Movies

★★★☆☆

94 min | R | December 29, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics

Clifton Collins Jr. plays an aging jockey whose body is breaking down faster than his will to ride. A young rider shows up claiming to be his son. The horse always knows before you do.

★★★★☆

136 min | PG | December 26, 2021 | Neon

A Scottish woman in Colombia keeps hearing a sound nobody else can hear. A deep, dull bang that arrives without warning and answers to no one. Tilda Swinton spends the film chasing it, and the chase turns out to be the point.

★★★★☆

105 min | R | December 25, 2021 | A24

Joel Coen strips Macbeth down to a bare soundstage and shoots it in stark black and white. Denzel Washington plays a Scottish general who murders his way to a crown. The ambition is the trap.

★★☆☆☆

112 min | PG | December 25, 2021 | Lionsgate

Kurt Warner stocks grocery shelves for minimum wage and insists he belongs in the NFL. He is right, and the climb from the night shift to a Super Bowl is one of the great true sports stories. The movie about it plays as safe as a kneel-down.

★★☆☆☆

131 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2021 | Columbia Pictures

A soldier fills a journal with everything he knows for the infant son he is leaving behind. Denzel Washington adapts that true story into a film that feels everything for you so you do not have to. The movie does the crying so the audience never has to start.

★★★★☆

123 min | R | December 24, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics

Two single women meet in a maternity ward and give birth on the same day. Their lives knot together in ways neither chooses. Almodovar uses the accident of motherhood to dig up the bodies Spain refuses to bury.

★★★★☆

92 min | NR | December 22, 2021 | Oscilloscope Laboratories

A photographer drags a restless writer into the Tibetan highlands to wait for an animal almost nobody ever sees. The cold does the teaching. Patience turns out to be the whole point.

★★★☆☆

148 min | R | December 22, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Eighteen years after he saved Zion, Thomas Anderson is a celebrated game designer who built a hit trilogy called The Matrix. His therapist keeps him medicated and his memories filed under fiction. Then a woman named Bugs offers him the red pill, and the franchise eats its own tail on purpose.

★★☆☆☆

131 min | R | December 22, 2021 | 20th Century Studios

A pacifist duke builds a secret spy network while the First World War grinds his world to mud. Rasputin dances, a villain’s cabal schemes, and Ralph Fiennes grieves in the middle of it all. The prestige war drama and the cartoon spy romp keep tripping over each other.

★★☆☆☆

110 min | PG | December 22, 2021 | Universal Pictures

Buster Moon talks his way into the biggest stage of his life by promising a reclusive rock legend he has never met. The show must go on, even if the whole thing rests on a lie. Sing 2 is a jukebox musical that runs on charm and fumes.

★★☆☆☆

104 min | R | December 17, 2021 | Amazon Studios

A fatherless boy grows up in a Long Island bar full of men who decide to raise him. His uncle hands him a reading list and a code to live by. The bar pours warmth. The movie sips it.

★★★★☆

122 min | R | December 17, 2021 | Netflix

Leda goes to the Greek coast for a quiet working holiday. A young mother and her small daughter pull her back into a past she has spent decades refusing to explain. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a film about the mothers who walk away and declines to call them monsters.

★★★☆☆

148 min | PG-13 | December 17, 2021 | Columbia Pictures

Peter Parker’s identity is public, his life is wrecked, and he asks Doctor Strange for a spell to make everyone forget. The spell goes wrong and tears open the multiverse. The villains pour through, and the movie spends two hours cashing in old memories.

★★★★☆

115 min | NR | December 17, 2021 | Greenwich Entertainment

Robert Mugabe is gone after thirty-seven years, and Zimbabwe holds its first open election. Nelson Chamisa thinks he can beat the man who inherited the machine. The vote is the easy part. The count is where they take it from him.

★★★☆☆

151 min | R | December 17, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures

Stanton Carlisle learns to read a room well enough to fake talking to the dead, then carries the act uptown to fleece the rich. He is the smartest man in every room until he meets a woman who is smarter. The con man always forgets that he is also a mark.

★★☆☆☆

95 min | PG | December 15, 2021 | Paramount+

In a world where monster wrestling is the national sport, a teenage girl trains a giant beast who would rather dance than fight. Winnie wants to revive her dead father’s gym and drag her washed-up town back to glory. The monsters are enormous. The ideas are not.

★★★★☆

156 min | PG-13 | December 10, 2021 | 20th Century Studios

A teenager named Tony falls for a girl named María on the wrong block in a city tearing itself apart. The Jets and the Sharks fight over pavement that the wrecking ball already condemned. Steven Spielberg waited his whole career to make a musical, and he does not waste the chance.

