[{"rating":3,"slug":"the-invite","tagline":"Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen make a mismatched couple in a dinner-party drama that has real ideas about open marriage. It never settles on a voice, so the ideas outrun the movie.","title":"The Invite","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"minions-and-monsters","tagline":"Cute, and weirder than a Minions movie has any right to be. It finally cuts the little yellow guys loose from the Despicable Me machine and mostly gets away with it.","title":"Minions \u0026 Monsters","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"lucky-strike","tagline":"A lean Battle of the Bulge survival thriller that keeps reaching for Saving Private Ryan and keeps coming up short. Real moments of tension, but never the scale or the authenticity to sell them.","title":"Lucky Strike","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"supergirl","tagline":"Kara Zor-El watched Krypton die slowly while her baby cousin escaped clean. Now she crosses the galaxy on a revenge quest with a grieving girl and a stolen ship. The cape is the same. The wound underneath is older.","title":"Supergirl","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"toy-story-5","tagline":"Pixar returns to the well a fifth time and the well is not dry. The threat this time is not abandonment. It is a screen.","title":"Toy Story 5","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"disclosure-day","tagline":"Spielberg returns to the aliens that made him, and Emily Blunt is his best partner in years. The yarn engages. The philosophy is shoehorned in and thinner than his reputation promises.","title":"Disclosure Day","year":2026},{"rating":2,"slug":"scary-movie","tagline":"A reboot of a parody franchise mocking the age of reboots. The joke writes itself, and the film still cannot finish it. Funny in spurts, mean in others.","title":"Scary Movie","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"masters-of-the-universe","tagline":"Travis Knight makes the case that He-Man always deserved better. For anyone who grew up with the figures, the nostalgia hits a specific nerve, and the performances earn it.","title":"Masters of the Universe","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-breadwinner","tagline":"Nate Bargatze turns his deadpan everyman act into a stay-at-home-dad comedy. It reaches hard for something to say about family, and reaches too far.","title":"The Breadwinner","year":2026},{"rating":2,"slug":"backrooms","tagline":"The kernel of a great idea, stretched past its breaking point. Kane Parsons has an eye for dread but not yet a feel for structure.","title":"Backrooms","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-mandalorian-and-grogu","tagline":"The TV series goes big without breaking new ground. Strong performances and a great score, dragged down by a crowd of throwaway characters.","title":"The Mandalorian and Grogu","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"is-god-is","tagline":"Aleshea Harris adapts her own play into a strange, uncomfortable revenge story that lands on the strength of its performances. The tone is deliberately off and that is the entire point.","title":"Is God Is","year":2026},{"rating":2,"slug":"obsession","tagline":"A sharp premise about male entitlement that never figures out what it wants to say. Strong performances and clean craft cannot save a confused thesis.","title":"Obsession","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-sheep-detectives","tagline":"Hugh Jackman, a flock of sheep, and a murder. Craig Mazin writes it like it matters, which is why it works.","title":"The Sheep Detectives","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"you-me-and-tuscany","tagline":"A handsome rom-com that coasts on its location and its leads. Charming until you ask it to do anything else.","title":"You, Me \u0026 Tuscany","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-drama","tagline":"A confession turns a love story into a controlled burn that nobody walks away from clean.","title":"The Drama","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-super-mario-galaxy-movie","tagline":"A perfect video game movie. Setup in five minutes, characters in ten, and a straight shot to the flag pole.","title":"The Super Mario Galaxy Movie","year":2026},{"rating":5,"slug":"project-hail-mary","tagline":"The best sci-fi film in a decade earns every minute of its runtime.","title":"Project Hail Mary","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"hoppers","tagline":"Pixar makes an original movie again. The premise is ridiculous. It works.","title":"Hoppers","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"reminders-of-him","tagline":"Colleen Hoover's best adaptation is still just a Colleen Hoover adaptation.","title":"Reminders of Him","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"scream-7","tagline":"Kevin Williamson returns to the director's chair and proves the franchise still has a pulse. Not exactly fun, but it hits all the right notes.","title":"Scream 7","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"good-luck-have-fun-dont-die","tagline":"Gore Verbinski goes full throttle on AI paranoia and gets most of it right. Pacing stumbles but the vision holds.","title":"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"how-to-make-a-killing","tagline":"A family thriller that doesn't moralize about its villains. Smarter than it looks.","title":"How to Make a Killing","year":2026},{"rating":2,"slug":"solo-mio","tagline":"Kevin James does something unexpected. The movie buries it under everything else.","title":"Solo Mio","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"wuthering-heights","tagline":"Emerald Fennell adapts Emily Brontë with raw carnality and visual opulence. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi destroy each other across the Yorkshire moors. This is not your grandmother's period drama.","title":"Wuthering Heights","year":2026},{"rating":4,"slug":"crime-101","tagline":"Bart Layton adapts Don Winslow's novella into a Los Angeles crime thriller that feels like it was made in 1995. Chris Hemsworth and Halle Berry anchor a film about desperate people making irreversible choices.","title":"Crime 101","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"shelter","tagline":"Statham does what Statham does best. Kills people beautifully in beautiful places. The kid nearly steals the whole thing.","title":"Shelter","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"send-help","tagline":"Raimi's survival horror has committed performances and inventive gore, but the plotting is a mess. Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien carry the film despite narrative confusion.","title":"Send Help","year":2026},{"rating":1,"slug":"melania","tagline":"A vanity project that mistakes access for insight. The most revealing thing about it is that no one in Trump's orbit had the courage to say this was a bad idea.","title":"Melania","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"anaconda","tagline":"Jack Black and Paul Rudd remake their favorite childhood movie in the rainforest and stumble into genuine heart. The slapstick lands, the sentiment earns it, and the whole thing works way better than it should.","title":"Anaconda","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"hamnet","tagline":"A grief story that earns every tear without manipulating you into them. The rare prestige period piece that trusts its audience.","title":"Hamnet","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"mercy","tagline":"Minority Report meets Judge Dredd meets GenZ phone addiction. Interesting premise undermined by a telegraphed twist and too many cop movie tropes.","title":"Mercy","year":2026},{"rating":2,"slug":"greenland-migration","tagline":"Big plot holes, small investment, performances that are unearned and characters barely worth knowing. But a few good shots and interesting plot devices make this \"something.\"","title":"Greenland: Migration","year":2026},{"rating":2,"slug":"28-years-later-the-bone-temple","tagline":"Watched most of this through the cracks in my fingers. Strong world-building for the \"28 Years\" universe, but a gaping plot hole sinks whatever story they were trying to tell. Bonus points for releasing close enough to the first film that I didn't need a refresher.","title":"28 Years Later: The Bone Temple","year":2026},{"rating":3,"slug":"dead-mans-wire","tagline":"Hip and fast-moving melodrama that doesn't take itself too seriously. Lots of nice visual touches, and a really strong performance from Colman Domingo as the DJ. Glows up the based-on-true-life characters as Dread Pirate Cary Elwes and It-clown Bill Skarsgard. Not exactly airy but still light enough to not take too seriously.","title":"Dead Man's Wire","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"song-sung-blue","tagline":"A Neil Diamond tribute act sounds like a punchline, but Jackman and Hudson sell the hell out of it. Surprisingly tender family drama underneath the sequins and chest hair. Craig Brewer knows exactly how much schmaltz he can get away with.","title":"Song Sung Blue","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"is-this-thing-on","tagline":"Will Arnett doing halting crowd work and mid-life crisis comedy? I'm there. Charming and real, with Laura Dern delivering a powerhouse turn as the wife balancing pride in parenthood against the quiet grief of setting aside who you used to be. Never saccharine, even when you see the beats coming.","title":"Is This Thing On?","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"marty-supreme","tagline":"Timothee Chalamet commits fully to a ping pong obsessive, but the pacing and tonal whiplash keep this from greatness. Strong supporting turns from Kevin O'Leary, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Odessa A'zion can't quite save the slapstick detours.","title":"Marty Supreme","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-spongebob-movie-search-for-squarepants","tagline":"Derek Drymon sends SpongeBob into the deep sea searching for his missing parents. The animation is gorgeous. The emotional stakes are real. This is SpongeBob at his best.","title":"The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"avatar-fire-and-ash","tagline":"Cameron delivers again. Three hours of visual spectacle from an obsessive perfectionist. Still can't explain why nobody talks about these movies a month later.","title":"Avatar: Fire and Ash","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-housemaid","tagline":"A domestic thriller that actually earns its twist. Amanda Seyfried is the reason to show up.","title":"The Housemaid","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-running-man","tagline":"Edgar Wright's Stephen King adaptation has style to spare but asks too much of your suspension of disbelief.","title":"The Running Man","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"rental-family","tagline":"Brendan Fraser as a too-big-for-Japan American finding himself through pretend families. My favorite movie of the year.","title":"Rental Family","year":2025},{"rating":1,"slug":"five-nights-at-freddys-2","tagline":"Emma Tammi returns to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza with a sequel that drowns in convoluted mythology and forgotten character. The animatronics look great. Everything else is a mess.","title":"Five Nights at Freddy's 2","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-secret-agent","tagline":"Brazil's military dictatorship gets the thriller treatment it deserves. The parallels to the present are not subtle. They don't need to be.","title":"The Secret Agent","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"wake-up-dead-man","tagline":"Rian Johnson sends Benoit Blanc into a religious community to solve an impossible murder. Daniel Craig leads an ensemble that includes Josh O'Connor, Glenn Close, and Josh Brolin. This is mystery filmmaking at its finest.","title":"Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"eternity","tagline":"David Freyne asks who you choose when you die and meet everyone you ever loved in the afterlife. Elizabeth Olsen anchors a romantic comedy about impossible choices.","title":"Eternity","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"zootopia-2","tagline":"Jared Bush and Byron Howard send Judy and Nick undercover into new corners of Zootopia. The animation is stunning. The mystery is sharp. Disney Animation remembers what made the original special.","title":"Zootopia 2","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"train-dreams","tagline":"Denis Johnson's novella gets the adaptation it deserves. Edgerton finally gets the role he deserves. Everybody wins.","title":"Train Dreams","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"sentimental-value","tagline":"Tender family drama with strong performances that never finds the gear it keeps reaching for. Cannes loved it. I liked it fine.","title":"Sentimental Value","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"die-my-love","tagline":"Jennifer Lawrence descends into postpartum madness in rural Montana. The performances work but the jagged edges make it a tough sit.","title":"Die My Love","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"predator-badlands","tagline":"Dan Trachtenberg makes a Predator film from the Predator's perspective. Elle Fanning plays a synthetic ally to an exiled Yautja. This is the boldest swing the franchise has taken.","title":"Predator: Badlands","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"nuremberg","tagline":"James Vanderbilt dramatizes the psychological battle between U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley and Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring. Rami Malek and Russell Crowe circle each other with intelligence and menace.","title":"Nuremberg","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"anniversary","tagline":"A political thriller that forgot to include either politics or thrills. Strong cast wasted on a story that refuses to commit.","title":"Anniversary","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"bugonia","tagline":"Lanthimos and Stone do their weird thing again. It works. Oscar bait, sure, but the kind that actually earns it.","title":"Bugonia","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"frankenstein","tagline":"Del Toro finally makes his Frankenstein and it's gorgeous. Too bad most people will watch it on a phone.","title":"Frankenstein","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"black-phone-2","tagline":"Scott Derrickson returns to the Black Phone mythology with a sequel that expands the horror intelligently. Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw anchor a film about trauma that lingers.","title":"Black Phone 2","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"good-fortune","tagline":"Aziz Ansari directs his first feature about an incompetent angel assigned to help a struggling gig worker. Keanu Reeves brings perfect deadpan to absurdist comedy with heart.","title":"Good Fortune","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"tron-ares","tagline":"Joachim Rønning sends a program from the Grid into the real world. Jared Leto plays AI made flesh. The visuals are stunning. The story is hollow.","title":"TRON: Ares","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"after-the-hunt","tagline":"Luca Guadagnino makes a campus thriller about accusations and secrets. Julia Roberts anchors a film that gestures at important themes without committing to difficult truths.","title":"After the Hunt","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"one-battle-after-another","tagline":"PTA's Pynchon adaptation is a tonal mess wrapped in prestige packaging. Great performances buried inside a film that can't decide if it's a comedy or an epic.","title":"One Battle After Another","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"downton-abbey-the-grand-finale","tagline":"Simon Curtis brings the Crawleys into the 1930s for a final chapter about scandal, financial ruin, and the end of an era. Julian Fellowes writes with precision and heart.","title":"Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-conjuring-last-rites","tagline":"Michael Chaves closes the Warrens' story with one final case. Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson anchor a film that delivers familiar scares without finding new territory.","title":"The Conjuring: Last Rites","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"nobody-2","tagline":"Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch Mansell on vacation with his family. Violence finds him anyway. Timo Tjahjanto directs with brutal efficiency.","title":"Nobody 2","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"f1","tagline":"A Brad Pitt racing movie had no business being this watchable. The supporting cast elevates what could have been a vanity project into something with actual depth.","title":"F1","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"weapons","tagline":"Zach Cregger follows Barbarian with an ambitious mystery horror about seventeen children who vanish simultaneously. The structure is bold. The payoff is muddled.","title":"Weapons","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"freakier-friday","tagline":"Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan return for another body swap. Nisha Ganatra directs with warmth and precision. This is how you make a legacy sequel that honors what came before.","title":"Freakier Friday","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-naked-gun","tagline":"Akiva Schaffer reboots Police Squad with Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr. The deadpan absurdity translates perfectly. This is what comedy reboots should be.","title":"The Naked Gun","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-bad-guys-2","tagline":"Pierre Perifel returns with a heist sequel that introduces the Bad Girls and doubles down on what made the first film work. Fast, funny, and surprisingly smart.","title":"The Bad Guys 2","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-fantastic-four-first-steps","tagline":"Matt Shakman sets the Fantastic Four in a retro-futuristic 1960s and remembers these are scientists first, superheroes second. Pedro Pascal leads an ensemble that actually feels like family.","title":"The Fantastic Four: First Steps","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-home","tagline":"James DeMonaco sends Pete Davidson to a haunted retirement home for mandatory community service. The premise is better than the execution.","title":"The Home","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"eddington","tagline":"Ari Aster makes a western about a small-town standoff that spirals into apocalyptic violence. Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal destroy each other. This is controlled chaos.","title":"Eddington","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"i-know-what-you-did-last-summer","tagline":"Jennifer Kaytin Robinson reboots the slasher franchise with meta commentary and returning legacy characters. The film knows what it is and cannot transcend that knowledge.","title":"I Know What You Did Last Summer","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"smurfs","tagline":"Chris Miller reboots the Smurfs with an all-star voice cast led by Rihanna. The film chooses chaos over charm and drowns in frantic energy that never coheres.","title":"Smurfs","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"superman","tagline":"James Gunn reboots Superman with sincerity and optimism. David Corenswet embodies the character without irony or apology. This is what superhero films should be.","title":"Superman","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"jurassic-world-rebirth","tagline":"Gareth Edwards reboots Jurassic World with a new cast and familiar formula. Scarlett Johansson hunts dinosaurs. The film delivers competent spectacle without surprise or vision.","title":"Jurassic World Rebirth","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"m3gan-2-0","tagline":"Gerard Johnstone trades horror for action-comedy and the shift destroys what made M3GAN work. The killer doll becomes a superhero and the satire becomes noise.","title":"M3GAN 2.0","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"28-years-later","tagline":"Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the Rage virus twenty-eight years later. Britain is sealed off. The infected have evolved. So have the survivors.","title":"28 Years Later","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"elio","tagline":"Pixar sends a space-obsessed misfit into the cosmos and remembers what made their early films special. This is heartfelt without being manipulative.","title":"Elio","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"materialists","tagline":"Celine Song follows Past Lives with a romantic comedy about money, self-worth, and modern dating. Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal navigate love as transaction.","title":"Materialists","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"how-to-train-your-dragon","tagline":"Dean DeBlois remakes his own animated masterpiece in live-action and discovers what works and what doesn't. The dragon is perfect. The humans are adequate.","title":"How to Train Your Dragon","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"ballerina","tagline":"Ana de Armas enters the Wick universe and proves she can carry an action franchise. Len Wiseman directs with brutal efficiency. The film earns its place in the world of professional killers.","title":"Ballerina","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"karate-kid-legends","tagline":"Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio team up to train a new kid. Ben Wang is the breakout. The film delivers exactly what nostalgia promises and nothing more.","title":"Karate Kid: Legends","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"mission-impossible-the-final-reckoning","tagline":"Tom Cruise says goodbye to Ethan Hunt in the longest Mission: Impossible film. Christopher McQuarrie directs the final mission with scope and sentiment in equal measure.","title":"Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"lilo-and-stitch","tagline":"Dean Fleischer Camp remakes Lilo \u0026 Stitch with live actors and a CGI alien. The film captures the heart of the original without trying to improve what already worked.","title":"Lilo \u0026 Stitch","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"final-destination-bloodlines","tagline":"Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein resurrect Final Destination and discover what the franchise always had in it. This is precision horror filmmaking disguised as crowd-pleasing spectacle.","title":"Final Destination: Bloodlines","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"thunderbolts","tagline":"Jake Schreier assembles Marvel's rejects and outcasts into a team movie that remembers character matters. Florence Pugh and Lewis Pullman anchor the best MCU film in years.","title":"Thunderbolts*","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-accountant-2","tagline":"Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal team up as autistic hitman brothers investigating a Treasury murder. Gavin O'Connor finds the sequel the first film was reaching for.","title":"The Accountant 2","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"until-dawn","tagline":"David F. Sandberg adapts the horror video game with an original story set in the same universe. The practical effects work. The time loop premise wears thin.","title":"Until Dawn","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"sinners","tagline":"Ryan Coogler invents a new genre and dares you to look away. You won't.","title":"Sinners","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-legend-of-ochi","tagline":"Isaiah Saxon directs his first feature and builds a fantasy world with tactile beauty and emotional stakes. Helena Zengel anchors a story about fear and connection.","title":"The Legend of Ochi","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"a-minecraft-movie","tagline":"Jared Hess adapts Minecraft into a family adventure that understands its audience better than its critics. Jack Black and Jason Momoa sell the absurdity completely.","title":"A Minecraft Movie","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"death-of-a-unicorn","tagline":"Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega accidentally kill a unicorn and corporate greed ensues. A24 tries to make a satire about pharmaceutical exploitation. The tone never settles.","title":"Death of a Unicorn","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"a-working-man","tagline":"Jason Statham plays a construction worker with a lethal past forced back into action. David Ayer directs. The formula is familiar but the execution is solid.","title":"A Working Man","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-alto-knights","tagline":"Robert De Niro plays two 1950s mob bosses in a turf war. Barry Levinson directs. Neither of them finds anything new in the well-worn genre they helped define.","title":"The Alto Knights","year":2025},{"rating":1,"slug":"snow-white","tagline":"Disney remakes Snow White with CGI dwarfs and flattened fairytale logic. The modernization rings hollow. The performances feel constrained. The whole enterprise misses the point.","title":"Snow White","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"opus","tagline":"John Malkovich plays a reclusive pop star who invites journalists to his compound for a sinister plan. Ayo Edebiri tries to ground the chaos. The film can't decide what it wants to be.","title":"Opus","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"black-bag","tagline":"Soderbergh makes another spy thriller because he can. