Josh Larsen

Select another critic »
LarsenOnFilm
For 903 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Josh Larsen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 75
Highest review score: 100 Son of Saul
Lowest review score: 25 Murder by Death
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 772 out of 903
  2. Mixed: 73 out of 903
  3. Negative: 58 out of 903
903 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    The Mastermind
    O’Connor balances an outer reticence with an inner confidence throughout, then slyly brings the two qualities together as the film proceeds (notice how he fiddles with his wedding ring while otherwise effortlessly lying to a pair of detectives). J.B. isn’t an antihero, exactly, but something more fitting for a Kelly Reichardt film.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Bugonia
    Bugonia has its creative “pleasures.” . . But mostly it feels like we’ve been here before, with the same faces.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Die My Love
    Even though she’s playing a woman who is suffering, Lawrence brings a playfulness to the screen that leavens the depths of misery in which Ramsay’s movies tend to wallow.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    It Was Just an Accident
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Frankenstein
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Hedda
    Hoss (so riveting in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix) gives the strongest performance, arriving at the party with a goddess-like superiority that Hedda tragically chips away at as the night proceeds. Though not without a riveting fight.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Blue Moon
    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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    A House of Dynamite
    While the ensemble cast is laudable—Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee—there isn’t a Henry Fonda to anchor things.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Josh Larsen
    One Battle After Another
    This is a movie that’s not only singular to the filmmaker behind it, but to the moment it’s in.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey won’t work for everyone, but hearts of a certain shape may treasure it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    The Thursday Murder Club
    Standing out among the cast are Pierce Brosnan, clearly enjoying his scruffy beard and potbelly, and Helen Mirren, who threatens to turn this into something sexier and scarier at every moment. Chris Columbus keeps things on the straight and narrow, however, directing as if this were an adaptation of Harry Potter Book 78.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Echo Valley
    It’s no insult, though still true, to say that director Michael Pearce doesn’t quite have the Hitchcockian filmmaking chops to turn the silly into something sublime.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    The History of Sound
    A bit muted, especially for a movie about songcraft, The History of Sound nevertheless quietly builds in import until it reaches a devastating finale, one that musically meditates on the impermanence of love and life
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    The Roses
    Colman and Cumberbatch easily keep up—they’re comic talents too—yet the best parts of The Roses involve the two of them alone together, either happily or in detest, leaving dazzling trails of repartee as they zip along.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Lurker
    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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Highest 2 Lowest
    A mashup of Macbeth and the biblical chronicles of King David, all set in contemporary New York City, Highest 2 Lowest sees Spike Lee playing with classical narratives in order to explore a modern man’s artistic reawakening.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Ne Zha 2
    During the many fight sequences, the action has a brightness and clarity—in terms of line work and movement—that should be studied by anyone working on the effects side of American superhero movies. There is admittedly too much plotting; in fact, you could argue that a final-act twist isn’t even necessary.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Ne Zha
    If the movie, at times, feels exhausting, there are also painterly details to savor, like the flowing locks of a dragon or the shimmer of a seascape at sundown.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Weapons
    You might say that it’s inappropriate for a gory horror movie about missing children to nod toward such real-life tragedy. And I’d tend to agree. Yet I must admit that during Weapons’ bonkers climax—a darkly comic, insanely sustained sequence of violent comeuppance—I felt something closer to catharsis.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Josh Larsen
    Together
    It’s a great conceit, with abundant potential. But the movie gets off to a shaky start by failing to flesh out, so to speak, the central couple.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Josh Larsen
    The Bad Guys 2
    The animated action in The Bad Guys 2 has the deftness and ingenuity of a Mission: Impossible movie, but in terms of storytelling, this follow-up to 2022’s The Bad Guys represents a step back.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Eddington
    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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Sunlight
    If Sunlight worked even a quarter as well as it does, the movie would still have been something of a miracle.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Josh Larsen
    Superman
    By the movie’s merciful end, you wonder what a nice guy like Superman is doing in a mean place like this.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Jurassic World Rebirth
    Tell me that you have an expedition movie with clear objectives and unlikely odds, anchored by a compelling cast of characters, and you have my attention. Add dinosaurs and you have my money. Make it all work—especially within the context of the Jurassic franchise—and you have a miracle.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Josh Larsen
    Jurassic World Dominion
    The result is a convoluted, overstuffed narrative that operates like two parallel movies until they converge for an extended climax.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Sorry, Baby
    Remarkably deft for a feature debut—in terms of construction, tone management, and performance—Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby defies definition.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    M3GAN 2.0
    Pure horror fans might object, but I found this model of M3gan, also directed by Gerard Johnstone, to be just as amusing as the prototype—with a firmer sense of what it wants to do.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    28 Years Later
    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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Familiar Touch
    When it remains focused on Ruth’s subjective perspective, it offers something special, and tough.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »