Josh Larsen

Dazed and Confused distinguishes itself because it looks upon its characters with understanding—understanding that their foibles come from the fact that they’re at a stage of life when they’re still trying to figure life out.

There is hardly a shot in Orson Welles’ towering achivement that doesn’t employ some sort of ingenious trick involving the camera, editing, sound, staging or production design. Kane didn’t invent all of its techniques, but it’s one of the few pictures I can think of that uses almost every one in the movie playbook. The film is like a dictionary of the cinematic language.

Like Pulp Fiction, Breathless runs on pure movie love, even as its heedless editing and bursts of jazz were redefining the art form. If the picture feels slight for a masterpiece, that’s because Breathless is primarily about itself.

Washington has never been better, capturing the greatly varied phases of Malcolm’s personality while always giving us a full sense of a single man: sharp, smart, with a quick smile but also a simmering, righteous anger.

Part historical document, part character portrait and part art project, The Act of Killing ultimately registers as something altogether more powerful: an exorcism.

If the moral horror of the Holocaust is at once crystal clear and unfathomable, then Son of Saul exists in that tension, employing the art of cinema to create a singular act of remembrance.

First Reformed manages to be ascetic, poetic, and prophetic. It’s at once centering, thrilling, and disturbing.

Holy Moses! (No need to desecrate this with any more words.)

Like much of the filmmaker’s work (not to mention Bergman’s), The Sacrifice is haunted by the gap between human yearning and ultimate understanding, between the way things are and the way we long for them to be.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is, in essence, a masterpiece of ingeniously edited reaction shots.

The bitter has not yet overpowered the sweet in this early film from writer-director Ingmar Bergman.

Part post-apocalyptic Western, part midnight motorcycle flick and part Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is, when you add it all up, a nutty, B-movie masterpiece.

Sansho the Bailiff stands as a humanist landmark alongside something like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which would come out a year later.

This is a movie that’s not only singular to the filmmaker behind it, but to the moment it’s in.

The Remains of the Day belongs in the same conversation as Wong Kar-wai’s lush, masterful In the Mood for Love. Both swoon in secret.

Ultimately, Jeanne Dielman registers not as a condemnation of domesticity, but a document of the exhaustion that comes from caring for others and never receiving care in return.

Given a hurtling pace by director Howard Hawks, His Girl Friday might just offer the highest laugh-to-minute ratio in film, considering there are jokes in the dialogue, delivery and actors' expressions coming at you all at once.

Nostalghia is further evidence that Andrei Tarkovsky might not be a filmmaker, but a sorcerer.

Haenel, who also appeared in Sciamma’s debut film, Water Lilies, is mesmerizing, conjuring a full person using little more than stillness and a direct stare.

A tender miracle, Tender Mercies presents itself as a parable—though one of those tricky ones where you’re not quite sure of the takeaway. The biblical allusion is apt, because the movie is faith-soaked, yet not sopped. Immersed in religion, it nevertheless resists pandering to either touchy religious audiences or scoffing irreligious ones.

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.

Playfulness is the defining characteristic of Jules and Jim, even if what it largely entails is a tragic gender gap of fatal proportions.

Au Hasard Balthazar has the transcendent beauty of a Renaissance painting and the inspiring fire of a sermon. It’s one of those rare movies that could change your life, by making you rethink how you live it.

The original Scared Straight!

Under the direction of Wyler, who is working from a novel by Jan Struther and won a Best Director Oscar for his efforts, this ultimately becomes a portrait of a community.

Cumberbatch makes every moment he’s onscreen mesmerizing—entertaining and terrifying at the same time.

As wonderful as Fantastic Mr. Fox is, Isle of Dogs represents a leap forward for Anderson and his extensive team of stop-motion animators.

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.

It’s propaganda, yet of the most artistic variety.

Pixar’s 23rd animated feature is an exercise in psychedelic existentialism that astonishingly increases in inventiveness as it goes along. Then, before you’re overwhelmed, it shifts into a lower gear, eventually arriving as a stirring and relatively simple meditation on what it means to be alive.

Directed by Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo has its fair share of gunfights and saloon showdowns (including a bravura opening confrontation that unfolds with barely any words). Yet the film resembles other Westerns less than it does Hawks’ snappy romances, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and To Have and Have Not.

Nothing that occurs is out of the realm of ordinary experience—there is a wedding, a grandmother’s stroke, money troubles, a funeral—yet it all reverberates with meaning because of the camera’s careful attention and the sensitive performances by every actor in the ensemble cast.

The Night of the Hunter is nearly as demented as its lead villain, and I mean that as a compliment.

Still ahead of its time.

The genius of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is the way this deeply sentimental film continually deflates sentimentality.

The movie manages both senses of scale—the intimate and the expansive—with equal majesty, merging them into something moving, mesmerizing, and poetic, in a way only Lean movies could really manage.

