94 min | NR | February 1, 2021 | Netflix
A teenage girl comes home to an empty flat and a note from her mother. Now she has a little brother to raise and a secret to keep from everyone who could take him away. The miracle is how much life she squeezes in between the panic.
140 min | NR | January 29, 2021 | Film Movement
A married couple adopts a baby boy after years of failed fertility treatment. Six years later a young woman appears at their door, claims to be his birth mother, and asks for money or her son back. Naomi Kawase takes a thriller premise and lets it dissolve into something slower and sadder.
128 min | R | January 29, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A burned-out deputy and a rising detective hunt a serial killer through 1990 Los Angeles. The case is a pretext. The movie is really about the things that get inside a cop and never wash out.
85 min | R | January 29, 2021 | A24
Maud is a hospice nurse who has found God and decided her terminally ill patient’s soul is hers to save. Amanda is a dying ex-dancer who finds the whole thing amusing until she doesn’t. Devotion this total has nowhere to go but down.
110 min | R | January 29, 2021 | Apple TV+
An ex-con returns to his Louisiana hometown and ends up caring for a neglected neighbor kid who likes dolls and dresses. The bond is genuine and the lead turn is quietly committed. The screenplay just hits every beat you can see coming from the opening reel.
108 min | R | January 29, 2021 | Searchlight Pictures
Fern loses her job, her town, and her home when one factory closes. She packs a van and drives into the American West to live as a nomad and chase seasonal work. It is a road movie for everyone the economy left on the shoulder.
106 min | R | January 29, 2021 | Netflix
A director and his girlfriend come home from his premiere, and the celebration curdles into an all-night fight about who owns the story he just turned into a movie. Two people who love each other take turns aiming for the soft spots. The performances are real. The screenplay is a grudge.
121 min | NR | January 29, 2021 | Neon
Lyuda Semina believes in Stalin, the Party, and the workers’ paradise. Then the army opens fire on striking workers in her town and her daughter vanishes into the bodies. The system she worships hands her the bill.
126 min | NR | January 29, 2021 | MUBI
A Jehovah’s Witness congregation in rural Georgia gets firebombed during a sermon. The film barely cares about who did it. It cares about the wife left behind, and what every man in her life expects her to swallow.
100 min | NR | January 22, 2021 | Super LTD
Gianfranco Rosi spends three years filming ordinary life along the war borders where Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon meet. No dates, no battles, no narration. Just the quiet that violence leaves behind, beautifully shot and impossible to hold onto.
114 min | PG-13 | January 22, 2021 | IFC Films
A retired Texas rancher and his son are mending a fence along the Rio Grande when a panicked night goes wrong and a boy ends up dead. Jackson runs south into the country he was raised to fear. The movie wants to atone for a sin it cannot stop committing.
95 min | NR | January 22, 2021 | Kino Lorber
A young man leaves a Mexican village for the United States and never arrives. His mother refuses the official story that he is dead and walks into the country’s open wound to find the truth. What she finds is worse than a grave.
108 min | PG-13 | January 15, 2021 | Open Road Films
A retired Arizona rancher and Marine sniper finds a Mexican boy and his mother at his fence line, running from a cartel. He buries the mother and drives the kid north toward Chicago with killers on his bumper. Liam Neeson has made this drive before, and the road is getting familiar.
112 min | PG-13 | January 15, 2021 | Netflix
Suffolk, 1939. A dying widow hires a self-taught excavator to open the burial mounds on her estate, and they haul an Anglo-Saxon ship out of the soil as the war closes in. It is a film about what you leave behind, and it has the patience to let that sink in.
104 min | NR | January 15, 2021 | IFC Films
J. Edgar Hoover decides Martin Luther King Jr. is the most dangerous man in America and turns the full machinery of the FBI against him. Wiretaps, hotel-room bugs, an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself. The film proves the conspiracy was real and signed by the federal government.
118 min | R | January 14, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A divorcing couple rides out the first lockdown in the same house, one firing employees over video calls and the other reciting poetry to no one. Then they decide to rob Harrods. The heist is the excuse. The marriage is the crime scene.
