Josh Larsen

A pileup of technology, population movement, and dehumanization, traffic is a natural subject for writer-director-star Jacques Tati, whose perceptive pratfall comedies are often concerned with how our humanity gets lost in the particulars of “progress.”

This is either the worst time for a movie like Jojo Rabbit or the best time. I lean toward the latter. I’m perfectly willing to concede that the film may come across as gauche in the coming years, but in November 2019—as an irreverently comic middle finger to idiotic, irrational tribalism—wow, does it feel good.

Wong captures this in his usual, expressive style, employing black and white at times and staggering the frame rate to accentuate heightened moments (including an aching slide into slow motion as the two men share a cigarette).

The Secret of Roan Inish is mostly a story about storytelling, and how folk tales and real life can intermingle.

Reggae music is a through line in almost all five installments of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, but in Alex Wheatle, it’s a lifeline.

Barry Lyndon is a costume epic that pokes fun of other costume epics even as it outdoes them.

Witheringly funny and willing to explore her own (her character’s?) flaws, Blank brings a vibrant brand of comic honesty to the screen.

The Truffle Hunters has a great subject—aging Italian foragers and their dogs, carrying on the storied tradition of searching forests for the rare fungi—but its true strength is in its compositions.

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

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a twilight film in more ways than one.

By making Frank the quiet focus of the movie, Mangrove becomes a document of both history and humanity—the story of a man rightly radicalized by the institutions oppressing him.

With Zama, Martel no longer hints at that past, but actively exhumes it, unleashing ghosts in the process.

By its bittersweet ending, Nomadland delicately suggests that Fern’s experience is a choice, but one born out of hardship. The “choice” represents the potential of the United States. The “hardship” is the nation’s capitalist curse.

Even here, in a calling-card genre exercise, the Coens are clearly interested in existential, quasi-spiritual concerns about guilt, justice, revenge, and violence. All that good Old Testament stuff.

So familiarity is certainly part of my outsized affection for this 1989 Joe Dante satire of suburban America. But I also think the movie has wider significance in the way it presents suburban expansion as a cheerier version of manifest destiny—an unstoppable force that gobbles up land and then quickly sets about circling the wagons.

Moss shifts into another gear for the truly disturbing finale, when those eyes flicker with thoughts of revenge and events unfold in a way that remind us that Whannell’s big break was as the screenwriter of Saw. The Invisible Man ends on a nasty note, but then again the 1933 film was nasty too. Given the omnipotent power of invisibility, humans apparently do their worst.

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.

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.

Watson is reliably sturdy in the lead role—you can see her panicked conscience in her eyes—but it’s Franciosi who grabs the film by its shoulders and turns it into a searing, singular experience.

Detractors might call it navel-gazing, but to me The Souvenir: Part II is introspection to adroit, therapeutic purpose.

There’s only one word for the power games going on between the two main characters in May December: delicious.

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.

At its worst, Pigeon and its predecessors seem to say, life is cruel. At its best, life is meaningless. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a laugh.

Intricate blocking keeps these early scenes visually engaging, but there’s no doubt High and Low takes off once the exec agrees to pay and we’re treated to an elaborate money-drop sequence, with the kidnapper staying one step ahead of the police.

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

Perhaps my preference is best explained this way: I’d rather live in the world of You, the Living. Songs from the Second Floor is the one I’d rather watch.

Slate gives Marcel a bit of wit along with that gentleness (I love when he teases Dean), but it’s the openness of heart you hear in the voice that defines the character—without ever making him mawkish.

A gory, violent consideration of end-times theology, the absence of God, and demonology, Bone Temple moves the franchise from the zombie genre into something closer to religious horror.