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.

Certainly The Phoenician Scheme still fits within what I’ve come to call “Wes Anderson’s restoration cinema.” It just does so more plainly, less poetically.

Bob Fosse’s half-confession about what a jerk he was to the women in his life may pull a lot of punches, but there’s just too much art on the screen to completely disregard the effort.

There’s joy in watching Cooper, for the most part, actually pull this off—including the gamble of casting an acting novice in the crucial title role.

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.

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.

How thoroughly does Joan Crawford own Grand Hotel? She makes Greta Garbo superfluous. A star parade (and Best Picture winner), Grand Hotel unfairly encourages such comparisons.

Gazzara is riveting as man who exudes cool and calm—style—while also stinking of panic.

Unfortunately the screenplay, by Dana Stevens, relies on crowd-pleasing story beats and injects a groan-worthy romantic subplot; the movie yearns a bit too much to be a hit. At least director Gina Prince-Bythewood (Love & Basketball, Beyond the Lights, The Old Guard) brings a lively musicality to the sequences depicting Dahomey cultural rituals, as well as a clean ferocity to the many (and gruesome) battle sequences.

The Long Goodbye is cheeky and often cheerily meta, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a lark.

It’s astonishing, and a bit sad really, how prescient Real Life was in retrospect. In 1979, Albert Brooks had already predicted and skewered the contrived inauthenticity of reality television with this biting mockumentary, yet we’ve gone ahead and given over much of our entertainment hours to the format anyway.

The Northman throws a few wrinkles into its vengeance story, but doesn’t offer up much food for thought. This is mostly a visual extravaganza of gritty historical detail, mythic imagination, and brutally horrific violence.

Lust for Life features exhilarating scenes of Van Gogh at work, often set in the locations of some of his most famous paintings and punctuated with close-ups of the original artwork. Like the 2017 animated experiment Loving Vincent, the movie functions not only as a biopic, but as an exercise in aesthetic reinterpretation.

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

If you’re going to take on an iconic role like Mary Poppins, it doesn’t pay to be timid. You might as well go for it. Emily Blunt does just that in Mary Poppins Returns, taking the Julie Andrews template, honoring it to a T, and adding her own lively spark.

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.

Old is vintage M. Night: a high concept brought ever higher by a filmmaker apparently incapable of second-guessing himself.

Here and there, Coppola seems interested in poking that Murray persona. On the Rocks would have been much better if Murray had done some poking too.

As adapted from the beloved Jane Austen novel by screenwriter Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde, Emma. is a cheerful confection—brightly colored, briskly consumed—and as such a worthy representation of one of the great literary characters.

A smart, sweet gem of a comedy.

She Dies Tomorrow is compelling, but I can’t say I ever truly felt the infectiousness that’s experienced by the characters.

Ophuls’ technique is often on the nose, but it’s still exhilarating.

Moura captivates as the quietly seething central figure, while Filho’s use of saturated colors and lively diegetic music make The Secret Agent a sumptuously unsettling experience.

When it remains focused on Ruth’s subjective perspective, it offers something special, and tough.

Superman is a bastion of blockbuster innocence, a movie that’s a studio product, certainly, but also something that could have grown from one of Smallville’s sun-kissed cornfields.

When Cryer eases up and lets Duckie’s vulnerability show, there’s an undeniable sweetness to the character. Ringwald, though, is the true wonder: Andie’s head is always held high—and she frequently backs that up with a self-empowering speech—but her facial expressions are constantly in flux, revealing the many other things she’s feeling: uncertainty, insecurity, her own vulnerability.

Pandora—the stunningly imagined planet of James Cameron’s Avatar enterprise—has been populated by something unexpected and extraordinary: compelling characters.

The Nest proceeds pretty much how we expect before ending on a grace note that feels well-earned. It’s a compelling story, but what makes the movie special is the fact that we’ve had Coon to watch along the way.

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.

Shelley scholars will likely have much to quibble with here, but for Buckley admirers, The Bride! is a must.

I’m not exactly sure what tone Friendship means to set, but the movie itself feels confident in its own skin. And that counts for a lot.

The result is a sci-fi fantasy that’s part Fantastic Planet and part Miyazaki.

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.

If Test Pattern feels a bit unfinished by its end, it’s not because I wanted resolution—documenting the refusal of resolution seems to be the point—but because there seemed to still be more, especially between the main couple, to explore.

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.

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.

Baumbach gets career-best performances from the leads.

Of course, Cruz is luminous—especially as she embraces a maternal side that is at once nurturing and ferocious.

The Killer is a gorgeously sterile, de-romanticized riff on the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (which notably features a near-silent assassin) and countless other hit-man movies, peppered with sideswipes at capitalism.

At its best, the movie captures the thrill of those moments, whether romantic or friendly, when you realize something special is happening.

What’s difficult to get past, even in Encore, is the queasiness of those minstrelsy club numbers, where the White audience gazes at Black bodies as the camera performs pyrotechnics. The vantage point is simply too compromised.

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.

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.

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

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

Like Marty, the movie wants to impress us. And like Marty, there’s something about it I don’t trust.

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.

Most of the picture takes place on a luxury cruise liner – on which Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo are stowaways – and the setting makes for a wonderful comic playground. Racing up and down decks and in and out of cabins, the brothers exhibit a more sophisticated sense of staging and interplay than they did in something like Animal Crackers.

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.

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.

The movie’s best moments are those of cinebro-bonding between Pascal and Cage’s characters.

The Fishing Place registers more as a calculated, intellectual exercise—particularly in the bold decision to break the fourth wall with 30 minutes left in the film and remain there, again via a single take.

The central romance of I Know Where I’m Going! may be a bit of a drip, but swirling around it are filmmaking flourishes of the sort that the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would lavish on the cinema throughout the 1940s, under the name of The Archers.

The whodunit plot is a bit laborious and uninvolving, but William Powell and Myrna Loy are so delightful together—slurrily sexy in the manner of the 1930s, when words and glances had to do all of the work—that it hardly matters.

In addition to the requisite action and excitement, there’s a painterliness to Twisters that I didn’t expect.

The movie belongs, without question, to Fraser, whose performance relies not on pity or saintliness (Charlie has his faults as well), but a gentle, even beguiling belief in dignity for all.

A lot of fun, even if it could have been better if it had taken itself just a smidge more seriously.

Cukor does stage a crackerjack sleigh chase in the climax (the movies need more of those), while overall managing to capture Crawford at what feels like a crucial juncture of her career, just as the gloves were really coming off.

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).

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

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

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

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.

[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.

The definition of a satisfying Hollywood action drama.

One side effect of a tagalong project like Lightyear is that even while the movie is rightly being shrugged off as another reheat, moments of real artistry will get overlooked. The animation in this Toy Story-adjacent adventure is astounding; with each new movie, the studio advances the art form in incremental ways.

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.

With or without special effects, Twister delivers the same sort of suspense that’s been a staple of good drama since storytelling began.

Directed by Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? has its funny moments—Richard E. Grant proves to be a sublime comic partner as Jack Hock, a fellow alcoholic who gets roped into Lee’s scheme—but mostly the movie is immensely sad, the story of a woman who deep down desires companionship but just isn’t wired to accept it.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a pair of performances—no, it’s really a singular, joint performance—like what we get from Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo in Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.