94 min | PG | May 15, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Scooby-Doo and Shaggy meet as kids and grow up solving mysteries with the Mystery Inc. gang. Then a cosmic plot pulls them into a superhero crossover with Blue Falcon and a half-dozen forgotten Hanna-Barbera characters. The dog deserves better.
102 min | PG-13 | May 8, 2020 | Orion Classics
A Valley girl falls for a Hollywood punk in the summer of 1983, and the soundtrack does the courting. Rachel Lee Goldenberg turns Martha Coolidge’s cult original into a glossy jukebox musical. It remembers every song and forgets why the romance mattered.
117 min | R | May 5, 2020 | Lionsgate
Two low-level drug couriers work the back roads of the South for a boss they never see. One bad delivery turns the whole operation against them. Everybody in this movie wants to be in a better one.
95 min | NR | May 1, 2020 | IFC Midnight
A sullen teenager spends the summer at the lake and notices something wrong with the woman next door. She is not sick. She is wearing a family. And once she takes your child, you forget you ever had one.
120 min | R | April 23, 2020 | Apple TV+
Mike D and Ad-Rock stand on a Brooklyn stage and narrate the entire history of the Beastie Boys to a sold-out crowd. Spike Jonze points his cameras at two survivors reading a script and missing their friend. It is a victory lap that keeps turning into a eulogy.
91 min | PG | April 10, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Poppy and Branch discover that troll society splits into six musical tribes, and a rock queen wants to melt them all into one anthem. The film preaches that every genre deserves to survive on its own terms. Then it runs every last one of them through the same pop blender.
120 min | R | March 27, 2020 | IFC Films
Before Marcel Marceau becomes the world’s most famous mime, he is a young Jewish art student in France who joins the Resistance and smuggles orphaned children past the Nazis. Jesse Eisenberg plays him with conviction. The movie around him cannot decide what it wants to be.
107 min | R | March 25, 2020 | Netflix
Teenagers with disabilities spend summers at a ramshackle camp in the Catskills and walk out as the people who will rewrite American law. Camp Jened looks like hippie chaos. It is actually a training ground for a revolution.
77 min | NR | March 20, 2020 | Greenwich Entertainment
A broke man blows his savings on a fringed deerskin jacket and decides it should be the only jacket left in the world. Quentin Dupieux turns that joke into a deadpan story about ego, delusion, and a guy who would rather be a filmmaker than a person. Jean Dujardin plays it dead straight, which is exactly why it works.
85 min | R | March 13, 2020 | Bleecker Street
Leo drifts through a single disordered day in New York while his mind splits into the lives he never lived. His daughter tries to hold him in the present. The film mistakes confusion for depth.
90 min | R | March 13, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Wealthy liberals kidnap a dozen strangers and hunt them for sport, certain their victims are deplorables who had it coming. One of the prey, a quiet Mississippi woman, turns out to be very good at staying alive. The premise is loaded, but the movie fires in every direction and hits nothing.
101 min | PG-13 | March 13, 2020 | Focus Features
A seventeen-year-old in rural Pennsylvania finds out she is pregnant and finds out her home state will not let her end it without her parents. So she and her cousin board a bus to New York with a bag of cash and no plan. The film never raises its voice, and it never needs to.
115 min | PG | March 13, 2020 | Lionsgate
Christian rocker Jeremy Camp falls in love with a college classmate the same week she learns she has cancer. The Erwin brothers build a faith-based biopic around the gap between the prayers and the prognosis. Sincerity is not the same thing as honesty.
110 min | PG-13 | March 13, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
Ray Garrison dies a hero and wakes up a product, rebuilt with nanites by a biotech company that hands him a tragedy to avenge. The man is unstoppable. Pity the movie around him is not.
113 min | NR | March 6, 2020 | Film Movement
Zhou Zenong runs a crew of motorcycle thieves until a botched job leaves a cop dead and a bounty on his own head. A woman from the lake meets him in the dark with a plan he cannot read. Everyone in the city wants the reward, and the reward is him.
108 min | R | March 6, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A washed-up basketball star drinks himself toward oblivion until his old school hands him a losing team to coach. The kids need a leader. He needs a reason to get out of bed. The game was never the thing that was killing him.