125 min | R | January 13, 2021 | Netflix
Balram Halwai is born poor and decides poverty is a cage he can pick the lock on. He charms his way into a job driving for the family that owns his village, then studies them like prey. The servant’s grin is the most dangerous thing in the room.
127 min | R | December 30, 2020 | Netflix
A home birth goes wrong. A woman loses her newborn daughter and spends the next year refusing to grieve the way everyone around her demands. Vanessa Kirby holds the whole thing together by shutting down.
151 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
The year is 1984 and a magic stone grants any wish you want. Diana wishes Steve Trevor back from the dead, and a broke con man wishes to become the stone itself. Everybody gets what they want, and the bill comes due.
119 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Briarcliff Entertainment
A Saudi journalist walks into a consulate to collect a marriage document and never walks out. Bryan Fogel traces the murder back to a crown prince and the surveillance machine that hunted Khashoggi’s friends across continents. The men who ordered it are still running the country.
101 min | PG | December 25, 2020 | Walt Disney Pictures
Joe Gardner finally lands the jazz gig of his life. Then he falls down a manhole and dies. Pixar spends the next ninety minutes arguing about whether the gig ever mattered.
114 min | R | December 25, 2020 | Focus Features
Cassie spends her nights pretending to be too drunk to stand, waiting for the nice guy who offers her a ride home to show what he really wants. By day she works a coffee counter and lets her medical-school dropout look like a tragedy. The men keep failing the test, and she keeps score.
124 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
Matteo Garrone strips the Disney varnish off Collodi and returns Pinocchio to its grim Italian roots. A wooden boy lies, wanders, and suffers for it at the hands of con men and worse. This is a fairy tale with the cruelty left in.
114 min | R | December 25, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Cassius Clay wins the heavyweight title and spends the night in a Miami motel room with Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke. Four icons argue about what their fame is actually good for. Regina King turns a single room into a battlefield.
118 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Five years after the Civil War, a former Confederate captain rides across Texas reading newspapers aloud to townsfolk for a dime a head. He takes charge of an orphaned girl raised by the Kiowa and points her toward family she does not remember. Paul Greengrass shoots a Western with the precision of a man who has never made one, and it shows in both directions.
114 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A struggling singer working in her father’s Harlem record shop falls for a saxophonist who takes a summer job behind the counter. Then careers and time pull them apart. Eugene Ashe bets that a sincere, unironic romance can still hold a modern audience, and the bet mostly pays off.
103 min | PG-13 | December 18, 2020 | Screen Gems
Artemis and her unit chase a vanished team into a sandstorm and come out in a world ruled by monsters the size of buildings. Paul W. S. Anderson turns a Capcom game into one long chain of soldiers versus claws. The monsters land. The movie does not.
93 min | NR | December 18, 2020 | IFC Films
A family lives off the grid in the deep woods, trapping fur and convinced a wolf is hunting their catch. Then a wounded stranger turns up at the edge of their land. The wolf is the least of their problems.
119 min | PG-13 | December 18, 2020 | STX Films
An astronomer-killing comet is headed for Earth, and a structural engineer gets a government text telling him his family has been selected for shelter. Then he has to actually get them there. The disaster is the easy part.
102 min | R | December 18, 2020 | Lionsgate
A married attorney has a one-night stand in Vegas, then watches a detective investigate a break-in at his home. She is the woman from the hotel. The trap closes from there.
102 min | PG-13 | December 11, 2020 | Bleecker Street
Two Irish farm families share a fence and a lifetime of things left unsaid. Rosemary loves Anthony. He cannot say it back, and the film never figures out why that should take so long.
97 min | R | December 11, 2020 | Lionsgate
Adrienne survives a car crash, or maybe she does not. The film drops her into a scrambled tour of her own failing relationship and dares her to figure out which memories are real. Sienna Miller and Diego Luna hold it together while the timeline falls apart around them.
118 min | PG-13 | December 11, 2020 | Netflix
A dying scientist in the Arctic tries to warn a returning spacecraft that Earth is no longer worth coming home to. George Clooney directs himself as a man racing his own mortality across the ice. The end of the world has rarely felt this tired.