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play married intelligence agents who might be betraying each other. Sleek, cold, efficient.","title":"Black Bag","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"novocaine","tagline":"Jack Quaid plays a bank employee who can't feel pain and has to rescue his kidnapped coworker. The premise is better than the execution but Quaid sells it completely.","title":"Novocaine","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"mickey-17","tagline":"Bong Joon Ho makes a sci-fi satire about disposable labor and corporate exploitation. Robert Pattinson plays the same man dying over and over. This is what cinema should be.","title":"Mickey 17","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"last-breath","tagline":"Alex Parkinson remakes his own 2019 documentary as a survival thriller. Woody Harrelson leads a rescue effort hundreds of feet below the ocean. Taut, efficient, terrifying.","title":"Last Breath","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-monkey","tagline":"Osgood Perkins adapts Stephen King's cursed toy monkey story and leans fully into horror-comedy chaos. Theo James plays twin brothers haunted by random death. It works.","title":"The Monkey","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-unbreakable-boy","tagline":"Jon Gunn adapts a true story about a boy with brittle-bone disease and autism who transforms his family. Zachary Levi tries. The film is earnest to a fault.","title":"The Unbreakable Boy","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"captain-america-brave-new-world","tagline":"Anthony Mackie officially takes up the shield and the MCU delivers its most middling entry yet. Competent, forgettable, and overstuffed with setup for movies nobody asked for.","title":"Captain America: Brave New World","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"paddington-in-peru","tagline":"Paddington goes to Peru and the franchise maintains its improbable winning streak. Dougal Wilson steps in for Paul King and delivers exactly what's needed.","title":"Paddington in Peru","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"heart-eyes","tagline":"Josh Ruben makes a Valentine's Day slasher that understands the genre and executes with precision. Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding sell the premise completely.","title":"Heart Eyes","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"bring-them-down","tagline":"Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan destroy each other over land, livestock, and pride in rural Ireland. No heroes. No easy answers. Just escalation and consequence.","title":"Bring Them Down","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"love-hurts","tagline":"Ke Huy Quan plays a retired hitman whose brother wants him dead. Ariana DeBose shows up as the ex-partner. The film is eighty-three minutes and feels longer.","title":"Love Hurts","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"companion","tagline":"Drew Hancock's directorial debut is a nasty, clever thriller that earns its twists and never apologizes. Sophie Thatcher continues her winning streak.","title":"Companion","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"valiant-one","tagline":"A military helicopter crashes in North Korea. The survivors must escape. You have seen this movie a dozen times and those versions were not good either.","title":"Valiant One","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"dog-man","tagline":"DreamWorks adapts Dav Pilkey's graphic novel with genuine respect for the source material and young audiences. Smart, fast, and surprisingly heartfelt.","title":"Dog Man","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"the-brutalist","tagline":"Brady Corbet makes a three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute epic about architecture, ambition, and the cost of artistic vision in America. Every minute earns its place.","title":"The Brutalist","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"presence","tagline":"Soderbergh shoots a haunted house movie from the ghost's point of view. The formal experiment works. The emotional core lands. This is what mastery looks like.","title":"Presence","year":2025},{"rating":2,"slug":"flight-risk","tagline":"Mel Gibson directs Mark Wahlberg in a contained thriller that never finds a reason to exist. Ninety-one minutes feels long.","title":"Flight Risk","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"one-of-them-days","tagline":"Lawrence Lamont directs his first feature. Syreeta Singleton writes her first screenplay. They deliver a comedy that feels lived-in and urgent. Hollywood needs more of this.","title":"One of Them Days","year":2025},{"rating":3,"slug":"wolf-man","tagline":"Leigh Whannell swings for the fences again with Universal's monster IP and lands somewhere between ambitious and frustrating. The Invisible Man was lightning. This is the bottle.","title":"Wolf Man","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"better-man","tagline":"Michael Gracey depicts Robbie Williams as a CGI chimpanzee and makes it work. The boldness of that choice elevates what could have been another paint-by-numbers music biopic.","title":"Better Man","year":2025},{"rating":4,"slug":"den-of-thieves-pantera","tagline":"Gerard Butler chases O'Shea Jackson Jr. across Europe in a heist sequel that knows exactly what it is and delivers without apology. Sometimes that's enough.","title":"Den of Thieves: Pantera","year":2025},{"rating":5,"slug":"nosferatu","tagline":"Robert Eggers remakes the vampire and makes you forget every bloodless franchise that came before.","title":"Nosferatu","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"mufasa-the-lion-king","tagline":"Barry Jenkins trades poetry for paycheck. The Lion King gets a backstory nobody asked for, rendered in photoreal animation that still can't make fake animals emote.","title":"Mufasa: The Lion King","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"babygirl","tagline":"Nicole Kidman plays a CEO who starts an affair with a young intern. Halina Reijn directs an erotic thriller that is actually erotic and actually thrilling. Kidman is fearless.","title":"Babygirl","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-complete-unknown","tagline":"Timothee Chalamet becomes Bob Dylan in a biopic that covers 1961 to 1965. He sings live. He plays live. James Mangold makes the rare music biopic that trusts the music.","title":"A Complete Unknown","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"sonic-the-hedgehog-3","tagline":"The Sonic franchise introduces Shadow and Keanu Reeves voices him with tragic sincerity. Jim Carrey plays two Robotniks. The whole thing is ridiculous and consistently entertaining.","title":"Sonic the Hedgehog 3","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-lord-of-the-rings-the-war-of-the-rohirrim","tagline":"An animated Lord of the Rings film tells the origin of Helm's Deep two hundred years before Frodo. The battle sequences are impressive. The characters are not.","title":"The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim","year":2024},{"rating":1,"slug":"kraven-the-hunter","tagline":"Sony's Spider-Man Universe dies the death it deserved. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a Marvel villain nobody asked to see as a hero. J.C. Chandor deserves better. Everyone deserves better.","title":"Kraven the Hunter","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"moana-2","tagline":"Disney sends Moana back to sea with a new crew and a bigger quest. The animation is stunning. The songs are not. The sequel does enough to justify its existence without matching the original.","title":"Moana 2","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"wicked","tagline":"Jon M. Chu brings the first act of the Broadway juggernaut to screen with two lead performances that justify twenty years of development hell. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande are the real deal.","title":"Wicked","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"gladiator-ii","tagline":"Ridley Scott returns to the Colosseum twenty-four years later. Paul Mescal fights well. Denzel Washington steals everything. The film cannot escape its predecessor's shadow but it fights hard.","title":"Gladiator II","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"red-one","tagline":"Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans team up to save a kidnapped Santa Claus. The film cost $250 million. It looks like it cost $250 million. It feels like it cost nothing.","title":"Red One","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-best-christmas-pageant-ever","tagline":"Dallas Jenkins adapts the beloved 1972 children's book about the worst kids in town hijacking the church Christmas pageant. Wholesome does not mean toothless. This one earns it.","title":"The Best Christmas Pageant Ever","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"heretic","tagline":"Hugh Grant plays a polite monster who traps two Mormon missionaries in his house for a theological debate that turns lethal. Grant has never been this terrifying or this entertaining.","title":"Heretic","year":2024},{"rating":5,"slug":"a-real-pain","tagline":"Jesse Eisenberg writes and directs a film about two cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland. Kieran Culkin gives the performance of his career. Ninety minutes. Not a wasted frame.","title":"A Real Pain","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"venom-the-last-dance","tagline":"The Venom trilogy ends with a whimper disguised as a bang. Tom Hardy talks to himself for two hours while the plot happens around him.","title":"Venom: The Last Dance","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"conclave","tagline":"Edward Berger turns a papal election into a political thriller. Ralph Fiennes leads an extraordinary ensemble through Vatican corridors where every whisper is a weapon.","title":"Conclave","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"we-live-in-time","tagline":"Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh fall in love across a decade told out of order. John Crowley makes a romantic drama that trusts its actors more than its structure.","title":"We Live in Time","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"smile-2","tagline":"Parker Finn takes his Smile franchise and makes the rare horror sequel that improves on the original in every way. Naomi Scott gives a star-making performance as a pop star losing her mind.","title":"Smile 2","year":2024},{"rating":5,"slug":"anora","tagline":"Sean Baker makes his masterpiece. A Brooklyn stripper marries a Russian oligarch's son and the fairy tale collapses in real time. Mikey Madison is extraordinary.","title":"Anora","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-apprentice","tagline":"Ali Abbasi makes a film about how Donald Trump became Donald Trump. Sebastian Stan disappears into the role. Jeremy Strong steals the film as Roy Cohn.","title":"The Apprentice","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"terrifier-3","tagline":"Art the Clown goes Christmas. Damien Leone escalates from Halloween to the holiday season and delivers the most transgressive slasher sequel in years. The kills are extraordinary. The budget is still nothing.","title":"Terrifier 3","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"saturday-night","tagline":"Jason Reitman makes a film about the ninety minutes before the first episode of Saturday Night Live aired. It is frantic and funny and more interested in the chaos of creation than the mythology of the show.","title":"Saturday Night","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"joker-folie-a-deux","tagline":"Todd Phillips makes a Joker sequel that nobody asked for and turns it into a jukebox musical that nobody wanted. The result is a film at war with itself and its audience.","title":"Joker: Folie à Deux","year":2024},{"rating":5,"slug":"the-wild-robot","tagline":"A robot learns to be a mother on a wild island. Chris Sanders adapts Peter Brown's book into one of the most beautiful animated films ever made. You will cry. Everyone cries.","title":"The Wild Robot","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"megalopolis","tagline":"Francis Ford Coppola spends forty years and $120 million of his own money to make his dream project. The result is a glorious, incoherent mess that only a genius could make this badly.","title":"Megalopolis","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"transformers-one","tagline":"The Transformers franchise goes animated and tells the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron as friends who became enemies. The best Transformers film since 1986. That is not a joke.","title":"Transformers One","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-substance","tagline":"Coralie Fargeat makes a body horror film about aging in Hollywood that goes further than anyone expects. Demi Moore gives the performance of her career. The last thirty minutes are insane.","title":"The Substance","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"never-let-go","tagline":"Halle Berry lives in a cabin with her twin sons, tethered by ropes to keep an unseen evil at bay. The atmosphere is suffocating. The answers are not worth the wait.","title":"Never Let Go","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"speak-no-evil","tagline":"James McAvoy plays the worst dinner host in cinema history. The American remake of the Danish original changes the ending and earns the change. Social politeness as a weapon has never been this terrifying.","title":"Speak No Evil","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"beetlejuice-beetlejuice","tagline":"Tim Burton returns to the property that made him Tim Burton. Michael Keaton is still Beetlejuice. Catherine O'Hara steals the film. The nostalgia is earned more often than not.","title":"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-crow-2024","tagline":"The Crow gets rebooted again. Bill Skarsgard replaces Brandon Lee. The gothic romance is gone. The visual style is gone. What remains is a generic revenge film wearing the wrong costume.","title":"The Crow","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"blink-twice","tagline":"Zoë Kravitz directs her first film about a tech billionaire's island paradise that is actually a nightmare. The allegory is obvious. The execution is sharp. Naomi Ackie is a star.","title":"Blink Twice","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"alien-romulus","tagline":"Fede Alvarez takes the Alien franchise back to basics. Young colonists trapped on a derelict space station with xenomorphs. The scares work. The fan service is excessive. The third act goes somewhere new.","title":"Alien: Romulus","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"in-the-rearview","tagline":"Maciek Hamela drives a van through a war zone, pulling Ukrainian civilians out one carload at a time. The camera never leaves the back seat, and everyone who climbs in gets the same question. Where are you coming from, and where are you going.","title":"In the Rearview","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"it-ends-with-us","tagline":"Blake Lively stars in the adaptation of the Colleen Hoover phenomenon. The domestic violence subject matter is handled with more care than expected. The romance around it is handled with less.","title":"It Ends with Us","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"cuckoo","tagline":"A teenager moves to a German Alps resort and discovers something profoundly wrong. Hunter Schafer anchors the dread. Dan Stevens goes full maniac. Tilman Singer makes horror weird again.","title":"Cuckoo","year":2024},{"rating":1,"slug":"borderlands","tagline":"Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart star in a video game adaptation that wastes every single one of them. Eli Roth directs. Nobody survives.","title":"Borderlands","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"trap","tagline":"M. Night Shyamalan makes a thriller about a serial killer trapped at a pop concert with his daughter. Josh Hartnett is genuinely great. The film around him is genuinely Shyamalan.","title":"Trap","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"harold-and-the-purple-crayon","tagline":"A beloved children's book gets the live-action treatment nobody wanted. Zachary Levi draws things with a purple crayon. The magic of the source material evaporates on contact.","title":"Harold and the Purple Crayon","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"deadpool-and-wolverine","tagline":"Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman team up for the MCU's first R-rated film. It is a buddy comedy disguised as a superhero movie disguised as a eulogy for the Fox Marvel universe. The cameos are insane.","title":"Deadpool \u0026 Wolverine","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"twisters","tagline":"The sequel to Twister that nobody expected delivers summer blockbuster thrills with genuine craft. Glen Powell is a movie star. Daisy Edgar-Jones grounds the spectacle. The tornadoes are terrifying.","title":"Twisters","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"longlegs","tagline":"Osgood Perkins makes a serial killer film that feels like a nightmare you cannot wake from. Nicolas Cage disappears into prosthetics and madness. Maika Monroe anchors the dread.","title":"Longlegs","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"fly-me-to-the-moon","tagline":"Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum make a romantic comedy about faking the moon landing. The premise is fun. The execution is uneven. The two leads carry it through the rough patches.","title":"Fly Me to the Moon","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"maxxxine","tagline":"Ti West completes his horror trilogy with Maxine Minx in 1985 Hollywood. Mia Goth goes full movie star. The Night Stalker lurks. The ambition is bigger. The results are messier.","title":"MaXXXine","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"despicable-me-4","tagline":"Gru gets a baby. The Minions get superpowers. Illumination gets another billion dollars. The franchise runs on fumes and merchandise.","title":"Despicable Me 4","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-quiet-place-day-one","tagline":"The Quiet Place franchise goes to New York City on the day the aliens arrive. Lupita Nyong'o plays a dying woman who just wants a slice of pizza. The best entry in the series.","title":"A Quiet Place: Day One","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"last-summer","tagline":"Anne defends abused teenagers for a living. Then her husband's seventeen-year-old son moves in and she starts an affair with him. Catherine Breillat returns to ask how a woman talks herself into the thing she spends her days condemning.","title":"Last Summer","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-bikeriders","tagline":"Jeff Nichols makes a motorcycle club movie that is really about the death of American rebellion. Austin Butler broods. Tom Hardy mumbles. Jodie Comer steals the whole thing.","title":"The Bikeriders","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"kinds-of-kindness","tagline":"Yorgos Lanthimos makes a three-part anthology about control, devotion, and obedience. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone play different roles in each segment. It is long and strange and not for everyone.","title":"Kinds of Kindness","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"green-border","tagline":"A Syrian family flies to Belarus expecting an open door into Europe. Instead two governments trap them in a freezing forest and use them as ammunition. Agnieszka Holland shoots the whole thing in black and white and dares you to call it exaggeration.","title":"Green Border","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"inside-out-2","tagline":"Riley hits puberty and new emotions move in. Anxiety takes over. Pixar remembers how to make adults cry in a children's movie. The formula works because the feelings are real.","title":"Inside Out 2","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"in-a-violent-nature","tagline":"A slasher movie told from the killer's perspective. The camera follows Johnny as he walks through the woods and murders people. It is ambient horror. It is also genuinely disturbing.","title":"In a Violent Nature","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"20-000-species-of-bees","tagline":"An eight-year-old assigned male at birth spends a summer at the family home in the Basque Country, certain she is a girl the adults insist she is not. The mother is breaking apart, the great-aunt tends her bees, and the kid just wants a name that fits. The film knows exactly how patient it can afford to be.","title":"20,000 Species of Bees","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-watchers","tagline":"Ishana Night Shyamalan makes her directorial debut with a forest horror film starring Dakota Fanning. The Shyamalan twist gene is hereditary. So is the inconsistency.","title":"The Watchers","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"bad-boys-ride-or-die","tagline":"Will Smith and Martin Lawrence return for a fourth Bad Boys. The formula has not changed. It still works. Nobody is more surprised than the franchise itself.","title":"Bad Boys: Ride or Die","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"banel-and-adama","tagline":"A young couple in rural Senegal wants only to live alone together, away from family and obligation. The land has other plans. Love that demands the world bend to it does not end well.","title":"Banel \u0026 Adama","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"robot-dreams","tagline":"A lonely dog in 1980s Manhattan orders a build-it-yourself robot to cure his isolation. They become inseparable. Then a day at the beach separates them, and the film never says a word about how much that costs.","title":"Robot Dreams","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-garfield-movie","tagline":"Chris Pratt voices Garfield in a heist movie about a cat reuniting with his deadbeat dad. The lasagna-loving indoor cat deserves better. So does the audience.","title":"The Garfield Movie","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"furiosa-a-mad-max-saga","tagline":"George Miller tells the origin story nobody asked for and makes it feel essential. Anya Taylor-Joy becomes Furiosa. Chris Hemsworth goes full maniac as Dementus. The Wasteland expands.","title":"Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"kidnapped-the-abduction-of-edgardo-mortara","tagline":"In 1858 Bologna, papal police seize a six-year-old Jewish boy because a servant secretly baptized him as an infant. The Church says a baptized child belongs to the Church, and the Pope keeps him. Marco Bellocchio turns a single act of theft into a portrait of an institution that mistakes cruelty for love.","title":"Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"if","tagline":"John Krasinski makes a family film about forgotten imaginary friends. The concept is Pixar-level. The execution is Hallmark-level. Ryan Reynolds cannot save it.","title":"IF","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"kingdom-of-the-planet-of-the-apes","tagline":"The Apes franchise jumps forward generations and finds a new story worth telling. The motion capture is stunning. The world-building is patient. Caesar's shadow looms over everything.","title":"Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-fall-guy","tagline":"David Leitch makes a love letter to stunt performers with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. The chemistry is electric. The stunts are real. Hollywood makes a movie about why movies matter.","title":"The Fall Guy","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"evil-does-not-exist","tagline":"A village in the woods runs on clean water and quiet routine. A Tokyo talent agency wants to build a glamping site upstream and bus in city tourists. The water always flows downhill, and so does everything else.","title":"Evil Does Not Exist","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"challengers","tagline":"Luca Guadagnino makes a tennis movie that is actually a three-way love story shot like an action thriller. Zendaya commands the screen. