Josh Larsen

It’s astonishing, and a bit sad really, how prescient Real Life was in retrospect. In 1979, Albert Brooks had already predicted and skewered the contrived inauthenticity of reality television with this biting mockumentary, yet we’ve gone ahead and given over much of our entertainment hours to the format anyway.

The Northman throws a few wrinkles into its vengeance story, but doesn’t offer up much food for thought. This is mostly a visual extravaganza of gritty historical detail, mythic imagination, and brutally horrific violence.

Lust for Life features exhilarating scenes of Van Gogh at work, often set in the locations of some of his most famous paintings and punctuated with close-ups of the original artwork. Like the 2017 animated experiment Loving Vincent, the movie functions not only as a biopic, but as an exercise in aesthetic reinterpretation.

Onward may not rank among Pixar’s best, but the studio’s ability to gently tweak heartstrings, without overdoing it, remains intact.

If you’re going to take on an iconic role like Mary Poppins, it doesn’t pay to be timid. You might as well go for it. Emily Blunt does just that in Mary Poppins Returns, taking the Julie Andrews template, honoring it to a T, and adding her own lively spark.

You can see the movie’s influence on everything from Forrest Gump to Idiocracy to Elf, all comedies with oblivious, world-changing simpletons at their center.

Old is vintage M. Night: a high concept brought ever higher by a filmmaker apparently incapable of second-guessing himself.

Here and there, Coppola seems interested in poking that Murray persona. On the Rocks would have been much better if Murray had done some poking too.

As adapted from the beloved Jane Austen novel by screenwriter Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde, Emma. is a cheerful confection—brightly colored, briskly consumed—and as such a worthy representation of one of the great literary characters.

A smart, sweet gem of a comedy.

She Dies Tomorrow is compelling, but I can’t say I ever truly felt the infectiousness that’s experienced by the characters.

Ophuls’ technique is often on the nose, but it’s still exhilarating.

Moura captivates as the quietly seething central figure, while Filho’s use of saturated colors and lively diegetic music make The Secret Agent a sumptuously unsettling experience.

When it remains focused on Ruth’s subjective perspective, it offers something special, and tough.

Superman is a bastion of blockbuster innocence, a movie that’s a studio product, certainly, but also something that could have grown from one of Smallville’s sun-kissed cornfields.

When Cryer eases up and lets Duckie’s vulnerability show, there’s an undeniable sweetness to the character. Ringwald, though, is the true wonder: Andie’s head is always held high—and she frequently backs that up with a self-empowering speech—but her facial expressions are constantly in flux, revealing the many other things she’s feeling: uncertainty, insecurity, her own vulnerability.

Pandora—the stunningly imagined planet of James Cameron’s Avatar enterprise—has been populated by something unexpected and extraordinary: compelling characters.

The Nest proceeds pretty much how we expect before ending on a grace note that feels well-earned. It’s a compelling story, but what makes the movie special is the fact that we’ve had Coon to watch along the way.

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.

Shelley scholars will likely have much to quibble with here, but for Buckley admirers, The Bride! is a must.

I’m not exactly sure what tone Friendship means to set, but the movie itself feels confident in its own skin. And that counts for a lot.

The result is a sci-fi fantasy that’s part Fantastic Planet and part Miyazaki.

With a mixture of cheeky stock footage (including, yes, Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments), ironic soundtrack choices, and abrupt edits that function as record-scratch exclamation points, Lane’s film breezily stays above the fray.

If Test Pattern feels a bit unfinished by its end, it’s not because I wanted resolution—documenting the refusal of resolution seems to be the point—but because there seemed to still be more, especially between the main couple, to explore.

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.

Burning Cane doesn’t resolve things as much as it makes poetry of them, right from its opening shot of the radiant beams of the sun shining upon the drifting smoke of a smoldering sugarcane field. Sometimes it seems as if there’s no escape from the stain of sin.

Baumbach gets career-best performances from the leads.