99 min | R | March 6, 2020 | Sony Pictures Classics
An art critic who lectures tourists on the power of his own words gets a job offer he cannot refuse. A rich collector wants him to steal a painting from a reclusive legend living on the estate. The con is everywhere, and the critic is the easiest mark in the room.
94 min | R | March 6, 2020 | IFC Films
A wealthy housewife with a perfect home and a baby on the way starts swallowing things she should not. A marble. A thumbtack. The objects keep getting sharper. The control she cannot have over her life, she takes one object at a time.
102 min | PG | March 6, 2020 | Walt Disney Pictures
Two elf brothers get a spell that can resurrect their dead father for one day. The magic misfires and brings back only his legs. What follows is a road trip to find the rest of him before sundown.
122 min | PG-13 | March 6, 2020 | A24
A wandering cook and a Chinese immigrant on the run go into business together in 1820s Oregon. Their product is a fried honey cake. Their supply chain is a rich man’s cow, milked in the dark, one quiet crime at a time.
131 min | NR | March 6, 2020 | Kino Lorber
A remote village in the Brazilian backcountry vanishes from the map, the water stops, and armed strangers arrive looking for sport. The locals figure out the game before the hunters do. Mess with the wrong town.
111 min | PG-13 | February 28, 2020 | Searchlight Pictures
A poor Louisiana boy hops a freight train to an island where children never grow old and never grow up. Benh Zeitlin remakes Peter Pan as a barefoot ode to feral youth. The ambition outruns the result.
97 min | NR | February 28, 2020 | Magnolia Pictures
A disgraced Romanian cop flies to a Canary Island to learn a whistled language that lets criminals talk past wiretaps and informants. The money is hidden, the femme fatale has her own plan, and every conversation is a trap. The plot is a maze. The fun is watching it fold in on itself.
124 min | R | February 28, 2020 | Universal Pictures
Cecilia escapes a controlling, abusive partner in the dead of night. Then he dies, and the torment gets worse. The monster here is not the invisibility. It is the man who refuses to let go.
124 min | NR | February 21, 2020 | Grasshopper Film
Vitalina Varela flies from Cape Verde to bury a husband who left her behind decades ago. She lands three days after the funeral, too late for everything except the reckoning. Pedro Costa carves her grief out of pure darkness and refuses to blink.
100 min | PG | February 21, 2020 | 20th Century Studios
Harrison Ford goes north to the Yukon and finds a dog. The dog is a computer. The wilderness is a hard drive.
125 min | PG | February 21, 2020 | Focus Features
Emma Woodhouse has money, time, and a dangerous hobby. She arranges marriages for neighbors who never asked and gets every match wrong. The dresses are flawless and the judgment is not.
87 min | PG-13 | February 21, 2020 | STX Films
A grieving family moves to the English countryside to start over, and the boy finds a porcelain doll buried in the woods. He names it Brahms and starts taking orders from it. The doll is the only one in the house with anything to do.
116 min | NR | February 19, 2020 | Film Movement
A twenty-year-old ex-convict finds God inside a juvenile detention center. Barred from the priesthood by his record, he lands in a small town and poses as its new priest instead. The fraud turns out to be a better shepherd than the church would ever ordain.
106 min | PG-13 | February 14, 2020 | Universal Pictures
A guarded museum curator inherits her dead mother’s secrets and a journalist who wants to dig them up. They fall for each other slow and low-key while the past explains the present. Sometimes the quietest romance is the one that trusts you to lean in.
99 min | PG | February 14, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
The fastest creature in the universe hides in small-town Montana, alone, until a power surge brings the government down on his head. A local sheriff and a hyperactive blue alien hit the road one step ahead of a roboticist with a god complex. It runs fast and arrives nowhere.
121 min | R | February 14, 2020 | Neon
A painter sails to a windswept island to secretly capture a reluctant bride before her arranged marriage. She is forbidden to let her subject know she is being studied, so she watches by day and paints by night. Then the woman starts watching back.
109 min | PG-13 | February 14, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
Guests win a trip to an island where Mr. Roarke makes every fantasy come true. Then the fantasies start collecting on the debt. It is a premise built for dread and a movie that forgot to bring any.
