94 min | NR | November 5, 2021 | IFC Films
Jordan Hines is a Hollywood talent agent who receives a purple envelope inviting him to an anonymous sexual encounter at a hotel. He goes. Then he spends the rest of the film unraveling over who sent it and what they know. Some men will burn their entire life down rather than admit they wanted the envelope.
116 min | R | November 5, 2021 | Neon
Princess Diana spends three days trapped at a royal Christmas, weighed on arrival and watched at every meal. Pablo Larraín calls it a fable, and Kristen Stewart turns the breakdown into something close to grace. The performance is the whole show, and it almost carries the rest.
95 min | PG-13 | November 5, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
A six-foot-two woman with a warbling voice teaches America that French food is not a class privilege. The cooking footage glistens and Julia Child remains a force of nature. The movie loves her too much to ask a hard question.
84 min | NR | November 5, 2021 | Zeitgeist Films
Fahrije’s husband vanishes in the Kosovo war and never comes back. She stops waiting, learns to drive, and starts selling pepper relish to feed her kids. The village would rather she sat home and grieved.
156 min | PG-13 | November 5, 2021 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Immortal beings have walked the Earth for seven thousand years, sworn to fight monsters and forbidden to touch anything else. Now they reunite to stop a threat bigger than any they have faced. Chloé Zhao makes Marvel slow down, and the franchise forgets how to move.
107 min | R | November 5, 2021 | Netflix
A Cop Movie follows two Mexico City officers through patrols and bribes, then reveals the cops on screen are actors playing real people. The documentary becomes a study of how a uniform turns a person into a performance. Clever as hell, and a little cold to the touch.
108 min | R | October 29, 2021 | A24
Julie survives a devastating relationship and decides to make a film about it. She is a film student in 1980s London, sorting grief into storyboards. The result is a movie about a young woman teaching herself to turn her worst year into art.
116 min | R | October 29, 2021 | Focus Features
A grieving fashion student moves to London and starts slipping into the body of a 1960s singer every time she sleeps. The dream is glamorous until it curdles into a nightmare she cannot wake from. Edgar Wright builds a gorgeous haunted house and then keeps adding rooms until he loses the floor plan.
117 min | NR | October 29, 2021 | Showtime
In September 1971, the men inside Attica Correctional Facility seize control of a cellblock and demand to be treated as human beings. For four days the world watches. Then the state of New York shows them what it thinks of the question.
99 min | R | October 29, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
A teacher returns to her dying Oregon hometown and notices a boy whose family hides something starving in the dark. The thing in the house is a Wendigo. The thing in the town is worse, and it has no shape you can shoot.
105 min | R | October 29, 2021 | Stage 6 Films
A children’s book author survives a suicide attempt and tries to raise her newborn while postpartum depression hunts her. Amanda Seyfried gives the illness a devastating face. The performance is braver than the film built around it.
98 min | PG-13 | October 27, 2021 | Netflix
Two childhood friends, both light-skinned Black women, reconnect by chance in 1920s New York. One lives openly as Black in Harlem. The other passes for white and goes home to a husband who would kill her if he knew.
108 min | R | October 22, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
An American magazine runs its foreign bureau out of a fictional French town and publishes its final issue after the editor drops dead. Wes Anderson adapts three of its feature stories into the most elaborate diorama he has ever built. The result is gorgeous, exacting, and easier to admire than to love.
111 min | PG-13 | October 22, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Louis Wain draws cats for a living and chases electricity in his head. He marries the governess, mourns the love of his life, and loses his grip on reality one psychedelic feline at a time. Will Sharpe makes the madness beautiful and the biopic ordinary.
107 min | PG | October 22, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
Every kid has a robot best friend wired into a social network. Barney gets a defective one named Ron that cannot follow the rules. The glitch turns out to be the only honest thing in his life.
155 min | PG-13 | October 22, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A noble house takes stewardship of the deadliest planet in the galaxy, the only place that produces the spice the empire runs on. The young heir inherits a trap wearing the face of an opportunity. Denis Villeneuve builds half a story on a colossal scale and dares you not to want the other half.