No film since Sunset Boulevard has better captured the spotlight’s cruel, heartless glare.

As more of the pieces of the puzzle are revealed, the movie never exploits them. Instead, they fall into place the way memories do. Indeed, the way the best movies do: as revelations that are nevertheless mysterious.

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

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.

In Forman’s hands, McMurphy becomes more than a rebel in this specific time and place. He becomes mythic—a symbol for irrepressible Life.

Black Girl gathers a forceful and lasting emotional power.

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.

If Mel Brooks has a masterpiece, it’s this homage to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and ’40s.

Frankenheimer guides all of it with the loopy logic of one of Marco’s nightmares – you’ll certainly never look at ladies’ gardening clubs the same.

How Green Was My Valley thrums with an indomitable confidence in a better day, one that’s rooted in the memory that life in this valley – before the mine hollowed things out – was once very good.

If Swing Time isn’t the pinnacle film in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, it surely has their pinnacle production number: Never Gonna Dance, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Dorothy Fields.

This is a creature flick, yes, but Alien is also on par with a genre masterpiece such as Jaws. The craftsmanship is that sound, the inventiveness that clever, the characterization that strong. And then there is the not-small matter of Alien being a seminal feminist action flick.

Shockingly modern in sensibility, construction, and execution, Brief Encounter is very different from what one thinks of as a David Lean movie, whose historical epics have come to define posh, mid-century, cinematic excellence.

For much of The Conversation you think you’re watching a person unraveling, but then the horrifying ending—where the editing and sound design become really sinister—reveals that the movie has been deconstructing the audience as well.

In the end, After Yang is less interested in excitedly speculating on the inner life of its title character than it is interested in what we homo sapiens do with the lives we’ve been given.

Directed by Michael Curtiz, Captain Blood is much more than a showcase for one of Hollywood’s legends. The action sequences at sea crackle with excitement (and surprisingly intricate special effects), while the well-navigated narrative, based on a book by adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini, has the fatalistic scope of Charles Dickens.

The Wizard of Oz is frantic, enchanting and spookily surreal.

There may have been better made movies starring Crawford (she’s working with director Vincent Sherman here, not Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz, or George Cukor), but I don’t know if she ever had a richer opportunity to click on all of her intimate, melodramatic, and camp cylinders.

Disorientingly glorious and thrilling, it’s a beguiling mixture of believability and artifice, of the sort that only the movies can manage.

The movie’s morality lies in its form.

Lovers Rock is a work of freedom. Freedom from narrative, freedom from main characters, freedom from whiteness, freedom from discrimination. It’s about creating a space to dance, flirt, argue, smoke, breathe.

Does Close-Up reveal the truth? I’d prefer to say it reveals the beauty of distortion.

The movie stands apart from the French New Wave in that it is very much the story of a woman, not about a woman.

If Spielberg’s account of the Holocaust is not his greatest movie, it is still the defining moment of his career, the point where his yearning to be taken seriously (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) finally fully merged with his filmmaking talents.

Crime may not pay, but The Public Enemy was one of the first pictures to recognize that it sure can be exciting to watch.

Andersson catalogs misery of many kinds, and aside from the moments of humor in the film he offers no balm.

The incessant, rhythmic swishing of the chain gang’s scythes burrows into your brain – and then adds Newman’s supernova performance. It’s a gulag melodrama, if such a thing is possible.

The only thing I can imagine anyone offering in complaint about Roma is that the movie delivers an uncomplicated depiction of a secular saint. That’s true, to an extent, and yet it’s also what I love about this full-hearted, exquisitely crafted, deeply grateful film.

Train to Busan is a cleverly concentrated shot of zombie terror.

Farrow admirably bears the burden of carrying the movie’s dread, portraying Rosemary as sharp and wary, but with too many social forces arrayed against her for her to have a fighting chance.

Diane is brutally honest about the losses that can define this stage of life.

Kenneth Lonergan, who wrote and directed Margaret, deserves credit for the framework and dialogue he provides, but it’s Paquin who channels the roiling surges of that age with a startling combination of unpredictability and precision.

Passing is an impressionistic experience, much like the Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou piano piece that composer Devonté Hynes incorporates into the score, a portrait of an identity that refuses to be pinned down, for better and for worse.

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.

There is no denying that for most of its substantial running time (including a haunting post-credits sequence), Sinners sings.

The moral burden of wealth weighs heavily on Knives Out, a dexterously cunning, immensely entertaining whodunit that has more than catching the killer on its mind.

Written by David Koepp, who also penned Soderbergh’s Kimi and Presence, Black Bag displays the twists and intrigue you’d expect from a top-rate spy flick, along with some scintillating dialogue. But it’s the movie’s intellectual provocation and formal invention that marks it among Soderbergh’s best work.

