June 16, 2023

The Flash

★★☆☆☆

144 min | PG-13 | June 16, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Barry Allen runs back in time to save his mother and tears a hole in reality instead. The multiverse he breaks coughs up an aging Batman and a Supergirl nobody came to rescue. The premise is a mission statement. The movie is a clearance sale.

The Blackening

★★★☆☆

97 min | R | June 16, 2023 | Lionsgate

Seven Black friends gather at a remote cabin for a reunion weekend. A killer forces them to play a board game built on racist horror tropes, and the first rule is that they have to decide which of them is the blackest. Survival comes down to knowing the genre better than the man trying to murder you.

Elemental

★★★☆☆

102 min | PG | June 16, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures

Fire meets water in a city built for the elements, and a shopkeeper’s daughter falls for the one boy she is supposed to evaporate. Pixar dresses up an immigrant-family story in periodic-table costumes. The allegory is heavier than the romance.

June 9, 2023

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

★★☆☆☆

127 min | PG-13 | June 9, 2023 | Paramount Pictures

Noah Diaz needs a job and a way to pay for his brother’s care. Optimus Prime needs a way home and a war he can win. The robots fight, the world stays small, and the movie settles for fine.

Dalíland

★★★☆☆

97 min | NR | June 9, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures

A young assistant lands a job in the orbit of an aging Salvador Dalí and his wife Gala, where the art is a sideshow to the cash and the chaos. Ben Kingsley plays the master as a man who has turned himself into a brand and forgotten the difference. The wild surrealist deserves a wilder movie than this.

June 2, 2023

The Boogeyman

★★☆☆☆

99 min | PG-13 | June 2, 2023 | 20th Century Studios

A family still raw from the mother’s death gets a visit from a stranger who insists a monster killed his children. The thing he carries does not leave when he does. Grief turns out to be the best door a monster ever found.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

★★★★☆

140 min | PG | June 2, 2023 | Columbia Pictures

Miles Morales is back, and so is every Spider-Person across the multiverse. A villain who can punch holes in reality threatens the whole web of worlds. The question is whether one kid gets to write his own story or follow the script everyone else insists on.

Past Lives

★★★★☆

106 min | PG-13 | June 2, 2023 | A24

Nora and Hae Sung are childhood sweethearts in Seoul. She emigrates. Twenty-four years and an ocean later, he flies to New York to find her married to someone else. Nobody yells. That is what makes it unbearable.

May 29, 2023

Reality

★★★★☆

83 min | NR | May 29, 2023 | HBO Films

Two FBI agents knock on Reality Winner’s door with a search warrant and a strange amount of small talk. They are there because she printed a classified document and mailed it to a news outlet. The whole film is the transcript, word for word.

May 26, 2023

You Hurt My Feelings

★★★★☆

93 min | R | May 26, 2023 | A24

Beth writes a novel and a husband who says he loves it. Then she overhears Don tell the truth, and the marriage she trusted turns to sand. A small lie detonates a whole life.

The Machine

★☆☆☆☆

112 min | R | May 26, 2023 | Screen Gems

Bert Kreischer turns his most famous drunken bar story into a feature film. The Russian mafia he robbed on a college train trip across Russia shows up two decades later to collect, and they bring his estranged father along for the trip. The movie mistakes a five-minute anecdote for a plot.

The Little Mermaid

★★★☆☆

135 min | PG | May 26, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures

Disney drains its 1989 animated classic into a literal live-action remake, with Halle Bailey under the sea as Ariel. The songs survive. The wonder does not.

Kandahar

★★☆☆☆

119 min | R | May 26, 2023 | Open Road Films

A black-ops contractor blows up an Iranian nuclear site, gets exposed, and finds himself stranded in hostile territory with a translator he barely knows. The only way out is a long drive to Kandahar through every faction that wants him dead. The chase is real. The movie around it never catches up.

About My Father

★☆☆☆☆

90 min | PG-13 | May 26, 2023 | Lionsgate

Sebastian Maniscalco brings his immigrant hairdresser father to a holiday weekend with his girlfriend’s old-money WASP family. Robert De Niro plays the dad as a man who refuses to be impressed by any of it. The clash writes itself, which turns out to be the problem.

May 19, 2023

Sanctuary

★★★☆☆

96 min | R | May 19, 2023 | Neon

A man hires a professional dominatrix to test him through a punishing ritual the night before he inherits his dead father’s hotel empire. She decides she wants a cut. What starts as a session becomes a negotiation neither one can walk away from.

Robots

★☆☆☆☆

93 min | R | May 19, 2023 | Neon

Charles sends a robot double out on his dates so he can skip to the sex. Elaine runs the same scam on rich men she wants to rob. Their machines fall in love and bolt, and the humans left behind turn out to be the least convincing things on screen.

Master Gardener

★★★☆☆

111 min | R | May 19, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures

A man with a hidden past tends the gardens of a wealthy estate and lives by ritual and routine. His employer asks him to take on her troubled grandniece as an apprentice. The soil is the only thing in this film that stays clean.

