Josh Larsen

The People’s Joker feels less like the work of someone who wants to watch the Batman burn and more like a refashioning of a modern myth for personal purposes. It’s the ultimate kill-the-author gesture, one that ironically gives birth to another author. No, even better: a community of authors, working together to create something wholly new and true.

Kudos to Patel for not making a dull vanity project for his feature directorial debut, but Monkey Man is still a rough watch of its own kind.

Kudos to her and her team for finding a way—through imaginative production design and backup dancers who essentially serve as supporting characters—to make her music feel both intimate and anthemic, something like a diary entry meant not to be hidden under a bed, but chanted by the masses.

Kong brings the personality, Godzilla brings the power, and we get to have the fun.

Bad in ways that are similar to 1989’s Road House—namely, an uneven handle on how seriously to take its silly premise.

This is scruffy around the edges, especially with the awkward insertion of its politics, but there is no denying the movie’s potency as a metaphor for alcoholism.

There are moments when Godzilla: King of the Monsters resembles a fantasy version of a National Geographic documentary—except those tend to deliver far more stunning visuals without any special effects whatsoever.

Skull Island circles around a number of intriguing ideas—about American arrogance and the post-war military-industrial complex, to name just two—but never quite coheres into anything particularly incisive. The movie gives good Kong though.

Little context beyond that narration is provided, a wise choice that provides the sort of self-imposed restrictions that a good biopic—fictional or documentary—needs.

The Tuba Thieves doesn’t quite have the mastery of the collage form you’ll find in somewhat similar experiments like Leviathan or Cameraperson, so that some of its ideas and images can feel scattershot, yet it undeniably subverts the tools of cinema in a uniquely compelling way.

Love Lives Bleeding has a grimy verve all its own. It’s a nightmare metaphor for how hard some people have to fight for love, especially when it’s not approved of.

To its credit, the movie gently questions Nyad’s compulsion—especially as it relates to her treatment of Bonnie—but it’s too eager to sweep all that under the rug when it comes time for the triumphant final swim.

The movie’s dark magic occurs when the stop-motion story and the narrative proper bleed into each other (often literally), with goopy puppets invading Ella’s space while she—perhaps psychologically, perhaps in reality—finds herself trapped in theirs.

In Drive-Away Dolls, almost every line is squeezed a bit too hard for cleverness, while the acts of violence frequently cross over into callousness. And although Qualley’s verbal dexterity is impressive (even if it owes a lot to Holly Hunter’s Edwina in Raising Arizona), her performance mostly made me eager to see what she might do in the future, with stronger comic material.

You’ll have to look for a spirited defense of the movie’s snowballing narrative, as well as the complicated character motivations driving it, elsewhere. I’m here to tell you to set much of that aside, breathe in the precious spice that has brought warring parties to the desert planet of Arrakis, and simply take the trip.

Thanks in part to McKenna-Bruce’s performance, How to Have Sex never feels exploitative. She gives Tara a sharp emotional intelligence.

The brilliance of the screenplay, which Wenders wrote with Takuma Takasaki, is the way it doesn’t inflate the interruptions to Hiryama’s happiness (a pushy coworker, the appearance of an estranged sister) into contrived drama.

You watch the film feeling as if life is precious—that every moment holds the chance for great wonder or great tragedy, even if, on most days, we live somewhere in between.

Rustin is a dutiful history-lesson movie of the type that usually fails to stir me, yet in recent years I’ve come to put more value on such efforts. If any acknowledgment of the difficult, “inconvenient” periods of America’s past are going to be banned from libraries and schools, then let art do what it can to fill in the gaps.

With that camerawork (the cinematography is by Jonathan Ricquebourg) and the elaborate, patiently detailed scenes of meal preparation, The Taste of Things easily deserves mention alongside the great food movies (Babette’s Feast, Big Night), while also being intensely erotic.

The movie’s most distinctive feature, especially as a family biopic, is the tragic nature of this story. The Iron Claw is a downer that ickily sticks with you.

The race itself is another of the movie’s astonishing set pieces; Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt give it a fresh sense of vroom, even if you think you’ve seen all the movie car races you’ll ever need.

Rye Lane may verge on corny at times in much of its humor and certainly its ending, but thanks to Jonsson and Oparah, you’re rooting for these two in every moment.

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.

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.

Wonka may be more Paul King than Roald Dahl—it bears the clever kindness of Paddington and Paddington 2 far more than the clever cynicism of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author—but a worse fate could have befallen the iconic title character.

Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki and his team of effects artists bring a thrilling immediacy and tactility to the monster sequences, but what I loved most about Godzilla Minus One is the way it evokes the sense of loss and mourning of the granddaddy of these pictures, 1954’s Gojira (Godzilla in the U.S.).

More successful as a quiet, nuanced family drama than a broad social satire.