116 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A young couple moves into a Montreal loft and finds they can see straight into the apartment across the street. They start watching the strangers there have sex, fight, and unravel, and they cannot make themselves stop. The film wants to be Rear Window and ends up peeping at itself.
112 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Focus Features
William Tell counts cards in casinos and lives in motel rooms he strips bare and rewraps in white sheets. He carries a past from a military prison and a young man who wants help settling a score. The math is the easy part.
110 min | R | September 10, 2021 | STXfilms
A bored couponer in suburban Arizona figures out how to game the manufacturer rebate system. She turns a hobby into a multimillion-dollar fraud and drags her best friend along for the ride. The scheme is more disciplined than the movie about it.
111 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Madison starts seeing visions of brutal murders as they happen, killings committed by a figure she cannot stop and does not understand. James Wan abandons the slow-burn dread of his earlier work for something louder and stranger. The first ninety minutes promise a horror film the last twenty refuses to deliver.
115 min | PG-13 | September 10, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A teenager in Sheffield wants to skip a career day and walk the prom in heels. His mother is in his corner. His town is not. He picks the dress anyway.
91 min | PG-13 | September 10, 2021 | IFC Films
Milo gets dumped, then meets Wendy on a hookup app, and the two agree to be friends with benefits while pretending neither one wants more. The movie knows every beat of the rom-com it is copying and announces each one with on-screen text. Self-awareness is not the same thing as having something to say.
89 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Lionsgate
An aging gunslinger rides with a U.S. marshal and a deputy to hunt the outlaws who shot his son and took his land. Three men, one trail, one revenge plot you have seen a hundred times. The horses give the best performances.
97 min | NR | September 3, 2021 | IFC Films
A family takes shelter in their bathroom when a violent storm hits. A tree falls across the only door and traps them inside. The thing outside is worse than the weather.
91 min | R | September 3, 2021 | Lionsgate
Shea Whigham plays a hard-drinking social worker who pulls kids out of broken homes and cannot fix his own life. When an ex-con resurfaces to reclaim his family, the job gets personal. The character study is sharp. The crime thriller bolted onto it is not.
132 min | PG-13 | September 3, 2021 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Shaun parks cars and sings karaoke in San Francisco. His real name is Shang-Chi, his father commands an ancient army, and the past he ran from has come to collect. Marvel finally makes a kung fu movie and remembers that kung fu movies need a reason to fight.
90 min | NR | September 3, 2021 | Strand Releasing
A British Pakistani rapper finally breaks through, then his body collapses on the eve of his first big tour. An autoimmune disease eats his muscles from the inside while he tries to figure out who he is. The illness is the easy part.
120 min | NR | September 3, 2021 | Janus Films
In the highlands of Harar, Ethiopia, farmers harvest khat, the narcotic leaf that fuels the local economy and dulls the country’s young men into a waking dream. Jessica Beshir films their labor and their longing in silver black and white. The high never lasts, and neither does the soil.
112 min | PG | September 3, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A scrappy seamstress dreams of running her own dress shop while a reluctant prince dreams of escaping his crown. Kay Cannon swaps the fairy godmother for Billy Porter and the orchestra for a karaoke playlist. The dress is the only thing that fits.
103 min | R | August 27, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
A buttoned-up couple meets a feral one on a Mexico vacation and makes the mistake of trading numbers. Months later the wild pair crashes the wedding, uninvited and undeterred. Some friendships you escape. This one books a flight.
91 min | R | August 27, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Say his name five times into a mirror and he comes for you. A Black artist in gentrified Chicago digs up the legend and turns his own neighborhood’s trauma into gallery art. The monster was never the man with the hook.
109 min | R | August 20, 2021 | Lionsgate
A retired assassin learns her mentor has been murdered and goes hunting for the people who did it. Standing between her and revenge is a smiling fixer who flirts as easily as he kills. The chemistry is real. The plot around it is not.
107 min | R | August 20, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
Beth’s husband builds her a house on the lake, then rows out onto the water and shoots himself. Now she is alone in the place he designed, finding things he never told her about. Grief is the easy part. The hard part is what was hiding behind it.