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross turn tennis into war.","title":"Challengers","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"abigail","tagline":"Radio Silence makes a vampire movie disguised as a heist movie. A twelve-year-old ballerina murders a house full of criminals. The blood is everywhere and the fun is relentless.","title":"Abigail","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"godzilla-x-kong-the-new-empire","tagline":"Godzilla and Kong team up to fight a bigger ape. The human characters exist to explain things. The monsters exist to destroy things. The film exists because the last one made money.","title":"Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"civil-war","tagline":"Alex Garland makes a war film set in a fractured America and refuses to tell you whose side to take. Kirsten Dunst anchors it with the exhaustion of a woman who has seen too much.","title":"Civil War","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-first-omen","tagline":"A prequel to The Omen that has no business being this good. Nell Tiger Free carries a horror film about institutional evil and forced motherhood with ferocious commitment.","title":"The First Omen","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"monkey-man","tagline":"Dev Patel writes, directs, produces, and stars in a revenge thriller set in India. The ambition is staggering. The action is brutal. The politics are real.","title":"Monkey Man","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-beast","tagline":"Léa Seydoux lives and dies across three centuries, haunted by a catastrophe she can feel but never name. In a future ruled by AI, machines offer to scrub away her emotions so she can be useful. The cure is worse than the dread.","title":"The Beast","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"la-chimera","tagline":"Arthur leads a gang of grave robbers across 1980s central Italy, dowsing for Etruscan tombs with a forked stick and a death wish. He is hunting for buried treasure. He is really hunting for a door to the dead.","title":"La Chimera","year":2024},{"rating":5,"slug":"late-night-with-the-devil","tagline":"A 1977 Halloween broadcast goes horribly wrong. David Dastmalchian delivers a career-defining performance. Found footage horror has never been this polished or this terrifying.","title":"Late Night with the Devil","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"immaculate","tagline":"Sydney Sweeney produces and stars in a nunsploitation horror film set in an Italian convent. The final act is ferocious. This is not the Sydney Sweeney movie the industry expected.","title":"Immaculate","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"ghostbusters-frozen-empire","tagline":"The Ghostbusters franchise continues with too many characters, too much nostalgia, and not enough reason to exist. McKenna Grace deserves her own movie. This is not it.","title":"Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"do-not-expect-too-much-from-the-end-of-the-world","tagline":"A Bucharest production assistant grinds through an 18-hour workday, filming testimonials for a corporate safety video while the city chews her up. To survive the boredom, she posts vulgar TikToks as a misogynist alter ego. The end of the world looks a lot like overtime.","title":"Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"arthur-the-king","tagline":"Mark Wahlberg does an adventure race through the Dominican Republic and adopts a stray dog. Based on a true story that is genuinely remarkable. The dog acts better than most of the humans.","title":"Arthur the King","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"love-lies-bleeding","tagline":"Rose Glass makes a steroid-fueled queer noir about love and violence in the desert Southwest. Kristen Stewart and Katy O'Brian generate heat that could melt asphalt.","title":"Love Lies Bleeding","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"kung-fu-panda-4","tagline":"Po gets a fourth adventure that he probably does not need but mostly earns. Awkwafina brings energy. The animation is gorgeous. The franchise treads water with style.","title":"Kung Fu Panda 4","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"imaginary","tagline":"Blumhouse makes a horror movie about a haunted teddy bear. The bear is named Chauncey. The scares are named absent.","title":"Imaginary","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"cabrini","tagline":"Angel Studios tells the story of Mother Cabrini, the Italian nun who built hospitals and orphanages in 1890s New York through sheer force of will. Cristiana Dell'Anna is a revelation.","title":"Cabrini","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"dune-part-two","tagline":"Denis Villeneuve finishes what he started. The second half of Frank Herbert's novel is the dangerous half. Villeneuve handles it with intelligence and spectacle in equal measure.","title":"Dune: Part Two","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"ordinary-angels","tagline":"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.","title":"Ordinary Angels","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"drive-away-dolls","tagline":"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.","title":"Drive-Away Dolls","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"io-capitano","tagline":"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.","title":"Io Capitano","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"about-dry-grasses","tagline":"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.","title":"About Dry Grasses","year":2024},{"rating":1,"slug":"madame-web","tagline":"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.","title":"Madame Web","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"bob-marley-one-love","tagline":"The authorized Bob Marley biopic hits every expected beat with craft and caution. Kingsley Ben-Adir commits fully. The film does not.","title":"Bob Marley: One Love","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"lisa-frankenstein","tagline":"Diablo Cody writes a teen horror comedy set in 1989. Zelda Williams directs. The vibes are immaculate. The script needed another pass.","title":"Lisa Frankenstein","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-taste-of-things","tagline":"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.","title":"The Taste of Things","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-monk-and-the-gun","tagline":"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.","title":"The Monk and the Gun","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"perfect-days","tagline":"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.","title":"Perfect Days","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"argylle","tagline":"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.","title":"Argylle","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-promised-land","tagline":"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.","title":"The Promised Land","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"sometimes-i-think-about-dying","tagline":"Daisy Ridley disappears into a quiet office worker who fantasizes about death. A tiny, precise film about the terror of human connection.","title":"Sometimes I Think About Dying","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"millers-girl","tagline":"A student-teacher boundary thriller that thinks it is smarter than it is. Martin Freeman deserves better material.","title":"Miller's Girl","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"totem","tagline":"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.","title":"Tótem","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"land-of-bad","tagline":"Russell Crowe flies a drone. Liam Hemsworth runs through a jungle. A straightforward military thriller that works because it commits to being exactly that.","title":"Land of Bad","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-mother-of-all-lies","tagline":"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.","title":"The Mother of All Lies","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"origin","tagline":"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.","title":"Origin","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"iss","tagline":"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.","title":"I.S.S.","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"inside-the-yellow-cocoon-shell","tagline":"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.","title":"Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-beekeeper","tagline":"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.","title":"The Beekeeper","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"mean-girls-2024","tagline":"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.","title":"Mean Girls","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-settlers","tagline":"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.","title":"The Settlers","year":2024},{"rating":3,"slug":"apolonia-apolonia","tagline":"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.","title":"Apolonia, Apolonia","year":2024},{"rating":2,"slug":"night-swim","tagline":"Blumhouse turns a backyard pool into a horror villain. The pool is scarier than the movie.","title":"Night Swim","year":2024},{"rating":4,"slug":"american-fiction","tagline":"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.","title":"American Fiction","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-teachers-lounge","tagline":"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.","title":"The Teachers' Lounge","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-color-purple","tagline":"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.","title":"The Color Purple","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-boys-in-the-boat","tagline":"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.","title":"The Boys in the Boat","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"ferrari","tagline":"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.","title":"Ferrari","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-iron-claw","tagline":"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.","title":"The Iron Claw","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"society-of-the-snow","tagline":"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.","title":"Society of the Snow","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"migration","tagline":"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.","title":"Migration","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"freuds-last-session","tagline":"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.","title":"Freud's Last Session","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"aquaman-and-the-lost-kingdom","tagline":"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.","title":"Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"anyone-but-you","tagline":"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.","title":"Anyone But You","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"all-of-us-strangers","tagline":"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.","title":"All of Us Strangers","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"wonka","tagline":"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.","title":"Wonka","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-zone-of-interest","tagline":"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.","title":"The Zone of Interest","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"chicken-run-dawn-of-the-nugget","tagline":"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.","title":"Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-boy-and-the-heron","tagline":"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.","title":"The Boy and the Heron","year":2023},{"rating":5,"slug":"poor-things","tagline":"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.","title":"Poor Things","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"concrete-utopia","tagline":"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.","title":"Concrete Utopia","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"anselm","tagline":"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.","title":"Anselm","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"waitress-the-musical","tagline":"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.","title":"Waitress: The Musical","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-shift","tagline":"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.","title":"The Shift","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"silent-night","tagline":"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.","title":"Silent Night","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"godzilla-minus-one","tagline":"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.","title":"Godzilla Minus One","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"eileen","tagline":"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.","title":"Eileen","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"smoke-sauna-sisterhood","tagline":"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.","title":"Smoke Sauna Sisterhood","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"american-symphony","tagline":"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.","title":"American Symphony","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"wish","tagline":"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.","title":"Wish","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"napoleon","tagline":"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.","title":"Napoleon","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"monster","tagline":"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.","title":"Monster","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"menus-plaisirs-les-troisgros","tagline":"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.","title":"Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"maestro","tagline":"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.","title":"Maestro","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"trolls-band-together","tagline":"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.","title":"Trolls Band Together","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-hunger-games-the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes","tagline":"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.","title":"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds \u0026 Snakes","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-disappearance-of-shere-hite","tagline":"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.","title":"The Disappearance of Shere Hite","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"thanksgiving","tagline":"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.","title":"Thanksgiving","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"saltburn","tagline":"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.","title":"Saltburn","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"next-goal-wins","tagline":"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.","title":"Next Goal Wins","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"may-december","tagline":"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.","title":"May December","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"fallen-leaves","tagline":"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.","title":"Fallen Leaves","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-marvels","tagline":"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.","title":"The Marvels","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"stamped-from-the-beginning","tagline":"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.","title":"Stamped from the Beginning","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"manodrome","tagline":"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.","title":"Manodrome","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"journey-to-bethlehem","tagline":"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.","title":"Journey to Bethlehem","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"dream-scenario","tagline":"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.","title":"Dream Scenario","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-still-small-voice","tagline":"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.","title":"A Still Small Voice","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"what-happens-later","tagline":"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.","title":"What Happens Later","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-marsh-kings-daughter","tagline":"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.","title":"The Marsh King's Daughter","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"rustin","tagline":"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.","title":"Rustin","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"rumble-through-the-dark","tagline":"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.","title":"Rumble Through the Dark","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"going-to-mars-the-nikki-giovanni-project","tagline":"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.","title":"Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"all-dirt-roads-taste-of-salt","tagline":"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.","title":"All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"under-the-boardwalk","tagline":"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.","title":"Under the Boardwalk","year":2023},{"rating":5,"slug":"the-holdovers","tagline":"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.","title":"The Holdovers","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"priscilla","tagline":"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.","title":"Priscilla","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"four-daughters","tagline":"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.","title":"Four Daughters","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"five-nights-at-freddys","tagline":"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.","title":"Five Nights at Freddy's","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"beyond-utopia","tagline":"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.","title":"Beyond Utopia","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"to-kill-a-tiger","tagline":"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.","title":"To Kill a Tiger","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-pigeon-tunnel","tagline":"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.","title":"The Pigeon Tunnel","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-persian-version","tagline":"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.","title":"The Persian Version","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"nyad","tagline":"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.","title":"Nyad","year":2023},{"rating":5,"slug":"killers-of-the-flower-moon","tagline":"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.","title":"Killers of the Flower Moon","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-delinquents","tagline":"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.","title":"The Delinquents","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-mission","tagline":"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.","title":"The Mission","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"dear-david","tagline":"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.","title":"Dear David","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"anatomy-of-a-fall","tagline":"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.","title":"Anatomy of a Fall","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"dark-harvest","tagline":"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.","title":"Dark Harvest","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"when-evil-lurks","tagline":"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.","title":"When Evil Lurks","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-exorcist-believer","tagline":"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.","title":"The Exorcist: Believer","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"dicks-the-musical","tagline":"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.","title":"Dicks: The Musical","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"desperation-road","tagline":"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.","title":"Desperation Road","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-re-education-of-molly-singer","tagline":"Molly Singer is a college dropout whose lawyer father pays her to go back to school and turn his nervous teenage intern into a party animal. The premise promises chaos and a little heart. It delivers a montage you have already seen.","title":"The Re-Education of Molly Singer","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-creator","tagline":"A nuke wipes out Los Angeles and America declares total war on artificial intelligence. An ex-soldier gets sent to destroy the ultimate AI weapon and finds a child. The future has never looked this good or thought this small.","title":"The Creator","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"saw-x","tagline":"John Kramer is dying of cancer and flies to Mexico for an experimental cure that turns out to be a scam. The con artists picked the wrong terminal patient. Jigsaw does not file complaints.","title":"Saw X","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"it-lives-inside","tagline":"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.","title":"It Lives Inside","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"expend4bles","tagline":"A mercenary crew chases a stolen nuclear payload across the South China Sea while Barney Ross and Lee Christmas trade insults between firefights. The franchise reloads with a new face behind the camera and a roster of fresh muscle. The result aims for the gut and hits nothing.","title":"Expend4bles","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"dumb-money","tagline":"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.","title":"Dumb Money","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"camp-hideout","tagline":"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.","title":"Camp Hideout","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"a-haunting-in-venice","tagline":"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.","title":"A Haunting in Venice","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-nun-ii","tagline":"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.","title":"The Nun II","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"my-big-fat-greek-wedding-3","tagline":"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.","title":"My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"el-conde","tagline":"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.","title":"El Conde","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"amerikatsi","tagline":"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.","title":"Amerikatsi","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-equalizer-3","tagline":"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.","title":"The Equalizer 3","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"retribution","tagline":"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.","title":"Retribution","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"gran-turismo","tagline":"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.","title":"Gran Turismo","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"golda","tagline":"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.","title":"Golda","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"bottoms","tagline":"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.","title":"Bottoms","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"strays","tagline":"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.","title":"Strays","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"landscape-with-invisible-hand","tagline":"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.","title":"Landscape with Invisible Hand","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"blue-beetle","tagline":"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.","title":"Blue Beetle","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-last-voyage-of-the-demeter","tagline":"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.","title":"The Last Voyage of the Demeter","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-eternal-memory","tagline":"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.","title":"The Eternal Memory","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"jules","tagline":"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.","title":"Jules","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"what-comes-around","tagline":"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.","title":"What Comes Around","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"shortcomings","tagline":"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.","title":"Shortcomings","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"passages","tagline":"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.","title":"Passages","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"meg-2-the-trench","tagline":"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.","title":"Meg 2: The Trench","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"dreamin-wild","tagline":"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.","title":"Dreamin' Wild","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"corner-office","tagline":"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.","title":"Corner Office","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-mutant-mayhem","tagline":"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.","title":"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-first-slam-dunk","tagline":"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.","title":"The First Slam Dunk","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"kokomo-city","tagline":"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.","title":"Kokomo City","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"haunted-mansion","tagline":"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.","title":"Haunted Mansion","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"bobi-wine-the-peoples-president","tagline":"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.","title":"Bobi Wine: The People's President","year":2023},{"rating":5,"slug":"oppenheimer","tagline":"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.","title":"Oppenheimer","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"cobweb","tagline":"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.","title":"Cobweb","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"barbie","tagline":"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.","title":"Barbie","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-deepest-breath","tagline":"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.","title":"The Deepest Breath","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"theater-camp","tagline":"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.","title":"Theater Camp","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"afire","tagline":"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.","title":"Afire","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"20-days-in-mariupol","tagline":"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.","title":"20 Days in Mariupol","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"mission-impossible-dead-reckoning-part-one","tagline":"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.","title":"Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"joy-ride","tagline":"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.","title":"Joy Ride","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"insidious-the-red-door","tagline":"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.","title":"Insidious: The Red Door","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"earth-mama","tagline":"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.","title":"Earth Mama","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"biosphere","tagline":"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.","title":"Biosphere","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"wham","tagline":"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.","title":"Wham!","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"sound-of-freedom","tagline":"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.","title":"Sound of