110 min | R | April 30, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A Navy SEAL loses everything to a Russian hit squad and goes hunting for the men who pulled the trigger. Michael B. Jordan throws himself into every fight scene like he believes in the movie. The movie does not return the favor.
110 min | R | April 30, 2021 | Lionsgate
A nameless contract killer botches a job and gets handed a cryptic next target by his mentor. He stalks a small town diner trying to figure out which stranger he is supposed to shoot. The mystery is the only thing keeping the lights on, and it goes out early.
128 min | NR | April 30, 2021 | Netflix
Sharad Nerulkar devotes his life to Hindustani classical music, chasing a purity his teachers preach and his idols recorded decades ago. He practices for years and waits for greatness to arrive. The film is honest enough to wonder whether it ever shows up.
107 min | R | April 30, 2021 | Open Road Films
A failed comic book artist loses his wife and inherits a custody fight with her rich father. Then his ghoulish puppet creations start crawling around the house where his daughter sleeps. The puppets are scarier than the script, which is not a compliment.
76 min | NR | April 30, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
A man and woman drift over a ruined city while a voice catalogs the strangers below. Roy Andersson stages the whole of human existence as a series of motionless gray tableaux. It sounds like a slog. It plays like a miracle.
90 min | R | April 23, 2021 | Bleecker Street
A fortysomething man hires a twentysomething surrogate to carry the baby he is having alone. What he wants is not a baby. It is someone who has to stay.
110 min | R | April 23, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A cold-blooded ninja, a washed-up cage fighter, and a band of chosen warriors train to defend Earthrealm in a tournament to the death. The fights are brutal and the blood is real. Everything between the fights is filler.
114 min | PG | April 22, 2021 | Netflix
A dysfunctional family roadtrip collides with a robot apocalypse when a spurned AI assistant decides humanity needs rounding up. The Mitchells are barely holding it together as a family. They are the planet’s only hope.
96 min | R | April 16, 2021 | Lionsgate
An assassin gets blackmailed into one last night of dirty work by a retired cop who holds her daughter hostage. She drives around a neon-soaked city collecting cash from drug dealers. The only thing the movie executes cleanly is itself.
116 min | R | April 16, 2021 | IFC Films
Two Americans meet at a party in Athens and fall into bed before they learn each other’s names. The summer never ends and the consequences never stop. The fantasy lasts exactly as long as it takes for Monday to arrive.
107 min | R | April 16, 2021 | Neon
A scientist treks into the English woods to find a colleague during a pandemic. The forest has other plans, and the people living in it have already surrendered to them. Ben Wheatley turns a few actors and a patch of trees into a strobing fever dream.
125 min | NR | April 16, 2021 | KimStim
A filmmaker gets a terminal diagnosis two days before Christmas, with a houseful of kids and a marriage that went cold years ago. Maria Sødahl pulls the story from her own brush with death. The result earns its tears instead of demanding them.
93 min | G | April 16, 2021 | Neon
Viktor Kossakovsky points his camera at a sow, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, and refuses to say a single word. No narration, no music, no message spelled out. Just animals living, and a filmmaker daring you to keep watching.
108 min | PG-13 | April 9, 2021 | Lionsgate
Thirty kids ship out on an eighty-six-year mission to colonize a distant planet. None of them will live to see it, and someone decides to stop taking the drug that keeps them calm. Turns out a spaceship full of horny teenagers with no rules is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
99 min | PG-13 | April 2, 2021 | Screen Gems
A washed-up reporter digs up a fake miracle in a small New England town and a mute girl starts hearing the Virgin Mary. The Church smells salvation. The movie smells like every possession picture you have already seen.
104 min | NR | April 2, 2021 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
Sam Ali is a Syrian refugee who agrees to let a famous artist tattoo a visa across his back so he can finally cross into Europe. The price is that he stops being a man and becomes a painting people pay to see. Freedom arrives, and it comes shrink-wrapped.
78 min | NR | April 2, 2021 | Utopia
A young woman juggling a sugar daddy and a directionless life walks into a shiva and finds both her ex-girlfriend and her benefactor already there. His wife and baby come too. The funeral is for someone else, but the corpse onscreen is her composure.
