Movies

★★★★☆

117 min | PG | February 23, 2024 | Lionsgate

Hilary Swank plays a recovering alcoholic hairdresser who mobilizes a community to save a dying child. Based on a true story. Earns its sentiment without drowning in it.

★★★★☆

84 min | R | February 23, 2024 | Focus Features

Ethan Coen goes solo with a lesbian road trip crime comedy set in 1999. It is slight and messy and more fun than it has any right to be.

★★★★☆

121 min | NR | February 23, 2024 | Cohen Media Group

Two cousins leave Dakar chasing a dream of Europe. Matteo Garrone walks them across the Sahara and into the hands of every smuggler, jailer, and thug who profits from desperation. The journey is gorgeous and the journey is hell, and Garrone refuses to let you pick just one.

★★★★☆

197 min | NR | February 23, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films

Samet teaches art in a snowbound Anatolian village and wants out. A student’s accusation and a rival for the same woman corner a man who treats everyone as a means to an end. Nuri Bilge Ceylan watches him squirm through a long winter, and the squirming is the point.

★☆☆☆☆

116 min | PG-13 | February 14, 2024 | Sony Pictures

Sony scrapes the bottom of the Spider-Man IP barrel and finds Madame Web. Dakota Johnson looks like she wants to be anywhere else. So does the audience.

★★★☆☆

107 min | PG-13 | February 14, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

The authorized Bob Marley biopic hits every expected beat with craft and caution. Kingsley Ben-Adir commits fully. The film does not.

★★★☆☆

101 min | PG-13 | February 9, 2024 | Focus Features

Diablo Cody writes a teen horror comedy set in 1989. Zelda Williams directs. The vibes are immaculate. The script needed another pass.

★★★★☆

135 min | PG-13 | February 9, 2024 | IFC Films

A celebrated gourmet and the cook who has served him for twenty years prepare meals together in a country kitchen in 1880s France. He has proposed marriage many times. She keeps her own door, and that distance is the whole story.

★★★☆☆

107 min | NR | February 9, 2024 | Roadside Attractions

Bhutan holds a mock election to teach its people how democracy works. A village lama sends a young monk to fetch two guns by the full moon, while an American scours the country for a rare antique rifle. Everyone wants the gun. Nobody agrees on what it is for.

★★★★☆

124 min | PG | February 7, 2024 | Neon

A man cleans public toilets in Tokyo. He rises before dawn, listens to old cassettes, photographs trees, and says almost nothing. Wim Wenders builds a whole life out of that, and dares you to call it small.

★★☆☆☆

139 min | PG-13 | February 2, 2024 | Universal Pictures

Matthew Vaughn makes a spy movie about a spy novelist caught up in a real spy plot. Two hours and nineteen minutes of that. With a cat.

★★★☆☆

127 min | NR | February 2, 2024 | Magnolia Pictures

Mads Mikkelsen plays a penniless soldier who marches onto a worthless Danish heath and swears he will grow a kingdom out of it. A local nobleman would rather see him dead than proven right. Ambition is cheaper than the men it costs.

★★★★☆

91 min | PG-13 | January 26, 2024 | Oscilloscope Laboratories

Daisy Ridley disappears into a quiet office worker who fantasizes about death. A tiny, precise film about the terror of human connection.

★★☆☆☆

93 min | R | January 26, 2024 | Lionsgate

A student-teacher boundary thriller that thinks it is smarter than it is. Martin Freeman deserves better material.

★★★★☆

95 min | NR | January 26, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films

A seven-year-old girl spends a single day in a crowded family home as the relatives prepare a birthday party for her dying father. The adults cook and decorate and quietly come apart. Lila Avilés builds an entire world out of one afternoon and never lets you look away.

★★★★☆

110 min | R | January 25, 2024 | Lionsgate

Russell Crowe flies a drone. Liam Hemsworth runs through a jungle. A straightforward military thriller that works because it commits to being exactly that.

★★★☆☆

96 min | NR | January 22, 2024 | None confirmed (festival/limited)

A filmmaker grows up with no pictures of her own childhood, just one photo of a girl who is not her. So she rebuilds her Casablanca neighborhood in clay and drags her family into the diorama to confront what they refuse to remember. The missing photograph turns out to hide a buried massacre.