Freedom","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"ruby-gillman-teenage-kraken","tagline":"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.","title":"Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"nimona","tagline":"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.","title":"Nimona","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"indiana-jones-and-the-dial-of-destiny","tagline":"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.","title":"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"no-hard-feelings","tagline":"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.","title":"No Hard Feelings","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"desperate-souls-dark-city-and-the-legend-of-midnight-cowboy","tagline":"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.","title":"Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-flash","tagline":"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.","title":"The Flash","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-blackening","tagline":"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.","title":"The Blackening","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"elemental","tagline":"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.","title":"Elemental","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"asteroid-city","tagline":"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.","title":"Asteroid City","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"transformers-rise-of-the-beasts","tagline":"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.","title":"Transformers: Rise of the Beasts","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"daliland","tagline":"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.","title":"Dalíland","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-boogeyman","tagline":"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.","title":"The Boogeyman","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"spider-man-across-the-spider-verse","tagline":"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.","title":"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"past-lives","tagline":"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.","title":"Past Lives","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"reality","tagline":"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.","title":"Reality","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"you-hurt-my-feelings","tagline":"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.","title":"You Hurt My Feelings","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-machine","tagline":"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.","title":"The Machine","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-little-mermaid","tagline":"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.","title":"The Little Mermaid","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"kandahar","tagline":"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.","title":"Kandahar","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"about-my-father","tagline":"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.","title":"About My Father","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"sanctuary","tagline":"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.","title":"Sanctuary","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"robots","tagline":"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.","title":"Robots","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"master-gardener","tagline":"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.","title":"Master Gardener","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"fast-x","tagline":"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.","title":"Fast X","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-starling-girl","tagline":"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.","title":"The Starling Girl","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"still-a-michael-j-fox-movie","tagline":"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.","title":"Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"monica","tagline":"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.","title":"Monica","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"knights-of-the-zodiac","tagline":"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.","title":"Knights of the Zodiac","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"it-aint-over","tagline":"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.","title":"It Ain't Over","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"fools-paradise","tagline":"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.","title":"Fool's Paradise","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"book-club-the-next-chapter","tagline":"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.","title":"Book Club: The Next Chapter","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"love-again","tagline":"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.","title":"Love Again","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"guardians-of-the-galaxy-vol-3","tagline":"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.","title":"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-eight-mountains","tagline":"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.","title":"The Eight Mountains","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"sisu","tagline":"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.","title":"Sisu","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"r-m-n","tagline":"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.","title":"R.M.N.","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"big-george-foreman","tagline":"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.","title":"Big George Foreman","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"are-you-there-god-its-me-margaret","tagline":"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.","title":"Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"32-sounds","tagline":"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.","title":"32 Sounds","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"trenque-lauquen","tagline":"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.","title":"Trenque Lauquen","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"somewhere-in-queens","tagline":"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.","title":"Somewhere in Queens","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"plan-75","tagline":"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.","title":"Plan 75","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"other-peoples-children","tagline":"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.","title":"Other People's Children","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"little-richard-i-am-everything","tagline":"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.","title":"Little Richard: I Am Everything","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"judy-blume-forever","tagline":"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.","title":"Judy Blume Forever","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"guy-ritchies-the-covenant","tagline":"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.","title":"Guy Ritchie's The Covenant","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"evil-dead-rise","tagline":"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.","title":"Evil Dead Rise","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"chevalier","tagline":"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.","title":"Chevalier","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"carmen","tagline":"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.","title":"Carmen","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-popes-exorcist","tagline":"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.","title":"The Pope's Exorcist","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"suzume","tagline":"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.","title":"Suzume","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"renfield","tagline":"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.","title":"Renfield","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"rare-objects","tagline":"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.","title":"Rare Objects","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"mafia-mamma","tagline":"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.","title":"Mafia Mamma","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"beau-is-afraid","tagline":"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.","title":"Beau Is Afraid","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"showing-up","tagline":"Lizzy has a gallery show in days, a broken water heater, and a landlord too busy with her own art to fix it. Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams reunite for a portrait of making art in the cracks of an uncooperative life. No breakthrough arrives, and you just keep showing up.","title":"Showing Up","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"paint","tagline":"Carl Nargle is the most famous public-access painter in Vermont, a Bob Ross clone in a perm and a leisure suit who has coasted on soft tones and softer ego for decades. Then the station hires a younger, better painter and his kingdom of one starts to crack. The premise wants to be a comedy. It forgot to be funny.","title":"Paint","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"joyland","tagline":"Haider takes a job as a backup dancer at a Lahore erotic theater and falls for the trans woman who runs the show. His wife waits at home inside a family that has already decided what he should be. The lie costs everyone.","title":"Joyland","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline","tagline":"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.","title":"How to Blow Up a Pipeline","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-super-mario-bros-movie","tagline":"Two Brooklyn plumbers fall down a warp pipe and land in the Mushroom Kingdom. Mario sets out to rescue his brother and stop Bowser from conquering every realm. The movie is a theme park ride that never pretends to be anything else.","title":"The Super Mario Bros. Movie","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"air","tagline":"A shoe company in last place bets everything on a rookie everyone else passed on. Sonny Vaccaro drives to the Jordan house with a pitch and no fallback plan. The deal made history. The movie just wants you to enjoy watching grown men negotiate.","title":"Air","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"dungeons-and-dragons-honor-among-thieves","tagline":"A washed-up bard and his barbarian partner break out of prison to rob the man who betrayed them and stole one of their daughters. They assemble the worst adventuring party in the realm. The dice land better than they have any right to.","title":"Dungeons \u0026 Dragons: Honor Among Thieves","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-thousand-and-one","tagline":"Inez kidnaps her own son from foster care and builds a life with him in a Harlem that is being sold out from under them both. A.V. Rockwell turns a decade of gentrification into a family secret waiting to detonate. Teyana Taylor announces herself as a movie star.","title":"A Thousand and One","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"tori-and-lokita","tagline":"Two African kids in Belgium pose as siblings to survive. He has papers. She does not, and the system has no use for a girl who cannot prove who she is. The bond is real even when the paperwork lies.","title":"Tori and Lokita","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-five-devils","tagline":"An eight-year-old girl with a superhuman nose bottles the scents of everyone she loves. One jar smells like her mother. When she opens it, she falls into the past her family spent a decade trying to forget.","title":"The Five Devils","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"john-wick-chapter-4","tagline":"John Wick wants out. The High Table wants him dead. To win his freedom he has to fight his way across four cities and one impossibly long staircase, and the whole world is happy to take the contract.","title":"John Wick: Chapter 4","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"a-good-person","tagline":"Florence Pugh causes a car crash, loses everything, and falls into opioid addiction. Morgan Freeman plays the grieving grandfather she cannot avoid. The two of them are worth watching, even when Zach Braff reaches for the Kleenex.","title":"A Good Person","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"shazam-fury-of-the-gods","tagline":"Billy Batson and his foster siblings share one superpower and a lot of teenage anxiety. The Daughters of Atlas arrive to take the magic back and wreck the city doing it. The kids are charming. The movie around them is a mess.","title":"Shazam! Fury of the Gods","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"moving-on","tagline":"Claire flies to a funeral and tells the widower she plans to kill him. The reason is fifty years old and entirely justified. The movie around that promise never decides how serious it wants to be.","title":"Moving On","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"full-river-red","tagline":"A Jin envoy turns up dead inside a sealed garrison, and the secret letter he carried has vanished. A disposable foot soldier and a rigid young commander get two hours to find both before dawn. Zhang Yimou turns a murder hunt into a referendum on what a nation chooses to remember.","title":"Full River Red","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"scream-vi","tagline":"Sam and Tara Carpenter flee Woodsboro for New York City, but Ghostface follows them into the subway and the bodega. A new killer wears the mask and a familiar pile of rules gets dragged into the five boroughs. The city is bigger. The body count is higher. The formula is the formula.","title":"Scream VI","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"champions","tagline":"A washed-up coach drives drunk into a cop car and a judge hands him a sentence. Ninety days coaching a team of players with intellectual disabilities. He needs them more than they need him, and the movie already knows it.","title":"Champions","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"65","tagline":"Sixty-five million years ago, a pilot crash-lands on an unknown planet that turns out to be prehistoric Earth. Adam Driver fights dinosaurs with a laser rifle and a terrified kid in tow. The pitch is the whole movie, and the movie knows it.","title":"65","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"operation-fortune-ruse-de-guerre","tagline":"A disgraced private operative gets pulled back in to stop a stolen weapon from hitting the black market. He needs a movie star to charm an arms dealer who collects celebrities. The plan is more fun than the execution.","title":"Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"creed-iii","tagline":"Adonis Creed retires undefeated and runs the business of boxing from a mansion. Then Damian Anderson walks out of prison with eighteen years of buried grudge and asks for a shot. The fight was never going to stay in the ring.","title":"Creed III","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-quiet-girl","tagline":"A nine-year-old girl from a crowded, neglectful home spends a summer with distant relatives on a farm in rural Ireland. For the first time, someone pays attention to her. The smallest kindnesses turn out to be the loudest thing in the room.","title":"The Quiet Girl","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"jesus-revolution","tagline":"Southern California, 1968. A burnt-out Calvary Chapel pastor opens his doors to barefoot hippies, a charismatic street preacher baptizes them by the hundreds in the Pacific, and a lost teenager finds Jesus instead of acid. The story is a genuine American earthquake. The movie treats it like a greeting card.","title":"Jesus Revolution","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"gods-time","tagline":"Dev gets out of a recovery meeting and decides the cure for his life is stopping his ex-girlfriend from committing murder. He tears across a locked-down New York to save her from a plan she may not even have. The cause is a fantasy, but the panic is real.","title":"God's Time","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"cocaine-bear","tagline":"A black bear in a Georgia forest eats a duffel bag of cocaine and decides the woods belong to it. Elizabeth Banks turns one tabloid headline into a creature feature with a high body count. The title is the whole pitch, and the movie never pretends otherwise.","title":"Cocaine Bear","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-house-made-of-splinters","tagline":"A documentary crew embeds in a shelter near Ukraine's eastern front, where children wait out the legal limbo between a broken home and whatever comes next. The camera does not flinch and does not perform. It just watches kids be kids in a place built to hold the wreckage adults leave behind.","title":"A House Made of Splinters","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"return-to-seoul","tagline":"A French woman lands in Seoul on a whim and decides to find the birth parents who gave her up. Everyone wants the reunion to mean something. She refuses to give them the satisfaction.","title":"Return to Seoul","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"pacifiction","tagline":"A French high commissioner drifts through Tahiti in a white linen suit, smiling at everyone and trusting no one. Rumors spread that France is about to resume nuclear testing in the Pacific. He keeps talking, keeps charming, keeps learning nothing.","title":"Pacifiction","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania","tagline":"Scott Lang and his family get sucked into the Quantum Realm, a subatomic world ruled by a conqueror who has been waiting for a way out. The franchise that once shrank a hero down to fight on a Thomas the Tank Engine track now blows itself up to universe-ending size. Bigger is not better.","title":"Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-blue-caftan","tagline":"A Moroccan tailor builds caftans by hand in a trade that is dying around him. His wife knows his secret. The film is about all three of the people in a marriage that only has room for two.","title":"The Blue Caftan","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"magic-mikes-last-dance","tagline":"Mike Lane is broke and bartending in Miami when a wealthy divorcee hires him to put on a show in London. He says yes. The franchise that started in a Tampa strip club ends as a stage musical about a woman's midlife reinvention, which is a strange place to land.","title":"Magic Mike's Last Dance","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"consecration","tagline":"A woman travels to a remote convent on the Scottish coast to learn how her priest brother died. The nuns insist it was suicide. The film insists on a dozen explanations and commits to none.","title":"Consecration","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"knock-at-the-cabin","tagline":"Two dads and their daughter are vacationing at a remote cabin when four strangers knock and demand a human sacrifice to stop the end of the world. Dave Bautista, of all people, plays the gentle giant holding the axe. The premise is a vise, and Shyamalan knows exactly how to turn it.","title":"Knock at the Cabin","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"godland","tagline":"A Danish priest treks across Iceland to build a church and photograph a people he does not respect. The land has other plans. Hlynur Pálmason turns a colonial errand into a slow war between a man's faith and the ground under his feet.","title":"Godland","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"full-time","tagline":"Julie Roy cleans hotel rooms in Paris and raises two kids alone in a town an hour outside the city. A transit strike turns her commute into a daily emergency she cannot afford to lose. Getting to work becomes the whole thriller.","title":"Full Time","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"80-for-brady","tagline":"Four screen legends fly to Houston to watch Tom Brady win a Super Bowl. They lie, they take edibles, they enter a hot wing eating contest. The movie loves them more than it trusts them.","title":"80 for Brady","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"shotgun-wedding","tagline":"A destination wedding in the Philippines goes sideways when pirates storm the resort and take the guests hostage. The bride and groom, mid-breakup, have to save everyone while sorting out whether they still want to get married. The premise promises chaos and delivers a shrug.","title":"Shotgun Wedding","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"one-fine-morning","tagline":"A widowed Paris translator raises her daughter alone while her father vanishes into a degenerative disease. Then an old friend reappears and her body remembers what it wants. Grief and desire arrive in the same season, and Mia Hansen-Løve refuses to rank them.","title":"One Fine Morning","year":2023},{"rating":1,"slug":"life-upside-down","tagline":"Three couples ride out the early lockdown trapped in their own neuroses and their own expensive homes. Cecilia Miniucchi wants a satire about the privileged coming apart in isolation. The isolation is the only thing that lands.","title":"Life Upside Down","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"close","tagline":"Two thirteen-year-old boys are inseparable until the world starts asking what they are to each other. Léo pulls away to prove he is normal. The film is about what that costs.","title":"Close","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"cairo-conspiracy","tagline":"A fisherman's son wins a scholarship to Cairo's most sacred university. When the Grand Imam dies, state security recruits him to spy on the men fighting to replace him. He came to study God and ends up working for the people who own Him.","title":"Cairo Conspiracy","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-wandering-earth-ii","tagline":"Earth's scientists strap thousands of fusion engines to the planet to push it out of the solar system before the dying sun swallows it. This is the prequel, so it shows the men who built the engines and the men who wanted to upload humanity into the cloud instead. The future ends in a fistfight over which apocalypse to choose.","title":"The Wandering Earth II","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"when-you-finish-saving-the-world","tagline":"A teenage folk singer broadcasts to his online fans while his mother runs a shelter for domestic violence survivors. Neither one can hear anyone but themselves. Jesse Eisenberg made a comedy about narcissism and forgot to make anyone likable, which turns out to be the point.","title":"When You Finish Saving the World","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-son","tagline":"A successful lawyer takes in his depressed teenage son and decides that love and good intentions will be enough to save him. Florian Zeller stages a mental illness as a debate between two well-dressed adults. The result lectures where it means to devastate.","title":"The Son","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"missing","tagline":"June Allen's mother flies to Colombia for a vacation and vanishes. June has never left her bedroom, but she has a laptop, a dead woman's passwords, and a willingness to break into every account she can reach. Turns out the kid raised on screens is the only one who knows how to find someone who lives on them.","title":"Missing","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"after-love","tagline":"A British Pakistani widow opens her dead husband's phone and finds a woman in Calais. She crosses the Channel to confront the secret. What she does next is not what grief is supposed to look like.","title":"After Love","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"saint-omer","tagline":"Alice Diop moves from documentary to fiction with a courtroom drama about a Senegalese woman on trial for the death of her infant daughter. A novelist sits in the gallery to watch, and the trial becomes hers too. The film asks what a mother is and refuses to hand you an answer.","title":"Saint Omer","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"plane","tagline":"A commercial pilot crash-lands a damaged jet on a remote island controlled by armed separatists. The only man who can help him is a murder suspect he was transporting in handcuffs. Sometimes you take the gun you can get.","title":"Plane","year":2023},{"rating":2,"slug":"house-party","tagline":"Two broke friends throw a giant party in a celebrity's mansion to get rich quick. The original is a scrappy cult classic with two leads and nothing to lose. This remake swaps the scrappiness for a parade of cameos and a soundtrack loud enough to drown out the jokes.","title":"House Party","year":2023},{"rating":3,"slug":"m3gan","tagline":"Gemma builds the perfect AI companion for her grieving niece. M3GAN learns to protect the child by any means available. The doll does her job too well.","title":"M3GAN","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"alcarras","tagline":"A Catalan family has farmed the same peaches for generations. This year the landowner sells out to a solar company and the orchard comes down. Carla Simón films the last harvest like a wake.","title":"Alcarràs","year":2023},{"rating":4,"slug":"turn-every-page-the-adventures-of-robert-caro-and-robert-gottlieb","tagline":"Robert Caro writes enormous biographies of power. Robert Gottlieb edits them, and the two have argued about it for fifty years. Lizzie Gottlieb points a camera at her father and his most stubborn author and finds a love story disguised as a fight over a semicolon.","title":"Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"alice-darling","tagline":"Alice is a woman who has trained herself to disappear. A week away with her two closest friends is supposed to be a break. Instead it becomes the place where the damage finally shows.","title":"Alice, Darling","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"a-man-called-otto","tagline":"Otto Anderson is a widower who has decided he is done living. A new family moves in across the street and keeps interrupting his suicide. Tom Hanks plays the most likable misanthrope alive, which is the whole problem.","title":"A Man Called