You know those countless slasher flicks in which a psychotic maniac slices his way through horny teenagers, only to be thwarted by the virginal heroine in the end? Halloween is the fountainhead. Despite countless imitators, however, few have been able to match the level of craft and psychological depth on display here. Halloween is a landmark, and a legitimately enduring classic.

By far the highlight is Astaire and Rogers’ impossibly fluid routine to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” in which even that formidable song knows its place and quiets down for a portion of their dance. The two are so elegantly in sync that the ill-fitting conventions of The Gay Divorcee simply melt away.

During much of Black Mother, the top of the next frame can be seen peeking from the bottom of the current one. The effect is a certain cinema verite bleariness, but also the suggestion that the person upon whom the camera is focused has a story that not only matters in this moment, but will go on.

Anyone who’s seen Beau Travail knows that Denis is a master of color. Here she uses the ship’s lighting system to shift between cool, medical blues and warm, arousing reds. And in the “garden,” a lush conservatory space where the crew grows their food, the deep greens evoke a primordial Eden, a place where nakedness carried no shame. The goings-on in High Life—including two instances of sexual assault—are like a crash landing into the Fall.

A Clockwork Orange ultimately asks: how deep is sin’s hold—on Alex, and on us? This being a Kubrick film—and considering that it leaves us with Beethoven’s Ninth triumphantly, transgressively ringing once more in Alex’s ears, after a fall from a window knocks the Ludovico out of him—the movie doesn’t seem to think humanity is worthy of an answer. To A Clockwork Orange, we’re all droogs at heart.

Mostly the movie registers as a comedy flag being planted, a claim being made. Anything your average clown could do, Chaplin could do better.

Time takes on a different tenor in Train Dreams, in which the life of an early 20th-century logger in Idaho both flits by in a blink and makes an eternal mark.

Honeymoon in Vegas is a bit corny and contrived, but the movie gradually levitates above its limitations thanks to its three leads, whose performances count among the best in their careers.

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.

It’s as if Moss is directing the movie through her performance.

As in the nature documentaries of Werner Herzog, there is grandeur and servility to be found here. Like the Kraffts, Fire of Love demonstrates a brazen humility.

It’s probably unwise to come to Leone looking for too much in the way of feminism. Instead, Once Upon a Time in the West offers quintessential examples of the things he was better known for, including another blustery Ennio Morricone score. Visually, he mostly vacillates between extreme close-ups of intense faces and vast widescreen compositions, a technique that is lurching but also luridly beautiful.

Paris is Burning crackles because of its subjects, almost all of whom are natural performers in some way.

Collette anchors all of this supernaturality with a powerhouse performance.

BlacKkKlansman is a joke that sticks in your throat, as well as a necessary examination of blight history (those shameful marks on the American record when “white history” and “black history” awfully intersect).

When it’s clicking—and it mostly clicks—Athena balances aesthetics with import, even interweaving the two into something that has the grave intimacy of Son of Saul and the political potency of The Battle of Algiers.

Broadcast News would be nearly perfect, except for its final few minutes.

Gently yet urgently, Flee gives intimate attention to one refugee’s story, while reminding us that Amin also stands in for millions upon millions of others across the globe who are subject to dehumanization as they simply seek a safer life.

As for Hopkins, he gives a precisely observed performance, capturing Anthony’s confusion without limiting the character to that single quality. He’s dazzling, for example, when turning on the charm for a potential new caregiver.

Vitalina Varela is a work of astonishing visual richness, boasting a depth of dark and light, a fullness of color, and an exquisite care for composition.

It takes a special sort of confidence to make a quiet movie, and that’s exactly what director Fernanda Valadez displays in her debut feature, Identifying Features.

A tender, fictionalized memoir anchored by two stellar performances.

The ingeniousness of screenwriter William Goldman and director Alan J. Pakula’s film is that it’s framed as a detective mystery.

Pattinson and Kravitz bring real heat to their scenes together—there’s a great moment where he holds her against his chest as they’re hiding from a pursuer and their breathing slowly, erotically falls into rhythm. Even at three hours, the movie could use more of her.

Strange and vaporous, The Eternal Daughter confirms Hogg as a filmmaker who knows how to transmute her most intimate ruminations in cinematically provocative ways.

Be careful with Petite Maman; the movie is small and quiet, but if you let your guard down, it might devastate you.

For me, the distinguishing factor is the sense of humanity director Jonathan Demme brings to this inhumane material.

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is not a love letter to the magic of the movies. It’s a nice note to more tactile matters of craft—how to thread a reel of film into a projector, for instance. And yet, in the process of paying attention to such details, The Fabelmans manages something even more specific than love: a deeply personal ardency for both how and why movies are made.