★★★★☆

141 min | PG-13 | January 19, 2024 | Neon

Ava DuVernay adapts a nonfiction book about caste into a narrative film about grief, obsession, and the architecture of human cruelty. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor anchors a film that should not work but does.

★★★☆☆

95 min | R | January 19, 2024 | Bleecker Street

War breaks out on Earth. Astronauts on the International Space Station get orders to take control by any means necessary. The premise is better than the movie.

★★★★☆

179 min | NR | January 19, 2024 | Kino Lorber

Thien hauls his sister-in-law’s body back to the countryside and goes looking for the brother who walked out on the family years ago. Pham Thien An builds his debut out of long unbroken takes and unhurried silence. This is a film that dares you to stop moving.

★★★★☆

99 min | R | January 12, 2024 | Amazon MGM Studios

Jason Statham punches his way through a phishing scam revenge thriller. David Ayer keeps it lean and mean. This is exactly as stupid and satisfying as it sounds.

★★★★☆

112 min | PG-13 | January 12, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

The Broadway musical adaptation of the movie based on the book. Reneé Rapp owns it. The meta-layers are dizzying but the songs hold up.

★★★★☆

101 min | NR | January 12, 2024 | MUBI

A wealthy landowner in 1901 Patagonia hires three men to clear his sheep ranch of the indigenous people who live on it. Felipe Gálvez turns the founding of modern Chile into a Western built on extermination. The frontier myth gets the autopsy it deserves.

★★★☆☆

116 min | NR | January 12, 2024 | Grasshopper Film

A painter spends thirteen years letting one filmmaker watch her chase a life in art. The money arrives with strings, the friendships fray, and the camera keeps rolling. It is a portrait of ambition that counts every receipt.

★★☆☆☆

98 min | PG-13 | January 5, 2024 | Universal Pictures

Blumhouse turns a backyard pool into a horror villain. The pool is scarier than the movie.

★★★★☆

117 min | R | December 15, 2023 | Amazon MGM Studios

Cord Jefferson adapts Percival Everett’s novel into a razor-sharp satire about race, publishing, and the stories America wants to buy. Jeffrey Wright carries the whole thing on his back.

★★★★☆

98 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics

A substitute teacher catches a thief in her school and decides to handle it herself. Her tidy sense of justice detonates across the faculty, the students, and one boy in particular. Doing the right thing has never looked more like a slow-motion catastrophe.

★★★☆☆

141 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Blitz Bazawule turns Alice Walker’s novel into a full-blown movie musical, all gospel choirs and dream-sequence spectacle. Celie spends decades surviving men who treat her as property. The songs are the loophole that lets her speak.

★★☆☆☆

123 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2023 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

George Clooney adapts the story of the 1936 University of Washington rowing crew that beat the Ivy League elites and rowed its way to the Berlin Olympics. Joe Rantz is broke, abandoned, and living in a half-finished car when he tries out for the boat. The film knows every beat of this story, and so do you.

★★★☆☆

131 min | R | December 25, 2023 | Neon

Enzo Ferrari builds the fastest cars in the world and buries the men who drive them. Michael Mann catches him in 1957 with his company failing, his marriage armed, and his drivers dying on open roads. The machines are gorgeous and the bodies pile up, and Enzo keeps both columns in the same ledger.

★★★☆☆

132 min | R | December 22, 2023 | A24

A Texas promoter raises his sons to win the wrestling title he never could. The Von Erich brothers break their bodies chasing his approval and call their bad luck a curse. The curse has a name, and it is their father.

★★★☆☆

143 min | R | December 22, 2023 | Netflix

A chartered plane carrying a Uruguayan rugby team slams into the Andes in 1972. The survivors spend more than two months deciding what they will do to live. Bayona films the part everyone whispers about and refuses to look away.

★★☆☆☆

83 min | PG | December 22, 2023 | Universal Pictures

A family of mallards lives safe and small on one pond because the father fears everything beyond it. One passing flock convinces them to fly to Jamaica. The animation soars and the story never leaves the ground.

★★☆☆☆

109 min | PG-13 | December 22, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics

Sigmund Freud summons C. S. Lewis to his London study on the day Britain enters the war. The dying atheist and the converted believer argue about God for an afternoon. The debate is real. The movie around it is furniture.