Otto","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"broker","tagline":"A desperate mother drops her newborn in a church baby box. Two small-time crooks snatch him to sell on the adoption black market, then she comes back and joins the hustle. It is a road movie about trafficking a baby that wants very badly to make you cry, and mostly succeeds.","title":"Broker","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"women-talking","tagline":"The women of an isolated religious colony learn the truth about who has been attacking them in the night. They have two days and three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The whole movie is the argument, and the argument is the point.","title":"Women Talking","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"whitney-houston-i-wanna-dance-with-somebody","tagline":"Whitney Houston has the voice of the century. Clive Davis turns it into a machine and the people around her fight over the parts. The film loves her too much to tell the whole truth.","title":"Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"no-bears","tagline":"Jafar Panahi plays himself, an Iranian director banned from leaving his country, directing a movie by laptop from a village pressed against the Turkish border. A photograph he may or may not have taken turns the whole village against him. Panahi builds the cage and points the camera straight at it.","title":"No Bears","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"living","tagline":"A dying London bureaucrat realizes he has spent thirty years stamping papers and accomplishing nothing. He decides to build one playground before the cancer takes him. Bill Nighy turns a whisper into the loudest thing in the room.","title":"Living","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"corsage","tagline":"Vienna, 1877. Empress Elisabeth turns forty and the court has already decided she is finished. So she starts setting it on fire from the inside.","title":"Corsage","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"babylon","tagline":"Hollywood in the 1920s runs on cocaine, ambition, and elephant dung. Damien Chazelle hurls orgies, vomit, and doomed silent-era stars at the screen until something sticks. A lot of it does not.","title":"Babylon","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"puss-in-boots-the-last-wish","tagline":"A swashbuckling cat realizes he has spent eight of his nine lives and only one remains. He chases a wish that can restore them while Death itself hunts him through the fairy-tale woods. The cartoon about a cat in a hat is really about dying.","title":"Puss in Boots: The Last Wish","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"children-of-the-mist","tagline":"A Hmong teenager in northern Vietnam gets close to a documentary camera, then closer to the tradition that decides her future for her. Bride kidnapping is not history here. It comes for her in real time, and the filmmaker keeps rolling when most people would put the camera down.","title":"Children of the Mist","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"avatar-the-way-of-water","tagline":"Jake Sully and Neytiri flee the forest for the reefs, dragging their kids and the Sky People's war behind them. James Cameron builds a planet you can feel the water pressure of. Then he runs three hours of plot through it like a garden hose.","title":"Avatar: The Way of Water","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-whale","tagline":"Charlie is a 600-pound man who teaches college writing from his couch and refuses to see a doctor. His estranged daughter walks back into his life with five days left to fix everything. Brendan Fraser does the heavy lifting, and the movie knows it.","title":"The Whale","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"roald-dahls-matilda-the-musical","tagline":"A five-year-old genius is born to parents who consider reading a character flaw and shipped off to a school run by a child-hating tyrant. She fights back with books, telekinesis, and spite. Roald Dahl always knew kids were smarter than the adults running their lives, and this one proves it.","title":"Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"empire-of-light","tagline":"A faded seaside cinema in early-1980s England. A lonely manager and a young usher build something fragile while the National Front marches outside. Sam Mendes wants to make four movies at once and finishes none of them.","title":"Empire of Light","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"detective-knight-redemption","tagline":"Armed robbers in Santa suits tear through a city at Christmas, and a detective named Knight is supposed to stop them. Bruce Willis gets top billing and almost no screen time. The mask is the only thing here with a personality.","title":"Detective Knight: Redemption","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"violent-night","tagline":"A burned-out, hard-drinking Santa Claus stumbles into a hostage heist on Christmas Eve and decides to fight. Mercenaries have taken a rich family captive in their compound, and Saint Nick is the only one left to stop them. The premise is a loaded weapon, and the movie mostly fires blanks.","title":"Violent Night","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-eternal-daughter","tagline":"A successful filmmaker checks into a near-empty country hotel with her elderly mother to celebrate a birthday and finish a film about her. The building was once the family home, and the past refuses to stay buried. Tilda Swinton plays both women, which tells you exactly what this ghost story is haunted by.","title":"The Eternal Daughter","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"sr","tagline":"Robert Downey Jr. turns a camera on his father, the underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., and films him in his final months. Sr. promptly hijacks the project to cut his own version. The son wanted a tribute. The father wanted the last word.","title":"Sr.","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"spoiler-alert","tagline":"Spoiler Alert adapts TV journalist Michael Ausiello's memoir about falling for Kit Cowan and then watching cancer take him. The title gives the ending away on purpose. Knowing how it ends does not make it hurt any less.","title":"Spoiler Alert","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"last-film-show","tagline":"A nine-year-old in rural Gujarat sneaks into a small-town theater and falls in love with the beam of light coming out of the projection booth. He trades his lunch for access to the machine. What he is really chasing is already dying.","title":"Last Film Show","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"hunt","tagline":"A loyal North Korean mole has burrowed into the heart of South Korea's spy agency. Two veteran officers must find him before he buries the country. They suspect each other, and the audience never finds out fast enough.","title":"Hunt","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"white-noise","tagline":"A professor of Hitler Studies has spent his life lecturing about death to avoid feeling it. Then a toxic cloud drifts over his town and the abstraction becomes a body count. The terror was always there. The chemicals just made it visible.","title":"White Noise","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-swimmers","tagline":"Two Syrian sisters flee Damascus and drag a sinking dinghy across the Aegean by swimming it to shore. One of them is an Olympic hopeful who ends up competing under a refugee flag. The story is remarkable, and the movie never stops reminding you.","title":"The Swimmers","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"strange-world","tagline":"Searcher Clade wants to be a quiet farmer. His missing father was a legendary explorer, and now a dying crop drags the whole family into a living world beneath their feet. The world is more imaginative than anything the family does inside it.","title":"Strange World","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"glass-onion-a-knives-out-mystery","tagline":"A tech billionaire flies his hangers-on to a private island for a murder mystery weekend. Benoit Blanc shows up uninvited, and the fake game turns into a real corpse. The puzzle is intricate. The man at the center is hollow.","title":"Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"devotion","tagline":"Two Navy pilots fly off the same carrier into the Korean War. One is the first Black aviator the Navy ever trained, and the war is the easy part. The hard part is everything that happens before the planes leave the ground.","title":"Devotion","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"all-the-beauty-and-the-bloodshed","tagline":"Photographer Nan Goldin builds her life into a slideshow, then aims her organizing muscle at the Sackler family whose painkillers killed her and a generation. Laura Poitras splits the screen between the art and the war. Both halves are about the same thing: who gets to look away.","title":"All the Beauty and the Bloodshed","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-menu","tagline":"Wealthy diners pay a fortune to eat at an exclusive island restaurant run by a celebrity chef. The chef has prepared a tasting menu built around them. Some meals you do not walk away from.","title":"The Menu","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-inspection","tagline":"A young gay Black man with nowhere left to go enlists in the Marine Corps. Boot camp promises to make him into someone his mother might finally love. The uniform does not change who you are. It just gives other men a reason to break you.","title":"The Inspection","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"she-said","tagline":"Two New York Times reporters pull a thread on Harvey Weinstein and find decades of payoffs and silence at the other end. Maria Schrader builds a procedural about the paperwork that protects powerful men. The drama is in the phone calls.","title":"She Said","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"lamborghini-the-man-behind-the-legend","tagline":"Ferruccio Lamborghini builds tractors, gets insulted by Enzo Ferrari, and decides to beat him at his own game. Frank Grillo and Gabriel Byrne suit up to play Italian icons across decades of ambition and grudges. The accents arrive long before the drama does.","title":"Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"eo","tagline":"A gray donkey named EO is taken from a Polish circus and pushed through the machinery of the human world. He passes through fur farms, soccer hooligans, truckers, and a crumbling Italian estate. Jerzy Skolimowski points the camera at the animal and dares you to look back.","title":"EO","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"bones-and-all","tagline":"Maren eats people. So does the drifter she falls for. Luca Guadagnino films their hunger as a love story and a road trip across Reagan-era America, and the cannibalism turns out to be the easy part.","title":"Bones and All","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"bad-axe","tagline":"A Cambodian-Mexican-American family runs a restaurant in rural Michigan, and 2020 arrives to test whether the place and the family survive it. The youngest son points a camera at his own parents and refuses to look away. The result is the rare documentary that earns its tears.","title":"Bad Axe","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-fabelmans","tagline":"Steven Spielberg turns the camera on his own childhood and the marriage that broke around him. A boy discovers that a movie camera sees the things people work hardest to hide. The most personal film of his career is also the most honest one.","title":"The Fabelmans","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"retrograde","tagline":"American Green Berets pack up after twenty years and hand the war to an Afghan general who has no way out. Matthew Heineman keeps the camera at the front while the official story gets written somewhere safer. The betrayal plays out in handshakes.","title":"Retrograde","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"is-that-black-enough-for-you","tagline":"Elvis Mitchell narrates a decade of Black American cinema that Hollywood discovered, cashed in on, then abandoned. Critic and fan at once, he treats the 1970s as a movement, not a punchline. The history lesson the canon refused to teach.","title":"Is That Black Enough for You?!?","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"black-panther-wakanda-forever","tagline":"Wakanda buries its king and the world senses weakness. From beneath the ocean, Namor and his hidden nation rise to test a nation in mourning. The film is a funeral that a franchise keeps interrupting.","title":"Black Panther: Wakanda Forever","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"guillermo-del-toros-pinocchio","tagline":"Geppetto carves a wooden boy out of grief and gets one who refuses to die. Guillermo del Toro drops the fairy tale into Mussolini's Italy and asks what obedience costs. The strings are the point.","title":"Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"good-night-oppy","tagline":"A golf-cart-sized robot lands on Mars for a 90-day mission and keeps working for fifteen years. The engineers who built it talk about it like a family member, and the film wants you to feel the same way. It mostly gets there.","title":"Good Night Oppy","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"bardo-false-chronicle-of-a-handful-of-truths","tagline":"A film director stands at the edge of death and the border between Mexico and the United States, and spends two and a half hours interrogating his own success. Alejandro G. Iñárritu builds a dream-logic confession out of memory, exile, and self-doubt. The trouble is that the man doing the confessing already thinks he is fascinating.","title":"Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-wonder","tagline":"A nurse arrives in post-famine Ireland to watch a girl who claims she has eaten nothing for months and lives. The village calls it a miracle. The nurse calls it a problem to solve.","title":"The Wonder","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"prey-for-the-devil","tagline":"A novice nun trains to become the first female exorcist while a demon she once knew sets its sights on her. The Catholic Church gets a fresh coat of paint and the same haunted patient strapped to the same bed. Faith moves mountains. It cannot move this script.","title":"Prey for the Devil","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"holy-spider","tagline":"A journalist arrives in the holy city of Mashhad to track a man strangling sex workers in the name of God. Ali Abbasi turns the manhunt into an autopsy of a culture that calls the killer a hero. The scariest thing here is how many people are on his side.","title":"Holy Spider","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"causeway","tagline":"Lynsey comes home from Afghanistan with a brain injury and no idea how to live in a body that betrayed her. James fixes her car and becomes the only person who sees her. Two broken people circle each other and figure out that healing is not the same as leaving.","title":"Causeway","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"call-jane","tagline":"Chicago, 1968. A pregnant housewife with a heart condition needs an abortion that is illegal and a hospital board of men who refuse to grant it. She finds the women who do it anyway.","title":"Call Jane","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"armageddon-time","tagline":"A Jewish kid in 1980 Queens befriends a Black classmate and learns what his family already knows about how America sorts people. His grandfather tells him to do the right thing. The rest of his world teaches him the opposite.","title":"Armageddon Time","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"all-quiet-on-the-western-front","tagline":"Young German recruits march into the trenches of 1917 believing in glory. What waits is mud, gas, and a uniform passed down from the last boy who died in it. The men in the warm rooms make sure the killing runs right up to the final minute.","title":"All Quiet on the Western Front","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"louis-armstrongs-black-and-blues","tagline":"Sacha Jenkins assembles a portrait of Louis Armstrong from the man's own tapes, writings, and horn. Nas reads Armstrong's private words while the archive tracks the grinning ambassador and the furious man behind the grin. The film lets Armstrong testify in his own defense.","title":"Louis Armstrong's Black \u0026 Blues","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"wendell-and-wild","tagline":"Kat Elliot is a haunted teenager with a dead family and a chip on her shoulder. Two scheming demon brothers offer to raise the dead if she helps them claw out of the underworld. Henry Selick builds a gorgeous handcrafted Hell and then crams three movies into it.","title":"Wendell \u0026 Wild","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"ticket-to-paradise","tagline":"Two divorced parents who can't stand each other fly to Bali to stop their daughter from marrying a man she just met. The catch is they have to work together to do it. The scenery is gorgeous and the stars are charming and you will forget all of it by the time you reach the parking lot.","title":"Ticket to Paradise","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-return-of-tanya-tucker-featuring-brandi-carlile","tagline":"Tanya Tucker quit the spotlight decades ago. Brandi Carlile drags her into a studio to make a comeback record Tucker never asked for. The result is less about the album than about a woman terrified of becoming her own legend again.","title":"The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-banshees-of-inisherin","tagline":"On a remote Irish island in 1923, one man decides he is finished with his best friend. There is no fight and no betrayal, just a verdict that the friendship is over. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson turn a petty falling-out into a small apocalypse.","title":"The Banshees of Inisherin","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"detective-knight-rogue","tagline":"A detective hunts a crew of armored-car robbers dressed as cops while his own badge hangs by a thread. Bruce Willis squints, mutters, and stands in the background of his own franchise. The premise promises a hard-boiled thriller. The movie delivers a placeholder.","title":"Detective Knight: Rogue","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"descendant","tagline":"In 1860 a rich man smuggles a shipload of enslaved Africans into Alabama on a bet, then burns the boat to bury the proof. A century and a half later, their descendants go hunting for the wreck. The hard part is not finding the ship but deciding who owns what it says.","title":"Descendant","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"black-adam","tagline":"A god wakes after five thousand years of imprisonment and finds his nation still occupied. He has the power of six deities and zero interest in being a hero. The premise asks what justice looks like with no mercy. The movie answers with slow-motion and a Rock who forgot to bring the charisma.","title":"Black Adam","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"argentina-1985","tagline":"A reluctant prosecutor takes on Argentina's former military dictators in open court. He has no army, no police, and a team of kids nobody else would touch. He builds the case anyway.","title":"Argentina, 1985","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"all-that-breathes","tagline":"Two brothers in Delhi run a basement clinic for falling birds. The city's air is poison and its streets are on edge. They keep healing kites because someone has to.","title":"All That Breathes","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"aftersun","tagline":"A young father takes his eleven-year-old daughter to a Turkish resort and films the whole trip on a rented camcorder. Years later she plays back the tape and tries to find the man she missed the first time. The vacation was the easy part.","title":"Aftersun","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-good-nurse","tagline":"Eddie Redmayne plays a nurse who murders his patients with quiet precision. Jessica Chastain plays the colleague who helps catch him. The horror here is institutional, and the system that protected him is the real killer.","title":"The Good Nurse","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"till","tagline":"Mamie Till-Mobley sends her fourteen-year-old son from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955. He comes home in a sealed box the state wants kept shut. She opens it and makes the whole country look.","title":"Till","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"halloween-ends","tagline":"Laurie Strode is writing her memoirs. Michael Myers has not been seen in four years. David Gordon Green ends his trilogy by handing the franchise to a man nobody asked for.","title":"Halloween Ends","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"decision-to-leave","tagline":"A detective investigates a man who falls to his death from a mountain. He becomes obsessed with the dead man's widow, a Chinese immigrant who may have done it. Park Chan-wook makes the interrogation room the most erotic place in cinema.","title":"Decision to Leave","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"triangle-of-sadness","tagline":"Two influencers board a luxury yacht full of the obscenely rich. A storm hits during the captain's dinner, and the natural order starts coming up the way it went down. Ruben Östlund hates these people, and he wants you to know it.","title":"Triangle of Sadness","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"to-leslie","tagline":"A West Texas woman wins the lottery, drinks the whole fortune away, and washes up broke in the town that watched her do it. Six years later she gets one more shot at not blowing it. Andrea Riseborough disappears into the wreckage so completely you forget there is an actor in the frame.","title":"To Leslie","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"tar","tagline":"Lydia Tár is the most powerful conductor in the world and the architect of her own myth. Then the past she buried starts making noise. The baton does not protect her.","title":"TÁR","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"lyle-lyle-crocodile","tagline":"A singing crocodile lives in the attic of a New York brownstone, and a lonely boy becomes his best friend. Javier Bardem hams it up while Shawn Mendes supplies the voice. The movie is a jukebox in a reptile costume.","title":"Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"last-flight-home","tagline":"Eli Timoner has decided to die. His family gathers to film the last weeks of his life as he ends it on his own terms through medically assisted death. His daughter points the camera at the one subject she cannot edit.","title":"Last Flight Home","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"amsterdam","tagline":"Three friends make a pact in postwar Amsterdam and swear to look out for each other for life. Years later a senator dies, his daughter ends up dead, and the friends are framed for the murder. The conspiracy is real and the movie still cannot find its way to it.","title":"Amsterdam","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-good-house","tagline":"Hildy Good sells houses, gossips about her neighbors, and pours a second glass of wine the second nobody is watching. She descends from a Salem witch and treats every secret in town as inventory. The wine is the one thing she cannot sell anyone, least of all herself.","title":"The Good House","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"smile","tagline":"A psychiatrist watches a patient die smiling, and then the smiling thing starts following her. It wears the faces of everyone she trusts. The dread is genuine. The metaphor is louder than it needs to be.","title":"Smile","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"bros","tagline":"Bobby Lieber is a neurotic podcast host building the first national LGBTQ+ history museum. He falls for Aaron, an emotionally locked estate lawyer who would rather lift than talk. The first big-studio gay rom-com turns out to be a regular rom-com, and that is exactly the flex.","title":"Bros","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"nothing-compares","tagline":"Sinéad O'Connor shaves her head, tears up a photo of the Pope on live television, and watches an industry decide she is finished. Kathryn Ferguson's documentary spends five years proving she was right the whole time. The world owed her an apology and mostly sent hate mail instead.","title":"Nothing Compares","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"dont-worry-darling","tagline":"Alice and Jack have the perfect life in a perfect desert town where the men keep secrets and the women never ask. Then Alice starts asking. The premise is a loaded gun the movie forgets to fire.","title":"Don't Worry Darling","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"catherine-called-birdy","tagline":"Birdy is the fourteen-year-old daughter of a broke medieval lord who decides the fastest way out of debt is to sell her into marriage. She spends the year sabotaging every rich suitor he drags to the manor. Lena Dunham puts a modern pop soundtrack over the 13th century and mostly gets away with it.","title":"Catherine Called Birdy","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"athena","tagline":"A police killing in the projects sparks an uprising, and three brothers find themselves on opposite sides of it. One wants justice, one wants order, one wants profit. The fire spreads faster than anyone can think.","title":"Athena","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-woman-king","tagline":"In 1820s West Africa, the all-female Agojie warriors guard the Kingdom of Dahomey against rival empires and European slavers. Viola Davis trains a new generation to fight while the kingdom grows rich on the trade it claims to resist. The action is sharp. The history gets sanded smooth.","title":"The Woman King","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-silent-twins","tagline":"June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical twins who speak to no one but each other. They write novels, chase boys, set fires, and land in Britain's most notorious psychiatric hospital. The film captures their private world better than it