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.
89 min | NR | November 24, 2023 | Greenwich Entertainment
Seven women crowd into an Estonian smoke sauna and tell the truth. They confess assaults, fears, and shames they have carried for decades. The steam hides their faces so the words can finally come out.
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.
95 min | PG | November 22, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
A young woman in the kingdom of Rosas discovers that the benevolent king who safeguards everyone’s wishes has no intention of granting most of them. She wishes on a star, and the star shows up. Disney throws itself a hundredth-birthday party and forgets to invite a story.
158 min | R | November 22, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Ridley Scott hands Joaquin Phoenix the most consequential man in modern European history and dares him to play the whole thing as a sulky, jealous shut-in. The battles are enormous. The man at the center is a void, and that is the point until it stops being interesting.
125 min | PG-13 | November 22, 2023 | Well Go USA
A mother notices her son acting strange. A teacher gets blamed. A friendship hides in plain sight. The truth keeps moving depending on who tells it.
240 min | PG | November 22, 2023 | Zipporah Films
Frederick Wiseman points his camera at a French restaurant that has held three Michelin stars across four generations of the same family. No narration, no interviews, just hands and knives and the quiet terror of a standard that never relaxes. It is a documentary about beauty, and about how much labor that beauty costs.
129 min | R | November 22, 2023 | Netflix
Bradley Cooper directs himself as Leonard Bernstein and spends two and a half hours chasing the great American conductor. The film cares less about the music than the marriage. It is a portrait of a genius told by the woman who had to live with him.
91 min | PG | November 17, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Branch has a secret. He used to be in a boy band with his four brothers, and now one of them needs rescuing from a pair of pop-star kidnappers. The plot is an excuse to cram a hundred songs into ninety minutes, and the movie knows it.
157 min | PG-13 | November 17, 2023 | Lionsgate
Decades before he rules Panem, Coriolanus Snow is a broke aristocrat assigned to mentor a tribute in the tenth Hunger Games. Tom Blyth plays the future dictator as a young man discovering that love and power cannot share the same room. The film makes you watch a monster get built, and it mostly does the job.
118 min | NR | November 17, 2023 | IFC Films
Shere Hite sold millions of copies of a report that told women the truth about their own bodies. Then the culture decided she never mattered and wiped her off the record. Nicole Newnham digs up the proof of both.
106 min | R | November 17, 2023 | TriStar Pictures
A Black Friday sale at a Plymouth superstore turns into a deadly stampede. One year later a killer in a pilgrim mask starts carving up the townspeople who caused it. Eli Roth finally turns a fake trailer he made years ago into the real thing.
131 min | R | November 17, 2023 | Amazon MGM Studios
Oliver Quick is a scholarship student at Oxford who attaches himself to the rich and beautiful Felix Catton. Felix brings him home for the summer to Saltburn, the family’s enormous estate. Oliver wants this life, and he will do anything to take it.
104 min | PG-13 | November 17, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
American Samoa loses a World Cup qualifier 31-0 and hires a washed-up coach to chase a single goal. Taika Waititi turns the real story into a comedy that keeps interrupting itself to be silly. The team deserved better than a director who cannot stop winking.
117 min | R | November 17, 2023 | Netflix
Natalie Portman plays an actress who moves in with the woman she is about to portray on screen. Twenty years ago that woman seduced a seventh grader, served her time, and married him. Portman wants the truth, and the truth is the one thing nobody in this house can afford to give.
81 min | NR | November 17, 2023 | Mubi
Two lonely Helsinki workers meet at a karaoke bar and try to build something out of bad luck and worse habits. Aki Kaurismäki strips romance down to glances, jukebox songs, and a stray dog. It is the warmest film ever made about people who can barely speak.
105 min | PG-13 | November 10, 2023 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Three heroes with light-based powers find themselves swapping places every time they use them. Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau, and the teenage superfan Ms. Marvel have to learn to fight as a unit before a vengeful Kree warrior tears the universe apart. The team-up works better than the plot holding it together.
