115 min | PG-13 | September 4, 2020 | Disney+
A young woman cuts her hair, straps on her father’s armor, and rides off to war pretending to be a man. Niki Caro trades the cartoon’s songs for sweeping wuxia battles and golden vistas. The pictures are gorgeous. The person inside the armor never shows up.
150 min | PG-13 | September 3, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A nameless operative learns that bullets can fall back into the gun. He gets pulled into a war fought across the timeline against an oligarch who can erase the future. The plot is impossible to follow on a first watch, and Nolan dares you to feel it instead.
90 min | NR | September 1, 2020 | Gravitas Ventures
An 83-year-old widower goes undercover in a Chilean nursing home to catch the staff abusing a resident. He turns out to be a terrible spy and an excellent listener. The case he cracks is the one nobody asked him to investigate.
119 min | PG | August 28, 2020 | Searchlight Pictures
Armando Iannucci turns Dickens loose and lets Dev Patel sprint through a life that keeps reinventing itself. Orphans, swindlers, and eccentrics pile up around him. The result is a Victorian novel that moves like it just had three espressos.
94 min | PG-13 | August 28, 2020 | 20th Century Studios
Five teenage mutants wake up locked in a hospital that doubles as a cage. Their powers are out of control and something in the building wants them dead. The premise is a horror movie. The result is a franchise placeholder that forgot to be scary.
106 min | R | August 28, 2020 | Lionsgate
Megan Fox leads a mercenary squad on a hostage rescue across the South African bush. The mission collapses and the rescuers become the hunted. Then the lions show up, and the people turn out to be the easy part.
135 min | R | August 28, 2020 | Netflix
A young woman drives through a snowstorm to meet her boyfriend’s parents at a remote farmhouse. She is thinking of ending things. Charlie Kaufman makes you sit inside that thought until you forget whose thought it is.
89 min | NR | August 28, 2020 | IFC Midnight
A couple wakes up in their SUV, buried alive under a Norwegian avalanche, with no signal and a baby on the way. The walls are tight, the air is thin, and the marriage is already cracked. The premise traps you. The movie just leaves you stuck.
92 min | PG-13 | August 28, 2020 | Orion Pictures
Bill and Ted are middle-aged and the song that unites the universe still doesn’t exist. Now reality is collapsing and they have a few hours to write it. Naturally, they decide to steal it from their future selves instead.
102 min | PG-13 | August 21, 2020 | IFC Films
Ethan Hawke plays Nikola Tesla as a man too far inside his own head to win the war he started. Michael Almereyda builds a biopic that keeps tripping its own period costume on roller skates and smartphones. The result is a brilliant man rendered as a closed door.
93 min | R | August 21, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Henry Page is seventeen and has never had anything worth writing about. Then Grace Town transfers in with a cane and a grief she will not name, and Henry decides her pain is exactly the material he has been waiting for. He wants a muse. She is a person.
109 min | PG-13 | August 14, 2020 | A24
A thousand Texas teenage boys gather to build a mock government from scratch in a single week. They split into two parties, run campaigns, and fight for the governorship. The result is the cleanest X-ray of American politics you will ever see.
99 min | NR | August 7, 2020 | PBS Distribution
Maria Ressa runs a newsroom that won’t print the lies Duterte’s drug war is built on. The state answers with arrest warrants and a troll army built to drown her. The cuts are small, legal, and meant to bleed a free press to death.
97 min | NR | August 6, 2020 | Shudder
Jayro Bustamante takes the weeping-woman legend and aims it at a Guatemalan general who ordered the slaughter of the Maya. A new servant named Alma arrives in his house as the dead refuse to stay quiet. The myth was always about guilt, and Bustamante names the guilty.
107 min | PG | July 31, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
A widowed mother of three meets a mysterious handyman who believes the universe gives you what you think about. He fixes her roof and rewires her optimism. The Secret turns a self-help bestseller into a feature-length affirmation.
99 min | PG | July 31, 2020 | IFC Films
A reclusive writer on the wartime Kent coast gets saddled with an evacuee boy and a heart she would rather keep frozen. The folklore she studies turns out to be the grief she has buried. The coastline does more work than the screenplay.
85 min | R | July 31, 2020 | Neon
A woman wakes up certain she will die tomorrow. The certainty is contagious. Everyone she tells catches it like a cold, and the dread spreads through her friends until the whole movie is sick with it.
