99 min | PG-13 | September 22, 2023 | Neon
A first-generation Indian-American teenager wants to be normal so badly that she shatters the jar holding her old friend’s demon. The thing she sets free feeds on isolation. She gave it a buffet.
105 min | R | September 15, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
A guy in a headband and cat t-shirt bets his savings on a dying mall stock and posts the receipts online. Millions of strangers follow him in. The hedge funds shorting GameStop never see the small money coming.
100 min | PG | September 15, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
A trio of inner-city kids ships off to a Christian summer camp run by Christopher Lloyd. One of them stumbles onto a hidden fortune and the criminals who want it back. The camp is the only thing here with anywhere to hide.
103 min | PG-13 | September 15, 2023 | 20th Century Studios
Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot retires to a crumbling Venetian palazzo and gets dragged to a Halloween seance. A girl drowned in the canal years ago, and the dead are supposedly talking. The detective who believes in nothing finally meets something he cannot explain, or so the house wants him to think.
110 min | R | September 8, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A demon named Valak possesses a man and starts murdering clergy across 1950s Europe. Sister Irene leaves her convent to hunt it down one more time. The hallways are scarier than the screenplay.
92 min | PG-13 | September 8, 2023 | Focus Features
Toula and the Portokalos clan haul their loud, loving chaos back to Greece for a family reunion in her late father’s village. Nia Vardalos writes, directs, and stars in a threequel that mistakes scenery for jokes. The wedding is in the title, but the movie forgot to pack everything else.
111 min | R | September 8, 2023 | Netflix
Augusto Pinochet never died. He is a two-hundred-fifty-year-old vampire hiding in the Chilean wilderness, sick of life and ready to stop drinking blood. Then his children show up to fight over the money he stole.
115 min | NR | September 8, 2023 | Variance Films
An Armenian-American survives the genocide, builds a quiet life in America, then answers Soviet propaganda and returns to a homeland that throws him in prison. From his cell window he watches a guard’s family live the ordinary life denied to him. Home turns out to be something you can only see through bars.
109 min | R | September 1, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
Robert McCall settles on the Amalfi Coast and finds something he never had. Then the Camorra come for the town. Retirement does not suit a man who counts in seconds.
91 min | R | August 25, 2023 | Lionsgate
Liam Neeson is a wealthy financial executive driving his two kids to school. A voice on the phone tells him there is a bomb under the seats, and if anyone gets out, it detonates. The car keeps moving and the movie never does.
135 min | PG-13 | August 25, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
A British teenager wins a video game and ends up strapped into a real race car. The pitch is a marketing executive’s fever dream made flesh. The surprise is that it mostly works on the track and stalls everywhere else.
100 min | PG-13 | August 25, 2023 | Bleecker Street
Helen Mirren disappears under latex to play Golda Meir during the eighteen days of the Yom Kippur War. The film locks her in smoke-filled rooms and keeps the war offscreen. The makeup does more acting than the script.
91 min | R | August 25, 2023 | Orion Pictures
Two unpopular queer best friends start a self-defense club at their football-obsessed high school. The real goal is hooking up with cheerleaders. The fists fly, the blood spills, and nobody learns a single lesson worth keeping.
93 min | R | August 18, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Reggie is a sweet, dim dog who reads his owner’s abuse as love. A foul-mouthed stray named Bug sets him straight and aims him at revenge. A dog cursing is funny exactly once, and the movie does it a hundred times.
105 min | R | August 18, 2023 | MGM
Aliens land, automate the economy, and leave teenagers selling their love lives as content. Adam and Chloe broadcast their courtship to paying alien subscribers because rent is due. The premise is the bleakest joke about capitalism anyone made this year.
128 min | PG-13 | August 18, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A college graduate comes home to a family that is losing its house and finds an alien scarab that turns him into a superhero he never asked to be. The powers are standard issue. The family is the whole movie.
119 min | R | August 11, 2023 | Universal Pictures
A merchant ship leaves the Carpathian coast carrying crates of dirt and one passenger who only moves after dark. Every night at sea, the crew loses another man. The voyage is doomed before it leaves port, and the movie is in no hurry to get there.
