Josh Larsen

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.