116 min | PG-13 | August 20, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
The seas have risen and Miami lives by night. Hugh Jackman runs a machine that lets people relive their memories, then a woman walks in and vanishes, and he dives into the past to find her. The film drowns in the same nostalgia it diagnoses.
81 min | R | August 20, 2021 | Lionsgate
Bella Thorne plays a party girl who scams her way into a Jesus-themed money laundering scheme and decides the only way out is to become the next coming of Christ. Janell Shirtcliff stages it as a feature-length perfume ad with a body count. The clothes are the only thing in focus.
108 min | R | August 20, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
A con man drifts in and out of his daughter’s life, lying to her even as she grows old enough to see through him. Jennifer Vogel loves her father and writes the truth about him anyway. Sean Penn casts his own kids and films it like a memory he cannot stop romanticizing.
104 min | R | August 20, 2021 | IFC Midnight
Neill Blomkamp scans actors into a digital purgatory and sends a woman into her comatose mother’s mind to confront the demon riding inside her. The technology is the most interesting thing in the room. That is the problem.
95 min | NR | August 20, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
A cryptozookeeper travels the world capturing mythical creatures and locking them inside a sanctuary built to keep them safe. Dash Shaw paints the whole utopia by hand and asks whether a cage with good intentions is still a cage. The animation runs wilder than anything it gets wrapped around.
95 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
A painting surfaces at a New Orleans estate sale for $1,175. Fifteen years later it sells as a Leonardo da Vinci for $450 million. This documentary follows the money and finds that authenticity is whatever the right people decide to believe.
145 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
Aretha Franklin learns to sing in her father’s church and spends the next two decades fighting the men who want to manage her voice for her. Respect lines up every biopic beat like dominoes and knocks them down on schedule. Jennifer Hudson is the only thing in it as big as the woman it is about.
115 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | 20th Century Studios
Guy is a background character in a violent open-world video game. He wears the same blue shirt, drinks the same coffee, and gets robbed at the same bank every single day. Then he picks up a pair of sunglasses and realizes the apocalypse around him is the whole point.
98 min | R | August 13, 2021 | Screen Gems
The Blind Man from the first film is back, this time raising a kidnapped girl in his fortified house. Then a crew of armed men show up to take her. The movie wants you to root for a serial killer because the new bad guys are worse.
112 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | Apple TV+
Ruby Rossi is the only hearing member of a deaf family that runs a struggling fishing boat. She also has a voice good enough to leave them behind for. The film makes you feel the weight of that choice in both directions.
98 min | NR | August 12, 2021 | HBO Documentary Films
Nanfu Wang points her camera at Wuhan as COVID erupts, then turns it on the United States and finds the same lies in a different language. Two governments, one playbook. The virus kills the body, but the propaganda does the real damage.
96 min | PG | August 6, 2021 | Netflix
A music-loving kinkajou loses his partner and inherits an unfinished love song. He sets out across Florida to deliver it to the woman it was written for. The songs soar. The map underneath them is laminated.
132 min | R | August 6, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Amanda Waller straps bombs to the necks of death-row supervillains and drops them on a South American island to level a secret facility. The mission is suicide and the squad is expendable. James Gunn turns a throwaway premise into the bloodiest cartoon a major studio will let him make.
105 min | R | August 6, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
Udo Kier plays a retired drag queen and hairdresser who slips out of his nursing home to style a dead woman’s hair one last time. Todd Stephens builds a small-town odyssey around a man the world already filed away. After fifty years in the margins of other people’s movies, Kier finally gets the close-up.
103 min | NR | August 6, 2021 | IFC Films
A wealthy family wakes up one day and finds the parents and the teenage daughter gone. Their twelve-year-old son has put them in an unfinished bunker in the woods. He goes home to play house with their lives, and the movie watches him do it.
140 min | R | August 6, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A stand-up comedian and an opera soprano fall in love and have a daughter who happens to be a wooden puppet. Leos Carax and the band Sparks turn the marriage into a sung-through opera about fame eating everything it touches. The puppet is the most human thing in it.