101 min | R | July 31, 2020 | Saban Films
Douglas “Arm” Armstrong is an ex-boxer turned enforcer for a rural Irish crime family. He is loyal to the wrong people and gentle with the wrong people, and the two cannot coexist forever. The film asks what a violent man owes the people he loves, and answers in blood.
88 min | R | July 24, 2020 | IFC Films
Two couples rent a beautiful coastal house for a weekend getaway. The host gives them a creepy feeling, the cell service drops out, and the secrets they brought with them start to surface. By the time they figure out the real threat, paranoia has already done most of the work.
169 min | NR | July 17, 2020 | IFC Films
A boy sent to the countryside to survive the Holocaust loses his parents and wanders alone through a landscape of peasants who decide he is a demon. Every village he reaches finds a new way to brutalize him. It is three hours of unbroken cruelty, shot in beautiful black and white, and it never once lets you breathe.
90 min | R | July 10, 2020 | Neon
A wedding guest wakes up on the same November day over and over. Then a stranger gets stuck in the loop with him. Eternity is more bearable when someone else is trapped in it too.
98 min | NR | July 10, 2020 | Utopia
A Las Vegas dive bar pours its last drinks while the regulars drink it dry. Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross shoot a fiction like a documentary and dare you to tell the difference. The bar is fake. The drunks are not.
92 min | PG-13 | July 9, 2020 | Apple TV+
A first-time captain leads a convoy across the North Atlantic into the Black Pit, the dead zone where the U-boats wait and no aircraft can reach. Tom Hanks spends two days on the bridge fighting an enemy he can barely see. The tactics are gripping. The man giving the orders stays a stranger.
96 min | NR | July 8, 2020 | Netflix
Walter Mercado wore capes that could pay a mortgage and beamed astrology into millions of Latino homes for decades. Then he vanished. This documentary tracks down the icon in his final years and asks what happened to the man inside the sequins.
89 min | R | July 3, 2020 | IFC Midnight
An elderly woman vanishes from her crumbling house. When she returns, something is wrong with her, and something is wrong with the walls. Natalie Erika James makes a horror film about dementia where the monster is the disease.
98 min | PG | July 3, 2020 | Magnolia Pictures
John Lewis spends a lifetime getting arrested on purpose and calls it good trouble. Dawn Porter follows the civil-rights icon as the voting fight he bled for in 1965 comes back to court. The film loves him too much to challenge him.
160 min | PG-13 | July 3, 2020 | Disney+
Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a founding father’s life into hip-hop and casts actors of color as the white men who built America. Thomas Kail films the original Broadway production and drags the camera up onto the stage. It does not film the show so much as catch it alive.
107 min | NR | June 30, 2020 | HBO Documentary Films
In Chechnya, the government runs a campaign to round up, torture, and disappear gay men. A small group of activists smuggles the survivors out before the police or their own families can kill them. The camera follows people who cannot afford to be seen.
99 min | PG-13 | June 26, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A hulking CIA operative blows an operation and gets stuck on surveillance duty in a Chicago apartment. The nine-year-old he is supposed to watch catches him on camera and blackmails him into spy lessons. You have seen this movie. You have seen it better.
102 min | R | June 26, 2020 | Focus Features
A burned-out Democratic strategist sees a video of a plainspoken Wisconsin farmer defending immigrants and decides he is the future of the party. He hauls a flood of consultant cash into a tiny mayor’s race to prove it. The point is that this is grotesque, and the film agrees so loudly it forgets to be funny.
121 min | PG-13 | June 26, 2020 | Netflix
Two Icelanders from a fishing village chase a lifelong dream of winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Will Ferrell sulks behind a fake accent while Rachel McAdams sings her heart out. The songs believe in the dream more than the comedy does.
105 min | PG-13 | June 24, 2020 | Netflix
A teenage gymnast reports a serial abuser to USA Gymnastics, and the people sworn to protect her bury it to protect the brand. A reporting team at the Indianapolis Star pulls the thread until the whole machine comes apart. The girls were never the product. The medals were.
103 min | R | June 19, 2020 | Vertical Entertainment
Turquoise Jones won Miss Juneteenth years ago and it bought her nothing. Now she spends money she does not have to put the same crown on her teenage daughter. She is selling a dream she already knows the price of.