85 min | PG-13 | December 11, 2020 | STXfilms
A mutated COVID-23 locks society indoors for a fourth straight year, and an immune courier races across a sealed Los Angeles to reach the woman he loves through a bolted door. The pandemic is real. The movie treats it as scenery.
120 min | R | December 11, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Jean has a nice house, a baby she did not give birth to, and a husband whose job no one names. Then he vanishes, armed men show up, and she is told to run with a bag of cash. It is a gangster movie that keeps the camera on the woman the gangster left behind.
101 min | NR | December 11, 2020 | IFC Films
Ekwa Msangi reunites an Angolan immigrant with the wife and daughter he left behind seventeen years ago. They share a Brooklyn apartment and almost nothing else. The reunion is the easy part.
131 min | PG-13 | December 4, 2020 | Netflix
Four self-absorbed Broadway stars descend on small-town Indiana to defend a lesbian teen barred from bringing her girlfriend to prom. They are there to fix their public image, not the girl. The cause is real. The movie is a billboard.
96 min | PG-13 | December 4, 2020 | Focus Features
A workaholic Mexican aviation executive learns his estranged American half-brother exists, then gets dragged across the border on a scavenger hunt their dying father designed. The two men hate each other on sight. The movie wants you to believe a road trip fixes that in an afternoon.
117 min | NR | December 4, 2020 | Samuel Goldwyn Films
Four burned-out Danish teachers test a theory that humans are born with a blood alcohol level half a percent too low. They decide to fix the deficit at work, during the school day, in the name of science. The experiment goes exactly as well as you would expect.
93 min | PG-13 | December 4, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Jennifer and Solomon fall in love and start planning a wedding. Then a terminal diagnosis turns the engagement into a race against the clock. The film knows exactly which heartstrings it wants to pull, and it yanks every one of them.
93 min | PG | December 4, 2020 | MTV Documentary Films
The pandemic seals Wuhan inside its own hospitals, and the cameras stay in the red zone with the people who cannot leave. No narrator, no experts, no politics. Just the work of keeping strangers alive.
95 min | R | November 25, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Frank Bledsoe teaches literature in New York and keeps a whole life hidden from his South Carolina family. His father’s death forces a road trip home with his college-age niece and the partner nobody back home knows about. Some closets come with a long driveway.
95 min | PG | November 25, 2020 | Universal Pictures
The Croods, a family of prehistoric cave dwellers, stumble into a walled paradise run by an evolved, smug couple who think they’re better. Two clans collide over property lines and parenting. It is loud, it is bright, and it is exactly what you expect.
93 min | R | November 25, 2020 | Netflix
A blues recording session in 1927 Chicago becomes a pressure cooker over one sweltering afternoon. Four musicians wait in a rehearsal room while their star keeps the white men upstairs waiting. Everyone in this band is fighting for a piece of something, and the band is the one place where that fight has nowhere to go.
102 min | PG-13 | November 25, 2020 | Hulu
Abby plans to propose to her girlfriend over Christmas. Then she learns Harper never came out to her conservative family. The holiday gets longer.
118 min | R | November 20, 2020 | TriStar Pictures
A Dutch forger sells fake Vermeers to the Nazis and gets charged with collaboration for it. His only defense is proving he is a liar. Guy Pearce has a blast. The movie around him does not.
120 min | R | November 20, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A metal drummer starts losing his hearing and watches the only life he knows slip out from under him. The film does not treat deafness as a tragedy to be cured. It treats it as a new world he refuses to enter.
90 min | PG-13 | November 20, 2020 | Hulu
A teenage girl raised in total isolation by her mother starts to notice that her medications do not match her symptoms. The pills are green when they should not be. What she finds in the pharmacy bag changes everything.
109 min | NR | November 20, 2020 | Magnolia Pictures
A nightclub fire kills dozens. Then the survivors start dying in hospitals that should have saved them. A team of sports reporters pulls the thread, and the whole rotten state unravels.
102 min | R | November 13, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Millie Kessler is a bullied high schooler running from a masked killer called the Butcher. His cursed dagger swaps their bodies instead of ending her life. Now she has 24 hours to switch back, and the only person who can stop a serial killer wearing her face is a serial killer wearing his.