Josh Larsen

Brilliant in terms of its overall structure, Kuritzkes’ script also manages crackerjack individual scenes that stack up one upon the other, like little chamber dramas within a larger opus.

If Fury Road wound its way, through much pain and violence, to a vision of a new “green place,” Furiosa leaves us in a place of tension, one caught between mercy and wrath, hope and despair. It’s the rare prequel that nearly feels necessary.

Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter with Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor. Her performance is one of the movie’s strengths.

While pop culture will never replace our need for genuine connection—for a relationship that both gives and receives—a movie like this, with a welcoming weirdness that communicates in a subliminal way, offers sustenance to anyone who has felt misunderstood, ostracized, and unsure of themselves. Even amidst the movie’s horror, there’s a glow here that feels warm.

The Fall Guy isn’t perfect, but as a crowd-pleasing, romantic action comedy, driven by the magnetism of its stars, it feels like an increasingly rare treat.

If not a cohesive whole, then, Evil Does Not Exist still has its captivating moments as a modestly scaled eco-parable.

This is a movie I was somewhat dreading—its premise just seems too possible in these fractious days—yet Garland managed to imbue Civil War with a solemnity and maturity that made me grateful for it. Let’s hope it remains a warning, not a weather vane.

If the movie’s straightforward dramatic and dialogue scenes don’t have the same delicacy as its more poetic gestures—especially once increasing crime, police harassment, and discriminatory housing policies close in on these two families—the film still stirs the soul as a counter-document to alarmist history.

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.