explains why anyone outside it failed them.","title":"The Silent Twins","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"see-how-they-run","tagline":"A Hollywood director turns up dead backstage at the long-running West End production of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. A hungover inspector and an over-eager constable work the case while the suspects rehearse their alibis. The film knows every whodunit trick and would rather wink at them than use them.","title":"See How They Run","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"riotsville-u-s-a","tagline":"In 1968, the U.S. government built fake towns called Riotsvilles and staffed them with soldiers playing rioters and cops. The military rehearsed crushing American dissent on these stage sets while cameras rolled. This film digs up the footage and asks what the rehearsal was actually for.","title":"Riotsville, U.S.A.","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"pearl","tagline":"Ti West shoots a slasher prequel as a Technicolor Hollywood melodrama. A farm girl named Pearl wants to dance her way off the family land and onto the silver screen. The screen is not interested, and Pearl does not take rejection well.","title":"Pearl","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"moonage-daydream","tagline":"David Bowie spends decades reinventing himself in public, and Brett Morgen builds a film that refuses to explain him. There is no narrator, no talking heads, no chronology to hold onto. It does not want to tell you who Bowie was. It wants you to feel why he stayed impossible to pin down.","title":"Moonage Daydream","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"gods-country","tagline":"Sandra Guidry buries her mother and finds two hunters parked on her land. She asks them once, politely, to leave. They do not, and neither does she.","title":"God's Country","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"confess-fletch","tagline":"Jon Hamm plays Fletch, a wiseass ex-reporter who flies to Boston, finds a dead woman in his rented townhouse, and becomes the prime suspect. He spends the rest of the movie needling cops and stealing art instead of acting innocent. The mystery is an excuse. The deadpan is the point.","title":"Confess, Fletch","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"blonde","tagline":"Andrew Dominik turns the life of Marilyn Monroe into a 167-minute gauntlet of abuse, told through the abandoned child she never stopped being. Ana de Armas commits to every second of it. The film mistakes suffering for insight.","title":"Blonde","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"clerks-iii","tagline":"Dante and Randal still run the Quick Stop, twenty-eight years older and no closer to peace. After a heart attack, Randal decides to make a movie about his life behind the counter. Kevin Smith puts his own near-death on screen and asks you to cry about it.","title":"Clerks III","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"barbarian","tagline":"A young woman arrives at her Airbnb in a gutted Detroit neighborhood and finds it already booked by a stranger. They agree to share the house for the night. That is the last decision in this movie that makes any sense, and it is the only one the movie wants you to trust.","title":"Barbarian","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"wire-room","tagline":"A wiretap surveillance agent watches a high-stakes drug operation from a dark room full of monitors. Then the suspects find out he is listening, and the room becomes a trap. The premise promises a thriller and delivers a screensaver.","title":"Wire Room","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"gigi-and-nate","tagline":"A meningitis infection leaves a vibrant young man paralyzed from the neck down. His family brings home a capuchin monkey to give him back his independence and his will to fight. The monkey is the most honest performer on screen.","title":"Gigi \u0026 Nate","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"three-thousand-years-of-longing","tagline":"A scholar of stories meets a Djinn who offers her three wishes. She knows every cautionary tale about what wishes cost, so she refuses to make one. The standoff is more interesting than the resolution.","title":"Three Thousand Years of Longing","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-invitation","tagline":"Evie answers a DNA test and finds a family she never knew. The rich English relatives invite her to a wedding at a country estate. She should have read the guest list before saying yes.","title":"The Invitation","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-good-boss","tagline":"A factory owner who hands out hugs and homilies needs everything perfect for an industrial excellence award. A fired worker camps outside his gates with a megaphone, and a new intern catches his eye. Julio Blanco will fix all of it, and every fix makes him worse.","title":"The Good Boss","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"funny-pages","tagline":"A teenage cartoonist drops out of school to chase a grimy ideal of artistic authenticity. He worships a former color separator at a comics company and mistakes a broken man for a mentor. The kid wants to suffer for his art, and the movie makes sure he does.","title":"Funny Pages","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"breaking","tagline":"A Marine veteran walks into a Georgia bank and says he is carrying a bomb. He does not want the vault. He wants the $892 the Department of Veterans Affairs owes him.","title":"Breaking","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"samaritan","tagline":"A kid in a decaying city is convinced his silent garbage-man neighbor is the superhero who vanished decades ago. Sylvester Stallone plays the neighbor. The premise writes a check the movie cannot cash.","title":"Samaritan","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-territory","tagline":"The Uru-eu-wau-wau are a few hundred people guarding a stretch of Amazon rainforest that ranchers and land grabbers want carved up and burned. When the pandemic locks the filmmakers out, the tribe picks up the cameras and shoots the invasion themselves. The result is a thriller where the stakes are the planet's lungs.","title":"The Territory","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"spin-me-round","tagline":"Amber wins a trip to an exclusive manager training program at her company's Italian villa. She expects romance and wine and a story that makes sense. The villa has other plans.","title":"Spin Me Round","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"orphan-first-kill","tagline":"Thirteen years before the events of the original, Leena Klammer escapes a psychiatric facility in Estonia and assumes the identity of a wealthy American family's missing daughter. The con works until the family turns out to have secrets of its own. The twist is clever. The movie around it is not.","title":"Orphan: First Kill","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"beast","tagline":"Idris Elba takes his daughters to a South African game reserve. A rogue lion turns the trip into a fight for survival. The lion is more developed than the people running from it.","title":"Beast","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"summering","tagline":"Four girls find a dead body in the woods on the last weekend before middle school. They decide to handle it themselves rather than tell their parents. The dead man stays a prop, and so does everything else.","title":"Summering","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"inu-oh","tagline":"A blind biwa player and a deformed dancer become rock stars in fourteenth-century Japan. They turn forgotten ghost stories into stadium spectacle. The dead want their songs sung, and these two are screaming them into the night.","title":"Inu-Oh","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"fall","tagline":"Two women climb a 2,000-foot abandoned radio tower for thrills. The ladder breaks. Now the only way down is the part nobody planned for.","title":"Fall","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"easter-sunday","tagline":"Joe Valencia is a Filipino-American comedian chasing a sitcom deal in Los Angeles when his mother guilts him into driving home to Daly City for Easter. One reunion, one dysfunctional family, one absurd debt subplot, and ninety minutes of warmed-over gags. The mother is funnier than the movie.","title":"Easter Sunday","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"bullet-train","tagline":"An assassin with rotten luck boards a bullet train for a simple grab-and-go. The car is packed with rival killers, all circling the same briefcase. The only thing harder than the job is getting off the train alive.","title":"Bullet Train","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"bodies-bodies-bodies","tagline":"Rich twenty-somethings ride out a hurricane in a family mansion and play a party game where one of them pretends to be a killer. Then a real body turns up and nobody stops playing. The phones still have signal, and that is the scariest part.","title":"Bodies Bodies Bodies","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"vengeance","tagline":"B.J. Novak plays a New York writer who flies to West Texas for the funeral of a woman he barely dated, then mines her family's grief for a podcast. The brother wants vengeance. The writer just wants a great episode.","title":"Vengeance","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"thirteen-lives","tagline":"Twelve boys and their soccer coach are trapped miles inside a flooded Thai cave with the water still rising. A pair of middle-aged British amateurs with diving gear are the only people on Earth who can reach them. Ron Howard films the rescue as procedure instead of heroics, and that is exactly the right call.","title":"Thirteen Lives","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"resurrection","tagline":"Margaret has built a quiet, controlled life for herself and her teenage daughter. Then a man from her past appears at the edge of a crowd and everything she buried starts clawing its way back. The horror here is not the monster. It is what she is willing to do to survive him.","title":"Resurrection","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"paradise-highway","tagline":"A female long-haul trucker discovers her latest cargo is not freight but a girl, and the network she works for has no intention of letting either of them walk away. Then a dead brother, a federal agent, and a retired cop all converge on the same lonely stretch of interstate. The road is the only honest thing in it.","title":"Paradise Highway","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"dc-league-of-super-pets","tagline":"Superman's dog has powers. When the Justice League gets captured, the only ones left to save them are a shelter full of misfit animals led by a cynical Bat-Hound. It is a Saturday-morning cartoon dressed up in a hundred-million-dollar costume.","title":"DC League of Super-Pets","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"ali-and-ava","tagline":"A British-Pakistani landlord and an Irish-heritage teaching assistant meet over a kid they both look after in Bradford. They are too old, too tired, and from the wrong sides of a divided city to fall for each other. They do it anyway.","title":"Ali \u0026 Ava","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-love-song","tagline":"A widow parks her camper in the Colorado high country and waits for a man she loved decades ago. He may or may not show up. Sometimes the bravest thing a person does is open the door.","title":"A Love Song","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"nope","tagline":"A horse trainer and his sister try to film proof of the thing in the clouds above their ranch. They want the perfect shot, the money shot, the one that makes them famous. Jordan Peele turns the hunger to capture a spectacle into the monster itself.","title":"Nope","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"anythings-possible","tagline":"Kelsa is a trans high school senior who wants what every teenager wants. A boy named Khal likes her, and that simple fact detonates the social order around them. Billy Porter directs a teen romance that treats its heroine like a person instead of a cause.","title":"Anything's Possible","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"aftershock","tagline":"Two young fathers lose their partners to preventable deaths in childbirth. They turn that grief into organizing and refuse to mourn quietly. Aftershock keeps its eye on the people the statistics erase.","title":"Aftershock","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"where-the-crawdads-sing","tagline":"A girl raised alone in the North Carolina marsh becomes a murder suspect when a local man turns up dead. The trial flashes back across her whole isolated life. The swamp is more convincing than anything that happens in it.","title":"Where the Crawdads Sing","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"paws-of-fury-the-legend-of-hank","tagline":"A dog named Hank wants to be a samurai in a village of cats who despise dogs. It is Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles redrawn as a kids cartoon, gags and all. The premise survives the journey. The jokes do not.","title":"Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"mrs-harris-goes-to-paris","tagline":"A London charwoman falls in love with a Christian Dior gown and decides she will own one. She scrubs floors, hoards her shillings, and books passage to Paris to buy couture she has no business affording. The fairy tale knows exactly what it is, and it commits.","title":"Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"1up","tagline":"V is a college gamer who blows up her own career and lands on an all-female esports team chasing a tournament spot. The movie wants to take on the boys' club of competitive gaming. It throws the punch in slow motion and pulls it before it connects.","title":"1Up","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"thor-love-and-thunder","tagline":"Thor has beaten every enemy and run out of reasons to fight. Then a grieving zealot starts butchering gods and his ex shows up swinging his old hammer. The villain wants to kill every god in the universe. The movie wants to crack jokes while he does it.","title":"Thor: Love and Thunder","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"both-sides-of-the-blade","tagline":"A long marriage holds steady until the ex who introduced the couple comes back into their orbit. Sara wants Jean, then wants François, then wants both, and watches the whole thing burn down around her. Desire here is not romance. It is a demolition.","title":"Both Sides of the Blade","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"fire-of-love","tagline":"Katia and Maurice Krafft spend twenty years chasing volcanoes and each other across the planet. They film everything, build a marriage on the edge of erupting craters, and never once pretend the danger is the problem. It is the whole point.","title":"Fire of Love","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"mr-malcolms-list","tagline":"A wealthy bachelor keeps a secret list of qualities his future wife must possess. A spurned woman decides to manufacture the perfect candidate and watch him fall. The trap is sharper than the man who set the rules.","title":"Mr. Malcolm's List","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"minions-the-rise-of-gru","tagline":"A young Gru idolizes a supervillain crew called the Vicious 6 and schemes his way into their world. His Minions stumble after him in a 1970s San Francisco built out of disco and kung fu. The franchise has found its formula and refuses to do anything else with it.","title":"Minions: The Rise of Gru","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"hot-seat","tagline":"A bomb sits under a hacker's chair. He has to break into bank accounts and dodge a bullheaded ex-cop while a voice in his ear counts down. The chair is the only thing in this movie holding tension.","title":"Hot Seat","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"hallelujah-leonard-cohen-a-journey-a-song","tagline":"Leonard Cohen labors for years over a song his label does not even want to release. Decades later it plays at funerals, talent shows, and the closing credits of every prestige drama. The verses outlive the man who could not stop rewriting them.","title":"Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-sea-beast","tagline":"A celebrated monster hunter and a stubborn orphan sail off to kill the most feared beast in the sea. What they find is that the kingdom has been lying for centuries about who the monsters really are. The adventure is grand. The history lesson lands harder.","title":"The Sea Beast","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-black-phone","tagline":"A boy gets snatched off a Denver street by a child killer and wakes up in a soundproof basement. The only thing in the room is a disconnected black phone on the wall. It rings anyway, and the voices on the line are the killer's previous victims.","title":"The Black Phone","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"marcel-the-shell-with-shoes-on","tagline":"A one-inch shell with one eye and a pair of shoes lives alone in an Airbnb with his grandmother. A filmmaker starts recording him and the videos go viral. The premise sounds like a gag, and then it quietly breaks your heart.","title":"Marcel the Shell with Shoes On","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"elvis","tagline":"A poor kid from Tupelo invents a new kind of American star and a carnival huckster turns him into a slot machine. Baz Luhrmann films the whole tragedy at the speed of a music video. The man inside the jumpsuit keeps slipping out of frame.","title":"Elvis","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"apples","tagline":"A man wakes on a bus with no memory during an amnesia pandemic, and the state hands him a tape recorder and a list of tasks to build a new self from scratch. Christos Nikou turns the gimmick into a deadpan study of grief and the people who would rather forget than feel. Eat your apples. They help.","title":"Apples","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"lightyear","tagline":"A Space Ranger strands his crew on a hostile planet and spends decades trying to fly his way out. Every test flight he survives costs him years on the ground, so the people he loves keep aging out of his life while he stays the same. The hook is great. The reason it exists is the problem.","title":"Lightyear","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"good-luck-to-you-leo-grande","tagline":"A repressed widow hires a young sex worker in a hotel room and arrives with a checklist of things she has never done. He arrives with patience and a fake name. The transaction turns into the most honest conversation either of them has had in years.","title":"Good Luck to You, Leo Grande","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"brian-and-charles","tagline":"A lonely inventor in rural Wales builds a robot out of a washing machine and a mannequin head, then names it Charles. Charles learns to talk, develops opinions, and decides he wants to see the world. Turns out the hardest thing you can build is a kid who stays.","title":"Brian and Charles","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"mad-god","tagline":"A lone Assassin descends in a diving bell through the rotting layers of a ruined world. Phil Tippett builds the whole nightmare by hand, one frame at a time, across thirty years. It is hell as a working factory, and the machines never stop.","title":"Mad God","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"hidden-letters","tagline":"In a remote corner of Hunan, women once invented a secret script and passed it down for centuries so they could speak to each other where men could not read. Two modern women inherit it now, and the world that crushed its creators has rebranded itself as their patron. The freedom that survived the footbinding age does not survive the gift shop.","title":"Hidden Letters","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"jurassic-world-dominion","tagline":"Dinosaurs roam the open world for the first time. The original trio reunites to stop a biotech firm harvesting prehistoric DNA. The dinosaurs end up the least interesting thing in their own movie.","title":"Jurassic World Dominion","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-janes","tagline":"In 1968, a network of Chicago women builds an underground service to give other women safe, illegal abortions. They run it out of apartments, route calls through a single answering machine, and dodge the cops and the mob. The state called it a crime. The women called it the job.","title":"The Janes","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"watcher","tagline":"An American woman follows her husband to Bucharest and lands in an apartment she cannot navigate and a language she cannot speak. A man in the window across the street keeps watching her. Everyone tells her she is imagining it.","title":"Watcher","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"crimes-of-the-future","tagline":"In a future where humans no longer feel pain, a performance artist grows new organs and his partner cuts them out in front of an audience. Saul Tenser is the canvas and the gallery at once. Cronenberg returns to the operating table, and the knife has not dulled.","title":"Crimes of the Future","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"benediction","tagline":"Siegfried Sassoon walks out of the First World War a decorated hero and a poet who hates the war that made him one. Terence Davies follows him through decades of glittering, loveless rooms as he searches for an absolution no one can give. The war ends. The penance never does.","title":"Benediction","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"top-gun-maverick","tagline":"Pete Mitchell is still a captain after thirty years because he refuses to die behind a desk. The Navy calls him back to train a squad for a mission no one expects to survive. The old dog has one more trick, and he is not done flying it.","title":"Top Gun: Maverick","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-bobs-burgers-movie","tagline":"A burst water main opens a sinkhole outside the Belcher family burger joint right as the bank loan comes due. The kids stumble onto a murder mystery while the parents scramble to save the business. It is a beloved sitcom episode with a bigger budget and a few songs, and it knows exactly that.","title":"The Bob's Burgers Movie","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"a-chiara","tagline":"A teenage girl in a Calabrian town watches her father's car explode and her father disappear the same night. She goes looking for him and finds the family business instead. Growing up here means choosing which lie to live inside.","title":"A Chiara","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"downton-abbey-a-new-era","tagline":"A wedding, a trip to the south of France, and a Hollywood crew descending on the great house to shoot a silent picture. Two stories run at once and neither one breaks a sweat. Downton has always known its audience, and here it simply pours the tea.","title":"Downton Abbey: A New Era","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"on-the-count-of-three","tagline":"Two best friends make a pact to kill each other by the end of the day, then go spend their last hours settling scores. Jerrod Carmichael turns a suicide pact into a buddy comedy and refuses to apologize for it. It is the funniest movie ever made about wanting to die.","title":"On the Count of Three","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"montana-story","tagline":"Two estranged siblings come home to a dying father and a ranch that is about to be sold out from under them. They have not spoken in seven years, and the silence has a reason neither wants to say. The landscape is enormous. The grudge is small. The film is about how long it takes to admit that.","title":"Montana Story","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"firestarter","tagline":"Andy can push thoughts into your head. His daughter Charlie can burn down a building by looking at it. A government agency wants the girl, and the movie wants to be over.","title":"Firestarter","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"family-camp","tagline":"Two suburban families pack up for a week at a Christian retreat called Camp Katokwah, where the cabins have no plumbing and the dads have something to prove. The Ackermans want connection. The Sanderses want to win. Faith-based comedy rarely aims this low and still misses.","title":"Family Camp","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"happening","tagline":"France, 1963. Anne is a brilliant literature student who discovers she is pregnant, and abortion is a crime that can land her and anyone who helps her in prison. The film does not flinch, and it does not ask you to either.","title":"Happening","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"doctor-strange-in-the-multiverse-of-madness","tagline":"Stephen Strange falls through the multiverse chasing a girl who can punch holes between worlds. Sam Raimi takes the controls of a Marvel machine and bolts a haunted house onto it. The seams show.","title":"Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"vortex","tagline":"An old man writes about cinema while his wife's mind comes apart in the next room. Gaspar Noé splits the screen in two and never lets the halves touch again. It is the gentlest film he has ever made and the one most likely to wreck you.","title":"Vortex","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"memory","tagline":"An aging assassin takes a contract in El Paso, then refuses to kill a child and becomes the target himself. The catch is that early Alzheimer's is erasing his memory faster than he can cover his tracks. Great hook, ordinary movie.","title":"Memory","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-unbearable-weight-of-massive-talent","tagline":"Nicolas Cage plays a washed-up actor named Nick Cage who takes a million dollars to attend a superfan's birthday party. The superfan turns out to be an arms dealer, and the CIA wants Cage to spy on him. The gimmick is the whole meal, and Cage knows exactly how to serve it.","title":"The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-northman","tagline":"A