★★☆☆☆

124 min | PG-13 | December 22, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Black Manta hunts Aquaman with a cursed trident and a grudge. Arthur springs his imprisoned brother to help him stop it. The team-up is the only idea here with a pulse.

★★☆☆☆

103 min | R | December 22, 2023 | Columbia Pictures

Bea and Ben have one perfect night, then spend months hating each other. A destination wedding in Sydney throws them back together, so they fake a romance to shut everyone up. The leads are gorgeous and the movie around them is a screensaver.

★★★★☆

105 min | R | December 22, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures

Adam lives alone in a near-empty London tower until a neighbor knocks and his dead parents turn up alive in the suburbs. Andrew Haigh turns a ghost story into the conversation a gay man never got to have with his mom and dad. It is grief with the lights left on.

★★★☆☆

117 min | PG | December 15, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures

A young Willy Wonka shows up in a city where a chocolate cartel owns the police, the church, and the price of every bar. He has a head full of inventions and twelve coins to his name. The con is rigged, so he decides to out-magic it.

★★★★☆

105 min | PG-13 | December 15, 2023 | A24

A Nazi commandant and his wife build their dream life in a pretty house with a big garden. On the other side of the garden wall sits Auschwitz. The film never looks over the wall, and it does not need to.

★★★☆☆

101 min | PG | December 15, 2023 | Netflix

Ginger and the chickens won their freedom. Now her daughter wanders into a shiny new factory that turns hens into nuggets, and the great escape becomes a great break-in. The prison movie runs in reverse, and the clay still has fingerprints in it.

★★★★☆

124 min | PG-13 | December 8, 2023 | GKIDS

A boy loses his mother to a wartime fire and follows a talking heron into a tower where the dead still walk. Hayao Miyazaki comes back after a decade to ask whether a broken world is worth rebuilding. He hands you no map and trusts you to find your way out.

★★★★★

141 min | R | December 8, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures

A scientist reanimates a drowned woman with the brain of an infant and turns her loose on the world. Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter learns to walk, talk, and want without anyone teaching her to feel ashamed. Polite society never stood a chance.

★★★☆☆

130 min | NR | December 8, 2023 | 815 Pictures

An earthquake flattens Seoul and leaves one apartment building standing. The survivors inside turn it into a fortress, then a kingdom, then something uglier. The disaster is over by the second act. The real catastrophe is the people.

★★★★☆

93 min | NR | December 8, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films

Wim Wenders builds a 3D portrait of Anselm Kiefer, the German painter who turns lead, ash, and straw into monuments to his country’s buried history. The camera does not explain the work. It walks inside it.

★★★☆☆

144 min | NR | December 7, 2023 | Bleecker Street

A pregnant waitress in a dead-end town pours everything she cannot say into the pies she bakes. Sara Bareilles wrote the songs and now plays the woman who sings them. The camera just points at Broadway and lets her cook.

★☆☆☆☆

113 min | PG-13 | December 1, 2023 | Angel Studios

A doctor named Kevin Garner meets a mysterious stranger who can move people between parallel worlds. He refuses to serve, so the Benefactor strands him in a bleak alternate reality and dares him to break. The Book of Job gets a multiverse and loses its point.

★★☆☆☆

104 min | R | December 1, 2023 | Lionsgate

A father loses his son and his voice to a gang’s stray bullet on Christmas Eve. He spends a year turning himself into a weapon and tracking the men who fired the shots. John Woo makes a revenge film that barely speaks a word, and the silence is the best idea in it.

★★★★☆

125 min | PG-13 | December 1, 2023 | Toho International

A kamikaze pilot fakes engine trouble and lives through a war he is ordered to die in. Then Godzilla rises from the same ocean to finish the job his country started. The monster is the death he dodged, coming back to collect.

★★★☆☆

98 min | R | December 1, 2023 | Neon

Eileen Dunlop works a dead-end job at a boys’ prison and goes home to her drunk father. A glamorous new psychologist walks in and rewires her whole life. Then the movie shows you what was underneath all that longing.

★★★☆☆

104 min | PG-13 | November 24, 2023 | Netflix

Jon Batiste sets out to compose and premiere an original symphony at Carnegie Hall. The same week, his wife learns her cancer has come back. Matthew Heineman points the camera at both and refuses to blink.