114 min | PG-13 | March 31, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Two titans get a title fight, and the movie knows it. Adam Wingard builds everything around the brawls and treats the humans as transportation between them. The monkey hits hard. The plot does not.
91 min | R | March 26, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Hutch Mansell is a suburban pushover who eats insults and misses the bus. Then a home invasion flips a switch that should have stayed off, and the mild dad turns out to be a man with a body count. Turning the other cheek was always the act.
87 min | R | March 26, 2021 | Netflix
Chris Carey falls for his high school crush and drags his best friend on a cross-country road trip to win her. The road, the strangers, and the chaos are all real. The marks just do not know they are extras in someone else’s love story.
112 min | PG-13 | March 19, 2021 | Roadside Attractions
A British salesman with no training gets recruited to smuggle Soviet secrets out of Moscow at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The KGB does not extend professional courtesy to amateurs. Benedict Cumberbatch finds out the hard way.
242 min | R | March 18, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A dead Superman leaves Earth defenseless, so Batman assembles a league of gods to hold the line against an alien invasion. Zack Snyder finally gets his full vision restored, and it is enormous. The vision is the problem.
84 min | PG-13 | March 5, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
Old men hunt the white Alba truffle in the forests of Piedmont, guarding their spots like buried treasure and trusting only their dogs. Buyers want the secret and the harvest. The men would sooner take it to the grave.
107 min | PG | March 5, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
A land called Kumandra has spent five hundred years tearing itself apart over the shards of a broken gem, and one warrior hunts the last living dragon to put it back together. The world Disney builds is gorgeous and specific. The lesson it teaches you can see coming from three kingdoms away.
104 min | NR | March 5, 2021 | Super LTD
A UN translator in Srebrenica spends a few hours trying to use her position to get her husband and two sons inside the safe zone before the Serb army comes for them. She has the documents. She has the access. None of it is enough.
109 min | PG-13 | March 5, 2021 | Lionsgate
A boy lands on a colony world where every man’s thoughts pour out loud as visible Noise, and there are no women left. Then a girl crashes from the sky, the only silent mind on the planet. The setup hands you a great movie. This is not it.
89 min | R | March 5, 2021 | Focus Features
Alfred Chin can ball, but his parents, his rival, and his first girlfriend all want a piece of him. Eddie Huang crams a coming-of-age story, a romance, and an immigrant family drama into one undersized debut. The voice is real. The movie around it is not finished.
95 min | PG | March 4, 2021 | Paramount+
SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary gets snatched by a vain sea king, so SpongeBob and Patrick set off for the Lost City of Atlantic City to bring him home. Keanu Reeves shows up as a talking tumbleweed and plays it completely straight. The journey is more interesting than the reason for it.
108 min | PG-13 | March 4, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Prince Akeem returns to Queens to find the bastard son he never knew he had and drag him back to Zamunda. The throne needs a male heir, and the script needs a reason to exist. It finds the first and fakes the second.
101 min | PG | February 26, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A cat and a mouse take their feud to a fancy Manhattan hotel during a celebrity wedding. The animation is hand-drawn over live action, which is the one bold idea here. Then the movie hands the spotlight to the people.
88 min | PG-13 | February 26, 2021 | IFC Midnight
A lapsed Hasidic man takes a one-night job watching over a dead body. The corpse comes with a passenger. He should have stayed in his support group.
131 min | R | February 26, 2021 | Hulu
Billie Holiday sings a song about lynching, and the federal government spends years trying to cage her for it. Andra Day vanishes into the role and sings every note herself. The performance is electric, but the movie around it never finds the same key.
97 min | PG-13 | February 26, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
An aging man refuses the caregiver his daughter has hired. His memory is collapsing, and the film locks you inside the wreckage with him. You do not watch dementia here. You get lost in it.
93 min | NR | February 26, 2021 | Neon
A young pickpocket lands in MACA, a prison outside Abidjan that the inmates run themselves. On the night of the red moon, the dying boss names him Roman and orders him to tell a story to the whole cell block. When the story ends, he dies.