87 min | R | February 14, 2020 | Searchlight Pictures
A family at an Austrian ski resort scatters when an avalanche bears down on their lunch. The snow stops short and nobody is hurt, but Dad ran and left his wife and kids behind. The mountain misses. The marriage does not.
87 min | G | February 14, 2020 | Netflix
Shaun the Sheep finds an alien stranded on the farm and decides to get her home before the men in hazmat suits do. No dialogue, no narration, just clay and chaos. Aardman builds a sci-fi adventure out of bleats and pratfalls and never says a word.
108 min | R | February 7, 2020 | Neon
Two grieving children get snowed into a remote lodge with their father’s fiancee, the lone survivor of a doomsday cult. Dad leaves for work. The storm seals the doors, and the dead are not done with anyone.
109 min | R | February 7, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Harley Quinn dumps the Joker and instantly loses the only protection she had. Every criminal she ever crossed comes collecting, so she reluctantly bands together with four women who hate her almost as much as they hate Gotham’s men. The plot is a mess. The attitude is the whole point.
113 min | NR | February 7, 2020 | Music Box Films
Merab dances in a Georgian ensemble that demands rigid masculine perfection. A new male dancer arrives, and Merab starts to come apart and together at the same time. The tradition wants his body. He decides it belongs to him.
109 min | R | January 31, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
Stephanie Patrick loses her family in a plane crash and learns it was no accident. She trades grief for a gun and goes hunting the people who built the bomb. The training montage is more convincing than the revenge.
88 min | R | January 31, 2020 | Bleecker Street
A young assistant arrives before dawn at a powerful film executive’s office and spends one ordinary day at her desk. She answers phones, copies scripts, and watches things she is not supposed to notice. The horror is that nothing happens, and everyone already knows.
87 min | PG-13 | January 31, 2020 | Orion Pictures
Osgood Perkins flips the fairy tale and points the camera at the girl. Gretel and her little brother get lost in the woods and find a house that smells like food and rot. The witch is not the only thing hunting them.
134 min | NR | January 29, 2020 | Kino Lorber
Leningrad, 1945. The siege is over, but two women who survived it cannot stop the war from living inside them. What they do to rebuild is harder to watch than the fighting ever was.
94 min | PG-13 | January 24, 2020 | Universal Pictures
A young governess takes a live-in job caring for two orphaned children in a vast country estate. The house has secrets, the children have a dead caretaker they will not stop talking about, and Kate starts seeing things in the dark. Then the movie ends like someone unplugged it mid-sentence.
110 min | R | January 24, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
A Pentagon careerist gets stuck with a dead-end assignment: investigate a thirty-year-old medal request for an airman killed in Vietnam. The deeper he digs, the more he understands why the government wanted it buried. The story is true and powerful. The film keeps reaching for the violins anyway.
113 min | R | January 24, 2020 | STX Films
A British weed kingpin wants out of the business and into retirement. Every gangster, journalist, and aristocrat in London smells the opening and moves in. Guy Ritchie comes home to the geezers, but home looks smaller than he remembers.
156 min | NR | January 24, 2020 | Netflix
A driving instructor preaches the same slogan to every student while insisting he has only one son. The other one is in prison, and the family has already chosen which boy gets the light and which gets the shade. The sun shines on everyone equally, and that is exactly the problem.
101 min | PG | January 17, 2020 | Universal Pictures
A veterinarian who talks to animals comes out of mourning to sail across the ocean for a sick queen. Robert Downey Jr. mumbles a Welsh accent at a flatulent CGI dragon. The animals talk and almost none of them have anything to say.
124 min | R | January 17, 2020 | Columbia Pictures
Mike and Marcus are Miami cops who are too old for this and know it. A killer from Mike’s past starts clearing the board, and retirement gets put on hold. The plot is nonsense, but the two stars still finish each other’s sentences like no time has passed.
104 min | R | January 10, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A teenage prank with a circus lion drone footage and a flash-ball gun ignites a Paris housing project already running hot. Three cops in an anti-crime unit spend one day trying to keep a lid on it. By nightfall the lid is gone.
84 min | R | January 10, 2020 | Lionsgate
A family runs opioids through the hills of Appalachia. The dealing is killing the people who buy and the people who sell, and the Conleys cannot stop because dealing is all they have. Inherit the Viper wants to be a tragedy about the cycle and forgets to write the tragedy.