Fast X

★★☆☆☆

142 min | PG-13 | May 19, 2023 | Universal Pictures

A vengeful son spends years plotting to destroy Dominic Toretto and everyone he calls family. Jason Momoa arrives with a smile, a paintbrush, and a plan built on spite, and he is having a blast. The movie around him is running on fumes.

May 12, 2023

The Starling Girl

★★★★☆

116 min | R | May 12, 2023 | Bleecker Street

Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling dances for God in a fundamentalist Kentucky community and aches to feel chosen. The new youth pastor offers her exactly that, and she mistakes his attention for grace. Laurel Parmet’s debut knows the difference between being seen and being prey.

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

★★★★☆

95 min | R | May 12, 2023 | Apple Original Films

Michael J. Fox built a career on speed. He moved fast, talked fast, and never stopped. Then his body started slowing down without his permission, and this film is about what a man who outran everything does when he can no longer outrun himself.

Monica

★★★☆☆

113 min | R | May 12, 2023 | IFC Films

A trans woman returns home to care for the dying mother who threw her out decades ago. The mother no longer recognizes her. Monica nurses the woman who refused to know her, and the film never lets her say who she is.

Knights of the Zodiac

★☆☆☆☆

112 min | PG-13 | May 12, 2023 | Stage 6 Films

A street brawler learns a goddess lives inside a teenage girl and that he is destined to protect her. Tomek Bagiński turns one of anime’s foundational sagas into a generic superhero origin. The armor gleams and the movie is hollow.

It Ain't Over

★★★★☆

98 min | PG | May 12, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics

Yogi Berra wins ten World Series rings and gets remembered for the malapropisms. His granddaughter sets out to fix that. The numbers were always hiding in plain sight.

Fool's Paradise

★☆☆☆☆

98 min | R | May 12, 2023 | Roadside Attractions

Latte Pronto leaves a mental institution mute and blank, and Hollywood mistakes his emptiness for genius. He becomes a movie star without saying a word or wanting any of it. Charlie Day spends a whole film telling a joke that he forgets to write a punchline for.

Book Club: The Next Chapter

★★☆☆☆

108 min | PG-13 | May 12, 2023 | Focus Features

Four friends take their book club to Italy for a bachelorette trip through Rome, Venice, and Tuscany. Keaton, Fonda, Bergen, and Steenburgen can still hold a screen with nothing but chemistry and good lighting. This time that is all they get.

May 5, 2023

Love Again

★☆☆☆☆

104 min | PG-13 | May 5, 2023 | Screen Gems

Mira Ray loses her fiancé and keeps texting his old number to feel close to him. The number now belongs to a stranger who reads every message and decides she is the love of his life. Céline Dion shows up to bless the whole arrangement, because nothing says romance like a man falling for your grief behind your back.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

★★★☆☆

150 min | PG-13 | May 5, 2023 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

The Guardians are barely holding together when an attack leaves Rocket dying with a kill switch buried in his body. Saving him means digging up where he came from, and where he came from is a nightmare. The trilogy that ran on needle drops and banter ends by making you look at the wound underneath.

April 28, 2023

The Eight Mountains

★★★★☆

147 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films

Two boys meet in a dying Alpine village and spend the next thirty years circling each other. One leaves the mountains. One stays. The film is about which choice is the lie.

Sisu

★★★☆☆

91 min | R | April 28, 2023 | Lionsgate

A taciturn Finnish prospector strikes gold in the wilderness of 1944 Lapland. A retreating Nazi patrol tries to take it from him, not knowing the old man used to kill for a living. They picked the wrong corpse to rob.

R.M.N.

★★★★☆

125 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | IFC Films

A bakery in a Transylvanian village hires two foreign workers, and the town decides their bread is now contaminated. Cristian Mungiu watches a community talk itself into hatred one polite objection at a time. The title means MRI, and the diagnosis is exactly that grim.

Big George Foreman

★★☆☆☆

129 min | PG-13 | April 28, 2023 | Sony Pictures Releasing

George Foreman beats the world, finds God, walks away, and climbs back into the ring at forty-five to do it again. The story is incredible. The movie never trusts you to notice without a push.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.

★★★★☆

106 min | PG-13 | April 28, 2023 | Lionsgate

Margaret Simon is eleven, freshly transplanted to the New Jersey suburbs, and negotiating with a God she is not sure she believes in. She wants a normal body, the right friends, and a religion to call her own. Kelly Fremon Craig adapts Judy Blume without flinching and without condescending to a single fear on screen.

32 Sounds

★★★★☆

95 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | Abramorama

Sam Green builds a documentary you are supposed to hear before you see. He hands the audience headphones and spends ninety minutes proving that sound is the closest thing we have to a time machine. Then he reminds you that everything you just heard is already gone.

April 21, 2023

Trenque Lauquen

★★★★☆

260 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | The Cinema Guild

A woman vanishes from a small town on the Argentine pampas, and the man who loves her starts retracing her movements. What he finds is a chain of mysteries hidden inside a botanist’s pressed flowers, a stranger’s love letters, and a thing in a lake. The deeper he digs, the more she dissolves.