Director Otto Preminger emphasizes the lurid whenever he can – the neon signs, the smoky interiors, the insinuating bass on the soundtrack – so that the movie plays like a blurry, bleary night-on-its-way-to-morning. Only Sinatra’s talent is clear.

This is Mulligan’s show. Her risky, raw performance is the life force of an otherwise muted film.

David Oyelowo plays King, and there’s no denying he brings a charismatic forcefulness to the part. This is particularly true in his speeches, which begin calmly, rooted in reason, and then whip up into a righteous fury that he struggles to contain and barely – just barely – does.

Working with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, editor Nicholas Monsour, and composer Michael Abels, Peele has once again constructed a movie experience that functions first and foremost on the level of sheer terror. From the drops of doom on the soundtrack to a POV camera that frequently puts us face to face with horror, Us turns identity politics into the stuff of nightmares.

There are unknown, uncontrollable, and perhaps even metaphysical forces at work in that water. Watching Atlantics harness them in the name of justice is a spooky thrill.

Dark—with a black wit to match—this serial-killer thriller from director Bong Joon-Ho functions clinically as a genre exercise, while also holding persuasive power as a stark meditation on police corruption.

Nearly every frame of Shaft is intent on doing one thing: establishing its hero – private detective John Shaft – as a powerful, independent, innately good yet still devilish man in complete control of his own destiny.

Right out of the gate—and even working within the modern Hong Kong gangster genre—Wong Kar-wai burst onto the screen as a strikingly unique talent. This is clearly a filmmaker less interested in plot and dialogue than he is in movement, music, and color—no matter the time, place, or story.

During the production numbers, Spielberg’s camera is almost always on the move, but not in a distracting way. Usually it’s trying to keep up with the dancers and give them as much of the frame as they need; at other times it winds its way among them, increasing our sense of exhilaration and intimacy.

Jaundiced and judicious, deeply cynical yet not quite ready to leap into the abyss, Joker is a provocatively toxic time capsule for an era of misguided rage. It’s galling, and pretty great.

Fiction, I’d argue, best captures the universal, while documentary—like journalism—details the specific. If Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a singular achievement, it’s in the way the movie manages to do a little bit of both.

This is another sad-sack Anderson movie, with perhaps the saddest collection of actors we’ve seen. And yet, this being Anderson, The French Dispatch is also absolutely delightful.

In Miss Bala, sexism doesn’t take sides, but is rather a harrowing, pervasive, dehumanizing force that even turns fashion into a weapon.

There is a soft sadness that permeates the film and steadily spreads, until it gradually devours each of the main characters. It may devour you.

As the hapless students flounder about, putting all their foibles on display, Booksmart always maintains a kind and understanding gaze. It’s a movie that wants to be there for its subjects.

With its epic setting and visual grace, The Hidden Fortress also is a precursor to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Watching the movie, though, you’ll be struck less by its influence than by an awesome artistry that’s all its own.

It will restore your faith in grace, goodness, and maybe—just maybe—even in humanity.

In a sense, the film only works because, in the real world, the system is rigged against someone like Axel Foley. Yet when Murphy seizes the screen, all bets are off, resulting in a work of racial subversion that’s both hilarious and cathartic.

Full of nuance and understanding, C’mon C’mon meets a family in crisis and proceeds to hold them in its gentle hands.

Scales glisten, legs scuttle, antennae unfurl, all in a symphony of exquisite shapes and inhuman motion. Watching the movie is like peering into a living kaleidoscope.

A stylish, saucy entry in the “stepford wife” subgenre, Don’t Worry Darling treads familiar ground while wearing a killer pair of pumps. The movie won’t surprise you (although I found its “reveal” to be timely and perhaps even prescient), but it sure looks great while not doing it.

At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal.

The documentary displays such winsome artistry that you also leave feeling energized. It’s an invigorating act of creative defiance in the face of Alzheimer’s disease.

No matter where the film leaves us narratively, however, its evocation of estrangement—even, perhaps especially, as part of an Internet where we can talk to anyone at anytime—is both emotionally palpable and cinematically potent.

You can argue with the movie in your head, even while you admit—say, when Dick and Jo dance their way across a stream by lightly stepping onto a floating raft—that your heart is having all sorts of fun.

Burge and Potrykus are both quite good—the director at one point even delivering a pitiable soliloquy/panic attack—but Vulcanizadora mostly unnerves due to the filmmaking.

Ford dials up the smarm of Han Solo and the hubris of Indiana Jones to portray a man who’s just smart, capable, and charming enough to be dangerous—to himself, his family, and the villagers.

Weerasethakul casts spells, and this is a particularly auditory one, the weaving of a liminal soundspace.

If Beale Street Could Talk is less interested in railing against systemic racism than lamenting the everyday goodness that is lost when racism carries the day.

Reinsve and Skarsgard work repressed magic in each scene they share—exploding on occasion, but still never directly confronting the deeper issues involved.

