Josh Larsen

Put it all together, and it’s as if Gerwig had dumped all of her own complicated feelings about Barbie onto the screen. This Barbie isn’t a problem to solve, then, but an experience to share.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is stingy with the stunts—though it only feels that way because the movie, in keeping with its bloated title, runs nearly three hours.

Crystal Skull (which I liked) didn’t really feel like a proper goodbye, however. Dial of Destiny does, allowing Indy to nobly, creakily hang up his hat and whip, leaving the rest of us in an increasingly exhausted multiverse of capes and cowls.

Song, a playwright, has fashioned an elegant script and displays a lovely feel for the camera, which unhurriedly finds its way to the places it needs to be. Yet Past Lives packs as much of a wallop as it does because of the intense connection of its leads (never mind that they’re physically disconnected in many of their scenes).

Asteroid City might be Anderson’s bleakest film, bordering, at times, on nihilistic. His comedies have always had a mordant edge—both The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited directly address suicide and grief—yet they usually employ despair as a starting point, from which the characters move toward healing of some kind. In contrast, Asteroid City—like the rumbling reverberations of those atomic explosions—quivers with disquietude throughout.

The unsung hero behind the best Pixar films is the story—the nuanced, inventive, resonant-for-all-ages narrative that provides a foundation for the indelible characters and dazzling animation. Elemental feels like a Pixar first draft, in story terms.

There is nothing like nostalgia here, but in the quiet consideration of how these days actually passed—what was dear about them, what was dangerous, and what has been irrevocably lost since then—A Brighter Summer Day gives early teen life, in all its complexity, a burnished reverence.

Led by directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, the animators lend clarity and excitement to the action, humanity to the characterizations, and—above all—a distinct vision for each of the worlds we visit.

I’m sure there’s a definitive explanation, but Enys Men strikes me as a puzzle that’s more enthralled with its individual pieces than any picture they might complete.

Bait functions on a subliminal level. A concoction of illogical insert shots, mismatched sound, and nonlinear edits, it has little regard for a cinematically conventional sense of time and space.

You Hurt My Feelings bursts out of the gate with four or five big laughs, then only adds emotional layers and dramatic complications from there.

A minor miracle.

A charitable reading of Master Gardener would be to say that it feels unfinished and unformed—that there might be something here with another pass at the script or a different cast.

Shinkai’s recent films have all been wildly ambitious in terms of their imagination and scope; Suzume might be the most impressive in terms of connecting that to a powerful emotional core.

A light delight, even if you have no experience with the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves takes its fantasy world seriously, but not itself.

Much of Vol. 3 feels like a combination of those exploitative ads from animal shelters and the Japanese body-horror endurance test Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Aside from that, the movie offers about 3,000 subplots and 2,000 supporting characters.

The movie, for its part, is fairly lively. Especially arresting, from a visual standpoint, is an extended sequence in which Beau encounters members of an interactive theater troupe in a forest.

Writer-director Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) paints a communal portrait with a large cast of characters, which makes the film feel a bit wandering and amorphous at times. Yet there are arresting, individual moments.

Showing Up is an argument for valuing the artistic process over the art—and each other, above all else.

An efficient thriller with eco-political ambitions.

Thrumming with energy—thanks to vivacious filmmaking from director Lola Quivoron and a ferocious lead performance by newcomer Julie Ledru—Rodeo takes place within the world of underground motocross in the suburbs of Paris.

Adonis’ motivations are less compelling here than they were in Creed—especially in the way they sideline his relationship with the pregnant Bianca. In the end, he does what he does so that there can be a Creed II, nothing more, nothing less.

Majors is easily the best thing in this third Rocky offshoot.

There’s an intriguing idea and an incredible sequence in Scream VI—which is just enough to justify this follow-up to 2022’s Scream (which itself was just clever enough to justify reheating the series 11 years after Scream 4).

The clarity and imagination of the world-building carried me through, as well as the fountain of charm that is Paul Rudd.

The undercurrent of economic insecurity is gone, replaced by a generic, “get-the-band-back-together” plot, but this sequel to Magic Mike still shines as a movie musical.

If Knock at the Cabin is mid-tier Shyamalan, at best, it may be because I was more taken with these formal choices than the story, which riffs on the Book of Revelation in ways that feel fairly perfunctory. I did appreciate the final moments, though, which resist any sort of Shyamalan twist and instead rely on an emotional, diegetic needle drop that I won’t spoil here.

We should never become accustomed to the horrors of war, so for all its familiarity (morally and formally), the movie still feels necessary.