Josh Larsen

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LarsenOnFilm
For 903 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Josh Larsen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 75
Highest review score: 100 Son of Saul
Lowest review score: 25 Murder by Death
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 772 out of 903
  2. Mixed: 73 out of 903
  3. Negative: 58 out of 903
903 movie reviews
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    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Moana 2
    You can feel the warm ocean breeze against your cheek while watching Moana 2, so supple and visceral is the animated artistry on display.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Brutalist
    The Brutalist is a momentous movie, if not quite as momentous as it thinks it is.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    The techniques ultimately reveal the way art can foster the sort of emotional connection that is vital to the human experience.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Nosferatu
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    The Room Next Door
    Much of what makes a great Pedro Almodovar film can be found in The Room Next Door: a layered narrative, a thoughtful color scheme, a focus on women, and an intense interest in sex and/or death. But a certain vitality is strangely missing, and not because of the subject matter.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Flow
    Harrowing, certainly, but also a beautiful promise of renewal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    National Anthem
    Plummer, so good in Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete (another horse movie of a sort), shines here, especially in one of those final shots that holds on an actor’s face and asks them to seal the movie’s deal. Plummer does, with flying colors.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Wicked
    A powder keg of movie-musical performances, Wicked balloons the Broadway sensation in unnecessary ways—this is only Part I, despite the fact that it runs nearly three hours—but I hardly minded thanks to the dynamic force of its two leads.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    My Old Ass
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Josh Larsen
    Gladiator II
    Washington has the most fun, swishing about in dangling jewels and flowing robes, while Mescal—one of our best young actors—struggles to define Lucius outside of Crowe’s shadow. As for the relentless fights and battles, I found them to be increasingly tedious—even the wild ones with animals, given their reliance on CGI effects.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Rebel Ridge
    Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, Green Room) lets the racial tension largely simmer beneath the surface (Terry is Black), leaning into his trademark, straight-ahead propulsive style.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Dahomey
    Educational, intimate, and transcendent, Dahomey is a minor treasure of its own.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Josh Larsen
    Here
    There’s a beating heart to the film, but it’s faint.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Heretic
    Even as the movie itself unnecessarily spirals further into madness and attendant plot holes—perhaps inspired by the wackadoo escalations of recent horror such as Malignant, Barbarian, and Longlegs—Grant makes for a genially deranged host.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Anora
    Anora is a tale of two shots: its first and its last.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    His Three Daughters
    Unfortunately, as nuanced as writer-director Azazel Jacobs’ script is about sibling relationships and impending morality, it never allows this cast to break out of these types that are established in the opening scene.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Blitz
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Conclave
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Memoir of a Snail
    There’s a fleshiness to the material that you can almost feel, as if you were stroking your own face.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Sisters
    There is no doubt the material is elevated by the interplay between Fey and Poehler.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Piano Lesson
    It’s the performances that ultimately carry the film.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Apartment 7A
    I imagine Rosemary’s Baby purists will be upset with the various references and connections Apartment 7A makes to the first film, a few of which are clumsy, but nothing was egregious enough to trip me up—including the final sequence, once again involving dance, which I found to be rather brilliant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Wild Robot
    I was most drawn to the simpler, early sequences, where Roz finds meaning not in proving her worth through work, but in genuine relationship.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Megalopolis
    Only Driver seems comfortable—indeed, invigorated—by the apparently improvisational atmosphere and haphazardly operatic material.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Joker: Folie à Deux
    Unfortunately, Folie à Deux fails to take full advantage of the musical format. Returning director Todd Phillips—who showed a surprising command of cinematic language in the first film—fails to bring a coherent formal strategy to this new genre.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Wolfs
    Once Wolfs leaves the hotel the charm begins to thin (though Austin Abrams has a giddily dizzy monologue as a third wheel they pick up along the way), while a last-act attempt to inject a moral dilemma into the proceedings feels false. Yet for a dad—and, let’s face it, mom—movie, Wolfs could have been way worse.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Will & Harper
    Overall, this is genuinely moving and instructive, though I do wish it was a wee bit funnier, considering the onscreen talent and the fact that director Josh Greenbaum guided the sublimely silly Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Substance
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Josh Larsen
    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    The screenplay, by the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, is at once overstuffed—in this it resembles Burton’s Dark Shadows—and full of missed opportunities.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    The Instigators
    Much of The Instigators feels a little lost somewhere between Ocean’s Eleven and The Town, but the movie—starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck as desperate strangers who get paired up for an ill-fated heist in Boston—has enough camaraderie between the leads, as well as a sharply comic supporting turn from Hong Chau, to make for a breezy crime farce.
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