Josh Larsen

Turning Red is a wonder in the way 13-year-old girls can be: monstrous one moment, heart-melting the next.

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.

The Deer King offers the personal touch of a hero’s journey alongside a more expansive vision of how to live in community. It’s a stunner.

A very particular sort of camera is at work in Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It peers from unconventional angles, lingers on images longer than they at first seem to deserve, and generally offers a perspective that is at once unremarkable, given the everyday subject matter, and revealing.

This is a movie that has the courage of its own convictions, but also the playfulness to wear them lightly on its ridiculously embroidered sleeves.

It’s Farrell who truly makes the dialogue sing, polishing off the punchlines (or responding to them) with facial reactions that add a few more laughs to every scene. Then, as the seriousness sets in, Farrell brings a deep sadness to the performance that’s staggering.

If you can get on its moodily monstrous wavelength, the movie will have you asking why we let some animals sleep on our beds and put others in pens.

With Chi-Raq, Spike Lee is vital again. This isn’t to say I agree with all of the movie’s politics or that he’s made a perfect film. What I mean is that he’s once again brought something necessary to the screen in a way that no other director could.

If all of this skewed romance doesn’t hook you, Park’s filmmaking choices likely will, including inventive transitional techniques that make this two-hour-plus movie unfold like a fluid dream.

Blitz gets a little preachy at times (perhaps another Dickens influence), but there is also a stark honesty about the dread and difficulty of living as a civilian under siege—as a person of color or not. And of course McQueen manages instances of jaw-dropping imagery.

As a director, Jia constructs sparsely edited scenes built upon long, single takes—nothing showy, just patient, uninterrupted attention given to the characters in a way that feels empathetic and mournful.

It’s the moral imperative of the found-footage formalism that sets REC apart, transforming Angela’s camera from a visceral instrument of voyeurism into a tragic, last-gasp tool of truth and justice.

Priscilla is one of Sofia Coppola’s “moments movies” — stories told not necessarily via plot, but via the textures, sounds, and accessories that combine to create an indelible 30 seconds or so, seconds which say as much about a character and their experience as endless pages of dialogue could.

Ballooning. Biking. Swimming. Parachuting. The Great Muppet Caper represented a giant leap for Muppetkind, in only their second big-screen outing.

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.

A collage of religio-goth gestures, Mother Mary never adds up to quite as much as it promises. But the movie has a somnambulant pull, thanks to its woozy imagery and cloistered, two-hander structure, in which Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel circle each other like figures in a hazy dream.

It has an optimistic charm all its own, as well as strong performances throughout—especially from White and Buckley.

This is a movie that’s honest about night coming on, but it also reminds us of the small things that will get you through that night, until the morning dawns.

As long as the movie remains a lightly comic meditation on aging, relationships, and time—say, a junior Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—it’s fantastic and frequently moving. But large chunks veer into television-drama territory, where the movie operates in a more generic register.

Splendor in the Grass may seem quaint, even silly. But anyone who’s thrown – or endured – a teenager’s temper tantrum will recognize the anger and confusion on the screen as genuine. In that sense, Splendor will never be out of touch.

Rex, meanwhile—an actor and former VJ with a brief early stint in adult entertainment—delivers an unequivocally great comic performance. Simultaneously sweet and icky, he gives the character a light, even gentle spirit that’s at odds with the materialist manner with which he thinks about and engages in sex.

Sophie delivers three “confessions” over the course of the film, each delivered by Streep with what can only be called a commanding fragility.

Sure, Risky Business is partially an adolescent fantasy, but it’s even more about how the prosperity pressures placed upon Joel Goodsen have frayed his nerves to the point that he can’t even bring his erotic dreams to fruition.

After a bumpy, Mr. Mom-style start, director Robert Benton settles the film into a quietly observed depiction of the challenges and rewards of single parenting, anchored by a Hoffman performance that mostly shakes off his gesticulating instincts in favor of a relational rootedness (he’s particularly good with young Justin Henry as the boy).

Just Mercy is a testament to what talented actors can do with material that might otherwise be stifling.

While the baby Ochi is something of a Grogu-Gizmo hybrid, the use of puppetry and animatronics gives it an idiosyncratic scruffiness. It feels as if you’re encountering a new species, not watching a digitized fantasy film.

Turner and Douglas have great chemistry—in their best moments, they recall Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable on the road in It Happened One Night—helped by the fact that Douglas is willing to be undercut by both Turner and the screenplay.

As 1917 goes on and the pair face a series of logistical challenges (navigating a collapsing bunker, crossing a bombed-out bridge), the film’s form begins to resemble that of a video game—only without the user interaction that makes games so compelling.