October 21, 2022

Wendell & Wild

★★★☆☆

105 min | PG-13 | October 21, 2022 | Netflix

Kat Elliot is a haunted teenager with a dead family and a chip on her shoulder. Two scheming demon brothers offer to raise the dead if she helps them claw out of the underworld. Henry Selick builds a gorgeous handcrafted Hell and then crams three movies into it.

Ticket to Paradise

★★☆☆☆

104 min | PG-13 | October 21, 2022 | Universal Pictures

Two divorced parents who can’t stand each other fly to Bali to stop their daughter from marrying a man she just met. The catch is they have to work together to do it. The scenery is gorgeous and the stars are charming and you will forget all of it by the time you reach the parking lot.

The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile

★★★☆☆

108 min | R | October 21, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics

Tanya Tucker quit the spotlight decades ago. Brandi Carlile drags her into a studio to make a comeback record Tucker never asked for. The result is less about the album than about a woman terrified of becoming her own legend again.

The Banshees of Inisherin

★★★★☆

114 min | R | October 21, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures

On a remote Irish island in 1923, one man decides he is finished with his best friend. There is no fight and no betrayal, just a verdict that the friendship is over. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson turn a petty falling-out into a small apocalypse.

Detective Knight: Rogue

★★☆☆☆

105 min | R | October 21, 2022 | Lionsgate

A detective hunts a crew of armored-car robbers dressed as cops while his own badge hangs by a thread. Bruce Willis squints, mutters, and stands in the background of his own franchise. The premise promises a hard-boiled thriller. The movie delivers a placeholder.

Descendant

★★★★☆

111 min | PG | October 21, 2022 | Netflix

In 1860 a rich man smuggles a shipload of enslaved Africans into Alabama on a bet, then burns the boat to bury the proof. A century and a half later, their descendants go hunting for the wreck. The hard part is not finding the ship but deciding who owns what it says.

Black Adam

★★☆☆☆

125 min | PG-13 | October 21, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures

A god wakes after five thousand years of imprisonment and finds his nation still occupied. He has the power of six deities and zero interest in being a hero. The premise asks what justice looks like with no mercy. The movie answers with slow-motion and a Rock who forgot to bring the charisma.

Argentina, 1985

★★★★☆

141 min | R | October 21, 2022 | Amazon Studios

A reluctant prosecutor takes on Argentina’s former military dictators in open court. He has no army, no police, and a team of kids nobody else would touch. He builds the case anyway.

All That Breathes

★★★★☆

97 min | NR | October 21, 2022 | Submarine Deluxe / Sideshow

Two brothers in Delhi run a basement clinic for falling birds. The city’s air is poison and its streets are on edge. They keep healing kites because someone has to.

Aftersun

★★★★☆

101 min | R | October 21, 2022 | A24

A young father takes his eleven-year-old daughter to a Turkish resort and films the whole trip on a rented camcorder. Years later she plays back the tape and tries to find the man she missed the first time. The vacation was the easy part.

October 19, 2022

The Good Nurse

★★★☆☆

121 min | R | October 19, 2022 | Netflix

Eddie Redmayne plays a nurse who murders his patients with quiet precision. Jessica Chastain plays the colleague who helps catch him. The horror here is institutional, and the system that protected him is the real killer.

October 14, 2022

Till

★★★☆☆

131 min | PG-13 | October 14, 2022 | Orion Pictures

Mamie Till-Mobley sends her fourteen-year-old son from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955. He comes home in a sealed box the state wants kept shut. She opens it and makes the whole country look.

Halloween Ends

★★☆☆☆

111 min | R | October 14, 2022 | Universal Pictures

Laurie Strode is writing her memoirs. Michael Myers has not been seen in four years. David Gordon Green ends his trilogy by handing the franchise to a man nobody asked for.

Decision to Leave

★★★★☆

139 min | NR | October 14, 2022 | MUBI

A detective investigates a man who falls to his death from a mountain. He becomes obsessed with the dead man’s widow, a Chinese immigrant who may have done it. Park Chan-wook makes the interrogation room the most erotic place in cinema.

October 7, 2022

Triangle of Sadness

★★★☆☆

147 min | R | October 7, 2022 | Neon

Two influencers board a luxury yacht full of the obscenely rich. A storm hits during the captain’s dinner, and the natural order starts coming up the way it went down. Ruben Östlund hates these people, and he wants you to know it.

To Leslie

★★★★☆

119 min | R | October 7, 2022 | Momentum Pictures

A West Texas woman wins the lottery, drinks the whole fortune away, and washes up broke in the town that watched her do it. Six years later she gets one more shot at not blowing it. Andrea Riseborough disappears into the wreckage so completely you forget there is an actor in the frame.

TÁR

★★★★☆

158 min | R | October 7, 2022 | Focus Features

Lydia Tár is the most powerful conductor in the world and the architect of her own myth. Then the past she buried starts making noise. The baton does not protect her.