★★★☆☆

130 min | R | December 10, 2021 | A24

A washed-up porn star washes back into his Texas Gulf Coast hometown with no money and no shame. He starts dealing weed and grooming a teenage girl who works the donut counter. Mikey calls it love. It is a hustle wearing a smile.

★★☆☆☆

116 min | R | December 10, 2021 | STXfilms

A star running back goes on strike two days before the national championship, demanding pay for the athletes who make the sport billions. He has the one piece of leverage the system cannot survive losing. The argument is bulletproof. The movie keeps shooting itself.

★★★☆☆

134 min | NR | December 10, 2021 | Kino Lorber

France de Meurs is the most famous television journalist in France, and she stages the news as much as she reports it. A car accident cracks her glossy life open and a crisis of conscience leaks out. Bruno Dumont points his camera at the media and never quite decides whether to mock it or mourn it.

★★☆☆☆

138 min | R | December 10, 2021 | Netflix

A comet is coming to wipe out the planet, and two scientists have the data to prove it. They beg the president, the media, and the internet to pay attention. Turns out the end of the world makes for bad ratings.

★★★☆☆

132 min | R | December 10, 2021 | Amazon Studios

Aaron Sorkin compresses one chaotic production week at I Love Lucy into a single film about Lucille Ball under siege. A red-baiting accusation, a pregnancy, and a marriage coming apart all land at once. The talking is the problem.

★★★☆☆

130 min | R | December 3, 2021 | Netflix

Paolo Sorrentino turns his own teenage years in 1980s Naples into a coming-of-age story about the moment a kid’s life splits in two. Diego Maradona is coming to play for Napoli. So is grief, and they arrive on the same wind.

★★★★☆

89 min | PG-13 | December 3, 2021 | Neon

A man named Amin sits down to tell his oldest friend the truth about how he got to Denmark. The story he has guarded for twenty years involves a childhood in Kabul, a vanishing family, and a lie he has repeated so long he half believes it. Animation is the only way he can finally say it out loud.

★★★☆☆

108 min | R | December 3, 2021 | Amazon Studios

A decorated Marine yanks his two sons out of bed and onto the highway, certain that an alien infestation is taking over human bodies. The road trip is real. The invasion is the part you should worry about.

★★☆☆☆

58 min | PG | December 3, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures

Greg Heffley starts middle school convinced it is a battlefield for social rank. He keeps a record of his climb in a journal he swears is not a diary. The animation finally looks like the books. The kid at the center is still a little jerk.

★★★☆☆

131 min | NR | December 3, 2021 | IFC Films

A seventeenth-century nun has visions of Christ, claims the stigmata, and takes a younger sister into her bed. The convent calls it a miracle. Paul Verhoeven calls it a power grab, and he is not wrong.

★★★★☆

97 min | PG-13 | November 26, 2021 | Music Box Films

Dalit women in rural India run a newspaper. They cover corruption, rape, and broken roads while men tell them to stay home. Then they trade their notebooks for smartphones and aim the camera straight at power.

★★★★★

133 min | R | November 26, 2021 | United Artists Releasing

A teenage hustler and a stalled twenty-five-year-old meet on picture day in the 1973 San Fernando Valley and spend the whole film circling each other. Waterbeds, pinball, and one terrifying Bradley Cooper cameo follow. Paul Thomas Anderson turns a string of bad schemes into the best film about being stuck that you will see.

★★★★☆

106 min | R | November 24, 2021 | A24

A family gathers in a crumbling New York duplex for Thanksgiving dinner. The walls knock, the lights die, and the people inside slowly admit what they have lost. The scariest thing in the apartment is the truth.

★★☆☆☆

107 min | R | November 24, 2021 | Screen Gems

A pharmaceutical company poisons a dying town, and the corpses do not stay down. Two cops and a handful of franchise heroes spend one night trying to get out of Raccoon City alive. The game knew exactly what it was. The movie keeps forgetting.

★★★☆☆

158 min | R | November 24, 2021 | United Artists Releasing

A secretary marries into Italian fashion royalty and decides she likes the throne more than the man. Patrizia Reggiani climbs into the House of Gucci and starts rearranging the furniture. By the end she is rearranging the family tree.

★★★☆☆

102 min | PG | November 24, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney builds a magical Colombian house where every child gets a gift, except one. Mirabel has no power, no door of her own, and a family that quietly treats her as the crack in the foundation. The cracks turn out to be the whole point.

