112 min | PG | December 30, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics
Robert Caro writes enormous biographies of power. Robert Gottlieb edits them, and the two have argued about it for fifty years. Lizzie Gottlieb points a camera at her father and his most stubborn author and finds a love story disguised as a fight over a semicolon.
90 min | R | December 30, 2022 | Lionsgate
Alice is a woman who has trained herself to disappear. A week away with her two closest friends is supposed to be a break. Instead it becomes the place where the damage finally shows.
129 min | R | December 26, 2022 | Neon
A desperate mother drops her newborn in a church baby box. Two small-time crooks snatch him to sell on the adoption black market, then she comes back and joins the hustle. It is a road movie about trafficking a baby that wants very badly to make you cry, and mostly succeeds.
104 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
The women of an isolated religious colony learn the truth about who has been attacking them in the night. They have two days and three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The whole movie is the argument, and the argument is the point.
144 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2022 | TriStar Pictures
Whitney Houston has the voice of the century. Clive Davis turns it into a machine and the people around her fight over the parts. The film loves her too much to tell the whole truth.
107 min | NR | December 23, 2022 | Sideshow / Janus Films
Jafar Panahi plays himself, an Iranian director banned from leaving his country, directing a movie by laptop from a village pressed against the Turkish border. A photograph he may or may not have taken turns the whole village against him. Panahi builds the cage and points the camera straight at it.
102 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics
A dying London bureaucrat realizes he has spent thirty years stamping papers and accomplishing nothing. He decides to build one playground before the cancer takes him. Bill Nighy turns a whisper into the loudest thing in the room.
114 min | NR | December 23, 2022 | IFC Films
Vienna, 1877. Empress Elisabeth turns forty and the court has already decided she is finished. So she starts setting it on fire from the inside.
189 min | R | December 23, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
Hollywood in the 1920s runs on cocaine, ambition, and elephant dung. Damien Chazelle hurls orgies, vomit, and doomed silent-era stars at the screen until something sticks. A lot of it does not.
103 min | PG | December 21, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A swashbuckling cat realizes he has spent eight of his nine lives and only one remains. He chases a wish that can restore them while Death itself hunts him through the fairy-tale woods. The cartoon about a cat in a hat is really about dying.
92 min | NR | December 16, 2022 | Film Movement
A Hmong teenager in northern Vietnam gets close to a documentary camera, then closer to the tradition that decides her future for her. Bride kidnapping is not history here. It comes for her in real time, and the filmmaker keeps rolling when most people would put the camera down.
192 min | PG-13 | December 16, 2022 | 20th Century Studios
Jake Sully and Neytiri flee the forest for the reefs, dragging their kids and the Sky People’s war behind them. James Cameron builds a planet you can feel the water pressure of. Then he runs three hours of plot through it like a garden hose.
117 min | R | December 9, 2022 | A24
Charlie is a 600-pound man who teaches college writing from his couch and refuses to see a doctor. His estranged daughter walks back into his life with five days left to fix everything. Brendan Fraser does the heavy lifting, and the movie knows it.
117 min | PG | December 9, 2022 | TriStar Pictures
A five-year-old genius is born to parents who consider reading a character flaw and shipped off to a school run by a child-hating tyrant. She fights back with books, telekinesis, and spite. Roald Dahl always knew kids were smarter than the adults running their lives, and this one proves it.
115 min | R | December 9, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
A faded seaside cinema in early-1980s England. A lonely manager and a young usher build something fragile while the National Front marches outside. Sam Mendes wants to make four movies at once and finishes none of them.
93 min | R | December 9, 2022 | Lionsgate
Armed robbers in Santa suits tear through a city at Christmas, and a detective named Knight is supposed to stop them. Bruce Willis gets top billing and almost no screen time. The mask is the only thing here with a personality.
112 min | R | December 2, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A burned-out, hard-drinking Santa Claus stumbles into a hostage heist on Christmas Eve and decides to fight. Mercenaries have taken a rich family captive in their compound, and Saint Nick is the only one left to stop them. The premise is a loaded weapon, and the movie mostly fires blanks.