140 min | R | February 26, 2021 | Neon
Billie Eilish records a debut album in her brother’s bedroom and becomes a global pop star at seventeen. R. J. Cutler’s camera never leaves her side. The access is total, and the hard questions are nowhere.
116 min | R | February 19, 2021 | Lionsgate
Ross Ulbricht builds the dark web’s biggest drug bazaar from a laptop and a libertarian fantasy. A washed-up DEA agent claws onto the case to save his own career. The movie wants to be two stories and commits to neither.
118 min | R | February 19, 2021 | Netflix
Marla Grayson is a court-appointed guardian who strips elderly wards of their freedom and drains their assets, all under a judge’s signature. She picks a wealthy retiree who looks like the perfect mark. The mark has connections that will make Marla regret the choice.
91 min | PG | February 19, 2021 | Walt Disney Pictures
A cynical ten-year-old revives a squirrel that comes back with superpowers. It can fly, type poetry, and understand every word she says. The real magic trick is using the rodent to glue a broken family back together.
105 min | R | February 12, 2021 | Bleecker Street
Two married women on neighboring farms in 1856 fall in love across the fence line and the frozen ground. Abigail keeps a diary, and the diary keeps the secret. The romance is familiar, but the cold and the dread are specific.
129 min | R | February 12, 2021 | STXfilms
Mohamedou Ould Slahi sits in Guantanamo Bay for years and is never charged with a crime. A defense lawyer fights to free him while a prosecutor builds the case to kill him. The story is damning, but the movie settles for a courtroom drama.
99 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Two teenagers wake up to the same day, over and over, and decide to map every fleeting perfect moment in it. The structure has been done to death since Groundhog Day woke up in Punxsutawney. This one knows the loop is a trap, and so do its kids.
115 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | A24
A Korean immigrant family plants a farm in rural Arkansas and bets everything on dirt nobody else wanted. Jacob chases the American dream while his marriage and his savings drain into the ground. The miracle is how small Lee Isaac Chung keeps it.
89 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | Focus Features
A woman loses everything and flees to a Wyoming mountain to live alone with no electricity, no phone, and no plan to survive the winter. A stranger finds her near death and refuses to let her die. Grief gets a postcard backdrop.
126 min | R | February 12, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
The FBI recruits a car thief named Bill O’Neal to infiltrate the Illinois Black Panthers and get close to chairman Fred Hampton. He climbs the ranks, earns the trust, and feeds the Bureau everything. The title tells you how it ends.
113 min | R | February 12, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Manhattan widow who has spent her fortune to zero and chooses to blow the rest in Paris rather than economize at home. She brings her grown son, an aging cat that houses her dead husband, and a frozen heart she refuses to thaw. Pfeiffer is electric, and the film keeps falling asleep around her.
107 min | PG-13 | February 12, 2021 | Lionsgate
Two inseparable friends from Soft Rock, Nebraska leave their furniture-store jobs and culottes behind for a pastel resort in Florida. There they walk straight into a supervillain’s plot to murder the whole town with weaponized mosquitoes. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo built a live-action cartoon and committed to it without blinking.
107 min | PG-13 | February 10, 2021 | Vertical Entertainment
A newly sober drug dealer becomes the sole guardian of her nonverbal autistic half-sister. A pop star directs. The result is a vanity project that mistakes a teenager’s neurology for a mood board.
92 min | NR | February 5, 2021 | Magnolia Pictures
Two retired women have loved each other for decades from across a hallway, hidden from a family that thinks they are just neighbors. They plan to sell up and move to Rome to live in the open. Then one of them can no longer keep the secret, and the closet turns into a cage.
101 min | NR | February 5, 2021 | IFC Films
A pandemic deletes human memory the way a hard drive fails. Emma and Jude are newlyweds when the disease starts wiping Jude, and she fights to keep their marriage on record before he forgets her face. The metaphor is enormous and the movie is small and sad.
103 min | R | February 5, 2021 | Amazon Studios
Owen Wilson gets fired, ruins his life, and meets a woman who tells him the world is a simulation and none of it counts. The pitch sells itself as a mind-bender about addiction and denial. Then it explains the magic crystals and the spell breaks.