108 min | NR | June 19, 2020 | Netflix
Sam Feder hands the camera to trans actors, historians, and filmmakers and asks them to watch a century of Hollywood depicting people like them. Laverne Cox anchors it. The footage does the indicting.
118 min | NR | June 19, 2020 | IFC Films
A terminally ill teenager falls hard for a twitchy small-time drug dealer her parents would never let through the door. Her mother medicates, her father prescribes, and the whole family pretends control is still on the table. Shannon Murphy takes the dying-girl movie and refuses to let it behave.
94 min | R | June 19, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A co-pilot seals the cockpit door when hijackers rush the plane. Protocol says he keeps it shut no matter who is screaming on the other side. The premise is a vise, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sweats through every minute of it.
93 min | R | June 18, 2020 | Universal Pictures
An older man, a younger wife, and a quiet daughter take a modernist rental in the Welsh hills that does not measure right. The walls run longer inside than out, the hallways loop, and the house knows exactly what Theo did. The movie just doesn’t trust you to be scared by it.
137 min | R | June 12, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Scott Carlin is twenty-four and going nowhere on Staten Island. He smokes weed, gives terrible tattoos, and still grieves the firefighter father who died when he was a kid. Then his mother starts dating a firefighter, and the grief stops being theoretical.
156 min | R | June 12, 2020 | Netflix
Four Black Vietnam veterans go back to the country that nearly killed them, chasing the bones of a lost brother and a crate of buried gold. Spike Lee uses the heist to expose the bigger theft. America sent these men to die for a freedom it never handed them.
94 min | PG | June 12, 2020 | Walt Disney Pictures
A twelve-year-old criminal mastermind discovers that fairies are real and kidnaps one to ransom his missing father. Kenneth Branagh adapts a beloved book series into a digital blur of exposition and weightless action. The film mistakes plot for story.
91 min | PG | June 9, 2020 | Lionsgate
A twelve-year-old inventor builds a gadget that lets him hear his dog’s thoughts. His parents are quietly splitting up, so naturally the dog becomes the family therapist. The premise writes the lesson before the kid plugs anything in.
107 min | R | June 5, 2020 | Neon
A young couple moves in with the famous horror writer Shirley Jackson and her domineering husband. What starts as a guest arrangement turns into a psychological experiment with no clear test subject. The house has rules, and the rules are designed to break you.
102 min | PG-13 | June 5, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
A band manager loses her teenage guitarist son in a crash. Years later she decides a ten-year-old guitar prodigy carries his soul and rebuilds the band around the kid. The movie thinks this is heartwarming.
113 min | PG-13 | May 29, 2020 | Focus Features
A burned-out music legend coasts on greatness tours and her overqualified assistant wants to produce. The assistant is right about the music and wrong about her place. The movie likes everyone too much to let that hurt.
95 min | NR | May 27, 2020 | HBO Max
Drew Dixon was a rising music executive at Def Jam until Russell Simmons assaulted her and her career evaporated. Decades later, she has to decide whether to break the silence that protects powerful men. The film knows exactly what that silence costs.
112 min | R | May 27, 2020 | Netflix
Ulises and his crew slow cumbia records to a crawl and dance to the wreckage in baggy clothes and towering sculpted hair. Then cartel violence runs him out of Monterrey and dumps him in Queens, where nobody has ever heard the music that made him who he is. Fernando Frías de la Parra builds a quiet elegy for a subculture nobody was watching disappear.
102 min | NR | May 22, 2020 | Neon
Someone steals two of Barbora Kysilkova’s paintings off a gallery wall. She tracks down the thief and asks to paint him. What starts as forgiveness becomes an obsession that runs in both directions.
87 min | R | May 22, 2020 | Netflix
A couple on the brink of breaking up runs over a man on a bicycle and lands in the middle of a murder. They spend one frantic night trying to clear their names before the police pin it on them. The plot is an excuse to watch two funny people argue.
89 min | R | May 22, 2020 | Lionsgate
A disgraced surgeon and his retired-sheriff father settle into a quiet night at the family ranch. Two wounded brothers force their way in and demand the doctor save the one bleeding out on the kitchen table. The hostages have more conviction than the movie does.
96 min | R | May 19, 2020 | Paramount Players
A traffic stop ends in death and the dashboard footage shows something that cannot exist. Renee works the night shift in a department that would rather she stop asking questions. The dead do not file complaints, but they do leave evidence.