prince watches his father murdered and his mother taken. He spends years turning himself into a weapon, then walks into the volcano-lit dark to collect the blood debt. Revenge has rarely looked this filthy or felt this inevitable.","title":"The Northman","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-bad-guys","tagline":"Mr. Wolf and his crew of animal criminals are the world's best thieves and the world's most feared villains. Caught at last, they fake going straight to dodge prison. The con is that one of them might actually mean it.","title":"The Bad Guys","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"petite-maman","tagline":"An eight-year-old loses her grandmother and helps clear out the family's old house in the woods. There she meets a girl her own age who turns out to be her mother as a child. Céline Sciamma builds an entire ghost story out of tenderness and tells it without raising her voice.","title":"Petite Maman","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"hit-the-road","tagline":"An Iranian family piles into a borrowed car and drives across the countryside toward a destination they refuse to name out loud. The youngest son treats it as an adventure. The parents know they are taking their older boy to the border and may never see him again.","title":"Hit the Road","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"paris-13th-district","tagline":"Three twentysomethings in a high-rise corner of Paris circle each other through hookups, dead-end jobs, and webcam screens. Jacques Audiard films it in cool black and white and lets the wanting do the work. It watches its lovers more than it ever touches them.","title":"Paris, 13th District","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"fantastic-beasts-the-secrets-of-dumbledore","tagline":"Dumbledore cannot fight Grindelwald directly. A blood pact made in their youth binds his hands, so he sends Newt Scamander and a small team to stop Grindelwald from seizing power through an election. Three films in, the saga still cannot explain why any of this matters.","title":"Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"father-stu","tagline":"A foul-mouthed boxer survives a near-fatal crash and decides to become a Catholic priest. Mark Wahlberg punches and prays his way through a real-life conversion story. The faith is sincere. The movie around it is not.","title":"Father Stu","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"navalny","tagline":"Someone in the Russian government poisons opposition leader Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent and he survives. Then he helps track down the men who did it, phone call by phone call. The hunters become the hunted, and Navalny holds the receiver.","title":"Navalny","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"sonic-the-hedgehog-2","tagline":"Sonic settles into small-town life until Dr. Robotnik crashes back to Earth with a new sidekick named Knuckles and a plan to grab a power source that could level the planet. The action is bigger and the jokes land more often. The movie just forgot to leave anything on the cutting room floor.","title":"Sonic the Hedgehog 2","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"ambulance","tagline":"A paramedic and a wounded cop. A bank robbery gone wrong. Two desperate brothers hijack an ambulance and drag the LAPD across Los Angeles at ninety miles an hour. The chase never stops, and neither does Michael Bay.","title":"Ambulance","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-contractor","tagline":"A Special Forces sergeant gets discharged without a pension and takes a private contract he should refuse. The money is good. The job goes wrong in the first twenty minutes, and the movie spends the rest of its time looking for the thriller it forgot to build.","title":"The Contractor","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"morbius","tagline":"A brilliant scientist with a fatal blood disease cures himself by splicing in bat DNA. The cure turns him into a vampire with a thirst he cannot control. The film has even less control than he does.","title":"Morbius","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-lost-city","tagline":"A reclusive romance novelist gets kidnapped by an eccentric billionaire who wants her to find a real lost treasure. Her dim cover-model muscle mounts a rescue. The map leads exactly where you think it does.","title":"The Lost City","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"rrr","tagline":"Two real revolutionaries who never met become sworn brothers in British-ruled India, each hiding a war from the other. S. S. Rajamouli stages their friendship at the scale of myth and the volume of a riot. It is the most sincere blockbuster in years, and it does not apologize for a single frame of it.","title":"RRR","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"infinite-storm","tagline":"A nurse climbs Mount Washington alone and finds a stranger half-frozen and barely alive on the descent. She abandons her own hike to drag him down through a whiteout. The mountain is the easy part.","title":"Infinite Storm","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"everything-everywhere-all-at-once","tagline":"Evelyn Wang runs a failing laundromat and gets audited by the IRS. Then she learns she is the only version of herself who can save the multiverse. The Daniels turn a tax audit into a story about whether a mother can love her daughter back.","title":"Everything Everywhere All at Once","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"x","tagline":"A film crew rents a remote Texas farmhouse in 1979 to shoot a porno without the elderly owners catching on. The old woman catches on. She wants what the young people have, and she will take it.","title":"X","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"umma","tagline":"Sandra Oh raises bees on an off-grid farm and homeschools her daughter to escape the mother who abused her. Then her mother's ashes show up in a suitcase on the doorstep. Generational trauma deserves a better horror movie than this one.","title":"Umma","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-outfit","tagline":"A master tailor runs his shop on a Chicago street, taking measurements and minding his own business. The mob uses his back room as a drop, and one night a wounded gangster and a hidden recording pull him into a war he wants no part of. The needle is sharper than the gun.","title":"The Outfit","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"turning-red","tagline":"A thirteen-year-old in 2002 Toronto worships her mother, aces her tests, and keeps her cool. Then she wakes up as a giant red panda every time her emotions spike. Puberty has never had a better metaphor.","title":"Turning Red","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-batman","tagline":"Bruce Wayne is two years into the job and still angry. A killer called the Riddler starts executing Gotham's elite and leaving puzzles addressed to the Batman. It is a rain-soaked detective noir that takes the cape seriously and never once apologizes for it.","title":"The Batman","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"great-freedom","tagline":"Hans Hoffmann keeps going to prison for the same crime. He sleeps with men, and West Germany keeps a law on the books that makes that a sentence. Sebastian Meise builds a love story out of the exact mechanism the state uses to crush it.","title":"Great Freedom","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"after-yang","tagline":"In a near future where families keep AI siblings, a malfunctioning android named Yang shuts down for good. A father tries to repair him and instead finds a hidden archive of memories. The machine, it turns out, was paying closer attention than the humans were.","title":"After Yang","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"studio-666","tagline":"The Foo Fighters move into a haunted mansion to record their tenth album. Something in the house wants the record finished, and it does not care who has to die. Dave Grohl plays a possessed version of himself, which is funnier as a pitch than as a movie.","title":"Studio 666","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"cyrano","tagline":"A man with the soul of a poet and a body the world mocks loves a woman he cannot bring himself to claim. So he writes another man's love letters and watches her fall for his words wearing someone else's face. The oldest cruelty in romance is loving in secret and calling it nobility.","title":"Cyrano","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"uncharted","tagline":"A bartender with light fingers gets pulled into a hunt for gold that Magellan's crew hid five hundred years ago. Tom Holland climbs, Mark Wahlberg squints, and the clues unlock right on schedule. It assembles every part of the treasure-hunt genre and forgets to bury anything worth finding.","title":"Uncharted","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"dog","tagline":"An Army Ranger drives a dead comrade's dog down the Pacific coast to a funeral. Neither man nor animal is fit for polite society. The road is the only place that makes sense for either of them.","title":"Dog","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"playground","tagline":"A seven-year-old girl starts elementary school and discovers her older brother is being bullied. She tries to help him. She learns that the schoolyard punishes loyalty as fast as it punishes weakness.","title":"Playground","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"marry-me","tagline":"A global pop star gets jilted on stage in front of millions and marries a random man holding a sign in the crowd. He is a divorced math teacher who came along to chaperone his kid. The fantasy works until you ask it a single question.","title":"Marry Me","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"death-on-the-nile","tagline":"Hercule Poirot takes a honeymoon cruise down the Nile, and a body turns up before dessert. Kenneth Branagh surrounds his detective with a glamorous cast and a digital Egypt that never feels like a real place. The mystery gets solved. The movie does not.","title":"Death on the Nile","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"blacklight","tagline":"Liam Neeson plays a government fixer who cleans up the FBI's messes and starts to suspect his own agency is the mess. A reporter, a whistleblower, and a deep-state conspiracy stand between him and retirement. The plot has all the parts and none of the pulse.","title":"Blacklight","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-worst-person-in-the-world","tagline":"Julie is almost thirty and still does not know what she wants to be, who she wants to love, or whether either question has an answer. Joachim Trier follows her through four years of starting over. The film is about the people we abandon to keep becoming someone else.","title":"The Worst Person in the World","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"moonfall","tagline":"The moon falls out of orbit and starts dropping toward Earth. A disgraced astronaut, a fired NASA boss, and a conspiracy blogger are the only people who can stop it. Roland Emmerich destroys the planet again and forgets to bring the fun this time.","title":"Moonfall","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"lingui-the-sacred-bonds","tagline":"In a walled compound on the outskirts of N'Djamena, a devout single mother named Amina learns her fifteen-year-old daughter is pregnant and wants it ended. Abortion is illegal in Chad and condemned by their faith. Lingui is the word for the bonds that hold people together, and the film asks what those bonds are worth when every institution turns its back.","title":"Lingui, The Sacred Bonds","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"jackass-forever","tagline":"Johnny Knoxville and the crew are middle-aged now, and they have come back to break each other's bodies one more time. The stunts are louder and the men are older. Turns out friendship is just the willingness to take a bull to the chest for the bit.","title":"Jackass Forever","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"plaza-catedral","tagline":"A wealthy Panama City gallery owner is buried in grief for her dead son. A wounded boy from the slum below her tower shows up at her door, and she lets him in. What starts as charity becomes something neither of them can afford to lose.","title":"Plaza Catedral","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"clean","tagline":"Adrien Brody plays a garbage man hauling around a violent past he cannot bury. A teenage girl next door pulls him back into the world he tried to leave behind. The atmosphere does all the work the script forgets to do.","title":"Clean","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"compartment-no-6","tagline":"A Finnish woman boards a train across the Russian Arctic to see ancient rock carvings. Her assigned bunkmate is a drunk Russian miner who insults her within minutes. The journey is the destination, and the carvings turn out to be the least interesting thing she finds.","title":"Compartment No. 6","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"redeeming-love","tagline":"Redeeming Love drops a Christian retelling of the Book of Hosea into the California Gold Rush. A farmer buys a prostitute out of a brothel, decides God wants him to marry her, and refuses to take no for an answer. The movie calls this grace.","title":"Redeeming Love","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"lunana-a-yak-in-the-classroom","tagline":"A burned-out young teacher who dreams of singing in Australia gets posted to the most remote school in the world, a glacial village in the Bhutanese highlands. He arrives wanting to quit. The mountain has other plans.","title":"Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom","year":2022},{"rating":1,"slug":"shattered","tagline":"A recently separated tech millionaire meets a beautiful younger woman and lets her into his life. Then she lets her friends in too. The trap is obvious from the first frame, and the movie never finds a reason to surprise you.","title":"Shattered","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"scream","tagline":"Twenty-five years after the Woodsboro murders, a new Ghostface picks up the knife and starts gutting teenagers who share the wrong last names. The killer is a film buff. So is the movie.","title":"Scream","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"hotel-transylvania-transformania","tagline":"A magic crystal turns Dracula human and turns Johnny into a monster, and the whole family scrambles for a cure before the change becomes permanent. The fourth Hotel Transylvania bets everything on a body-swap gimmick. Everyone transforms except the formula.","title":"Hotel Transylvania: Transformania","year":2022},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-355","tagline":"The 355 sends a CIA agent to assemble a team of international spies and recover a weapon that can crash the world. Five of the best actresses alive sign on. The movie forgot to give them a movie.","title":"The 355","year":2022},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-hero","tagline":"Rahim is in prison for a debt he cannot pay. On a short leave he finds a bag of gold coins and decides to do the honest thing and return it. Then the honest thing becomes the most dangerous thing he has ever done.","title":"A Hero","year":2022},{"rating":3,"slug":"jockey","tagline":"Clifton Collins Jr. plays an aging jockey whose body is breaking down faster than his will to ride. A young rider shows up claiming to be his son. The horse always knows before you do.","title":"Jockey","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"memoria","tagline":"A Scottish woman in Colombia keeps hearing a sound nobody else can hear. A deep, dull bang that arrives without warning and answers to no one. Tilda Swinton spends the film chasing it, and the chase turns out to be the point.","title":"Memoria","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-tragedy-of-macbeth","tagline":"Joel Coen strips Macbeth down to a bare soundstage and shoots it in stark black and white. Denzel Washington plays a Scottish general who murders his way to a crown. The ambition is the trap.","title":"The Tragedy of Macbeth","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"american-underdog","tagline":"Kurt Warner stocks grocery shelves for minimum wage and insists he belongs in the NFL. He is right, and the climb from the night shift to a Super Bowl is one of the great true sports stories. The movie about it plays as safe as a kneel-down.","title":"American Underdog","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"a-journal-for-jordan","tagline":"A soldier fills a journal with everything he knows for the infant son he is leaving behind. Denzel Washington adapts that true story into a film that feels everything for you so you do not have to. The movie does the crying so the audience never has to start.","title":"A Journal for Jordan","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"parallel-mothers","tagline":"Two single women meet in a maternity ward and give birth on the same day. Their lives knot together in ways neither chooses. Almodovar uses the accident of motherhood to dig up the bodies Spain refuses to bury.","title":"Parallel Mothers","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-velvet-queen","tagline":"A photographer drags a restless writer into the Tibetan highlands to wait for an animal almost nobody ever sees. The cold does the teaching. Patience turns out to be the whole point.","title":"The Velvet Queen","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-matrix-resurrections","tagline":"Eighteen years after he saved Zion, Thomas Anderson is a celebrated game designer who built a hit trilogy called The Matrix. His therapist keeps him medicated and his memories filed under fiction. Then a woman named Bugs offers him the red pill, and the franchise eats its own tail on purpose.","title":"The Matrix Resurrections","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-kings-man","tagline":"A pacifist duke builds a secret spy network while the First World War grinds his world to mud. Rasputin dances, a villain's cabal schemes, and Ralph Fiennes grieves in the middle of it all. The prestige war drama and the cartoon spy romp keep tripping over each other.","title":"The King's Man","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"sing-2","tagline":"Buster Moon talks his way into the biggest stage of his life by promising a reclusive rock legend he has never met. The show must go on, even if the whole thing rests on a lie. Sing 2 is a jukebox musical that runs on charm and fumes.","title":"Sing 2","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-tender-bar","tagline":"A fatherless boy grows up in a Long Island bar full of men who decide to raise him. His uncle hands him a reading list and a code to live by. The bar pours warmth. The movie sips it.","title":"The Tender Bar","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-lost-daughter","tagline":"Leda goes to the Greek coast for a quiet working holiday. A young mother and her small daughter pull her back into a past she has spent decades refusing to explain. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a film about the mothers who walk away and declines to call them monsters.","title":"The Lost Daughter","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"spider-man-no-way-home","tagline":"Peter Parker's identity is public, his life is wrecked, and he asks Doctor Strange for a spell to make everyone forget. The spell goes wrong and tears open the multiverse. The villains pour through, and the movie spends two hours cashing in old memories.","title":"Spider-Man: No Way Home","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"president","tagline":"Robert Mugabe is gone after thirty-seven years, and Zimbabwe holds its first open election. Nelson Chamisa thinks he can beat the man who inherited the machine. The vote is the easy part. The count is where they take it from him.","title":"President","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"nightmare-alley","tagline":"Stanton Carlisle learns to read a room well enough to fake talking to the dead, then carries the act uptown to fleece the rich. He is the smartest man in every room until he meets a woman who is smarter. The con man always forgets that he is also a mark.","title":"Nightmare Alley","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"rumble","tagline":"In a world where monster wrestling is the national sport, a teenage girl trains a giant beast who would rather dance than fight. Winnie wants to revive her dead father's gym and drag her washed-up town back to glory. The monsters are enormous. The ideas are not.","title":"Rumble","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"west-side-story","tagline":"A teenager named Tony falls for a girl named María on the wrong block in a city tearing itself apart. The Jets and the Sharks fight over pavement that the wrecking ball already condemned. Steven Spielberg waited his whole career to make a musical, and he does not waste the chance.","title":"West Side Story","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"red-rocket","tagline":"A washed-up porn star washes back into his Texas Gulf Coast hometown with no money and no shame. He starts dealing weed and grooming a teenage girl who works the donut counter. Mikey calls it love. It is a hustle wearing a smile.","title":"Red Rocket","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"national-champions","tagline":"A star running back goes on strike two days before the national championship, demanding pay for the athletes who make the sport billions. He has the one piece of leverage the system cannot survive losing. The argument is bulletproof. The movie keeps shooting itself.","title":"National Champions","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"france","tagline":"France de Meurs is the most famous television journalist in France, and she stages the news as much as she reports it. A car accident cracks her glossy life open and a crisis of conscience leaks out. Bruno Dumont points his camera at the media and never quite decides whether to mock it or mourn it.","title":"France","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"dont-look-up","tagline":"A comet is coming to wipe out the planet, and two scientists have the data to prove it. They beg the president, the media, and the internet to pay attention. Turns out the end of the world makes for bad ratings.","title":"Don't Look Up","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"being-the-ricardos","tagline":"Aaron Sorkin compresses one chaotic production week at I Love Lucy into a single film about Lucille Ball under siege. A red-baiting accusation, a pregnancy, and a marriage coming apart all land at once. The talking is the problem.","title":"Being the Ricardos","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-hand-of-god","tagline":"Paolo Sorrentino turns his own teenage years in 1980s Naples into a coming-of-age story about the moment a kid's life splits in two. Diego Maradona is coming to play for Napoli. So is grief, and they arrive on the same wind.","title":"The Hand of God","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"flee","tagline":"A man named Amin sits down to tell his oldest friend the truth about how he got to Denmark. The story he has guarded for twenty years involves a childhood in Kabul, a vanishing family, and a lie he has repeated so long he half believes it. Animation is the only way he can finally say it out loud.","title":"Flee","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"encounter","tagline":"A decorated Marine yanks his two sons out of bed and onto the highway, certain that an alien infestation is taking over human bodies. The road trip is real. The invasion is the part you should worry about.","title":"Encounter","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"diary-of-a-wimpy-kid","tagline":"Greg Heffley starts middle school convinced it is a battlefield for social rank. He keeps a record of his climb in a journal he swears is not a diary. The animation finally looks like the books. The kid at the center is still a little jerk.","title":"Diary of a Wimpy Kid","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"benedetta","tagline":"A seventeenth-century nun has visions of Christ, claims the stigmata, and takes a younger sister into her bed. The convent calls it a miracle. Paul Verhoeven calls it a power grab, and he is not wrong.","title":"Benedetta","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"writing-with-fire","tagline":"Dalit women in rural India run a newspaper. They cover corruption, rape, and broken roads while men tell them to stay home. Then they trade their notebooks for smartphones and aim the camera straight at power.","title":"Writing with Fire","year":2021},{"rating":5,"slug":"licorice-pizza","tagline":"A teenage hustler and a stalled twenty-five-year-old meet on picture day in the 1973 San Fernando Valley and spend the whole film circling each other. Waterbeds, pinball, and one terrifying Bradley Cooper cameo follow. Paul Thomas Anderson turns a string of bad schemes into the best film about being stuck that you will see.","title":"Licorice Pizza","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-humans","tagline":"A family gathers in a crumbling New York duplex for Thanksgiving dinner. The walls knock, the lights die, and the people inside slowly admit what they have lost. The scariest thing in the apartment is the truth.","title":"The Humans","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"resident-evil-welcome-to-raccoon-city","tagline":"A pharmaceutical company poisons a dying town, and the corpses do not stay down. Two cops and a handful of franchise heroes spend one night trying to get out of Raccoon City alive. The game knew exactly what it was. The movie keeps forgetting.","title":"Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"house-of-gucci","tagline":"A secretary marries into Italian fashion royalty and decides she likes the throne more than the man. Patrizia Reggiani climbs into the House of Gucci and starts rearranging the furniture. By the end she is rearranging the family tree.","title":"House of Gucci","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"encanto","tagline":"Disney builds a magical Colombian house where every child