Writer-director Steve Kloves (who would go on to write the screenplays for all the Harry Potter films) takes three gripping characters who could each anchor their own movie, and crafts a film that honors all of them.

Mosese’s camera is dispassionate, but deeply attentive.

Reds is about the personal and the political and the intermingling of the two—what it meant for Reed and Bryant as a couple and, for Bryant particularly, separately. Both performances support the movie’s overall project: to demonstrate that these “reds” were real people, with good intentions, brave convictions, naive expectations, and—first and foremost—complicated hearts.

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.

Writing and directing her first feature, which she adapted from an Elena Ferrante novel, Maggie Gyllenhaal employs an intensely intimate camera, one that’s so tight on Colman’s face that at times her features are a blur.

White Heat is smart enough to give nearly every audience member whatever they could possibly want.

Director Alfred Hitchcock, who would remake the movie in 1956 with James Stewart, invests each scene with a blithe sense of fun.

Rather than take a histrionic approach, Lee trusts his four-hour running time, allowing the evidence of governmental indifference and incompetence to quietly pile up until it becomes cumulatively enraging.

A horror meditation on the biblical origins and self-perpetuating permutations of patriarchy, Men unfolds like an echoing primal scream.

Good One is a crafty feature debut from writer-director India Donaldson, in that its unassuming air and “small” story create little ripples that eventually coalesce into something shattering.

The bold cinematic techniques Welles employed in Citizen Kane are put to even more sophisticated use here.

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.

Del Toro’s film is a gothic horror story, with gloomy settings and macabre dismemberments, yet it also holds, within its central Creature, a heart that yearns for an ecstatic life.

Deep, dark forests; thorny thickets; spiraling castle stairs – every detail seems to envelop us. And then there is Maleficent, voiced by Eleanor Audley and undoubtedly one of the great Disney villainesses. Her transformation into a roaring dragon in the finale is so triumphant you almost want her to win.

Unlike his last two films, Song to Song and Knight of Cups, which dithered in a metaphysical malaise, this thrums with a spiritual vigor.

Pure horror fans might object, but I found this model of M3gan, also directed by Gerard Johnstone, to be just as amusing as the prototype—with a firmer sense of what it wants to do.

Wild is a relative term for Wong Kar-wai, the master of cinematic languor. You can feel the tension in his second film between genre excitement (there are jarring bursts of violence) and the languid sort of yearning that would become his trademark. These Days of Being Wild are both electric and exhausted.

If this works at all it’s because of the sound design: the cacophony of squawks and flapping over the opening credits, followed by incessant tapping, screeching, chirping, fluttering – sometimes in scenes where no birds are present. And then the occasional shock of silence, which is eerier still.

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.

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

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.

We observe family dynamics that could take place in any home, at any time; as Noriko and Shukichi tentatively negotiate the future of their family, they’re enacting a story that’s both distinct to post-war Japan and straight from the pages of Jane Austen.

Nimbly and unassumingly, this relatively straightforward anthropological study blossoms into both a socioeconomic commentary on the dangers of globalization and a biblically resonant parable about our relationship with the environment.

Incredibles 2, written and directed by original filmmaker Brad Bird, consists of two parallel narratives.... Together, they add up to a joyous and cathartic riff on working parenthood in this multitasking millennium.

The fabulous 1970s fashions don’t hold up too well, but what still resonates is the movie’s empathetic attention to what it’s like if your sexual identity doesn’t neatly fit into traditional norms.

Featuring a pair of novice performances that will either make the actors stars or preserve them in cinematic amber as these exact characters, the 1973-set Licorice Pizza marks an ambling, deceptively breezy, and incredibly sweet effort from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson.

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.).

Reinsve gives Julie both a hard edge and soft center, so that we root for her even when she makes decisions with which we disagree.

The long, seemingly monotonous shots in Skinamarink will be trying for some, yet there are rewards if you have the patience: occasional, eerie beauty (that night-light evokes a twinkling star dangling in space) and clever filmmaking.

In their hands, and with Pusić’s guidance, Tuesday registers as a magical metaphor for how we process death—and particularly how that might play out in this mother-daughter relationship.

Like each of del Toro’s nastier pictures, Nightmare Alley closes in on you with a hellish elegance.

As Yusuke Kafuku, the theater director, Hidetoshi Nishijima delivers a master class in withholding, while still giving the audience everything we need. He’s both stoic and seething.

Broker marks another minor miracle from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, featuring another one of his makeshift families.

The visual design is a trip, combining a comic-book aesthetic (not just the use of panels and dialogue balloons, but also digital tricks that mimic the hand drawing and paper printing of an actual comic) with the dynamism of state-of-the-art animation.

Hardly a flattering portrait of the military machine, Paths of Glory suggests a soldier’s best hope often is to survive the chaos that his or her own army causes.

