Josh Larsen

One of Nolan’s greatest attributes as a filmmaker is his trust in the intellect of mainstream audiences—audiences who have rewarded that trust by making challenging, original works like Inception huge hits. This time, though, it might have been smart to dumb things down a bit.

This is largely Dickens as farce, which is occasionally fun—Peter Capaldi is a delightful Mr. Micawber, whose creditors are so insistent they try to yank his rug out from under his front door—but it often feels forced.

There’s a playfulness and a romanticism to the technique—a way of placing the characters both within and without history—that elevates Tesla from being a snarky art installation to something, presumably like Tesla himself, with a soul.

She Dies Tomorrow is compelling, but I can’t say I ever truly felt the infectiousness that’s experienced by the characters.

A smart, sweet gem of a comedy.

Black Is King—like the offstage sequences of Homecoming or the soft-glow segments of Lemonade—is ultimately a project of image cultivation. African history, African-American experience, Timon and Pumbaa—all bend in service of a staggeringly talented star. It’s an astral projection that nearly functions as an eclipse.

At its worst, Pigeon and its predecessors seem to say, life is cruel. At its best, life is meaningless. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have a laugh.

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.

While mostly hewing to unremarkable biopic formula (yes, there’s a slow-clap response to a speech given by the main character), this dramatization of the life of double Nobel-prize winning scientist Marie Curie does manage a few inventive flourishes along the way.

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

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

What’s difficult to get past, even in Encore, is the queasiness of those minstrelsy club numbers, where the White audience gazes at Black bodies as the camera performs pyrotechnics. The vantage point is simply too compromised.

Eventually a fatalistic torpor settles over the film, even during the increasingly gun-heavy action scenes. For all its early intoxication, The Old Guard has an aftertaste that’s deadening.

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.

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

This is a middling Ferrell project that has its moments but mostly brings to mind better, music-themed comedies (A Mighty Wind in particular).

Shirley isn’t a masterful film, but it suggests that Decker has one in her.

Penetrating as it is, Irresistible exists not to score political points, but to call for a renewal of the American political process.

With Chi-Raq, Spike Lee is vital again. This isn’t to say I agree with all of the movie’s politics or that he’s made a perfect film. What I mean is that he’s once again brought something necessary to the screen in a way that no other director could.

Da 5 Bloods may be mid-tier Spike for me, but man did we need it in June of 2020.

An even more callow cousin to Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, Ready Player One combines motion-capture performance with state-of-the-art animation to free the filmmaker from the constraints of the traditional, live-action format. Yet form seems to be about all the movie is really interested in.

The Painter and the Thief tells a remarkable story of artistic understanding, one which Rees gives a clever, two-part structure.

The silliness is as sharp and improvisational as ever, as are the impressions.

It’s less Close Encounters of the Third Kind and more like a special episode of The Twilight Zone, starring The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. Which is to say, pretty fun.

There’s a soft, dim quality to the air in Clementine, the feature debut of writer-director Lara Gallagher. It sometimes blurs into murkiness, but mostly it gives the psychological drama an appropriately dusky glow. This is a movie about not being able to see others clearly, and how that distorts the way you see yourself.

Honest, incisive, and deeply sympathetic, Beach Rats is an intimate portrait of the cost that is paid when a teenager feels societal pressure to remain closeted.

Blow the Man Down snagged me right away with its bold, stylized opening.

Unlike Daze and those other predecessors, Selah and the Spades never convincingly establishes its own stylized universe, resting somewhat uncomfortably between the real world and a fully realized, believably hermetic place.