Josh Larsen

This is one of [Hitchcock's] significant works, accented by wickedly effective insert shots and a handful of strong performances.

This ranks among the most mercilessly creepy children’s films I’ve seen.

In the end, After Yang is less interested in excitedly speculating on the inner life of its title character than it is interested in what we homo sapiens do with the lives we’ve been given.

There is pleasure and poignancy in that adventure, even as it grows, but I was content to immerse myself in the seemingly hand-sketched, watercolor-hued opening sections.

A tender miracle, Tender Mercies presents itself as a parable—though one of those tricky ones where you’re not quite sure of the takeaway. The biblical allusion is apt, because the movie is faith-soaked, yet not sopped. Immersed in religion, it nevertheless resists pandering to either touchy religious audiences or scoffing irreligious ones.

With that camerawork (the cinematography is by Jonathan Ricquebourg) and the elaborate, patiently detailed scenes of meal preparation, The Taste of Things easily deserves mention alongside the great food movies (Babette’s Feast, Big Night), while also being intensely erotic.

I’m sure there’s a definitive explanation, but Enys Men strikes me as a puzzle that’s more enthralled with its individual pieces than any picture they might complete.

McCraney has a background as a playwright, which may explain why High Flying Bird mostly consists of a series of zippy conversations. Each one is overstuffed with so many ideas—not just about sports, but also sexuality, faith, economics, and history—that the characters don’t quite register as flesh-and-blood figures.

With The Card Counter, Schrader offers another self-flagellating portrait of a man who’s experienced—and enacted—great sin, struggling to perceive anything akin to divine grace.

Near Dark boasts one of the horror genre’s most unique milieus.

Whatever ineffable thing Wong Wong Kar-wai does—let’s call it despondent extravagance—he distilled it into its purest form with Chungking Express.

Sure, this is mostly propaganda, a self-described memorial to the men who sacrificed their lives in World War I, but at the same time it’s honest enough to include a scene—60 years before Born on the Fourth of July—in which a returning soldier makes a tearful confession to the family of a lost pilot.

I could watch Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck whisper while staring deeply into each other’s eyes for ages, yet Spellbound still registers as a talky exploration of psychoanalysis, something director Alfred Hitchcock would later examine with more insinuating subtext in his masterpieces of the 1950s and ’60s.

Endgame provides something truly satisfying: a sense of closure.

The People’s Joker feels less like the work of someone who wants to watch the Batman burn and more like a refashioning of a modern myth for personal purposes. It’s the ultimate kill-the-author gesture, one that ironically gives birth to another author. No, even better: a community of authors, working together to create something wholly new and true.

I defy anyone to resist the pair’s commitment to their bits, many of which involve hidden-camera work on the streets of Toronto—or above them.

Ramsay, whose Ratcatcher was noxiously obsessed with the miseries of life in a 1970s Glasgow housing complex, finds a locus in Morvern’s stunned grief. Morvern Callar is equally bleak, but to a purpose.

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.

The techniques ultimately reveal the way art can foster the sort of emotional connection that is vital to the human experience.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is, in essence, a masterpiece of ingeniously edited reaction shots.

Honest, incisive, and deeply sympathetic, Beach Rats is an intimate portrait of the cost that is paid when a teenager feels societal pressure to remain closeted.

As for the two leads, they have charm to spare, and it’s startling to see Hepburn bring bitterness to bear on her trademark wit, but the relationship and all its foibles still feel prescribed by the overall structure, not borne of real life.

There’s a lot of invention here, but as a complete film Barbarian lacks coherence.

No matter where the film leaves us narratively, however, its evocation of estrangement—even, perhaps especially, as part of an Internet where we can talk to anyone at anytime—is both emotionally palpable and cinematically potent.

The movie vacillates between a metaphorical meditation on the debilitating demands of motherhood in general and a reality-based drama about dealing with a particular child eating disorder, yet Byrne gives a performance that’s game for both.

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.

It comes at you hard, bright, and fast. This is an angry, explicitly funny movie that refuses to conform to a three-act structure. Instead, it plays like a series of loosely connected skits riffing on the impossibility of black identity in a United States that’s hurtling toward classist, capitalistic implosion.

It’s not the sum of its parts, so much as it is the way De Niro and Grodin make almost every one of those parts glisten.