Tokyo Story is a work of considerable restraint. And all the more affecting for it.

The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do.

If you gave Jordan Peele a list of random cultural ingredients—some songs, a few television shows, a film genre or two, a variety of actors—chances are he could concoct a smart, funny, thrilling filmgoing experience out of the randomness. Peele makes pop-culture smoothie movies that are nutritious and delicious.

These three form a fascinating trio—especially when Eddie inevitably begins to revert to the chaotic choices of his youth—but in truth, that camera is the story. Working with cinematographer Michael Ballhaus and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese doesn’t just offer an endless array of exciting movements and cuts. He also gives each one emotional heft and thematic purpose, evoking adrenaline, uncertainty, antagonism, anger, and hubris at just the right moments.

Children of Heaven is a simple film – it has bold, childlike colors and a narrative that turns on unremarkable, everyday events – yet Majidi and his young actors invest it with such basic truth about the inner lives of children that the movie feels as big as the universe.

By the movie’s end, the aching mixture of loneliness and desire transcends the immanent to embrace the metaphysical, a move that is a Weerasethakul signature.

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

You might say that it’s inappropriate for a gory horror movie about missing children to nod toward such real-life tragedy. And I’d tend to agree. Yet I must admit that during Weapons’ bonkers climax—a darkly comic, insanely sustained sequence of violent comeuppance—I felt something closer to catharsis.

Never underestimate what people will do for a beaver hat, a pail of milk, or a warm oily cake.

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings isn’t perfect. There’s a bit too much exposition involving myths, history, and character backstory; that climax inevitably abandons the intimacy of the fight scenes for gargantuan CGI. Yet by that point the movie has earned too much goodwill to be affected much by such complaints. I’m sure there are plenty of punchplosions to come in the MCU, probably even delivered by Shang-Chi himself, but at least Ten Rings offers a momentary respite from the reverberations.

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).

Rowlands takes the movie by the throat in the dramatic, onstage sequences, just as Brando would have done, yet she’s equally compelling in the film’s smaller moments.

Stewart, Wolfwalkers borrows something from werewolf mythology, another thing from Irish history, and more than a few things from the animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and emerges with a dazzling feature that ultimately establishes its own distinct pattern.

Works of art like these are more than creative endeavors. They function more as testaments: to the lives of their subjects, to the awfulness of death, and to the inspired ways we cling to the former, even in the face of the latter.

A gem, in that there’s really no other movie like it. A mixture of camp, parody, and full-throated sincerity, Moonstruck ultimately coalesces into a romantic comedy that’s tonally aberrant yet emotionally coherent.

A sequel that retains the gee-whiz geniality of the original while still going in interesting new directions.

This may be the definitive Busby Berkeley-choreographed musical simply because the entire movie revels in the sort of things that Berkeley’s elaborate dance numbers revel in: innuendo, flirtations and flesh.

It comes at you hard, bright, and fast. This is an angry, explicitly funny movie that refuses to conform to a three-act structure. Instead, it plays like a series of loosely connected skits riffing on the impossibility of black identity in a United States that’s hurtling toward classist, capitalistic implosion.

It’s not the sum of its parts, so much as it is the way De Niro and Grodin make almost every one of those parts glisten.

A Streetcar Named Desire works itself up into a hurricane of emotional chaos, yet ironically, as these final scenes give in to hysteria, Brando starts dialing down. Depending on your reading, that makes Stanley either remorseful or sinister. Either way, he’s riveting. If Brando is calm at the end of Streetcar, that’s because he’s the center of the storm.

Minding the Gap honors the pain of these young men’s lives so fully, it earns the right to conclude with the equivalent of a perfectly executed flip—audacious, improbable, and liberating.

At first glance it’s as if the masterful Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days had been remade as a piece of scruffy American neorealism. But then comes The Scene.

The genius is in the way the movie’s little details and character touches lead to an absolutely bonkers climax—after a shocking twist I won’t reveal—that nevertheless feels inevitable.

In spite of the clinical approach the filmmakers bring to No Other Land, the activist documentary nevertheless enrages. It boggles the mind (and moral compass) to watch ludicrously overarmed Israeli forces repeatedly destroy the homes, schools, and water-supply systems of Palestinian families who have lived on the land in question since before the establishment of the state of Israel.

Marlene Dietrich is in full plume in Shanghai Express, literally and figuratively.

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.

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.

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

Pain and Glory is one of Almodovar’s least exuberant productions. It’s also one of his best.

It never really mattered what loopy plot was devised to get Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers together in their musicals – once they started dancing in each other’s arms, all contrivances fall to the wayside and you clearly see they were made for each other.

A bit muted, especially for a movie about songcraft, The History of Sound nevertheless quietly builds in import until it reaches a devastating finale, one that musically meditates on the impermanence of love and life

This is largely another of Malick’s impressionistic tales of paradise lost, but here the dreamy approach feels fresh and exciting.