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile

★★☆☆☆

106 min | PG | October 7, 2022 | Columbia Pictures

A singing crocodile lives in the attic of a New York brownstone, and a lonely boy becomes his best friend. Javier Bardem hams it up while Shawn Mendes supplies the voice. The movie is a jukebox in a reptile costume.

Last Flight Home

★★★☆☆

101 min | NR | October 7, 2022 | MTV Documentary Films

Eli Timoner has decided to die. His family gathers to film the last weeks of his life as he ends it on his own terms through medically assisted death. His daughter points the camera at the one subject she cannot edit.

Amsterdam

★★☆☆☆

134 min | R | October 7, 2022 | 20th Century Studios

Three friends make a pact in postwar Amsterdam and swear to look out for each other for life. Years later a senator dies, his daughter ends up dead, and the friends are framed for the murder. The conspiracy is real and the movie still cannot find its way to it.

September 30, 2022

The Good House

★★★☆☆

103 min | R | September 30, 2022 | Roadside Attractions

Hildy Good sells houses, gossips about her neighbors, and pours a second glass of wine the second nobody is watching. She descends from a Salem witch and treats every secret in town as inventory. The wine is the one thing she cannot sell anyone, least of all herself.

Smile

★★★☆☆

115 min | R | September 30, 2022 | Paramount Pictures

A psychiatrist watches a patient die smiling, and then the smiling thing starts following her. It wears the faces of everyone she trusts. The dread is genuine. The metaphor is louder than it needs to be.

Bros

★★★☆☆

115 min | R | September 30, 2022 | Universal Pictures

Bobby Lieber is a neurotic podcast host building the first national LGBTQ+ history museum. He falls for Aaron, an emotionally locked estate lawyer who would rather lift than talk. The first big-studio gay rom-com turns out to be a regular rom-com, and that is exactly the flex.

September 23, 2022

Nothing Compares

★★★☆☆

96 min | NR | September 23, 2022 | Showtime Documentary Films

Sinéad O’Connor shaves her head, tears up a photo of the Pope on live television, and watches an industry decide she is finished. Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary spends five years proving she was right the whole time. The world owed her an apology and mostly sent hate mail instead.

Don't Worry Darling

★★☆☆☆

123 min | R | September 23, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Alice and Jack have the perfect life in a perfect desert town where the men keep secrets and the women never ask. Then Alice starts asking. The premise is a loaded gun the movie forgets to fire.

Catherine Called Birdy

★★★☆☆

108 min | PG-13 | September 23, 2022 | Amazon Studios

Birdy is the fourteen-year-old daughter of a broke medieval lord who decides the fastest way out of debt is to sell her into marriage. She spends the year sabotaging every rich suitor he drags to the manor. Lena Dunham puts a modern pop soundtrack over the 13th century and mostly gets away with it.

Athena

★★★☆☆

97 min | R | September 23, 2022 | Netflix

A police killing in the projects sparks an uprising, and three brothers find themselves on opposite sides of it. One wants justice, one wants order, one wants profit. The fire spreads faster than anyone can think.

September 16, 2022

The Woman King

★★★☆☆

135 min | PG-13 | September 16, 2022 | TriStar Pictures

In 1820s West Africa, the all-female Agojie warriors guard the Kingdom of Dahomey against rival empires and European slavers. Viola Davis trains a new generation to fight while the kingdom grows rich on the trade it claims to resist. The action is sharp. The history gets sanded smooth.

The Silent Twins

★★★☆☆

113 min | R | September 16, 2022 | Focus Features

June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical twins who speak to no one but each other. They write novels, chase boys, set fires, and land in Britain’s most notorious psychiatric hospital. The film captures their private world better than it explains why anyone outside it failed them.

See How They Run

★★★☆☆

99 min | PG-13 | September 16, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures

A Hollywood director turns up dead backstage at the long-running West End production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. A hungover inspector and an over-eager constable work the case while the suspects rehearse their alibis. The film knows every whodunit trick and would rather wink at them than use them.

Riotsville, U.S.A.

★★★★☆

90 min | NR | September 16, 2022 | Magnolia Pictures

In 1968, the U.S. government built fake towns called Riotsvilles and staffed them with soldiers playing rioters and cops. The military rehearsed crushing American dissent on these stage sets while cameras rolled. This film digs up the footage and asks what the rehearsal was actually for.

Pearl

★★★☆☆

102 min | R | September 16, 2022 | A24

Ti West shoots a slasher prequel as a Technicolor Hollywood melodrama. A farm girl named Pearl wants to dance her way off the family land and onto the silver screen. The screen is not interested, and Pearl does not take rejection well.

Moonage Daydream

★★★★☆

135 min | PG-13 | September 16, 2022 | Neon

David Bowie spends decades reinventing himself in public, and Brett Morgen builds a film that refuses to explain him. There is no narrator, no talking heads, no chronology to hold onto. It does not want to tell you who Bowie was. It wants you to feel why he stayed impossible to pin down.

