Josh Larsen

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.

It’s gutsy and largely works, though something about the theatricality of it all kept me at a distance.

What follows is a slightly unfocused twist on the sex-and-death genre; promiscuity is punished, yes, but out of hypocritical jealousy rather than any sort of moral high ground. If this doesn’t entirely work, it’s because of the movie’s depiction of the elderly couple.

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.

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.

Prince of the City mostly feels like a competent procedural, but it occasional startles with images of similar artistry.

The brilliance of the screenplay, which Wenders wrote with Takuma Takasaki, is the way it doesn’t inflate the interruptions to Hiryama’s happiness (a pushy coworker, the appearance of an estranged sister) into contrived drama.

By far the highlight is Astaire and Rogers’ impossibly fluid routine to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” in which even that formidable song knows its place and quiets down for a portion of their dance. The two are so elegantly in sync that the ill-fitting conventions of The Gay Divorcee simply melt away.

The more avant-garde this becomes, the more interesting—aesthetically and thematically—Four Daughters is.

Perhaps the best lead performance of 2023 belongs to Hüller, who is achingly sincere as Sandra, while never pleading for an ounce of audience sympathy. It’s her purposeful performance, more than anything else, that opens the door to doubt.

Incredibles 2, written and directed by original filmmaker Brad Bird, consists of two parallel narratives.... Together, they add up to a joyous and cathartic riff on working parenthood in this multitasking millennium.

In Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece Solaris, a character observes that even in the depths of outer space, “we want a mirror.” Perhaps that’s why Ad Astra—starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut in the near future who travels to Neptune to find his missing scientist father—feels like the most visually arresting session of talk therapy you’ve ever experienced.

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

You Hurt My Feelings bursts out of the gate with four or five big laughs, then only adds emotional layers and dramatic complications from there.

Unlike his last two films, Song to Song and Knight of Cups, which dithered in a metaphysical malaise, this thrums with a spiritual vigor.

A piercing dignity defines this infamous Tod Browning picture, in which a community of circus sideshow performers exact revenge on the trapeze beauty who exploits one of their own.

Crime may not pay, but The Public Enemy was one of the first pictures to recognize that it sure can be exciting to watch.

Bergman Island deftly interrogates the idolization of art and the lionization of artists, while also distinguishing between experiencing a place and sucking it for “inspiration.”

Put it all together, and it’s as if Gerwig had dumped all of her own complicated feelings about Barbie onto the screen. This Barbie isn’t a problem to solve, then, but an experience to share.

Strange and vaporous, The Eternal Daughter confirms Hogg as a filmmaker who knows how to transmute her most intimate ruminations in cinematically provocative ways.

The actor’s cadences and vocal register are different than the real Rogers (did I detect an illogical Southern accent here and there?), but he mostly embodies the lightness with which Rogers held the screen, the unhurried manner in which he spoke to people, and the way, while watching his show, the world stopped for a little while and you felt like someone deeply cared.

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

In this early feature, which he co-wrote and co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, Sean Baker displays a soon-to-be-familiar instinct and affection for characters existing on the edges of society. If his eye for casting and sense of narrative drive isn’t finely honed yet, you can still sense a unique cinematic perspective being brought to bear on an overlooked milieu.

Mostly a work of stop-motion, the movie boasts expansive, intricately detailed sets that the eye can’t help but want to explore, despite the horrors that take place among them.

As a storyteller adept at evoking both the mundane and the metaphysical, Nyoni is a talent to watch.

Deliverance is a harsh film asking harsh questions, less a thrilling adventure movie than an ecological, existential nightmare.

The Ross brothers—who handle the cinematography and editing in addition to directing duties—manage some indelible images, even as they stay as inconspicuous as possible.

Writer-director Paul Harrill stages a gripping early investigation sequence—in which Shelia wanders the home alone at night, asking any supernatural presence to make itself known—but otherwise the film largely consists of long conversation scenes that verge on the inert.