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.

Endgame provides something truly satisfying: a sense of closure.

Torres gives a performance that gains strength even as Eunice increasingly trembles; this is no stoic, generic portrait of resilience, but one that’s always counting the cost.

A mixture of hard-boiled intrigue and mental instability, this dark passage takes us from the film noirs of its time to the psychological thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock would make in the 1950s. Altogether, it’s a wild, harrowing journey.

Mildred Pierce is a somewhat reckless mixture of film noir and soap opera. It opens with a murder and then proceeds to run on revelations and betrayals and wild swings of fortune. Yet the high-wire act works, largely because Mildred Pierce has the right trapeze artist dangling in the air.

So what is a Coen brother movie like? Imagine a work of German expressionism as filtered through the stark spirituality of Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer.

At once a time-capsule snapshot of the economic despair of American youth and a larger, existential consideration of how to find meaning in a seemingly callous universe, Boys Go to Jupiter is sharp, knowing, realistic, and yet somehow uplifting.

Despite all the mania and exaggerated characterizations, Raising Arizona is ultimately one of the Coens’ kinder (if not gentler) efforts, a raucous cartoon that consistently offers the beleaguered, desert-stricken H.I. little oases of grace.

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.

Ably mixing past and present sensibilities is no easy feat, but every person in Gerwig’s ensemble cast manages it.

Watching Game Night is like witnessing someone on a hot streak while playing charades. As they keep nailing points for their team in rapid succession, you wonder how long they can sustain it. In Game Night, it’s the laughs that just keep coming.

O’Connor balances an outer reticence with an inner confidence throughout, then slyly brings the two qualities together as the film proceeds (notice how he fiddles with his wedding ring while otherwise effortlessly lying to a pair of detectives). J.B. isn’t an antihero, exactly, but something more fitting for a Kelly Reichardt film.

It’s all incredibly immersive, to the point that these everyday farm animals—the sort that usually only receive a passing glance—begin to seem fascinatingly alien.

Everything we see in Welcome to the Dollhouse is filtered through Dawn’s heightened perspective. There is one explicit fantasy sequence, but really the whole movie could be taken as a hormonal exaggeration. Solondz and Matarazzo may offer the cringiest middle-school experience imaginable, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

A mashup of Macbeth and the biblical chronicles of King David, all set in contemporary New York City, Highest 2 Lowest sees Spike Lee playing with classical narratives in order to explore a modern man’s artistic reawakening.

The definitive zombie picture.

Watching The Souvenir is like watching a friend drown, and being unable to help.

For all its pointed critique, The Last Black Man in San Francisco also offers a fair amount of whimsy.

Leave No Trace, Debra Granik’s first fiction feature since 2010’s masterful Winter’s Bone, is a movie that’s willing to whisper. If you don’t listen (and watch) closely, you might miss out on the deep wells of emotion beneath its placid surface.

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.

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.

The Turin Horse might befuddle you and it might bore you. But I guarantee you won’t forget some of the images, and more likely than not you’ll be left pondering their potential meaning.

What begins as a sympathetic, almost neorealist portrayal of a mentally and physically challenged newspaper peddler named Qinawi (played by Chahine) eventually warps its way into a slasher film, complete with sex-as-death overtones.

Earth Mama taps into a primal understanding of motherhood that’s true for Gia, whether she is a “good” mother or not. The movie captures what it means to be a mother of any kind, faced with watching your children being torn from their roots.

Beneath all the formal sophistication and dark humor, there is a roiling anger that defines Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

I could describe Uncut Gems for you, or you could try and hold your breath for a full minute and pretty much have the same experience.

The historical record, meticulously laid out here, speaks for itself.

One of Them Days is propulsively directed by music-video veteran Lawrence Lamont, who knows how to frame a punchline, from a sharp script by Syreeta Singleton, who wrote many episodes of HBO’s Insecure. The same mixture of hilarity and humanity is on display here.

Some might balk at the literary Easter eggs, but thanks to the fierceness of the lead performances and Zhao’s equal commitment behind the camera, I always experienced this as human story first and Shakespeare fanfic second.

The filmmaking is hypnotic, thanks partly to Kangding Ray’s thumping score but also to the early long takes of revelers in motion, as well as later, mesmerizing images of vans rolling across vast landscapes and open roads.

A thrilling and infuriating burst of movie id, The Wild Bunch makes you want to slump into the dust and stare dumbly into the distance.

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

There are enough issues here for three films by a perennial provoker like Lee, and critics will undoubtedly accuse him of throwing too much fuel on the fire. But this time, aided by Reggie Rock Bythewood’s thoughtful script, Lee’s ambition pays off. With 15 men squeezed together on a single bus, issues such as racism, homophobia and responsibility are tackled as they would be in real life: fitfully, passionately, derisively and, above all, hilariously.

