Josh Larsen

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LarsenOnFilm
For 903 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Josh Larsen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 75
Highest review score: 100 Son of Saul
Lowest review score: 25 Murder by Death
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 772 out of 903
  2. Mixed: 73 out of 903
  3. Negative: 58 out of 903
903 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Our Time Will Come
    Zhou is fantastic as the schoolteacher-turned-rebel-leader; clearly not content to keep her head down, she’s always peering out of windows to get the lay of the land, even before she officially joins the movement.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Pain and Glory
    Pain and Glory is one of Almodovar’s least exuberant productions. It’s also one of his best.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Parasite
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Joker
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Josh Larsen
    Late Night
    The real problem, however, is that neither Molly, nor Newbury, nor anyone on her staff is very funny.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    The Biggest Little Farm
    You can feel the ungainly attempts to force that material into tidy little narratives.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Fast Color
    In the lead, Mbatha-Raw delivers a shaken, exposed performance that hints at the more familiar stories of domestic trauma (drug use, suicide, having to give up a child) that this otherwise super story might stand in for.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Let the Bullets Fly
    As a political satire, Let the Bullets Fly is pointed and precise.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Little Woods
    A predictable narrative is given rich contours in Little Woods.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Ad Astra
    In Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction masterpiece Solaris, a character observes that even in the depths of outer space, “we want a mirror.” Perhaps that’s why Ad Astra—starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut in the near future who travels to Neptune to find his missing scientist father—feels like the most visually arresting session of talk therapy you’ve ever experienced.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 25 Josh Larsen
    It: Chapter Two
    It Chapter Two has structural problems, character problems, and aesthetic problems.... But the movie’s main issue is an unexamined streak of cruelty.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Honeyland
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    Ungainly in many ways (inconsistent in tone, unconvincing in locale, contrived in its plotting), Where’d You Go, Bernadette manages two stellar sequences that are raw and truthful enough to salvage the movie.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Nightingale
    There has been debate over the graphic depiction of violence in the film, which is sickening and unblinking. Still, the explicitness undoubtedly forces you to face the brutal trauma that was inflicted upon women in this particular time and place—indeed, has been inflicted throughout history.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    I laughed a great deal at the bad-boy banter during Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. I also thought the action stood up alongside anything else in the franchise. But the thing I enjoyed the most about this riotously ridiculous movie is that way it functions as a near-brilliant exercise in cinematic parallelism.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is a twilight film in more ways than one.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Farewell
    The Farewell resists any temptation to be a wacky, extended family comedy and instead stays true to the sadness of its central premise.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Midsommar
    Like Hereditary, Midsommar functions as an outlandish imagining of the effects of personal trauma, especially for someone who already struggles with an unsteady mind. Yet the psychology and the horror aren’t quite as holistically handled this time around.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Josh Larsen
    Spider-Man: Far from Home
    Like its predecessor, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home is content to be a high-school movie first and a superhero saga second.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Josh Larsen
    Men in Black: International
    Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson are the reason to see Men in Black: International—she has a comic precision that nicely deflates his humorous hubris—but for some reason the movie doesn’t bring them together until a third of the way in, after failing to establish any real sense of their characters.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Toy Story 4
    No, Toy Story 4 isn’t necessary. Yes, Toy Story 4 is fun. Does it end in a way that’s worthy of the series, and Woody in particular? We’ll get there.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    The Dead Don't Die
    When The Dead Don’t Die sputters, you fear that Jarmusch’s political angst may have paralyzed him. But then there is the bleak, sardonic beauty of the climactic scene.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    For all its pointed critique, The Last Black Man in San Francisco also offers a fair amount of whimsy.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    The Souvenir
    Watching The Souvenir is like watching a friend drown, and being unable to help.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Under the Silver Lake
    A mostly meaningless film about meaninglessness, Under the Silver Lake nonetheless has enough fetid charm to justify wasting a few hours on it. After all, the movie ultimately suggests that wasting our time is the best we can do in this rotten, rigged life.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    Booksmart
    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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Josh Larsen
    John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    In Parabellum, the shootouts—and there are two disastrous ones, that finale and a mid-film sequence featuring new costar Halle Berry—are less about Wick (his motivations, his anger, his technique) and more about the grandiosity of the violence.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    The movie is, mostly, interested in Adele’s interior life more than her exterior features. And in those moments where the reverse is true (they’re there), Exarchopoulos rightly refocuses the attention with an extraordinarily evocative performance of a confused, conflicted teen.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Josh Larsen
    Hail Satan?
    With a mixture of cheeky stock footage (including, yes, Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments), ironic soundtrack choices, and abrupt edits that function as record-scratch exclamation points, Lane’s film breezily stays above the fray.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Josh Larsen
    High Life
    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.
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