96 min | PG-13 | December 2, 2022 | A24
A successful filmmaker checks into a near-empty country hotel with her elderly mother to celebrate a birthday and finish a film about her. The building was once the family home, and the past refuses to stay buried. Tilda Swinton plays both women, which tells you exactly what this ghost story is haunted by.
90 min | R | December 2, 2022 | Netflix
Robert Downey Jr. turns a camera on his father, the underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., and films him in his final months. Sr. promptly hijacks the project to cut his own version. The son wanted a tribute. The father wanted the last word.
110 min | PG-13 | December 2, 2022 | Focus Features
Spoiler Alert adapts TV journalist Michael Ausiello’s memoir about falling for Kit Cowan and then watching cancer take him. The title gives the ending away on purpose. Knowing how it ends does not make it hurt any less.
110 min | NR | December 2, 2022 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
A nine-year-old in rural Gujarat sneaks into a small-town theater and falls in love with the beam of light coming out of the projection booth. He trades his lunch for access to the machine. What he is really chasing is already dying.
131 min | NR | December 2, 2022 | Magnet Releasing
A loyal North Korean mole has burrowed into the heart of South Korea’s spy agency. Two veteran officers must find him before he buries the country. They suspect each other, and the audience never finds out fast enough.
136 min | R | November 25, 2022 | Netflix
A professor of Hitler Studies has spent his life lecturing about death to avoid feeling it. Then a toxic cloud drifts over his town and the abstraction becomes a body count. The terror was always there. The chemicals just made it visible.
134 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Netflix
Two Syrian sisters flee Damascus and drag a sinking dinghy across the Aegean by swimming it to shore. One of them is an Olympic hopeful who ends up competing under a refugee flag. The story is remarkable, and the movie never stops reminding you.
102 min | PG | November 23, 2022 | Walt Disney Pictures
Searcher Clade wants to be a quiet farmer. His missing father was a legendary explorer, and now a dying crop drags the whole family into a living world beneath their feet. The world is more imaginative than anything the family does inside it.
139 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Netflix
A tech billionaire flies his hangers-on to a private island for a murder mystery weekend. Benoit Blanc shows up uninvited, and the fake game turns into a real corpse. The puzzle is intricate. The man at the center is hollow.
139 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
Two Navy pilots fly off the same carrier into the Korean War. One is the first Black aviator the Navy ever trained, and the war is the easy part. The hard part is everything that happens before the planes leave the ground.
122 min | NR | November 23, 2022 | Neon
Photographer Nan Goldin builds her life into a slideshow, then aims her organizing muscle at the Sackler family whose painkillers killed her and a generation. Laura Poitras splits the screen between the art and the war. Both halves are about the same thing: who gets to look away.
107 min | R | November 18, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
Wealthy diners pay a fortune to eat at an exclusive island restaurant run by a celebrity chef. The chef has prepared a tasting menu built around them. Some meals you do not walk away from.
95 min | R | November 18, 2022 | A24
A young gay Black man with nowhere left to go enlists in the Marine Corps. Boot camp promises to make him into someone his mother might finally love. The uniform does not change who you are. It just gives other men a reason to break you.
129 min | R | November 18, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Two New York Times reporters pull a thread on Harvey Weinstein and find decades of payoffs and silence at the other end. Maria Schrader builds a procedural about the paperwork that protects powerful men. The drama is in the phone calls.
97 min | R | November 18, 2022 | Lionsgate
Ferruccio Lamborghini builds tractors, gets insulted by Enzo Ferrari, and decides to beat him at his own game. Frank Grillo and Gabriel Byrne suit up to play Italian icons across decades of ambition and grudges. The accents arrive long before the drama does.
88 min | NR | November 18, 2022 | Sideshow / Janus Films
A gray donkey named EO is taken from a Polish circus and pushed through the machinery of the human world. He passes through fur farms, soccer hooligans, truckers, and a crumbling Italian estate. Jerzy Skolimowski points the camera at the animal and dares you to look back.