92 min | R | November 10, 2023 | Netflix
Ibram X. Kendi’s history of racist ideas gets adapted into a documentary with one inverted claim. Racist policy comes first and the ideas arrive later to justify it. The film stops asking what is wrong with Black people and starts asking who profited from the question.
96 min | R | November 10, 2023 | Lionsgate
Jesse Eisenberg plays an expectant father who falls in with a cult of celibate men who call themselves a family. The deeper he goes, the more the rage underneath comes loose. The ideas are sharper than the film built around them.
98 min | PG | November 10, 2023 | Affirm Films
A teenage Mary and an awkward Joseph sing and dance their way toward the manger while Antonio Banderas vamps as a power-ballad King Herod. Adam Anders turns the Nativity into a full pop musical aimed at the family minivan. It is sincere, sugary, and exactly as silly as that sounds.
102 min | R | November 10, 2023 | A24
Paul Matthews is a tenured biology professor so unremarkable that nobody remembers him. Then strangers across the world start seeing him in their dreams, doing nothing, just standing there. Fame finds the one man least equipped to survive it.
93 min | NR | November 10, 2023 | Abramorama
A chaplaincy resident at Mount Sinai spends her days sitting with the dying and the terrified. The work demands she absorb other people’s grief without drowning in it. She is drowning.
104 min | R | November 3, 2023 | Bleecker Street
A snowstorm strands two former lovers in a deserted airport overnight, decades after they split. They have one long night to relitigate everything. The chemistry is real. The reason for the movie is not.
109 min | R | November 3, 2023 | Lionsgate
Daisy Ridley plays a woman raised in the wilderness by a father who kidnapped her mother. When he escapes a prison transport, the survival skills he drilled into her become the only thing that can stop him. The bones of a great thriller sit here. The movie never builds the body.
108 min | PG-13 | November 3, 2023 | Netflix
Bayard Rustin organizes the 1963 March on Washington in eight weeks while the movement’s own leaders try to bury him for being gay. He builds the largest protest in American history from a cramped Harlem office. The movie knows the man is more interesting than the monument.
116 min | R | November 3, 2023 | Lionsgate
A bare-knuckle fighter works the Mississippi Delta for money he owes before he ever earns it. His memory is failing, his foster mother is dying, and Big Momma Sweet wants her cut. Aaron Eckhart bleeds for a film that knows his body is the only thing it can spend.
102 min | NR | November 3, 2023 | HBO Documentary Films
Nikki Giovanni has spent six decades writing poems that imagine Black freedom somewhere off this planet. Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson build a documentary around her belief that the only real escape is to leave Earth behind. They treat a poet’s mind as a spacecraft and never ask her to land.
92 min | PG | November 3, 2023 | A24
A Black girl grows up in rural Mississippi, and the film tells her life not as a story but as a series of sensations. Raven Jackson builds it from mud, river water, fingertips, and skin. It asks you to feel a life instead of follow one.
87 min | PG | October 27, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Two young crabs from feuding clans fall for each other in the wet sand under a Jersey Shore boardwalk. David Soren turns Romeo and Juliet into a musical with claws and a head full of songs. The shape is older than the tide, and the movie never once fights it.
133 min | R | October 27, 2023 | Focus Features
A bitter classics teacher gets stuck supervising the prep-school boys with nowhere to go over Christmas. One troubled kid and a grieving cook are all the company he gets. Turns out the company is the point.
113 min | R | October 27, 2023 | A24
A fourteen-year-old girl on an Army base in Germany meets the most famous man in the world. He picks her, grooms her, and reshapes her into the woman he wants. The fairy tale is the cage.
108 min | NR | October 27, 2023 | Kino Lorber
A Tunisian mother loses two of her daughters to Islamist radicalization. Kaouther Ben Hania hires actresses to play the missing girls and to stand in for the mother when the memories cut too deep. The reenactment is the autopsy.
