102 min | PG | November 13, 2020 | GKIDS
An English girl in occupied Ireland hunts wolves with her father until she meets a girl who is one. Their friendship sets the wild forest against the walled town that wants it gone. Cartoon Saloon draws the cage and the freedom by hand, and the hand wins.
94 min | R | November 13, 2020 | Sony Pictures Classics
Two friends ride bikes up a mountain in France. One of them confesses he has slept with the other’s fiancee. The friendship survives. The wedding is a different question.
132 min | R | November 13, 2020 | Netflix
Herman Mankiewicz lies in a Victorville bed with a broken leg, drinking, dictating the screenplay that becomes Citizen Kane. David Fincher builds a movie about Old Hollywood out of his late father’s script. It is a love letter written in acid.
117 min | R | November 11, 2020 | Netflix
J.D. Vance gets a law school dinner crisis and flashes back to his Appalachian childhood and his drug-addicted mother. Ron Howard turns a memoir about class and poverty into a parade of slammed doors and screaming matches. The misery is loud and the meaning is nowhere.
86 min | NR | November 11, 2020 | 7th Empire Media
An MIT researcher discovers that facial-recognition software cannot see her dark-skinned face until she puts on a white mask. From that one glitch, the film builds a case against the algorithms already deciding who gets a job, a loan, and a place to live. The machines are not neutral. They learned from us.
94 min | PG-13 | November 6, 2020 | Netflix
Sophia Loren returns to the screen as Madame Rosa, an aging Holocaust survivor who minds the children of prostitutes in a seaside Italian city. A twelve-year-old Senegalese boy robs her, then ends up living under her roof. Two people the world threw away decide to keep each other.
114 min | R | November 6, 2020 | Focus Features
A grandmother and her retired-sheriff husband leave Montana to bring their grandson back from the family that swallowed him. The Weboys do not give children back. What starts as a custody dispute ends in fire.
91 min | R | October 30, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
A high-flying Atlanta lawyer survives a plane crash and wakes up in a stranger’s attic, his leg shattered and bound by an old woman who calls herself a healer. She practices hoodoo. He just wants to walk again. The premise has teeth, but the movie keeps pulling its punches.
93 min | NR | October 30, 2020 | Netflix
A South Sudanese couple survives the boat crossing and lands in a crumbling council house on the edge of England. The asylum system tells them to assimilate and be grateful. The thing that followed them across the water has other plans.
97 min | PG-13 | October 30, 2020 | Focus Features
Oliver is a nonverbal boy with no friends and a monster that lives inside his screens. The creature is lonely too, and the glass is the door it comes through. The scary part is not the monster. It is the device every kid already holds.
94 min | PG-13 | October 28, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
A teenage girl moves to a new town and discovers three classmates have been waiting for a fourth witch to complete their coven. They induct her, bend reality, and start remaking the boys around them. The premise has teeth. The movie files them down.
272 min | NR | October 28, 2020 | Zipporah Films
Frederick Wiseman points his camera at the government of Boston and lets it run. Permit hearings, parking enforcement, a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway, a marijuana dispensary zoning fight. This is what democracy actually looks like when nobody is performing for a vote.
137 min | R | October 23, 2020 | 20th Century Studios
A retired cop takes a missing-persons case in suburban Missouri and finds a teenage urban legend waiting at the end of it. Blow into a bottle on a bridge for three nights and the Empty Man hears you. The bottle turns out to be the least of his problems.
95 min | PG | October 23, 2020 | Netflix
A grieving girl builds a rocket to the moon to prove a goddess of lost love is real. What she finds up there is a neon pop diva stuck in the same grief she is running from. The movie has a real heart buried under a scavenger hunt it did not need.
96 min | R | October 23, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Borat returns to America to deliver a bribe and ends up offering his teenage daughter instead. The disguise still works on real people who have no idea they are in a movie. The joke is no longer Borat. The joke is the country.
105 min | R | October 23, 2020 | Open Road Films
Tessa and Hardin break up, then circle each other through parties, jealousy, and grand gestures that pass for passion. The film mistakes a man who reads your texts and explodes for romance. It wants you to swoon at the thing a restraining order is built to stop.
