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.
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.
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.
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.
87 min | PG-13 | August 12, 2022 | Bleecker Street
Four girls find a dead body in the woods on the last weekend before middle school. They decide to handle it themselves rather than tell their parents. The dead man stays a prop, and so does everything else.
98 min | PG-13 | August 12, 2022 | GKIDS
A blind biwa player and a deformed dancer become rock stars in fourteenth-century Japan. They turn forgotten ghost stories into stadium spectacle. The dead want their songs sung, and these two are screaming them into the night.
107 min | PG-13 | August 12, 2022 | Lionsgate
Two women climb a 2,000-foot abandoned radio tower for thrills. The ladder breaks. Now the only way down is the part nobody planned for.
96 min | PG-13 | August 5, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Joe Valencia is a Filipino-American comedian chasing a sitcom deal in Los Angeles when his mother guilts him into driving home to Daly City for Easter. One reunion, one dysfunctional family, one absurd debt subplot, and ninety minutes of warmed-over gags. The mother is funnier than the movie.
126 min | R | August 5, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
An assassin with rotten luck boards a bullet train for a simple grab-and-go. The car is packed with rival killers, all circling the same briefcase. The only thing harder than the job is getting off the train alive.
94 min | R | August 5, 2022 | A24
Rich twenty-somethings ride out a hurricane in a family mansion and play a party game where one of them pretends to be a killer. Then a real body turns up and nobody stops playing. The phones still have signal, and that is the scariest part.
107 min | R | July 29, 2022 | Focus Features
B.J. Novak plays a New York writer who flies to West Texas for the funeral of a woman he barely dated, then mines her family’s grief for a podcast. The brother wants vengeance. The writer just wants a great episode.
147 min | PG-13 | July 29, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
Twelve boys and their soccer coach are trapped miles inside a flooded Thai cave with the water still rising. A pair of middle-aged British amateurs with diving gear are the only people on Earth who can reach them. Ron Howard films the rescue as procedure instead of heroics, and that is exactly the right call.
104 min | R | July 29, 2022 | IFC Films
Margaret has built a quiet, controlled life for herself and her teenage daughter. Then a man from her past appears at the edge of a crowd and everything she buried starts clawing its way back. The horror here is not the monster. It is what she is willing to do to survive him.
115 min | R | July 29, 2022 | Lionsgate
A female long-haul trucker discovers her latest cargo is not freight but a girl, and the network she works for has no intention of letting either of them walk away. Then a dead brother, a federal agent, and a retired cop all converge on the same lonely stretch of interstate. The road is the only honest thing in it.
105 min | PG | July 29, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Superman’s dog has powers. When the Justice League gets captured, the only ones left to save them are a shelter full of misfit animals led by a cynical Bat-Hound. It is a Saturday-morning cartoon dressed up in a hundred-million-dollar costume.
95 min | NR | July 29, 2022 | Greenwich Entertainment
A British-Pakistani landlord and an Irish-heritage teaching assistant meet over a kid they both look after in Bradford. They are too old, too tired, and from the wrong sides of a divided city to fall for each other. They do it anyway.
81 min | PG | July 29, 2022 | Bleecker Street
A widow parks her camper in the Colorado high country and waits for a man she loved decades ago. He may or may not show up. Sometimes the bravest thing a person does is open the door.
130 min | R | July 22, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A horse trainer and his sister try to film proof of the thing in the clouds above their ranch. They want the perfect shot, the money shot, the one that makes them famous. Jordan Peele turns the hunger to capture a spectacle into the monster itself.
96 min | PG-13 | July 22, 2022 | Amazon Studios
Kelsa is a trans high school senior who wants what every teenager wants. A boy named Khal likes her, and that simple fact detonates the social order around them. Billy Porter directs a teen romance that treats its heroine like a person instead of a cause.
