Josh Larsen

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.

The best numbers in The Color Purple capture the anger and/or exultation of personal experience.

Devastation without manipulation. That’s the miracle pulled off by writer-director Andrew Haigh with All of Us Strangers, his supple adaptation of a novel by Taichi Yamada.

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.