94 min | PG-13 | October 22, 2021 | Picturehouse / National Geographic Documentary Films
Jacques-Yves Cousteau invents the gear, films the deep, and becomes the most famous explorer alive. Liz Garbus builds his story entirely from his own footage. The man who taught the world to love the ocean spends his last act trying to save it from people like him.
81 min | NR | October 21, 2021 | Aerofilms
A Czech woman marries into an Afghan family and tries to build a life in Kabul after the Taliban falls. The household pulls her in two directions at once. Belonging here means surrendering the parts of herself that brought her here.
121 min | NR | October 15, 2021 | Film Movement
Ryusuke Hamaguchi builds three short stories out of coincidence: an ex who resurfaces, a honeytrap that backfires, two strangers who mistake each other for someone from their past. Nothing explodes. Nobody dies. The talking is the action.
121 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Apple TV+
Todd Haynes makes a documentary about the band that invented the underground. He refuses the talking-heads formula and builds the film like the music itself. The result is a portrait that sounds the way the Velvets felt.
153 min | R | October 15, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
Two French knights, once friends, accuse each other of lies and settle it with a trial by combat. The same events play out three times, once from each man and once from the woman they both talk past. The men think the fight is about honor. The woman knows it is about her.
111 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Lionsgate
Nick and Janine have a perfect marriage. Then her jealous ex starts traveling through time to erase it. The mechanics get in the way of the heartbreak.
94 min | NR | October 15, 2021 | Kino Lorber
Jesmark is a Maltese fisherman whose hand-painted wooden boat is taking on water and whose newborn son needs money the sea no longer pays. The regulations reward the men who scrap their boats and quit. The black market just asks if he wants to make rent.
104 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
A drunk country singer wins a dice game in a dive bar and uses the cash to chase down the woman who got away. Justin Corsbie builds his debut from a Todd Snider song and fills it with character actors who deserve better. The song is three minutes long and the movie keeps going.
105 min | R | October 15, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Michael Myers survives the fire that was supposed to end him and walks back into Haddonfield. The town that spent forty years afraid of him decides to stop running and hunt him down. The mob turns out to be almost as dangerous as the man in the mask, and the movie is too busy pointing that out to scare you.
113 min | R | October 15, 2021 | IFC Films
Two filmmakers married to each other retreat to the island where Ingmar Bergman made his masterpieces. He worships the ghost and basks in the pilgrimage. She tries to write in its shadow and discovers her own movie staring back.
107 min | PG | October 8, 2021 | National Geographic Documentary Films
Twelve boys and their soccer coach are trapped miles inside a flooded Thai cave, and the world’s armies cannot reach them. The only people who can are a few retirement-age British men who dive caves as a hobby. The plan to save the kids sounds like a plan to drown them, which is exactly why it works as a film.
163 min | PG-13 | October 8, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
James Bond has retired to Jamaica with no missions and no MI6. The CIA pulls him back for one more job, and the woman he loved becomes the thread that unravels everything. Daniel Craig finally gets the exit the character has never been allowed.
111 min | PG-13 | October 8, 2021 | Bleecker Street
Four parents meet in the back of a church. Two buried their son after a school shooting. The other two raised the boy who pulled the trigger, and now they all have to sit at the same table.
106 min | R | October 8, 2021 | A24
A childless couple on a remote Icelandic farm finds a newborn that is half lamb and half human. They name her, dress her, and raise her as their daughter. Nature notices, and nature wants its child back.
97 min | NR | October 8, 2021 | MTV Documentary Films
A factory worker assembles sex dolls. A trainee learns to smile for the rich. A model holds a pose for hours. Jessica Kingdon films the Chinese Dream from the bottom of the supply chain up, and lets the images do the indicting.
97 min | PG-13 | October 1, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
Eddie Brock and his alien parasite are stuck in a bad domestic partnership. Then a serial killer gets his own symbiote and starts a war. The bickering is more fun than the carnage.
108 min | R | October 1, 2021 | Neon
A dancer with a titanium plate in her skull leaves a trail of bodies and then disappears into the life of a grieving fire captain who thinks she is his missing son. Julia Ducournau dares you to keep watching. Most of the time the dare works.