110 min | PG-13 | October 27, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Mike Schmidt needs a job and takes the worst one available. He signs on as night guard at an abandoned pizza place where the animatronic mascots get up and walk around after closing. The robots are scarier than anything the script does with them.
116 min | PG-13 | October 23, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
Beyond Utopia follows a North Korean family as they run for the border with a pastor and a chain of brokers as their only lifeline. Madeleine Gavin builds the escape in real time, from footage shot on the run. The terror is that none of it is staged.
128 min | NR | October 20, 2023 | Netflix
A 13-year-old girl is gang-raped in a village in Jharkhand, India. Her father refuses to let the case disappear into bribes, threats, and pressure to marry her to an attacker. He takes on his entire community to put three men in prison, and the camera never looks away.
92 min | PG-13 | October 20, 2023 | Apple Original Films
John le Carré, the son of a con man turned master of spy fiction, sits down with Errol Morris for one last interview. Two men who built careers on deception circle each other for the truth. The interview is the interrogation.
108 min | R | October 20, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
Leila is a queer Iranian-American filmmaker who would rather do anything than become her mother. Maryam Keshavarz mines her own family for a generation-spanning comedy that crosses an ocean and forty years to prove the two women are the same person. It is overstuffed, and it earns the mess.
120 min | PG-13 | October 20, 2023 | Netflix
Diana Nyad decides at sixty that she will swim from Cuba to Florida, more than a hundred miles of open ocean no one has crossed without a cage. She has tried before and failed. The film bets everything on two actresses, and it wins.
206 min | R | October 20, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Oil money pours into the Osage Nation, and white men marry in to murder their way to the inheritance. Martin Scorsese tells the story from the side of the killers, not the lawmen. The result is an American crime story about love used as a weapon.
190 min | NR | October 18, 2023 | Mubi
A bank teller steals the exact sum he needs to never work again, then turns himself in to serve a short sentence while a nervous coworker hides the cash. Rodrigo Moreno stretches that scheme into a wandering anti-capitalist comedy about time, work, and the hours a job quietly steals from you. The robbery is the easy part, and freedom turns out to be the harder crime.
103 min | PG-13 | October 13, 2023 | National Geographic Documentary Films
A young American missionary decides God wants him to convert the most isolated tribe on Earth. The Sentinelese have killed every outsider who lands on their beach. He paddles in anyway.
94 min | R | October 13, 2023 | Lionsgate
An illustrator dreams of a dead boy with a crushed skull who climbs one stair closer to his bedroom every night. He posts the haunting online and watches it go viral. The thread was scarier than the movie.
151 min | R | October 13, 2023 | Neon
A wife stands trial for the death of her husband, who fell from the top floor of their isolated chalet. Their half-blind son is the only witness, and what he saw is not what he remembers. The truth is the one thing the courtroom can never recover.
96 min | R | October 11, 2023 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Every Halloween a small town arms its teenage boys and sends them into the cornfields to kill a scarecrow with a pumpkin head. The winner gets money, a car, and a ticket out. The monster is real, but the town is worse.
99 min | NR | October 6, 2023 | IFC Films
A demon gestates inside a man’s body in rural Argentina, and there are rules for destroying it before it gets loose. Pedro breaks every one of them. What follows is a contagion that spreads through panic and refuses to grant anyone mercy.
111 min | R | October 6, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Two girls vanish in the woods and return three days later wrong. A single father drags a houseful of strangers and one familiar face into the work of casting it out. The premise borrows the bones of a masterpiece and finds nothing to put inside them.
86 min | R | October 6, 2023 | A24
Two arrogant salesmen discover they are identical twins separated at birth. They decide to Parent Trap their estranged parents back into love. The film treats good taste as the one thing worth blowing up.
112 min | R | October 6, 2023 | Lionsgate
A man walks out of Mississippi’s Parchman prison after eleven years and finds the family of the man he killed waiting for him. A woman walks a back road with a child and a gun and a body to bury. Two ruined people collide, and the only question is who pays the debt.