85 min | NR | August 11, 2023 | MTV Documentary Films
Augusto Góngora builds a career preserving Chile’s memory of the dictatorship. Now Alzheimer’s takes his own, one name at a time. His wife becomes the last place he still exists.
87 min | PG-13 | August 11, 2023 | Bleecker Street
A lonely Pennsylvania widower discovers a crashed flying saucer in his backyard and a small gray alien hiding in the bushes. He does not call the authorities. He offers it apple slices and a place to stay.
83 min | NR | August 4, 2023 | IFC Films
A teenage girl falls for an older man. Then her mother meets him and recognizes something she would rather forget. The film keeps hinting at a darker truth and never has the nerve to commit to it.
92 min | R | August 4, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
Ben Tagawa runs a failing arthouse cinema in Berkeley and picks apart everyone in his life. His girlfriend leaves for New York and he takes it as permission to chase the white women he swears he never wanted. The movie knows he is the problem long before he does.
92 min | NR | August 4, 2023 | Mubi
Tomas finishes a film, sleeps with a woman at the wrap party, and tells his husband about it the next morning like he is reporting the weather. Then he decides he wants both of them. Passages watches a charming man burn through everyone who loves him and call it freedom.
116 min | PG-13 | August 4, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
Jonas Taylor dives back into the trench, where sharks the size of buildings have waited millions of years for a meal this stupid. The movie promises Jason Statham versus a megalodon. It spends an hour making you wait and forgets why you came.
110 min | PG | August 4, 2023 | Roadside Attractions
Two teenage brothers record an album on their family farm in 1979. Nobody buys it. Thirty years later a collector pulls it from obscurity, and Donnie Emerson has to face what the dream already cost.
102 min | PG-13 | August 4, 2023 | Lionsgate
A corporate drone discovers a hidden office that makes him brilliant, productive, and serene. His coworkers insist the office does not exist. The premise promises a sharp little nightmare and then forgets to be one.
100 min | PG | August 2, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
Four teenage turtles live in the sewer and want one thing. They want to go to high school and get treated like normal kids. The mutant origin story finally remembers that the turtles are supposed to be teenagers.
125 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | GKIDS
A point guard the size of nobody takes the floor against the best team in Japan. The game runs the length of the film, but the story is everything that happened before tipoff. Takehiko Inoue adapts his own manga and turns a basketball game into a movie about grief.
73 min | R | July 28, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures
Four Black trans women who do sex work sit down and talk. They talk about clients, danger, money, and the men who want them in the dark and deny them in daylight. D. Smith hands them the mic and gets out of the way.
123 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
A grieving scientist who built a camera to photograph ghosts takes a job clearing spirits out of a New Orleans mansion. He brings a fake priest, a loud psychic, and a tipsy historian along for the haunting. The cast is stacked, the mansion is gorgeous, and the movie still cannot decide whether to scare you or hug you.
113 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | National Geographic Documentary Films
A Ugandan pop star decides to run for president against a man who has held power since 1986. Moses Bwayo and Christopher Sharp follow him from the concert stage to the prison cell to the hospital bed. The regime answers his songs with bullets.
181 min | R | July 21, 2023 | Universal Pictures
J. Robert Oppenheimer builds the bomb that ends the war and then spends the rest of his life answering for it. Christopher Nolan stages the whole thing as a trial, not a triumph. The man who splits the atom learns that the people who run the country are the real chain reaction.
88 min | R | July 21, 2023 | Lionsgate
A boy hears a voice from inside the walls of his house. His parents tell him it is nothing and forbid him from leaving. The walls are right and the parents are lying.
114 min | PG-13 | July 21, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A doll achieves consciousness in a plastic paradise and goes looking for the woman playing with her in the real world. Ken tags along and discovers patriarchy. One of them takes the lesson too far.
108 min | PG | July 19, 2023 | Netflix
A young Italian freediver chases the deepest dives ever recorded on a single breath. An Irish safety diver waits at the bottom to bring her back. The ocean keeps the receipts.