86 min | NR | July 19, 2022 | Hulu
Two young fathers lose their partners to preventable deaths in childbirth. They turn that grief into organizing and refuse to mourn quietly. Aftershock keeps its eye on the people the statistics erase.
126 min | PG-13 | July 15, 2022 | Columbia Pictures
A girl raised alone in the North Carolina marsh becomes a murder suspect when a local man turns up dead. The trial flashes back across her whole isolated life. The swamp is more convincing than anything that happens in it.
94 min | PG | July 15, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
A dog named Hank wants to be a samurai in a village of cats who despise dogs. It is Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles redrawn as a kids cartoon, gags and all. The premise survives the journey. The jokes do not.
115 min | PG | July 15, 2022 | Focus Features
A London charwoman falls in love with a Christian Dior gown and decides she will own one. She scrubs floors, hoards her shillings, and books passage to Paris to buy couture she has no business affording. The fairy tale knows exactly what it is, and it commits.
100 min | R | July 15, 2022 | Amazon Studios
V is a college gamer who blows up her own career and lands on an all-female esports team chasing a tournament spot. The movie wants to take on the boys’ club of competitive gaming. It throws the punch in slow motion and pulls it before it connects.
119 min | PG-13 | July 8, 2022 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Thor has beaten every enemy and run out of reasons to fight. Then a grieving zealot starts butchering gods and his ex shows up swinging his old hammer. The villain wants to kill every god in the universe. The movie wants to crack jokes while he does it.
117 min | NR | July 8, 2022 | IFC Films
A long marriage holds steady until the ex who introduced the couple comes back into their orbit. Sara wants Jean, then wants François, then wants both, and watches the whole thing burn down around her. Desire here is not romance. It is a demolition.
94 min | PG | July 6, 2022 | Neon
Katia and Maurice Krafft spend twenty years chasing volcanoes and each other across the planet. They film everything, build a marriage on the edge of erupting craters, and never once pretend the danger is the problem. It is the whole point.
117 min | PG | July 1, 2022 | Bleecker Street
A wealthy bachelor keeps a secret list of qualities his future wife must possess. A spurned woman decides to manufacture the perfect candidate and watch him fall. The trap is sharper than the man who set the rules.
87 min | PG | July 1, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A young Gru idolizes a supervillain crew called the Vicious 6 and schemes his way into their world. His Minions stumble after him in a 1970s San Francisco built out of disco and kung fu. The franchise has found its formula and refuses to do anything else with it.
99 min | R | July 1, 2022 | Lionsgate
A bomb sits under a hacker’s chair. He has to break into bank accounts and dodge a bullheaded ex-cop while a voice in his ear counts down. The chair is the only thing in this movie holding tension.
115 min | PG-13 | July 1, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics
Leonard Cohen labors for years over a song his label does not even want to release. Decades later it plays at funerals, talent shows, and the closing credits of every prestige drama. The verses outlive the man who could not stop rewriting them.
115 min | PG | June 24, 2022 | Netflix
A celebrated monster hunter and a stubborn orphan sail off to kill the most feared beast in the sea. What they find is that the kingdom has been lying for centuries about who the monsters really are. The adventure is grand. The history lesson lands harder.
103 min | R | June 24, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A boy gets snatched off a Denver street by a child killer and wakes up in a soundproof basement. The only thing in the room is a disconnected black phone on the wall. It rings anyway, and the voices on the line are the killer’s previous victims.
90 min | PG | June 24, 2022 | A24
A one-inch shell with one eye and a pair of shoes lives alone in an Airbnb with his grandmother. A filmmaker starts recording him and the videos go viral. The premise sounds like a gag, and then it quietly breaks your heart.
159 min | PG-13 | June 24, 2022 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A poor kid from Tupelo invents a new kind of American star and a carnival huckster turns him into a slot machine. Baz Luhrmann films the whole tragedy at the speed of a music video. The man inside the jumpsuit keeps slipping out of frame.