104 min | PG | October 22, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A boy and his grandmother check into a seaside hotel that happens to be hosting a convention of child-hating witches led by Anne Hathaway in full hiss. The premise is pure Roald Dahl menace. The movie sands every sharp edge off it.
99 min | R | October 16, 2020 | Stage 6 Films
Abe Applebaum is the most famous kid detective his small town has ever produced. Two decades later he is thirty-two, drinking through the afternoon, and still running the same sad office his parents pay for. Then a real murder walks in the door.
129 min | NR | October 16, 2020 | Kino Lorber
Martin Eden is a self-taught sailor who decides to become a writer to win a bourgeois woman and the class she was born into. Pietro Marcello transplants Jack London from California to Naples and lets the ambition rot from the inside. The dream costs more than the man can ever pay.
109 min | PG-13 | October 16, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
Giant monsters have inherited the Earth and Joel Dawson has spent seven years hiding from them in a bunker. Then he hears his old girlfriend’s voice on the radio and decides to walk eighty-five miles of killing ground to find her. Love makes you stupid, and stupid is how you meet a crab the size of a house.
99 min | PG-13 | October 16, 2020 | Open Road Films
A retired bank robber decides to come clean for the woman he loves. The FBI agents he confesses to would rather keep the money than close the case. Liam Neeson punches his way through another one of these, and the autopilot is showing.
92 min | R | October 16, 2020 | Lionsgate
A pandemic turns the population into raging zombies and traps a slacker alone in his apartment. He has no food, no plan, and a dwindling phone battery. The siege is real. The movie is not.
123 min | NR | October 13, 2020 | Neon
Alex Gibney builds a forensic timeline of the early American pandemic response while the pandemic is still killing people. The witnesses worked inside the system as it failed. They saw the crash coming and nobody touched the brakes.
90 min | NR | October 13, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A driven music student finds a notebook that belonged to a dead classmate, and her piano playing starts to improve overnight. The price is her sister, her sanity, and maybe her soul. Talent this sudden always comes with a bill.
90 min | NR | October 13, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A mother becomes convinced that her daughter’s perfect new boyfriend is the reincarnation of the man who once tried to kill her. She might be paranoid. She might be right. The movie cannot decide which possibility is scarier, and that indecision is the whole problem.
81 min | PG-13 | October 9, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A wife spends two decades fighting to free her husband from a sixty-year prison sentence. She films herself the entire time. The result is less a story about a crime than a record of the years a system steals.
95 min | R | October 6, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A teenage girl tells her parents she pushed her best friend off a bridge. They decide to protect her instead of calling the police. Every choice they make to cover it up digs the hole deeper, and the film mistakes that hole for suspense.
100 min | NR | October 6, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A man wakes from a car crash with no memory of his wife, his job, or his own daughter. A neurologist offers to hypnotize him back to himself, and something is waiting in the dark behind his eyes. The premise has teeth, even when the twist shows its hand early.
83 min | PG | October 4, 2020 | Netflix
David Attenborough has spent a lifetime filming the natural world. Now he sits down to deliver his witness statement on what humanity destroyed while he watched. The diagnosis is devastating. The cure is a TED talk.
86 min | PG-13 | October 2, 2020 | Netflix
Three Bronx kids notice their neighborhood vanishing one bodega at a time. The new buyers smile too much, avoid daylight, and want everyone out. Turns out gentrification has teeth.
123 min | R | October 2, 2020 | Netflix
Radha is a Harlem playwright who got named a promising new voice before thirty and has produced nothing since. Approaching forty, she decides to reinvent herself as a rapper. Radha Blank wrote it, directed it, and stars in it, and she makes starting over look like the only honest option left.
102 min | R | October 2, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
High school seniors start spontaneously exploding into clouds of blood. No cause, no warning, no cure. Brian Duffield turns a teen-massacre premise into the most clear-eyed movie about grief in years.
103 min | R | October 2, 2020 | Neon
A corporate assassin hijacks other people’s bodies to carry out her kills, then walks away clean while the host takes the fall. Tasya Vos has done it so many times that her own identity is starting to slip. Brandon Cronenberg makes a body-horror film about losing yourself one job at a time.