God's Country

★★★☆☆

102 min | R | September 16, 2022 | IFC Films

Sandra Guidry buries her mother and finds two hunters parked on her land. She asks them once, politely, to leave. They do not, and neither does she.

Confess, Fletch

★★★☆☆

99 min | R | September 16, 2022 | Miramax

Jon Hamm plays Fletch, a wiseass ex-reporter who flies to Boston, finds a dead woman in his rented townhouse, and becomes the prime suspect. He spends the rest of the movie needling cops and stealing art instead of acting innocent. The mystery is an excuse. The deadpan is the point.

Blonde

★★☆☆☆

167 min | NC-17 | September 16, 2022 | Netflix

Andrew Dominik turns the life of Marilyn Monroe into a 167-minute gauntlet of abuse, told through the abandoned child she never stopped being. Ana de Armas commits to every second of it. The film mistakes suffering for insight.

September 13, 2022

Clerks III

★★☆☆☆

100 min | R | September 13, 2022 | Lionsgate

Dante and Randal still run the Quick Stop, twenty-eight years older and no closer to peace. After a heart attack, Randal decides to make a movie about his life behind the counter. Kevin Smith puts his own near-death on screen and asks you to cry about it.

September 9, 2022

Barbarian

★★★★☆

103 min | R | September 9, 2022 | 20th Century Studios

A young woman arrives at her Airbnb in a gutted Detroit neighborhood and finds it already booked by a stranger. They agree to share the house for the night. That is the last decision in this movie that makes any sense, and it is the only one the movie wants you to trust.

September 2, 2022

Wire Room

★☆☆☆☆

97 min | R | September 2, 2022 | Lionsgate

A wiretap surveillance agent watches a high-stakes drug operation from a dark room full of monitors. Then the suspects find out he is listening, and the room becomes a trap. The premise promises a thriller and delivers a screensaver.

Gigi & Nate

★★☆☆☆

114 min | PG-13 | September 2, 2022 | Roadside Attractions

A meningitis infection leaves a vibrant young man paralyzed from the neck down. His family brings home a capuchin monkey to give him back his independence and his will to fight. The monkey is the most honest performer on screen.

August 26, 2022

Three Thousand Years of Longing

★★★☆☆

108 min | R | August 26, 2022 | United Artists Releasing

A scholar of stories meets a Djinn who offers her three wishes. She knows every cautionary tale about what wishes cost, so she refuses to make one. The standoff is more interesting than the resolution.

The Invitation

★★☆☆☆

105 min | PG-13 | August 26, 2022 | Screen Gems

Evie answers a DNA test and finds a family she never knew. The rich English relatives invite her to a wedding at a country estate. She should have read the guest list before saying yes.

The Good Boss

★★★☆☆

120 min | NR | August 26, 2022 | Cohen Media Group

A factory owner who hands out hugs and homilies needs everything perfect for an industrial excellence award. A fired worker camps outside his gates with a megaphone, and a new intern catches his eye. Julio Blanco will fix all of it, and every fix makes him worse.

Funny Pages

★★★☆☆

87 min | R | August 26, 2022 | A24

A teenage cartoonist drops out of school to chase a grimy ideal of artistic authenticity. He worships a former color separator at a comics company and mistakes a broken man for a mentor. The kid wants to suffer for his art, and the movie makes sure he does.

Breaking

★★★☆☆

103 min | PG-13 | August 26, 2022 | Bleecker Street

A Marine veteran walks into a Georgia bank and says he is carrying a bomb. He does not want the vault. He wants the $892 the Department of Veterans Affairs owes him.

August 25, 2022

Samaritan

★★☆☆☆

102 min | PG-13 | August 25, 2022 | Amazon Studios

A kid in a decaying city is convinced his silent garbage-man neighbor is the superhero who vanished decades ago. Sylvester Stallone plays the neighbor. The premise writes a check the movie cannot cash.

August 19, 2022

The Territory

★★★★☆

85 min | PG | August 19, 2022 | National Geographic Documentary Films

The Uru-eu-wau-wau are a few hundred people guarding a stretch of Amazon rainforest that ranchers and land grabbers want carved up and burned. When the pandemic locks the filmmakers out, the tribe picks up the cameras and shoots the invasion themselves. The result is a thriller where the stakes are the planet’s lungs.

Spin Me Round

★★★☆☆

104 min | R | August 19, 2022 | IFC Films

Amber wins a trip to an exclusive manager training program at her company’s Italian villa. She expects romance and wine and a story that makes sense. The villa has other plans.

Orphan: First Kill

★★☆☆☆

99 min | R | August 19, 2022 | Paramount Pictures

Thirteen years before the events of the original, Leena Klammer escapes a psychiatric facility in Estonia and assumes the identity of a wealthy American family’s missing daughter. The con works until the family turns out to have secrets of its own. The twist is clever. The movie around it is not.

Beast

★★☆☆☆

93 min | R | August 19, 2022 | Universal Pictures

Idris Elba takes his daughters to a South African game reserve. A rogue lion turns the trip into a fight for survival. The lion is more developed than the people running from it.