120 min | R | October 1, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A young Tony Soprano grows up watching his uncle Dickie Moltisanti run rackets in 1967 Newark while the city burns around them. The prequel knows exactly how this kid turns out. It just cannot decide whether it is a movie or a backdoor pilot.
109 min | PG-13 | October 1, 2021 | Lionsgate
A fringe sound born in the Jesus Movement of the 1960s grows into stadium worship and crossover radio. The Erwin brothers chart that rise with archival footage and the genre’s biggest names. They throw a victory party and forget to ask anyone the hard questions.
93 min | PG | October 1, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
Gomez packs the family into a black RV and drags them across America to stop the kids from growing up. The road-trip comedy runs the most morbid family in fiction through every cheerful vacation cliche available. The premise is a costume, and the movie never finds the body underneath.
99 min | NR | October 1, 2021 | Shout! Studios
A weathered farmer takes in a wounded stranger and a satchel of stolen money. Then the men with badges come looking for both. The quiet ones always have the worst secrets.
100 min | NR | October 1, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
Ana escapes her grim life through a radio and lands in a dreamworld where women lure soldiers to their deaths. It wants to be a feminist war fantasy with teeth. It settles for a beautiful postcard.
108 min | R | September 24, 2021 | Bleecker Street
A Berlin scientist agrees to test a humanoid robot built to be her perfect partner. Tom looks like Dan Stevens and is engineered down to the algorithm to please her. The catch is that being handed exactly what you want exposes how little you understand what you want.
137 min | PG-13 | September 24, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Evan Hansen, an anxious high schooler, lets a grieving family believe he was their dead son’s closest friend. The lie grows into a viral movement built on a kid who is no longer alive to deny it. The movie wants you to forgive him and never figures out why you should.
113 min | R | September 24, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Two ballet students at an elite Paris academy fight for one contract that only one of them can win. They become friends, then lovers, then enemies, sometimes within the same scene. The dancing is the least interesting thing about it.
115 min | NR | September 17, 2021 | Kino Lorber
A silk merchant in wartime Kobe returns from Manchuria carrying proof of an atrocity and a plan to expose it. His wife must decide whether the man she loves is a hero or a traitor using her as cover. Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns the marriage into a minefield.
92 min | NR | September 17, 2021 | IFC Films
St. Vincent agrees to let her bandmate Carrie Brownstein film a documentary about her tour. The footage of her real life is too boring to use, so the documentary starts inventing a more interesting St. Vincent. Then the invention takes over.
126 min | PG-13 | September 17, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
Tammy Faye Bakker builds a televangelism empire alongside her husband Jim, then watches fraud and scandal burn it down. Jessica Chastain vanishes under pounds of prosthetics to play her. The makeup does more work than the script.
91 min | PG-13 | September 17, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Pauli Murray builds the legal arguments that crack segregation and sex discrimination, then watches the courts use them and forget the name. Lawyer, poet, organizer, priest, and decades early on all of it. Betsy West and Julie Cohen finally put that name on the marquee.
96 min | R | September 17, 2021 | Lionsgate
A stoner cons her way into a costumed tour-guide gig at a historic manor and gets haunted by the aristocrat she is paid to impersonate. The ghost wants to teach her to be a proper lady. The movie just wants to make her fart.
104 min | PG-13 | September 17, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A washed-up rodeo star takes a job retrieving a rich man’s son from Mexico City and hauling him back across the border. The kid would rather keep his fighting rooster. Clint Eastwood, ninety-one years old, ambles through a movie that has nowhere to be.
108 min | R | September 17, 2021 | Open Road Films
A con man gets himself arrested to hide from the hitman hunting him. The hitman gets himself arrested too and takes the cell across the hall. The only thing standing between them is a rookie cop who is sharper than either predator.
117 min | R | September 17, 2021 | Focus Features
Antonio LeBlanc has lived in Louisiana since he was three, and a paperwork error from his adoption now puts him in line for deportation to a country he never knew. The premise is a gut punch. The execution keeps reaching for the next one.
95 min | R | September 15, 2021 | Peacock
James McAvoy plays a father who races back to the Scottish Highlands when his young son vanishes from a campsite. He improvises every line, handed no script and only the broad shape of the plot. The experiment throws off more heat than the movie wrapped around it.