Nelson is jarring, scary and brilliantly bitter.

In its erratic narrative, random assortment of characters, and omnipresent soundtrack, Car Wash captures something perfectly: the rhythms of a working-class work day.

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.

Hahn and Giamatti make for a great movie couple, in that the very way they stand near each other makes you believe they’ve already been through better and worse.

As Naru, a smart, skilled young woman who would rather be hunting than gathering, Midthunder is mesmerizing—capable in the crunchy fight scenes (especially a single-take standoff between her and a handful of Frenchmen), but also in the ways her eyes are always watching, consuming every detail about the way the Predator works and the weapons it uses.

The structure doesn’t work and the characters feel like screenplay concoctions (despite being drawn from a Larry McMurtry novel), but that hardly matters considering the three performances at the center of Terms of Endearment.

O’Connor (Challengers, The Mastermind) gives a remarkable performance, tapping into Father Jud’s spiritual struggle while also nimbly managing the movie’s sense of humor.

It might be corny, but the basketball nerd in me can’t resist their rivalrously romantic games of one on one, which is a sweet motif throughout the film.

Near Dark boasts one of the horror genre’s most unique milieus.

The stunning set pieces take full advantage of animation’s unique mastery over time and space, so that we don’t just watch the characters’ daredevil exploits – we’re spinning and whirling right along with them. It’s as if we’ve mastered space and time ourselves.

This might be one of Bette Davis’ least sympathetic parts, which is saying something.

A minor miracle.

Mon Oncle zeroes on in the way we often use our homes as status symbols first, and places of care and comfort second.

Rashomon is a movie of ideas first and foremost. There is little room for subtext here. Matters of truth and human nature are debated in an anguished, grandiose acting style that can be jarring to contemporary, Western eyes.

It’s a given that the sound design would be a crucial element in a film about a drummer who suddenly loses his hearing, but Sound of Metal is so artfully crafted on that front that it nearly develops a new way of experiencing a movie.

Anora is a tale of two shots: its first and its last.

Great horror movies are often built on guilt, and that’s the case with Relic. The film has creeping mold, strange sounds in the night, and gore to spare, but at heart it’s about the increasing shame a middle-aged woman feels for the distance she’s kept from her aging mother.

To borrow a phrase from the movie itself, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a “terrible joy.”

Garner gives a remarkable performance, especially considering she has very little dialogue with which to work.

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.

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.

The fact that Columbia Pictures produced this is hugely significant. It’s not only that School Daze is written and directed by an African-American filmmaker; it’s that it offers a black perspective outside of genre (blaxploitation) or historical fiction.

Brother’s Keeper is more of a fly on the wall than opportunistic shock doc.

Romvari imbues both halves with their own observational elegance, at once soft and searing. She has a knack for the incisive, off-kilter image.

It’s all immensely entertaining, revealing, and moving—especially the occasional silences, when they sit comfortably together and the shared years fill the open space.

Yun’s portrayal of Mija has a novelistic richness to it, acutely observed in its details (the way she carries her purse), yet expansive enough to encompass the character’s long psychological journey.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is at once a showcase for one of the world’s greatest acting talents and a manic meditation on reality, regret, and the richness of family bonds. It’s a movie that’s difficult to describe, but easy to love.

Apollo 10 ½ is so adept at making the mundane magical that it almost doesn’t need the conceit that gives the movie its title.

The reprieves are what elevate the film, including a mournful moment in the coda – I shouldn’t give it away – that was almost shocking in its starkness and bravery. Such thoughtful touches are far quieter than a dragon’s roar, but they speak volumes.

A dizzying story told at a dizzying pace, Zola might register for some as a transgressive lark (it certainly has comic touches, including a montage of Stefani’s clients’ penises). My experience was more like a simmering panic attack; it’s “fun” in the same way Uncut Gems was fun.

Amidst all the controlled artistry on display in Tár, it must be acknowledged that as much as the movie seeks to skewer the pretensions of Lydia and her world (beginning with her flamboyant stage name, pronounced “tar”), it also exhibits its own indulgences.

Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations.

This ranks among the most mercilessly creepy children’s films I’ve seen.

Decades before an apologist Western such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, The Searchers bluntly addressed this country’s racism toward Native Americans by putting one of Hollywood’s most famous faces on it.

It’s a miracle it all works—and it works wonderfully, thanks mostly to Mendes’ script and his casting of Olivia Colman.

An amusing and heartfelt exercise in boots-on-the-ground feminism, Support the Girls takes place in an unlikely location for such an endeavor.

Whatever ineffable thing Wong Wong Kar-wai does—let’s call it despondent extravagance—he distilled it into its purest form with Chungking Express.