Josh Larsen

Tokyo Story is a work of considerable restraint. And all the more affecting for it.

There is hardly a shot in Orson Welles’ towering achivement that doesn’t employ some sort of ingenious trick involving the camera, editing, sound, staging or production design. Kane didn’t invent all of its techniques, but it’s one of the few pictures I can think of that uses almost every one in the movie playbook. The film is like a dictionary of the cinematic language.

Still ahead of its time.

The original Scared Straight!

A thrilling and infuriating burst of movie id, The Wild Bunch makes you want to slump into the dust and stare dumbly into the distance.

Au Hasard Balthazar has the transcendent beauty of a Renaissance painting and the inspiring fire of a sermon. It’s one of those rare movies that could change your life, by making you rethink how you live it.

Rashomon is a movie of ideas first and foremost. There is little room for subtext here. Matters of truth and human nature are debated in an anguished, grandiose acting style that can be jarring to contemporary, Western eyes.

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

Playfulness is the defining characteristic of Jules and Jim, even if what it largely entails is a tragic gender gap of fatal proportions.

The Night of the Hunter is nearly as demented as its lead villain, and I mean that as a compliment.

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.

It’s propaganda, yet of the most artistic variety.

A Streetcar Named Desire works itself up into a hurricane of emotional chaos, yet ironically, as these final scenes give in to hysteria, Brando starts dialing down. Depending on your reading, that makes Stanley either remorseful or sinister. Either way, he’s riveting. If Brando is calm at the end of Streetcar, that’s because he’s the center of the storm.

Dumbo ends happily enough...but all that comes in a rushed finale; the movie is more interested in capturing the shadings and sounds of sadness (so many scenes take place in the blue night).

The only thing I can imagine anyone offering in complaint about Roma is that the movie delivers an uncomplicated depiction of a secular saint. That’s true, to an extent, and yet it’s also what I love about this full-hearted, exquisitely crafted, deeply grateful film.

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.

Like Pulp Fiction, Breathless runs on pure movie love, even as its heedless editing and bursts of jazz were redefining the art form. If the picture feels slight for a masterpiece, that’s because Breathless is primarily about itself.

Perhaps the defining moment of Robert Altman’s legendary career. It was here, after all, where Altman’s signature traits were all assembled and perfected: the extensive ensemble cast, the fluid and unforced narrative, the overlapping dialogue that freed the movies from the stilted patter of the stage and injected them with the interrupted babbling of real conversation.

Farrow admirably bears the burden of carrying the movie’s dread, portraying Rosemary as sharp and wary, but with too many social forces arrayed against her for her to have a fighting chance.

Sansho the Bailiff stands as a humanist landmark alongside something like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which would come out a year later.

Lovers Rock is a work of freedom. Freedom from narrative, freedom from main characters, freedom from whiteness, freedom from discrimination. It’s about creating a space to dance, flirt, argue, smoke, breathe.

This adaptation of Don’t Look Now by director Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, The Witches) is primarily an achievement in hallucinatory editing.

This is a movie that’s not only singular to the filmmaker behind it, but to the moment it’s in.

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.

Beneath all the formal sophistication and dark humor, there is a roiling anger that defines Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

As more of the pieces of the puzzle are revealed, the movie never exploits them. Instead, they fall into place the way memories do. Indeed, the way the best movies do: as revelations that are nevertheless mysterious.

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

If Spielberg’s account of the Holocaust is not his greatest movie, it is still the defining moment of his career, the point where his yearning to be taken seriously (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) finally fully merged with his filmmaking talents.

Given a hurtling pace by director Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday might just offer the highest laugh-to-minute ratio in film, considering there are jokes in the dialogue, delivery and actors' expressions coming at you all at once.

Holy Moses! (No need to desecrate this with any more words.)

Decades before an apologist Western such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, The Searchers bluntly addressed this country’s racism toward Native Americans by putting one of Hollywood’s most famous faces on it.