93 min | PG-13 | July 14, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures
A scrappy theater camp loses its founder to a strobe-light coma and inherits her clueless crypto-bro son. The teachers keep the lights on through sheer delusion and a homemade musical. It is a mockumentary by theater kids who know the joke is on them and tell it anyway.
103 min | NR | July 14, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films
A blocked novelist holes up at a seaside house to finish his book and finds it already full of people who refuse to leave him to his misery. A wildfire creeps closer while he sulks. Christian Petzold makes self-pity look like the most dangerous thing in the woods.
94 min | NR | July 14, 2023 | PBS Distribution
Mstyslav Chernov and a small Associated Press team are the last international journalists left inside Mariupol when the Russian army surrounds it. For twenty days they keep filming while the bombs fall and the lies pile up. The camera is the only thing left telling the truth.
164 min | PG-13 | July 12, 2023 | Paramount Pictures
A rogue artificial intelligence learns to think for itself, and the world’s intelligence agencies want to weaponize it. Ethan Hunt wants it destroyed. The fate of the world hangs on a two-piece key and a man who refuses to stop running.
94 min | R | July 7, 2023 | Lionsgate
Audrey, a Chinese American adoptee raised in a white town, flies to China for work and drags her three most unhinged friends along for the ride. The business trip turns into a raunchy hunt for the birth mother she has never met. It gets filthy, then it gets real.
107 min | PG-13 | July 7, 2023 | Screen Gems
Josh and Dalton Lambert buried their memories of the astral plane years ago. Dalton heads off to art college and starts painting the things he was made to forget. Some doors stay shut for a reason, and this one creaks open on schedule.
101 min | R | July 7, 2023 | A24
Gia is pregnant, broke, and fighting to win back the two kids the foster system already took. The state wants proof she can be a stable mother and gives her no way to become one. Savanah Leaf’s debut watches the machine grind without ever blinking.
106 min | NR | July 7, 2023 | IFC Films
Two men, the last on Earth, share a dome one of them built. The other is the ex-president who ignored every warning. The setup is wild and the talk crackles, but the film runs out of road before it runs out of ideas.
92 min | NR | July 5, 2023 | Netflix
Chris Smith builds a documentary about Wham! out of nothing but archive footage, old audio, and a family scrapbook. Two teenage friends conquer pop and then watch the friendship outgrow the band. It is the last happy chapter before George Michael becomes George Michael.
131 min | PG-13 | July 4, 2023 | Angel Studios
A federal agent spends his career catching the men who buy children and never the children themselves. So he quits to go get them back. Sound of Freedom is a real rescue dressed up as a holy war.
91 min | PG | June 30, 2023 | Universal Pictures
Ruby Gillman is a shy high schooler who learns she descends from a line of giant sea krakens sworn to guard the ocean. Becoming a hero means embracing the exact thing her mother told her to hide. You have seen this movie before, and you saw it done better.
99 min | PG | June 30, 2023 | Netflix
A shapeshifting girl crashes into the life of a knight everyone has decided is a monster. She wants to be his sidekick. He wants his name back, and she is the only creature in the kingdom strange enough to help him get it.
155 min | PG-13 | June 30, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
Indiana Jones is old, divorced, and one day from retirement when his goddaughter drags him after a dial that bends time. The Nazis chasing it now work for NASA. The send-off is heartfelt, but a good reason for it never arrives.
103 min | R | June 23, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
A broke Montauk townie answers a Craigslist ad from rich parents who want her to date their sheltered son out of his shell before he leaves for college. The pay is a car. Jennifer Lawrence commits so hard she almost makes a tame premise feel dangerous.
101 min | NR | June 23, 2023 | Kino Lorber
Nancy Buirski digs into how a movie about two desperate men hustling through a rotting New York City became the only X-rated film to win Best Picture. She treats the 1969 release as a fault line where Old Hollywood died and something hungrier took its place. The result is a documentary that loves its subject and trusts you to keep up.
105 min | PG-13 | June 16, 2023 | Focus Features
A grieving father drives his kids into a desert town for a junior stargazer convention. An alien shows up and the government quarantines everyone. Then Wes Anderson reminds you it is all a play, just in case you felt something.