Josh Larsen

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

Predators lost credibility with me well before its stunt ending.

As the parents of a busy family in an early 20th-century English hamlet, Donald Crisp and Anne Revere save this treacly family drama from choking on its own sentimentality.

Figuring everything out isn’t necessary to enjoying The Lighthouse; it’s staggering simply as an audiovisual feast.

One of Hollywood’s true curiosities. At times a charming, kiddie Western, this John Wayne vehicle also has a real nasty streak.

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.

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

In some ways, this second Bond film was already too self aware to remember to be itself.

There is something unseemly in its choice to document the Beales at all. It’s not exactly that mother and daughter are being unwittingly exploited (though one wonders what a psychologist would make of their mental states). It’s that Edith and Edie – who both pursued show-business careers at different points in their lives – are such eager subjects, so willing to let the camera roll with little thought to what, aside from their immediate selves, it might be capturing. If Grey Gardens doesn’t exactly exploit that, the documentary certainly takes dubious advantage.

One Night in Miami—adapted by Kemp Powers from his own play, as well as the directorial debut of actress Regina King—manages to elevate that conceit (and its obvious stage origins) with sharp performances and a bold directorial hand.

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.

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).

This is a sad film, if beautifully observed, about a young girl learning that she won’t always be able to have her mom to herself—that, in fact, she never really had her in the first place.

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

A landmark in terms of science-fiction style and influence, The Day the Earth Stood Still boasts a wavering, theremin score (by Hitchcock regular Bernard Herrmann), a shiny, disc-shaped spacecraft and even a robot named Gort. Yet it deals in these sci-fi cliches with an amazing artistry.

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

Keeping in mind that he was well aware of the presence of the camera—as was everyone during the cast recording session for the Broadway hit Company—lyricist-composer Stephen Sondheim comes off as the kindest, gentlest genius you can imagine in Original Cast Album: Company.

Just putting us in Maud’s head—even as grippingly as the filmmaking does here—is not the same as trying to empathize with her. Still, the movie marks Glass as a filmmaker to watch.

Stunning on every account, however, is the cinematography by Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Saint Omer). Working with an autumnal setting, Mathon manages to give each tree its own light, while also allowing the dark, mysterious undergrowth to add an unsettling darkness. Such shots are the most troublingly beautiful element of the movie.

Unless you’ve seen every Archers’ film, you’ll come away with at least two you’ll want to track down immediately after watching Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. And you’ll want to revisit Scorsese titles like Raging Bull and The Age of Innocence to fully appreciate how their work directly influenced his.

Palm Springs is fun, but long live the theatrical experience.

The doc works best when Mitchell, who narrates, gets past the facts and lets his acutely observant critical voice merge with his memories, as when he recalls seeing Spook on the big screen with friends as a teenager in Detroit. His education then, is ours now.

This sounds a bit like Hitchcock, but Charade—written by Peter Stone and directed by Stanley Donen—isn’t nearly interested enough in humanity’s dark side to qualify. The movie just wants to have fun.

Part poetry slam, part dance performance, part survivalist nightmare, Night of Kings imagines narrative as a saving grace, even in the darkest place.

If Neptune Frost plays like a visual album rather than a traditional movie (even a movie musical), it offers more substance than that description suggests.

I’d say the movie is a lot, but you’d need way more than those four letters to cover it.

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.