Josh Larsen

Ultimately, The Zone of Interest demonstrates what it means to have moral vision, to choose to see—or, in this case, hear.

It’s a signature achievement and utterly exhausting.

There’s only one word for the power games going on between the two main characters in May December: delicious.

There can sometimes be a significant gap between a great high concept for a movie and that concept’s execution. Such is the case with Dream Scenario.

It’s nearly an apotheosis, in that the movie synthesizes his greatest achievements into a stirring, standalone work of art.

Monster takes the long way around to get to the movie it ultimately wants to be, and I’m not sure the process is to its benefit.

The more avant-garde this becomes, the more interesting—aesthetically and thematically—Four Daughters is.

A shockingly raw combination of first-person reporting and personal video diary.

Emerald Fennell’s follow-up, as writer and director, to Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is another stylishly glib exercise, entertaining and engagingly acted until the bottom falls out.

The movie won’t change your world—but it’s nice watching two lost people experience a hopeful change in theirs.

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.

The Killer is a gorgeously sterile, de-romanticized riff on the likes of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (which notably features a near-silent assassin) and countless other hit-man movies, peppered with sideswipes at capitalism.

If The Holdovers is about anything, it’s about the hard, hard work of small acts of kindness.

Thanks to Larson, Parris, and Vellani, The Marvels feels like a breath of fresh air.

It has an optimistic charm all its own, as well as strong performances throughout—especially from White and Buckley.

The two main characters in The Royal Hotel—young women abroad who take bartending jobs at a run-down resort in the Australian outback after they’ve run out of traveling funds—make so many ill-advised choices that you begin to wonder if director Kitty Green, who wrote the film with Oscar Redding, is conducting some sort of feminist litmus test.

Priscilla is one of Sofia Coppola’s “moments movies” — stories told not necessarily via plot, but via the textures, sounds, and accessories that combine to create an indelible 30 seconds or so, seconds which say as much about a character and their experience as endless pages of dialogue could.

It’s fun, of course, but also a wittily verbose master class on the way voice can be employed in fiction.

Perhaps the best lead performance of 2023 belongs to Hüller, who is achingly sincere as Sandra, while never pleading for an ounce of audience sympathy. It’s her purposeful performance, more than anything else, that opens the door to doubt.

A work of astonishing tactility, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt reminds us that what we remember—what might matter most as corporeal beings—is not word or even story, but touch.

There is pleasure and poignancy in that adventure, even as it grows, but I was content to immerse myself in the seemingly hand-sketched, watercolor-hued opening sections.

I had no trouble believing all of the fantastic imagery that The Creator puts up on the screen; it’s the story I couldn’t quite invest in.

Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto manage cinematic flourishes that tell us everything we need to know in a particular moment.

If Carney had wanted to dive into the darkness of this drama—and Hewson has the heavy eyelids to do it—he might have enabled her to give a powerhouse performance. This perhaps isn’t the great Flora and Son we might have wanted, but it’s the pretty good one we’ve got.

As a storyteller adept at evoking both the mundane and the metaphysical, Nyoni is a talent to watch.

Bottoms—which puts a queer spin on teen sex comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, American Pie, Superbad, and (the partially queer) Booksmart—is at its best when it is at its most anarchic.

The Little Mermaid mostly takes place in an uncanny valley between imaginative invention and relatable live action. When we can see what’s on the screen, it tends to look like a cheapie commercial for Royal Caribbean Cruises.

The possession scenes are the calling card for the Philippous as filmmakers, whose 360-degree camera captures both the unsettling otherworldliness of the ritual and the giddy naivete of the teens.