Josh Larsen

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LarsenOnFilm
For 911 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 8.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Josh Larsen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 75
Highest review score: 100 Citizen Kane
Lowest review score: 25 Murder by Death
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 780 out of 911
  2. Mixed: 73 out of 911
  3. Negative: 58 out of 911
911 movie reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Misericordia
    Stunning on every account, however, is the cinematography by Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Saint Omer). Working with an autumnal setting, Mathon manages to give each tree its own light, while also allowing the dark, mysterious undergrowth to add an unsettling darkness. Such shots are the most troublingly beautiful element of the movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Good Boy
    Good Boy is a harrowing experience for dog lovers—or possibly anyone who’s noticed an animal staring at something you can’t quite perceive—yet the movie never quite unearths the subterranean chills of the most potent horror.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Testament of Ann Lee
    It’s gutsy and largely works, though something about the theatricality of it all kept me at a distance.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    The Ugly Stepsister
    The Ugly Stepsister has macabre fun with what some women will do to make a shoe fit. It’s The Substance by way of the Brothers Grimm.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Train Dreams
    Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 25 Josh Larsen
    Wicked: For Good
    It’s ugly and tuneless, with characters whose actions are so arbitrary as to render any consideration of what it means to be “good” or “wicked” meaningless.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    O’Connor (Challengers, The Mastermind) gives a remarkable performance, tapping into Father Jud’s spiritual struggle while also nimbly managing the movie’s sense of humor.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Perfect Neighbor
    I point this out not to exonerate Lorincz in any way—goodness knows that the sheriff’s investigation in the doc’s final third gives her outrageously more leeway than a Black suspect would receive. Still in monsterizing her in this way, The Perfect Neighbor lets viewers off the hook.
    • 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.
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