96 min | R | October 2, 2020 | A24
A successful entrepreneur suspects her husband is cheating. Her charming, exasperating father insists on investigating, and turns the whole thing into a martini-fueled stakeout across Manhattan. The mystery is a pretext. The real subject is a daughter who never stopped waiting for her father to take her seriously.
89 min | PG-13 | October 2, 2020 | Netflix
Kirsten Johnson’s father is dying slowly. So she kills him over and over on camera, with stunt doubles and fake blood, to rehearse the loss she cannot stop. It is the most loving thing a daughter has ever filmed.
147 min | R | September 30, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
Julie Taymor turns Gloria Steinem’s memoir into a four-actress, magic-bus odyssey through one woman’s life on the road. Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander split the title role across the decades. The ambition is real. The focus is not.
130 min | R | September 25, 2020 | Netflix
Seven men go on trial for crossing state lines to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The government wants a conviction. Aaron Sorkin wants a standing ovation, and he engineers one whether the history earns it or not.
90 min | R | September 25, 2020 | Stage 6 Films
Stanley has worked the overnight shift at a fast-food joint in Michigan for decades. Now he is training his replacement, a young Black writer on probation, before he retires to Florida. The film wants to be about both men. It only ever belongs to one.
105 min | R | September 25, 2020 | Focus Features
Old Dolio Dyne has spent twenty-six years as the third member of her parents’ grifting operation. A charming stranger joins the crew and accidentally shows her what affection looks like. Miranda July turns a small-time heist movie into the story of a woman robbed of love her entire life.
102 min | PG-13 | September 18, 2020 | Focus Features
Pete Souza spends eight years a few feet from Barack Obama with a camera. Dawn Porter turns his archive into a feature-length argument that the country lost something it cannot get back. The photographs are the evidence and the eulogy.
107 min | R | September 18, 2020 | IFC Films
A British broker moves his American family into a Surrey manor he cannot afford, chasing a deal that will fix everything. The deal never comes. Turns out the haunted house was the marriage all along.
106 min | R | September 18, 2020 | Lionsgate
A successful Black author wakes up on a Civil War-era plantation, enslaved, brutalized, and unable to escape. The film promises a horror story built on a twist. The twist is the only idea it has.
97 min | R | September 16, 2020 | Bleecker Street
A Romanian immigrant in postwar America hears a whistle and a laugh and becomes certain her new neighbor is the Nazi who assaulted her and killed her sister. So she knocks him out and chains him in the basement. The question is whether she grabbed the right man, and the movie is too eager to answer it.
109 min | PG-13 | September 11, 2020 | TriStar Pictures
Lucy keeps everything from her exes. A ticket stub, a tie, a tooth. When her latest breakup leaves her sleeping in a stranger’s car, she turns her hoarding into a gallery where other people dump their heartbreak too.
108 min | NR | September 11, 2020 | IFC Midnight
David is a lonely man in 1990 who cares for his ailing mother and pays a video service to find him a wife. Then he finds a discarded VHS tape of a man named Andy who promises to be his friend. The tape talks back, and David starts to listen.
94 min | PG-13 | September 9, 2020 | Netflix
The people who built the engagement machines at Google and Facebook sit down to explain how it works. They engineered your compulsion on purpose and sold your attention by the pound. The confession is more convincing than the dramatization wrapped around it.
102 min | PG-13 | September 9, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Stacey Abrams loses a governor’s race to a system designed to make her lose. The film follows the wreckage back two hundred years to the same hands building the same machine. It is a history lesson with a body count, and the body is American democracy.
85 min | NR | September 7, 2020 | Netflix
A burned-out filmmaker starts free-diving in a freezing South African kelp forest and befriends an octopus. It sounds like a setup for self-help nonsense. It turns out to be something stranger and harder to shake.
84 min | R | September 4, 2020 | Lionsgate
Randy Cockfield gets out of prison, discovers his best friend sold the family home, and decides the guest house is his now. He throws parties, wrecks the place, and dares the new owners to evict him. The squatter outstays his welcome, and so does the movie.
94 min | NR | September 4, 2020 | Giant Pictures
Matt Furie draws a mellow cartoon frog for a comic about post-college slackers. The internet turns it into a hate symbol and a court case. Feels Good Man watches the artist try to reclaim something that stopped being his the moment it went viral.