Josh Larsen

Scales glisten, legs scuttle, antennae unfurl, all in a symphony of exquisite shapes and inhuman motion. Watching the movie is like peering into a living kaleidoscope.

A stylish, saucy entry in the “stepford wife” subgenre, Don’t Worry Darling treads familiar ground while wearing a killer pair of pumps. The movie won’t surprise you (although I found its “reveal” to be timely and perhaps even prescient), but it sure looks great while not doing it.

At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal.

The documentary displays such winsome artistry that you also leave feeling energized. It’s an invigorating act of creative defiance in the face of Alzheimer’s disease.

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.

You can argue with the movie in your head, even while you admit—say, when Dick and Jo dance their way across a stream by lightly stepping onto a floating raft—that your heart is having all sorts of fun.

Burge and Potrykus are both quite good—the director at one point even delivering a pitiable soliloquy/panic attack—but Vulcanizadora mostly unnerves due to the filmmaking.

Ford dials up the smarm of Han Solo and the hubris of Indiana Jones to portray a man who’s just smart, capable, and charming enough to be dangerous—to himself, his family, and the villagers.

Weerasethakul casts spells, and this is a particularly auditory one, the weaving of a liminal soundspace.

If Beale Street Could Talk is less interested in railing against systemic racism than lamenting the everyday goodness that is lost when racism carries the day.

Reinsve and Skarsgard work repressed magic in each scene they share—exploding on occasion, but still never directly confronting the deeper issues involved.

Writer-director Steve Kloves (who would go on to write the screenplays for all the Harry Potter films) takes three gripping characters who could each anchor their own movie, and crafts a film that honors all of them.

Mosese’s camera is dispassionate, but deeply attentive.

Reds is about the personal and the political and the intermingling of the two—what it meant for Reed and Bryant as a couple and, for Bryant particularly, separately. Both performances support the movie’s overall project: to demonstrate that these “reds” were real people, with good intentions, brave convictions, naive expectations, and—first and foremost—complicated hearts.

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.

Writing and directing her first feature, which she adapted from an Elena Ferrante novel, Maggie Gyllenhaal employs an intensely intimate camera, one that’s so tight on Colman’s face that at times her features are a blur.

White Heat is smart enough to give nearly every audience member whatever they could possibly want.

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

Rather than take a histrionic approach, Lee trusts his four-hour running time, allowing the evidence of governmental indifference and incompetence to quietly pile up until it becomes cumulatively enraging.

A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.

Good One is a crafty feature debut from writer-director India Donaldson, in that its unassuming air and “small” story create little ripples that eventually coalesce into something shattering.

The bold cinematic techniques Welles employed in Citizen Kane are put to even more sophisticated use here.

There are plenty of big laughs to be found in Theater Camp—Ayo Edibiri pops up to steal a few scenes—but it’s this ability to weave self-deprecation with theatrical passion that distinguishes the movie.

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.

Deep, dark forests; thorny thickets; spiraling castle stairs – every detail seems to envelop us. And then there is Maleficent, voiced by Eleanor Audley and undoubtedly one of the great Disney villainesses. Her transformation into a roaring dragon in the finale is so triumphant you almost want her to win.

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

Pure horror fans might object, but I found this model of M3gan, also directed by Gerard Johnstone, to be just as amusing as the prototype—with a firmer sense of what it wants to do.

Wild is a relative term for Wong Kar-wai, the master of cinematic languor. You can feel the tension in his second film between genre excitement (there are jarring bursts of violence) and the languid sort of yearning that would become his trademark. These Days of Being Wild are both electric and exhausted.