130 min | R | July 30, 2021 | A24
A young knight takes a swing at a green stranger on Christmas Day and agrees to take the blow back in a year. The deal is a death sentence dressed up as honor. The whole film is the long walk to collect.
139 min | R | July 30, 2021 | Focus Features
An Oklahoma roughneck flies to Marseille to spring his daughter from a French prison. He cannot speak the language, work the courts, or read the people he leans on. The investigation is bait, and the lonely man building a new life is the movie that actually shows up.
124 min | R | July 30, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
An unborn soul interviews for the right to be born. A grim bureaucrat of the afterlife runs the test, grading candidates on how well they would survive a life they have never lived. The premise is audacious and the film almost gets all the way there.
127 min | PG-13 | July 30, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
A riverboat captain with a rigged routine and a secret guides a scientist up the Amazon toward a tree that supposedly cures everything. German soldiers and cursed conquistadors chase them the whole way. The ride is smoother than the movie.
103 min | NR | July 30, 2021 | IFC Films
A young Air Force veteran turns whistleblower, claims the FBI is persecuting him, and flees the country. Then the documentary stops trusting him. Sonia Kennebeck builds a film that keeps pulling the floor out from under you.
109 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Val Kilmer has filmed himself his entire adult life. Now throat cancer has taken his speaking voice, so his son reads the words while decades of old tape tell the story. A movie star edits his own life and decides which parts you get to see.
121 min | PG-13 | July 23, 2021 | Paramount Pictures
A mute orphan watches his father die, grows up fighting for cash, and gets pulled into a war between two ancient ninja clans. He swears revenge and lies to everyone to get it. Then the movie forgets it ever set that up.
108 min | PG-13 | July 23, 2021 | Universal Pictures
A family wanders onto a beautiful beach that ages them two years every hour. Childhood, marriage, and mortality collapse into a single afternoon. The concept is terrifying until Shyamalan explains it.
99 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Lionsgate
Two detectives hunting a Florida serial killer cross paths with an undercover agent working a trafficking ring. The pieces of a real thriller are here. The movie never bothers to assemble them.
91 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Lindy carries a rare disorder that drowns her in rage, so she wears a vest of electrodes and shocks herself calm. When the one man who steadies her turns up dead, she stops shocking and starts swinging. The premise has voltage and the movie keeps shorting out.
93 min | R | July 23, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
A father walks across America to lecture strangers about bullying after his gay son suffers for being himself. The walk is real. The movie is a guilt trip with a backpack.
118 min | NR | July 23, 2021 | Strand Releasing
Jan Mikolášek heals thousands by studying their urine in a glass flask. He has no medical degree and no warmth for the people who depend on him. When the Communists take power, the gift that made him famous becomes the thing that destroys him.
94 min | PG-13 | July 23, 2021 | Neon
Alvin Ailey turns Black grief and the Texas church into modern dance and a company that outlives him. Jamila Wignot builds the film from his own voice and decades of archival footage. The dancing says everything the man refused to.
106 min | PG | July 21, 2021 | Netflix
Jim Lake Jr. has battled trolls, aliens, and wizards across three series. Now Arcadia faces the apocalypse, and every hero del Toro built gets one last stand. The titans are enormous, and the goodbye is rushed.
83 min | R | July 20, 2021 | American International Pictures
A comet is hours from ending the world, so Liza walks across Los Angeles to reach one last party and say her goodbyes. Her younger self tags along to force the honesty she has dodged for decades. It is a sweet end-of-the-world hangout that keeps saying goodbye and never builds to anything.
88 min | PG-13 | July 16, 2021 | Columbia Pictures
The survivors of the first murder room get pulled back in, this time onto a New York subway car rigged to kill. Minos runs a championship bracket of past winners, and the prize is staying alive. The puzzles are clever. The people solving them are not.
92 min | R | July 16, 2021 | Lionsgate
Ben and Mary are star-crossed lovers from feuding families, and the movie reminds you of that with onscreen text, comic-book panels, and a narrator who will not shut up. Their old flame reignites just as a jealous fiance and a hired gun close in. It is Romeo and Juliet with handguns and the IQ of a bumper sticker.