You watch the film feeling as if life is precious—that every moment holds the chance for great wonder or great tragedy, even if, on most days, we live somewhere in between.

Nothing that occurs is out of the realm of ordinary experience—there is a wedding, a grandmother’s stroke, money troubles, a funeral—yet it all reverberates with meaning because of the camera’s careful attention and the sensitive performances by every actor in the ensemble cast.

Frankenheimer guides all of it with the loopy logic of one of Marco’s nightmares – you’ll certainly never look at ladies’ gardening clubs the same.

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

Ultimately, Jeanne Dielman registers not as a condemnation of domesticity, but a document of the exhaustion that comes from caring for others and never receiving care in return.

A paean to the nuclear family and the fertile soil where it ostensibly grows best—the American Midwest—Meet Me in St. Louis would feel a bit claustrophobic, if not cultish, if it weren’t for Vincente Minnelli’s elegant camerawork and Judy Garland’s spiky performance.

No film since Sunset Boulevard has better captured the spotlight’s cruel, heartless glare.

Song, a playwright, has fashioned an elegant script and displays a lovely feel for the camera, which unhurriedly finds its way to the places it needs to be. Yet Past Lives packs as much of a wallop as it does because of the intense connection of its leads (never mind that they’re physically disconnected in many of their scenes).

This is largely another of Malick’s impressionistic tales of paradise lost, but here the dreamy approach feels fresh and exciting.

Romvari imbues both halves with their own observational elegance, at once soft and searing. She has a knack for the incisive, off-kilter image.

Baumbach gets career-best performances from the leads.

Be careful with Petite Maman; the movie is small and quiet, but if you let your guard down, it might devastate you.

The bold cinematic techniques Welles employed in Citizen Kane are put to even more sophisticated use here.

Directed by Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo has its fair share of gunfights and saloon showdowns (including a bravura opening confrontation that unfolds with barely any words). Yet the film resembles other Westerns less than it does Hawks’ snappy romances, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and To Have and Have Not.

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.

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.

In spite of the clinical approach the filmmakers bring to No Other Land, the activist documentary nevertheless enrages. It boggles the mind (and moral compass) to watch ludicrously overarmed Israeli forces repeatedly destroy the homes, schools, and water-supply systems of Palestinian families who have lived on the land in question since before the establishment of the state of Israel.

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.

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.

There are clear reasons why some might consider The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp their definitive film: its very Britishness, its doomed romanticism, its cheeky bits of humor, and moments like the crane shot during Candy and Kretschmar-Schuldorff’s duel.

Wild is a relative term for Wong Kar-wai, the master of cinematic languor. You can feel the tension in his second film between genre excitement (there are jarring bursts of violence) and the languid sort of yearning that would become his trademark. These Days of Being Wild are both electric and exhausted.

Amidst all the controlled artistry on display in Tár, it must be acknowledged that as much as the movie seeks to skewer the pretensions of Lydia and her world (beginning with her flamboyant stage name, pronounced “tar”), it also exhibits its own indulgences.

It never really mattered what loopy plot was devised to get Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together in their musicals – once they started dancing in each other’s arms, all contrivances fall to the wayside and you clearly see they were made for each other.

Brother’s Keeper is more of a fly on the wall than opportunistic shock doc.

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

Like An American in Paris, which Vincente Minnelli directed two years earlier, The Band Wagon will either strike you as ebullient and exhilarating or aggressive and overwhelming—in both technique and theme.

We observe family dynamics that could take place in any home, at any time; as Noriko and Shukichi tentatively negotiate the future of their family, they’re enacting a story that’s both distinct to post-war Japan and straight from the pages of Jane Austen.

The genius of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is the way this deeply sentimental film continually deflates sentimentality.

The Wizard of Oz is frantic, enchanting and spookily surreal.

Weerasethakul casts spells, and this is a particularly auditory one, the weaving of a liminal soundspace.