Somewhere in Queens

★★★☆☆

106 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Roadside Attractions

Ray Romano plays a Queens tile contractor whose whole identity rests on his son’s college basketball scholarship. Then the kid gets dumped and stops shooting. Turns out the father needs the dream more than the son ever did.

Plan 75

★★★☆☆

113 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | KimStim

Japan’s government offers citizens over seventy-five a deal. Choose death, and the state covers the bonus, the paperwork, and a friendly voice on the phone. Chie Hayakawa turns euthanasia into a customer-service transaction, and the horror is how reasonable everyone sounds.

Other People's Children

★★★★☆

104 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | Music Box Films

Rachel loves her job, her partner, and her life. Then she falls for a man with a five-year-old daughter who is not hers, and discovers she wants to mother a child she has no claim to. Loving someone else’s kid means loving the part of them that can be taken away.

Little Richard: I Am Everything

★★★★☆

98 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures

Little Richard invents rock and roll, then watches white performers get rich playing his music. Lisa Cortes builds a documentary that drags the queer Black architect of the genre back to the center of the frame. The history books spent seventy years writing him out. This puts him back.

Judy Blume Forever

★★★★☆

97 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | Amazon Studios

Judy Blume spent decades telling kids the truth about periods, sex, and divorce while school boards tried to ban her for it. This documentary tracks how a New Jersey housewife became the most challenged author in America. The films lets her win that fight in plain sight.

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant

★★★☆☆

123 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

An American special forces sergeant in Afghanistan owes his life to the local interpreter who dragged his unconscious body across hostile terrain. When the war moves on and the promised visas never come, that debt becomes a one-man rescue mission. Guy Ritchie drops the wisecracks and finds a pulse.

Evil Dead Rise

★★★☆☆

96 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Beth visits her estranged sister Ellie and three kids in a condemned Los Angeles high-rise. An earthquake cracks open a hidden vault, and the Book of the Dead turns a mother into a monster who wants her children dead. Cronin trades the cabin in the woods for an apartment with no way out.

Chevalier

★★★☆☆

107 min | PG-13 | April 21, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures

Joseph Bologne is a virtuoso violinist, a champion fencer, and the son of an enslaved woman in pre-revolutionary France. He charms a king and feuds with Mozart while the court that celebrates him refuses to see him as fully human. The man is extraordinary. The movie about him plays it safe.

Carmen

★★★☆☆

117 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics

A young woman flees Mexico after violence claims her mother and crosses the border on foot. A discharged Marine working night patrol abandons his post to run with her. Benjamin Millepied wants the desert to sing, but he forgets to give it words.

April 14, 2023

The Pope's Exorcist

★★☆☆☆

103 min | R | April 14, 2023 | Screen Gems

Russell Crowe straps on a cassock and climbs onto a Vespa to play the Vatican’s chief exorcist, dispatched to a Spanish abbey where a demon has moved into a little boy. He fights the devil with one-liners and a heavy accent. The movie is a paycheck, and Crowe spends it right in front of you.

Suzume

★★★☆☆

122 min | PG | April 14, 2023 | Crunchyroll

A teenage girl in rural Japan opens a strange door and lets loose the force that causes earthquakes. She chases it across the country with a talking three-legged chair for a companion. Makoto Shinkai turns a nation’s grief into a road movie.

Renfield

★★☆☆☆

93 min | R | April 14, 2023 | Universal Pictures

Renfield has spent decades as Dracula’s familiar, hauling home victims and swallowing abuse from an immortal who treats him like furniture. He joins a support group for people in toxic relationships and starts plotting his exit. Quitting the prince of darkness turns out to be harder than quitting any other bad boss.

Rare Objects

★★☆☆☆

123 min | R | April 14, 2023 | IFC Films

A young woman recovering from a trauma she won’t name takes a job at a Manhattan antiques shop and starts piecing herself back together among the broken treasures. Katie Holmes directs with obvious care and earnest sympathy. The patience reads as caution, and the film never stops being polite to its own pain.

Mafia Mamma

★★☆☆☆

101 min | R | April 14, 2023 | Bleecker Street

A widowed American mom flies to Italy for a funeral and inherits the family business. The family business is the Mafia. The movie thinks that sentence is the whole joke.

Beau Is Afraid

★★★☆☆

179 min | R | April 14, 2023 | A24

Beau is a paralyzed neurotic who needs to fly home to see his mother. Everything between his apartment and her front door wants to destroy him. Ari Aster spends three hours inside one man’s panic and dares you to find the exit with him.

April 7, 2023

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

★★★☆☆

104 min | R | April 7, 2023 | Neon

Eight young radicals meet in the West Texas desert with a plan to blow up an oil pipeline. Daniel Goldhaber turns Andreas Malm’s theory into a lean heist movie that takes its title at its word. It does not argue the politics so much as hand these kids a detonator and watch.