91 min | NR | June 24, 2022 | Cohen Media Group
A man wakes on a bus with no memory during an amnesia pandemic, and the state hands him a tape recorder and a list of tasks to build a new self from scratch. Christos Nikou turns the gimmick into a deadpan study of grief and the people who would rather forget than feel. Eat your apples. They help.
105 min | PG | June 17, 2022 | Walt Disney Pictures
A Space Ranger strands his crew on a hostile planet and spends decades trying to fly his way out. Every test flight he survives costs him years on the ground, so the people he loves keep aging out of his life while he stays the same. The hook is great. The reason it exists is the problem.
97 min | R | June 17, 2022 | Searchlight Pictures
A repressed widow hires a young sex worker in a hotel room and arrives with a checklist of things she has never done. He arrives with patience and a fake name. The transaction turns into the most honest conversation either of them has had in years.
91 min | PG | June 17, 2022 | Focus Features
A lonely inventor in rural Wales builds a robot out of a washing machine and a mannequin head, then names it Charles. Charles learns to talk, develops opinions, and decides he wants to see the world. Turns out the hardest thing you can build is a kid who stays.
84 min | NR | June 16, 2022 | IFC Midnight
A lone Assassin descends in a diving bell through the rotting layers of a ruined world. Phil Tippett builds the whole nightmare by hand, one frame at a time, across thirty years. It is hell as a working factory, and the machines never stop.
86 min | NR | June 11, 2022 | PBS Independent Lens
In a remote corner of Hunan, women once invented a secret script and passed it down for centuries so they could speak to each other where men could not read. Two modern women inherit it now, and the world that crushed its creators has rebranded itself as their patron. The freedom that survived the footbinding age does not survive the gift shop.
147 min | PG-13 | June 10, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Dinosaurs roam the open world for the first time. The original trio reunites to stop a biotech firm harvesting prehistoric DNA. The dinosaurs end up the least interesting thing in their own movie.
101 min | NR | June 8, 2022 | HBO Documentary Films
In 1968, a network of Chicago women builds an underground service to give other women safe, illegal abortions. They run it out of apartments, route calls through a single answering machine, and dodge the cops and the mob. The state called it a crime. The women called it the job.
96 min | R | June 3, 2022 | IFC Midnight
An American woman follows her husband to Bucharest and lands in an apartment she cannot navigate and a language she cannot speak. A man in the window across the street keeps watching her. Everyone tells her she is imagining it.
107 min | R | June 3, 2022 | Neon
In a future where humans no longer feel pain, a performance artist grows new organs and his partner cuts them out in front of an audience. Saul Tenser is the canvas and the gallery at once. Cronenberg returns to the operating table, and the knife has not dulled.
137 min | PG-13 | June 3, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
Siegfried Sassoon walks out of the First World War a decorated hero and a poet who hates the war that made him one. Terence Davies follows him through decades of glittering, loveless rooms as he searches for an absolution no one can give. The war ends. The penance never does.
131 min | PG-13 | May 27, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
Pete Mitchell is still a captain after thirty years because he refuses to die behind a desk. The Navy calls him back to train a squad for a mission no one expects to survive. The old dog has one more trick, and he is not done flying it.
102 min | PG-13 | May 27, 2022 | 20th Century Studios
A burst water main opens a sinkhole outside the Belcher family burger joint right as the bank loan comes due. The kids stumble onto a murder mystery while the parents scramble to save the business. It is a beloved sitcom episode with a bigger budget and a few songs, and it knows exactly that.
121 min | R | May 27, 2022 | Neon
A teenage girl in a Calabrian town watches her father’s car explode and her father disappear the same night. She goes looking for him and finds the family business instead. Growing up here means choosing which lie to live inside.
125 min | PG | May 20, 2022 | Focus Features
A wedding, a trip to the south of France, and a Hollywood crew descending on the great house to shoot a silent picture. Two stories run at once and neither one breaks a sweat. Downton has always known its audience, and here it simply pours the tea.