Does Close-Up reveal the truth? I’d prefer to say it reveals the beauty of distortion.

Shockingly modern in sensibility, construction, and execution, Brief Encounter is very different from what one thinks of as a David Lean movie, whose historical epics have come to define posh, mid-century, cinematic excellence.

The incessant, rhythmic swishing of the chain gang’s scythes burrows into your brain – and then adds Newman’s supernova performance. It’s a gulag melodrama, if such a thing is possible.

Part historical document, part character portrait and part art project, The Act of Killing ultimately registers as something altogether more powerful: an exorcism.

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.

Ultimately, The Zone of Interest demonstrates what it means to have moral vision, to choose to see—or, in this case, hear.

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

The movie’s morality lies in its form.

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.

There is a soft sadness that permeates the film and steadily spreads, until it gradually devours each of the main characters. It may devour you.

As Yusuke Kafuku, the theater director, Hidetoshi Nishijima delivers a master class in withholding, while still giving the audience everything we need. He’s both stoic and seething.

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.

Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations.

Time puts a face—and a family—to the systemic injustice within the American prison system, asking why it took an extraordinary woman’s extraordinary efforts to reclaim basic human rights.

If anything identifies The Killing as a Kubrick picture, it is the movie’s overall sense of fatalism – even as we watch how carefully things are planned, there is a sense of impending doom.

If Swing Time isn’t the pinnacle film in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, it surely has their pinnacle production number: Never Gonna Dance, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields.

If the moral horror of the Holocaust is at once crystal clear and unfathomable, then Son of Saul exists in that tension, employing the art of cinema to create a singular act of remembrance.

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

Gently yet urgently, Flee gives intimate attention to one refugee’s story, while reminding us that Amin also stands in for millions upon millions of others across the globe who are subject to dehumanization as they simply seek a safer life.

There is nothing like nostalgia here, but in the quiet consideration of how these days actually passed—what was dear about them, what was dangerous, and what has been irrevocably lost since then—A Brighter Summer Day gives early teen life, in all its complexity, a burnished reverence.

Nickel Boys overflows with formal ingenuity and daring.

It’s nearly an apotheosis, in that the movie synthesizes his greatest achievements into a stirring, standalone work of art.

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.

Mosese’s camera is dispassionate, but deeply attentive.

Anora is a tale of two shots: its first and its last.

As for the actors, Weisz gets to showcase her skill for subterfuge, while Stone reveals new levels of manipulation and deceit. But it’s the lesser-known Colman, as Queen Anne, who ultimately wrests control of the film.

You know those countless slasher flicks in which a psychotic maniac slices his way through horny teenagers, only to be thwarted by the virginal heroine in the end? Halloween is the fountainhead. Despite countless imitators, however, few have been able to match the level of craft and psychological depth on display here. Halloween is a landmark, and a legitimately enduring classic.

It’s beautiful, powerful stuff. The Disney animators evoke a naturalism of such depth and detail that you feel shrouded by the forest. Then, just when it seems as if you’re watching a nature documentary, bursts of artistry arrive in the form of choreographed raindrops or a wildly impressionistic forest fire.

The Brutalist is a momentous movie, if not quite as momentous as it thinks it is.

Reinsve gives Julie both a hard edge and soft center, so that we root for her even when she makes decisions with which we disagree.

Featuring a pair of novice performances that will either make the actors stars or preserve them in cinematic amber as these exact characters, the 1973-set Licorice Pizza marks an ambling, deceptively breezy, and incredibly sweet effort from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson.

As an adaptation of Great Expectations, this is scattershot and unsatisfying, but as a fever dream you might have after reading it, the movie mesmerizes.

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

Devastation without manipulation. That’s the miracle pulled off by writer-director Andrew Haigh with All of Us Strangers, his supple adaptation of a novel by Taichi Yamada.

Greene seems to have produced a respectful account of the experiment, allowing these men to find some form of catharsis without exploiting them.

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.