Zhou is fantastic as the schoolteacher-turned-rebel-leader; clearly not content to keep her head down, she’s always peering out of windows to get the lay of the land, even before she officially joins the movement.

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

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.

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.

The real problem, however, is that neither Molly, nor Newbury, nor anyone on her staff is very funny.

You can feel the ungainly attempts to force that material into tidy little narratives.

In the lead, Mbatha-Raw delivers a shaken, exposed performance that hints at the more familiar stories of domestic trauma (drug use, suicide, having to give up a child) that this otherwise super story might stand in for.

As a political satire, Let the Bullets Fly is pointed and precise.

A predictable narrative is given rich contours in Little Woods.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece Solaris, a character observes that even in the depths of outer space, “we want a mirror.” Perhaps that’s why Ad Astra—starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut in the near future who travels to Neptune to find his missing scientist father—feels like the most visually arresting session of talk therapy you’ve ever experienced.

It Chapter Two has structural problems, character problems, and aesthetic problems.... But the movie’s main issue is an unexamined streak of cruelty.

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.

Ungainly in many ways (inconsistent in tone, unconvincing in locale, contrived in its plotting), Where’d You Go, Bernadette manages two stellar sequences that are raw and truthful enough to salvage the movie.

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.

I laughed a great deal at the bad-boy banter during Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. I also thought the action stood up alongside anything else in the franchise. But the thing I enjoyed the most about this riotously ridiculous movie is that way it functions as a near-brilliant exercise in cinematic parallelism.

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

The Farewell resists any temptation to be a wacky, extended family comedy and instead stays true to the sadness of its central premise.

Like Hereditary, Midsommar functions as an outlandish imagining of the effects of personal trauma, especially for someone who already struggles with an unsteady mind. Yet the psychology and the horror aren’t quite as holistically handled this time around.

Like its predecessor, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home is content to be a high-school movie first and a superhero saga second.

Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters.

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.

When The Dead Don’t Die sputters, you fear that Jarmusch’s political angst may have paralyzed him. But then there is the bleak, sardonic beauty of the climactic scene.

For all its pointed critique, The Last Black Man in San Francisco also offers a fair amount of whimsy.

Watching The Souvenir is like watching a friend drown, and being unable to help.

A mostly meaningless film about meaninglessness, Under the Silver Lake nonetheless has enough fetid charm to justify wasting a few hours on it. After all, the movie ultimately suggests that wasting our time is the best we can do in this rotten, rigged life.

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 Parabellum, the shootouts—and there are two disastrous ones, that finale and a mid-film sequence featuring new costar Halle Berry—are less about Wick (his motivations, his anger, his technique) and more about the grandiosity of the violence.

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.

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.

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.

Diane is brutally honest about the losses that can define this stage of life.

Endgame provides something truly satisfying: a sense of closure.

It’s as if Moss is directing the movie through her performance.

This bloated, big-screen take on the DC comic is dumb, but not nearly dumb enough.

I suppose if you wanted to be really generous to the film, you could argue that this Dumbo takes a subversive swipe at Disney, its own corporate overseer.

As Starfish becomes a more obvious personal metaphor involving betrayal and forgiveness, it also becomes a bit less interesting—even as it still marks White as an ambitious talent to watch.

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.