★★★★☆

179 min | NR | November 24, 2021 | Janus Films

A theater director who lost his wife stages a multilingual Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and lets a quiet young woman drive his red Saab. He thinks the car is where he hides from his grief. It turns out to be where he finally faces it.

★★★☆☆

98 min | PG | November 24, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures

A grown man narrates the story of how, at ten years old, he schemed and lied his way toward a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 Chicago. The kids want a video game console. The movie wants to make you cry about your father. Both get what they came for.

★★★☆☆

85 min | R | November 19, 2021 | Lionsgate

A soldier moves through a Rome emptied by lockdown, hunting a plot against the Vatican while his radical twin sits in a cell. Abel Ferrara films the whole thing in paranoid near-darkness where every screen is watching back. The dread is real. The plot is a rumor.

★★★★☆

94 min | R | November 19, 2021 | National Geographic Documentary Films

A camera follows the doctors and nurses inside a Queens hospital during the first weeks of COVID, when nobody knows what works and the bodies keep coming. It films people doing the impossible job with no script and no end date. The result is the closest thing to standing in that room.

★★★★☆

144 min | PG-13 | November 19, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Richard Williams writes a plan to make his daughters tennis champions before they are born. Will Smith plays him as a stubborn visionary who is impossible to argue with and usually right. The man and the movie both refuse to know their place.

★★☆☆☆

124 min | PG-13 | November 19, 2021 | Columbia Pictures

A broke single mother and her two kids inherit a rundown Oklahoma farm from a grandfather they never met. The grandfather is a dead Ghostbuster, and the soil is full of demons. The movie spends its energy decorating a grave instead of telling a story.

★★★★☆

109 min | R | November 19, 2021 | A24

A commercial-radio journalist who interviews kids for a living suddenly has to raise one. His nephew is nine, relentless, and smarter than the questions Johnny gets paid to ask. Turns out the man who records children for a living has no idea how to listen to one.

★★★☆☆

92 min | R | November 19, 2021 | Saban Films

A high-end London restaurant opens its doors on the busiest night of the year. The head chef is drowning in debt, a failed marriage, and a health inspector who just downgraded his rating. Everything that can go wrong gets one long, unbroken take to do it.

★★★☆☆

106 min | NR | November 19, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures

A schoolteacher’s private sex tape leaks online and the parents of her students convene a tribunal to decide her fate. Radu Jude turns that single incident into a vivisection of a whole society. The verdict is on the country, not the teacher.

★★★★☆

127 min | R | November 17, 2021 | Netflix

Two ranching brothers run a Montana cattle operation in 1925. One of them marries a widow, and the other sets out to destroy her. The cruelty is quiet, and that is what makes it lethal.

★★★★☆

110 min | NR | November 17, 2021 | Netflix

In a mountain village in rural Mexico, mothers cut their daughters’ hair short and dig holes in the ground to hide them. The cartel takes girls. This is what childhood looks like when survival means becoming invisible.

★★★★☆

97 min | NR | November 16, 2021 | HBO Documentary Films

Megan Mylan follows Syrian families pulled apart by war and scattered across four countries. There are no battle scenes and no narration, just parents and children trying to hold a family together across borders built to keep them out. The catastrophe here is the quiet one that starts after the headlines stop.

★★★☆☆

120 min | PG-13 | November 12, 2021 | Netflix

A struggling composer waits tables, turns thirty, and watches the clock run out on the musical that has eaten his twenties. Andrew Garfield sings every note himself and never stops sweating. The panic is the point.

★★★★☆

118 min | R | November 12, 2021 | Netflix

Six men who survived sexual abuse by Catholic priests pick up cameras and rebuild the rooms where it happened. Robert Greene turns drama therapy into filmmaking and lets the survivors call the shots. The result is the rare documentary that hands the victims the director’s chair and means it.

★☆☆☆☆

93 min | PG | November 12, 2021 | 20th Century Studios

A kid gets left behind at Christmas while two desperate adults plot to break into his house. Disney resurrects a corpse and props it up with the name of a man who died in 2009. The traps still work. Nothing else does.

★★★☆☆

98 min | PG-13 | November 12, 2021 | Focus Features

A boy grows up on a Belfast street in 1969 as his Protestant neighborhood turns into a war zone overnight. The barricades go up. The question is whether the family stays or runs.

★★☆☆☆

96 min | PG | November 10, 2021 | Paramount Pictures

A lonely girl in a cramped Manhattan apartment adopts a tiny red puppy from a magical rescuer, then wakes up to find he has grown into a ten-foot dog she cannot possibly hide. The city panics and a biotech CEO comes hunting. The premise is sweeter than anything the film does with it.