Josh Larsen

It’s a lot, and only becomes more so, but something about the movie’s central idea—as well as the black streak of humor Fargeat brings to the proceedings—kept me hooked.

The stunning set pieces take full advantage of animation’s unique mastery over time and space, so that we don’t just watch the characters’ daredevil exploits – we’re spinning and whirling right along with them. It’s as if we’ve mastered space and time ourselves.

James and the Giant Peach is a wondrous interpretation of Dahl’s book that revives the magical possibilities of film while liberating our own imaginations as well.

Anyone who’s seen Beau Travail knows that Denis is a master of color. Here she uses the ship’s lighting system to shift between cool, medical blues and warm, arousing reds. And in the “garden,” a lush conservatory space where the crew grows their food, the deep greens evoke a primordial Eden, a place where nakedness carried no shame. The goings-on in High Life—including two instances of sexual assault—are like a crash landing into the Fall.

Nosferatu feels unique compared to other Dracula variations in the way this world appears drained—of color, light, nearly life itself. It’s as if blood has been sucked from the very images.

This is largely Dickens as farce, which is occasionally fun—Peter Capaldi is a delightful Mr. Micawber, whose creditors are so insistent they try to yank his rug out from under his front door—but it often feels forced.

Ramsay has a gifted eye—the opening shot, of a boy twisting himself in a lacy curtain, is a stunner—and she establishes an undeniably vivid sense of place, yet there is a gravitation toward the tragic and repugnant that goes beyond description and toward a place of awed fascination.

If you gave Jordan Peele a list of random cultural ingredients—some songs, a few television shows, a film genre or two, a variety of actors—chances are he could concoct a smart, funny, thrilling filmgoing experience out of the randomness. Peele makes pop-culture smoothie movies that are nutritious and delicious.

An original script from Arthur Miller, The Misfits turns on the playwright’s usual concern: that of the individual trying to maintain his identity in a changing world.

A Clockwork Orange ultimately asks: how deep is sin’s hold—on Alex, and on us? This being a Kubrick film—and considering that it leaves us with Beethoven’s Ninth triumphantly, transgressively ringing once more in Alex’s ears, after a fall from a window knocks the Ludovico out of him—the movie doesn’t seem to think humanity is worthy of an answer. To A Clockwork Orange, we’re all droogs at heart.

In Longlegs, writer-director Oz Perkins establishes a strong enough sense of mood and atmosphere to absorb a DEFCON-2 level Nicolas Cage performance

Broker marks another minor miracle from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, featuring another one of his makeshift families.

Women Talking reduces women to their words, as the title implies, a choice that is bold but limiting.

Considering the limited material, what we get from Washington and Zendaya is doubly impressive. There’s not enough in the text for them to form full characters, but wow do they nail individual moments, shifting from tenderness to cruelty to scorn to reluctant introspection (in this way the film comes across as a series of successful auditions).

Under the direction of Wyler, who is working from a novel by Jan Struther and won a Best Director Oscar for his efforts, this ultimately becomes a portrait of a community.

The two main characters in The Royal Hotel—young women abroad who take bartending jobs at a run-down resort in the Australian outback after they’ve run out of traveling funds—make so many ill-advised choices that you begin to wonder if director Kitty Green, who wrote the film with Oscar Redding, is conducting some sort of feminist litmus test.

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).

Part post-apocalyptic Western, part midnight motorcycle flick and part Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is, when you add it all up, a nutty, B-movie masterpiece.

These three form a fascinating trio—especially when Eddie inevitably begins to revert to the chaotic choices of his youth—but in truth, that camera is the story. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese doesn’t just offer an endless array of exciting movements and cuts. He also gives each one emotional heft and thematic purpose, evoking adrenaline, uncertainty, antagonism, anger, and hubris at just the right moments.

Children of Heaven is a simple film – it has bold, childlike colors and a narrative that turns on unremarkable, everyday events – yet Majidi and his young actors invest it with such basic truth about the inner lives of children that the movie feels as big as the universe.

There has been debate over the graphic depiction of violence in the film, which is sickening and unblinking. Still, the explicitness undoubtedly forces you to face the brutal trauma that was inflicted upon women in this particular time and place—indeed, has been inflicted throughout history.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who would remake the movie in 1956 with James Stewart, invests each scene with a blithe sense of fun.

Soderbergh, who serves as editor, cinematographer, and director, gets significant mileage out of the visual conceit alone.

Maestro does manage an incredibly moving later section depicting Bernstein’s response to Felicia’s struggle with cancer (though much of these scenes owe their power to Mulligan), yet I ultimately came away feeling that the movie was more interested in Cooper as an artist than Bernstein.

Andersson catalogs misery of many kinds, and aside from the moments of humor in the film he offers no balm.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) manage a coherent tone of genial wonder, while also offering some stunning, color-soaked space visuals, as well as a witty camera.

Great horror movies are often built on guilt, and that’s the case with Relic. The film has creeping mold, strange sounds in the night, and gore to spare, but at heart it’s about the increasing shame a middle-aged woman feels for the distance she’s kept from her aging mother.

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.