131 min | R | November 18, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
Maren eats people. So does the drifter she falls for. Luca Guadagnino films their hunger as a love story and a road trip across Reagan-era America, and the cannibalism turns out to be the easy part.
100 min | NR | November 18, 2022 | IFC Films
A Cambodian-Mexican-American family runs a restaurant in rural Michigan, and 2020 arrives to test whether the place and the family survive it. The youngest son points a camera at his own parents and refuses to look away. The result is the rare documentary that earns its tears.
151 min | PG-13 | November 11, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Steven Spielberg turns the camera on his own childhood and the marriage that broke around him. A boy discovers that a movie camera sees the things people work hardest to hide. The most personal film of his career is also the most honest one.
94 min | R | November 11, 2022 | National Geographic Documentary Films
American Green Berets pack up after twenty years and hand the war to an Afghan general who has no way out. Matthew Heineman keeps the camera at the front while the official story gets written somewhere safer. The betrayal plays out in handshakes.
135 min | R | November 11, 2022 | Netflix
Elvis Mitchell narrates a decade of Black American cinema that Hollywood discovered, cashed in on, then abandoned. Critic and fan at once, he treats the 1970s as a movement, not a punchline. The history lesson the canon refused to teach.
162 min | PG-13 | November 11, 2022 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Wakanda buries its king and the world senses weakness. From beneath the ocean, Namor and his hidden nation rise to test a nation in mourning. The film is a funeral that a franchise keeps interrupting.
117 min | PG | November 9, 2022 | Netflix
Geppetto carves a wooden boy out of grief and gets one who refuses to die. Guillermo del Toro drops the fairy tale into Mussolini’s Italy and asks what obedience costs. The strings are the point.
105 min | PG | November 4, 2022 | Amazon Studios
A golf-cart-sized robot lands on Mars for a 90-day mission and keeps working for fifteen years. The engineers who built it talk about it like a family member, and the film wants you to feel the same way. It mostly gets there.
159 min | R | November 4, 2022 | Netflix
A film director stands at the edge of death and the border between Mexico and the United States, and spends two and a half hours interrogating his own success. Alejandro G. Iñárritu builds a dream-logic confession out of memory, exile, and self-doubt. The trouble is that the man doing the confessing already thinks he is fascinating.
108 min | R | November 2, 2022 | Netflix
A nurse arrives in post-famine Ireland to watch a girl who claims she has eaten nothing for months and lives. The village calls it a miracle. The nurse calls it a problem to solve.
93 min | PG-13 | October 28, 2022 | Lionsgate
A novice nun trains to become the first female exorcist while a demon she once knew sets its sights on her. The Catholic Church gets a fresh coat of paint and the same haunted patient strapped to the same bed. Faith moves mountains. It cannot move this script.
118 min | NR | October 28, 2022 | Utopia
A journalist arrives in the holy city of Mashhad to track a man strangling sex workers in the name of God. Ali Abbasi turns the manhunt into an autopsy of a culture that calls the killer a hero. The scariest thing here is how many people are on his side.
94 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Apple TV+
Lynsey comes home from Afghanistan with a brain injury and no idea how to live in a body that betrayed her. James fixes her car and becomes the only person who sees her. Two broken people circle each other and figure out that healing is not the same as leaving.
121 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
Chicago, 1968. A pregnant housewife with a heart condition needs an abortion that is illegal and a hospital board of men who refuse to grant it. She finds the women who do it anyway.
114 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Focus Features
A Jewish kid in 1980 Queens befriends a Black classmate and learns what his family already knows about how America sorts people. His grandfather tells him to do the right thing. The rest of his world teaches him the opposite.
147 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Netflix
Young German recruits march into the trenches of 1917 believing in glory. What waits is mud, gas, and a uniform passed down from the last boy who died in it. The men in the warm rooms make sure the killing runs right up to the final minute.
104 min | R | October 27, 2022 | Apple TV+
Sacha Jenkins assembles a portrait of Louis Armstrong from the man’s own tapes, writings, and horn. Nas reads Armstrong’s private words while the archive tracks the grinning ambassador and the furious man behind the grin. The film lets Armstrong testify in his own defense.