Josh Larsen

It’s all incredibly immersive, to the point that these everyday farm animals—the sort that usually only receive a passing glance—begin to seem fascinatingly alien.

Cumberbatch makes every moment he’s onscreen mesmerizing—entertaining and terrifying at the same time.

This is a creature flick, yes, but Alien is also on par with a genre masterpiece such as Jaws. The craftsmanship is that sound, the inventiveness that clever, the characterization that strong. And then there is the not-small matter of Alien being a seminal feminist action flick.

The definitive zombie picture.

A bit ham-fisted in its call to arms, Foreign Correspondent also fails in trying to force a romance between McCrea and Day. But there are plenty of signature Hitchcock sequences to recommend it.

With Zama, Martel no longer hints at that past, but actively exhumes it, unleashing ghosts in the process.

Works of art like these are more than creative endeavors. They function more as testaments: to the lives of their subjects, to the awfulness of death, and to the inspired ways we cling to the former, even in the face of the latter.

A Woman Under the Influence made me wonder: What’s the point of only showing a mentally challenged character’s distress? Is it fair to reduce Mabel to her rock-bottom experiences?

Wyler is smart enough to plant the camera fixed on Streisand, from the shoulders up, for her final number, “My Man.” Always willing to let his stars be the star, Wyler may have been the perfect choice to center her, for the first time, on the big screen.

For much of The Conversation you think you’re watching a person unraveling, but then the horrifying ending—where the editing and sound design become really sinister—reveals that the movie has been deconstructing the audience as well.

The bitter has not yet overpowered the sweet in this early film from writer-director Ingmar Bergman.

How Green Was My Valley thrums with an indomitable confidence in a better day, one that’s rooted in the memory that life in this valley – before the mine hollowed things out – was once very good.

As The Death of Stalin goes on, its cleverness withers into something more wearying.

There isn’t a boring frame in the film, even when the scenes involve little more than long conversations between two people.

Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark.

There’s joy in watching Cooper, for the most part, actually pull this off—including the gamble of casting an acting novice in the crucial title role.

As for Hopkins, he gives a precisely observed performance, capturing Anthony’s confusion without limiting the character to that single quality. He’s dazzling, for example, when turning on the charm for a potential new caregiver.

Overall, this is an uneven work of adaptation.

Leave No Trace, Debra Granik’s first fiction feature since 2010’s masterful Winter’s Bone, is a movie that’s willing to whisper. If you don’t listen (and watch) closely, you might miss out on the deep wells of emotion beneath its placid surface.

Of course, Cruz is luminous—especially as she embraces a maternal side that is at once nurturing and ferocious.

Mildred Pierce is a somewhat reckless mixture of film noir and soap opera. It opens with a murder and then proceeds to run on revelations and betrayals and wild swings of fortune. Yet the high-wire act works, largely because Mildred Pierce has the right trapeze artist dangling in the air.

It’s a signature achievement and utterly exhausting.

It’s amusing, in a Barry Lyndon sort of way, but also feels a bit blinkered. Discounting Napoleon Bonaparte as a buffoon who merely benefitted from societal chaos does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, he left dead.

Lean stages the events with an expert sense of suspense, then leaves us wondering what to make of the mythologizing that came before. Was all that whistling really the sound of legendary British resolve, or were those soldiers only whistling past their own graveyard?

There is a lot of joy in Faces—John Cassavetes’ second real “Cassavetes” film, 10 years after Shadows—and there is also a lot of anger. Often there’s a drunken combination of the two. But no matter what emotion dominates, the movie itself has the same edge, the same itchiness. It’s constantly scratching its own skin.

Yun’s portrayal of Mija has a novelistic richness to it, acutely observed in its details (the way she carries her purse), yet expansive enough to encompass the character’s long psychological journey.

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.

Directed by Marielle Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? has its funny moments—Richard E. Grant proves to be a sublime comic partner as Jack Hock, a fellow alcoholic who gets roped into Lee’s scheme—but mostly the movie is immensely sad, the story of a woman who deep down desires companionship but just isn’t wired to accept it.