gets a gift, except one. Mirabel has no power, no door of her own, and a family that quietly treats her as the crack in the foundation. The cracks turn out to be the whole point.","title":"Encanto","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"drive-my-car","tagline":"A theater director who lost his wife stages a multilingual Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and lets a quiet young woman drive his red Saab. He thinks the car is where he hides from his grief. It turns out to be where he finally faces it.","title":"Drive My Car","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"8-bit-christmas","tagline":"A grown man narrates the story of how, at ten years old, he schemed and lied his way toward a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 Chicago. The kids want a video game console. The movie wants to make you cry about your father. Both get what they came for.","title":"8-Bit Christmas","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"zeros-and-ones","tagline":"A soldier moves through a Rome emptied by lockdown, hunting a plot against the Vatican while his radical twin sits in a cell. Abel Ferrara films the whole thing in paranoid near-darkness where every screen is watching back. The dread is real. The plot is a rumor.","title":"Zeros and Ones","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-first-wave","tagline":"A camera follows the doctors and nurses inside a Queens hospital during the first weeks of COVID, when nobody knows what works and the bodies keep coming. It films people doing the impossible job with no script and no end date. The result is the closest thing to standing in that room.","title":"The First Wave","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"king-richard","tagline":"Richard Williams writes a plan to make his daughters tennis champions before they are born. Will Smith plays him as a stubborn visionary who is impossible to argue with and usually right. The man and the movie both refuse to know their place.","title":"King Richard","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"ghostbusters-afterlife","tagline":"A broke single mother and her two kids inherit a rundown Oklahoma farm from a grandfather they never met. The grandfather is a dead Ghostbuster, and the soil is full of demons. The movie spends its energy decorating a grave instead of telling a story.","title":"Ghostbusters: Afterlife","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"cmon-cmon","tagline":"A commercial-radio journalist who interviews kids for a living suddenly has to raise one. His nephew is nine, relentless, and smarter than the questions Johnny gets paid to ask. Turns out the man who records children for a living has no idea how to listen to one.","title":"C'mon C'mon","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"boiling-point","tagline":"A high-end London restaurant opens its doors on the busiest night of the year. The head chef is drowning in debt, a failed marriage, and a health inspector who just downgraded his rating. Everything that can go wrong gets one long, unbroken take to do it.","title":"Boiling Point","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"bad-luck-banging-or-loony-porn","tagline":"A schoolteacher's private sex tape leaks online and the parents of her students convene a tribunal to decide her fate. Radu Jude turns that single incident into a vivisection of a whole society. The verdict is on the country, not the teacher.","title":"Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-power-of-the-dog","tagline":"Two ranching brothers run a Montana cattle operation in 1925. One of them marries a widow, and the other sets out to destroy her. The cruelty is quiet, and that is what makes it lethal.","title":"The Power of the Dog","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"prayers-for-the-stolen","tagline":"In a mountain village in rural Mexico, mothers cut their daughters' hair short and dig holes in the ground to hide them. The cartel takes girls. This is what childhood looks like when survival means becoming invisible.","title":"Prayers for the Stolen","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"simple-as-water","tagline":"Megan Mylan follows Syrian families pulled apart by war and scattered across four countries. There are no battle scenes and no narration, just parents and children trying to hold a family together across borders built to keep them out. The catastrophe here is the quiet one that starts after the headlines stop.","title":"Simple as Water","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"tick-tick-boom","tagline":"A struggling composer waits tables, turns thirty, and watches the clock run out on the musical that has eaten his twenties. Andrew Garfield sings every note himself and never stops sweating. The panic is the point.","title":"tick, tick... BOOM!","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"procession","tagline":"Six men who survived sexual abuse by Catholic priests pick up cameras and rebuild the rooms where it happened. Robert Greene turns drama therapy into filmmaking and lets the survivors call the shots. The result is the rare documentary that hands the victims the director's chair and means it.","title":"Procession","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"home-sweet-home-alone","tagline":"A kid gets left behind at Christmas while two desperate adults plot to break into his house. Disney resurrects a corpse and props it up with the name of a man who died in 2009. The traps still work. Nothing else does.","title":"Home Sweet Home Alone","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"belfast","tagline":"A boy grows up on a Belfast street in 1969 as his Protestant neighborhood turns into a war zone overnight. The barricades go up. The question is whether the family stays or runs.","title":"Belfast","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"clifford-the-big-red-dog","tagline":"A lonely girl in a cramped Manhattan apartment adopts a tiny red puppy from a magical rescuer, then wakes up to find he has grown into a ten-foot dog she cannot possibly hide. The city panics and a biotech CEO comes hunting. The premise is sweeter than anything the film does with it.","title":"Clifford the Big Red Dog","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-beta-test","tagline":"Jordan Hines is a Hollywood talent agent who receives a purple envelope inviting him to an anonymous sexual encounter at a hotel. He goes. Then he spends the rest of the film unraveling over who sent it and what they know. Some men will burn their entire life down rather than admit they wanted the envelope.","title":"The Beta Test","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"spencer","tagline":"Princess Diana spends three days trapped at a royal Christmas, weighed on arrival and watched at every meal. Pablo Larraín calls it a fable, and Kristen Stewart turns the breakdown into something close to grace. The performance is the whole show, and it almost carries the rest.","title":"Spencer","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"julia","tagline":"A six-foot-two woman with a warbling voice teaches America that French food is not a class privilege. The cooking footage glistens and Julia Child remains a force of nature. The movie loves her too much to ask a hard question.","title":"Julia","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"hive","tagline":"Fahrije's husband vanishes in the Kosovo war and never comes back. She stops waiting, learns to drive, and starts selling pepper relish to feed her kids. The village would rather she sat home and grieved.","title":"Hive","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"eternals","tagline":"Immortal beings have walked the Earth for seven thousand years, sworn to fight monsters and forbidden to touch anything else. Now they reunite to stop a threat bigger than any they have faced. Chloé Zhao makes Marvel slow down, and the franchise forgets how to move.","title":"Eternals","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"a-cop-movie","tagline":"A Cop Movie follows two Mexico City officers through patrols and bribes, then reveals the cops on screen are actors playing real people. The documentary becomes a study of how a uniform turns a person into a performance. Clever as hell, and a little cold to the touch.","title":"A Cop Movie","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-souvenir-part-ii","tagline":"Julie survives a devastating relationship and decides to make a film about it. She is a film student in 1980s London, sorting grief into storyboards. The result is a movie about a young woman teaching herself to turn her worst year into art.","title":"The Souvenir: Part II","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"last-night-in-soho","tagline":"A grieving fashion student moves to London and starts slipping into the body of a 1960s singer every time she sleeps. The dream is glamorous until it curdles into a nightmare she cannot wake from. Edgar Wright builds a gorgeous haunted house and then keeps adding rooms until he loses the floor plan.","title":"Last Night in Soho","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"attica","tagline":"In September 1971, the men inside Attica Correctional Facility seize control of a cellblock and demand to be treated as human beings. For four days the world watches. Then the state of New York shows them what it thinks of the question.","title":"Attica","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"antlers","tagline":"A teacher returns to her dying Oregon hometown and notices a boy whose family hides something starving in the dark. The thing in the house is a Wendigo. The thing in the town is worse, and it has no shape you can shoot.","title":"Antlers","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"a-mouthful-of-air","tagline":"A children's book author survives a suicide attempt and tries to raise her newborn while postpartum depression hunts her. Amanda Seyfried gives the illness a devastating face. The performance is braver than the film built around it.","title":"A Mouthful of Air","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"passing","tagline":"Two childhood friends, both light-skinned Black women, reconnect by chance in 1920s New York. One lives openly as Black in Harlem. The other passes for white and goes home to a husband who would kill her if he knew.","title":"Passing","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-french-dispatch","tagline":"An American magazine runs its foreign bureau out of a fictional French town and publishes its final issue after the editor drops dead. Wes Anderson adapts three of its feature stories into the most elaborate diorama he has ever built. The result is gorgeous, exacting, and easier to admire than to love.","title":"The French Dispatch","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-electrical-life-of-louis-wain","tagline":"Louis Wain draws cats for a living and chases electricity in his head. He marries the governess, mourns the love of his life, and loses his grip on reality one psychedelic feline at a time. Will Sharpe makes the madness beautiful and the biopic ordinary.","title":"The Electrical Life of Louis Wain","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"rons-gone-wrong","tagline":"Every kid has a robot best friend wired into a social network. Barney gets a defective one named Ron that cannot follow the rules. The glitch turns out to be the only honest thing in his life.","title":"Ron's Gone Wrong","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"dune","tagline":"A noble house takes stewardship of the deadliest planet in the galaxy, the only place that produces the spice the empire runs on. The young heir inherits a trap wearing the face of an opportunity. Denis Villeneuve builds half a story on a colossal scale and dares you not to want the other half.","title":"Dune","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"becoming-cousteau","tagline":"Jacques-Yves Cousteau invents the gear, films the deep, and becomes the most famous explorer alive. Liz Garbus builds his story entirely from his own footage. The man who taught the world to love the ocean spends his last act trying to save it from people like him.","title":"Becoming Cousteau","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"my-sunny-maad","tagline":"A Czech woman marries into an Afghan family and tries to build a life in Kabul after the Taliban falls. The household pulls her in two directions at once. Belonging here means surrendering the parts of herself that brought her here.","title":"My Sunny Maad","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"wheel-of-fortune-and-fantasy","tagline":"Ryusuke Hamaguchi builds three short stories out of coincidence: an ex who resurfaces, a honeytrap that backfires, two strangers who mistake each other for someone from their past. Nothing explodes. Nobody dies. The talking is the action.","title":"Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-velvet-underground","tagline":"Todd Haynes makes a documentary about the band that invented the underground. He refuses the talking-heads formula and builds the film like the music itself. The result is a portrait that sounds the way the Velvets felt.","title":"The Velvet Underground","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-last-duel","tagline":"Two French knights, once friends, accuse each other of lies and settle it with a trial by combat. The same events play out three times, once from each man and once from the woman they both talk past. The men think the fight is about honor. The woman knows it is about her.","title":"The Last Duel","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"needle-in-a-timestack","tagline":"Nick and Janine have a perfect marriage. Then her jealous ex starts traveling through time to erase it. The mechanics get in the way of the heartbreak.","title":"Needle in a Timestack","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"luzzu","tagline":"Jesmark is a Maltese fisherman whose hand-painted wooden boat is taking on water and whose newborn son needs money the sea no longer pays. The regulations reward the men who scrap their boats and quit. The black market just asks if he wants to make rent.","title":"Luzzu","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"hard-luck-love-song","tagline":"A drunk country singer wins a dice game in a dive bar and uses the cash to chase down the woman who got away. Justin Corsbie builds his debut from a Todd Snider song and fills it with character actors who deserve better. The song is three minutes long and the movie keeps going.","title":"Hard Luck Love Song","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"halloween-kills","tagline":"Michael Myers survives the fire that was supposed to end him and walks back into Haddonfield. The town that spent forty years afraid of him decides to stop running and hunt him down. The mob turns out to be almost as dangerous as the man in the mask, and the movie is too busy pointing that out to scare you.","title":"Halloween Kills","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"bergman-island","tagline":"Two filmmakers married to each other retreat to the island where Ingmar Bergman made his masterpieces. He worships the ghost and basks in the pilgrimage. She tries to write in its shadow and discovers her own movie staring back.","title":"Bergman Island","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-rescue","tagline":"Twelve boys and their soccer coach are trapped miles inside a flooded Thai cave, and the world's armies cannot reach them. The only people who can are a few retirement-age British men who dive caves as a hobby. The plan to save the kids sounds like a plan to drown them, which is exactly why it works as a film.","title":"The Rescue","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"no-time-to-die","tagline":"James Bond has retired to Jamaica with no missions and no MI6. The CIA pulls him back for one more job, and the woman he loved becomes the thread that unravels everything. Daniel Craig finally gets the exit the character has never been allowed.","title":"No Time to Die","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"mass","tagline":"Four parents meet in the back of a church. Two buried their son after a school shooting. The other two raised the boy who pulled the trigger, and now they all have to sit at the same table.","title":"Mass","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"lamb","tagline":"A childless couple on a remote Icelandic farm finds a newborn that is half lamb and half human. They name her, dress her, and raise her as their daughter. Nature notices, and nature wants its child back.","title":"Lamb","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"ascension","tagline":"A factory worker assembles sex dolls. A trainee learns to smile for the rich. A model holds a pose for hours. Jessica Kingdon films the Chinese Dream from the bottom of the supply chain up, and lets the images do the indicting.","title":"Ascension","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"venom-let-there-be-carnage","tagline":"Eddie Brock and his alien parasite are stuck in a bad domestic partnership. Then a serial killer gets his own symbiote and starts a war. The bickering is more fun than the carnage.","title":"Venom: Let There Be Carnage","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"titane","tagline":"A dancer with a titanium plate in her skull leaves a trail of bodies and then disappears into the life of a grieving fire captain who thinks she is his missing son. Julia Ducournau dares you to keep watching. Most of the time the dare works.","title":"Titane","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-many-saints-of-newark","tagline":"A young Tony Soprano grows up watching his uncle Dickie Moltisanti run rackets in 1967 Newark while the city burns around them. The prequel knows exactly how this kid turns out. It just cannot decide whether it is a movie or a backdoor pilot.","title":"The Many Saints of Newark","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-jesus-music","tagline":"A fringe sound born in the Jesus Movement of the 1960s grows into stadium worship and crossover radio. The Erwin brothers chart that rise with archival footage and the genre's biggest names. They throw a victory party and forget to ask anyone the hard questions.","title":"The Jesus Music","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-addams-family-2","tagline":"Gomez packs the family into a black RV and drags them across America to stop the kids from growing up. The road-trip comedy runs the most morbid family in fiction through every cheerful vacation cliche available. The premise is a costume, and the movie never finds the body underneath.","title":"The Addams Family 2","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"old-henry","tagline":"A weathered farmer takes in a wounded stranger and a satchel of stolen money. Then the men with badges come looking for both. The quiet ones always have the worst secrets.","title":"Old Henry","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"mayday","tagline":"Ana escapes her grim life through a radio and lands in a dreamworld where women lure soldiers to their deaths. It wants to be a feminist war fantasy with teeth. It settles for a beautiful postcard.","title":"Mayday","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"im-your-man","tagline":"A Berlin scientist agrees to test a humanoid robot built to be her perfect partner. Tom looks like Dan Stevens and is engineered down to the algorithm to please her. The catch is that being handed exactly what you want exposes how little you understand what you want.","title":"I'm Your Man","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"dear-evan-hansen","tagline":"Evan Hansen, an anxious high schooler, lets a grieving family believe he was their dead son's closest friend. The lie grows into a viral movement built on a kid who is no longer alive to deny it. The movie wants you to forgive him and never figures out why you should.","title":"Dear Evan Hansen","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"birds-of-paradise","tagline":"Two ballet students at an elite Paris academy fight for one contract that only one of them can win. They become friends, then lovers, then enemies, sometimes within the same scene. The dancing is the least interesting thing about it.","title":"Birds of Paradise","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"wife-of-a-spy","tagline":"A silk merchant in wartime Kobe returns from Manchuria carrying proof of an atrocity and a plan to expose it. His wife must decide whether the man she loves is a hero or a traitor using her as cover. Kiyoshi Kurosawa turns the marriage into a minefield.","title":"Wife of a Spy","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-nowhere-inn","tagline":"St. Vincent agrees to let her bandmate Carrie Brownstein film a documentary about her tour. The footage of her real life is too boring to use, so the documentary starts inventing a more interesting St. Vincent. Then the invention takes over.","title":"The Nowhere Inn","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-eyes-of-tammy-faye","tagline":"Tammy Faye Bakker builds a televangelism empire alongside her husband Jim, then watches fraud and scandal burn it down. Jessica Chastain vanishes under pounds of prosthetics to play her. The makeup does more work than the script.","title":"The Eyes of Tammy Faye","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"my-name-is-pauli-murray","tagline":"Pauli Murray builds the legal arguments that crack segregation and sex discrimination, then watches the courts use them and forget the name. Lawyer, poet, organizer, priest, and decades early on all of it. Betsy West and Julie Cohen finally put that name on the marquee.","title":"My Name Is Pauli Murray","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"lady-of-the-manor","tagline":"A stoner cons her way into a costumed tour-guide gig at a historic manor and gets haunted by the aristocrat she is paid to impersonate. The ghost wants to teach her to be a proper lady. The movie just wants to make her fart.","title":"Lady of the Manor","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"cry-macho","tagline":"A washed-up rodeo star takes a job retrieving a rich man's son from Mexico City and hauling him back across the border. The kid would rather keep his fighting rooster. Clint Eastwood, ninety-one years old, ambles through a movie that has nowhere to be.","title":"Cry Macho","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"copshop","tagline":"A con man gets himself arrested to hide from the hitman hunting him. The hitman gets himself arrested too and takes the cell across the hall. The only thing standing between them is a rookie cop who is sharper than either predator.","title":"Copshop","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"blue-bayou","tagline":"Antonio LeBlanc has lived in Louisiana since he was three, and a paperwork error from his adoption now puts him in line for deportation to a country he never knew. The premise is a gut punch. The execution keeps reaching for the next one.","title":"Blue Bayou","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"my-son","tagline":"James McAvoy plays a father who races back to the Scottish Highlands when his young son vanishes from a campsite. He improvises every line, handed no script and only the broad shape of the plot. The experiment throws off more heat than the movie wrapped around it.","title":"My Son","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-voyeurs","tagline":"A young couple moves into a Montreal loft and finds they can see straight into the apartment across the street. They start watching the strangers there have sex, fight, and unravel, and they cannot make themselves stop. The film wants to be Rear Window and ends up peeping at itself.","title":"The Voyeurs","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-card-counter","tagline":"William Tell counts cards in casinos and lives in motel rooms he strips bare and rewraps in white sheets. He carries a past from a military prison and a young man who wants help settling a score. The math is the easy part.","title":"The Card Counter","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"queenpins","tagline":"A bored couponer in suburban Arizona figures out how to game the manufacturer rebate system. She turns a hobby into a multimillion-dollar fraud and drags her best friend along for the ride. The scheme is more disciplined than the movie about it.","title":"Queenpins","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"malignant","tagline":"Madison starts seeing visions of brutal murders as they happen, killings committed by a figure she cannot stop and does not understand. James Wan abandons the slow-burn dread of his earlier work for something louder and stranger. The first ninety minutes promise a horror film the last twenty refuses to deliver.","title":"Malignant","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"everybodys-talking-about-jamie","tagline":"A teenager in Sheffield wants to skip a career day and walk the prom in heels. His mother is in his corner. His town is not. He picks the dress anyway.","title":"Everybody's Talking About Jamie","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"dating-and-new-york","tagline":"Milo gets dumped, then meets Wendy on a hookup app, and the two agree to be friends with benefits while pretending neither one wants more. The movie knows every beat of the rom-com it is copying and announces each one with on-screen text. Self-awareness is not the same thing as having something to say.","title":"Dating \u0026 New York","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"catch-the-bullet","tagline":"An aging gunslinger rides with a U.S. marshal and a deputy to hunt the outlaws who shot his son and took his land. Three men, one trail, one revenge plot you have seen a hundred times. The horses give the best performances.","title":"Catch the Bullet","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"we-need-to-do-something","tagline":"A family takes shelter in their bathroom when a violent storm hits. A tree falls across the only door and traps them inside. The thing outside is worse than the weather.","title":"We Need to Do Something","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-gateway","tagline":"Shea Whigham plays a hard-drinking social worker who pulls kids out of broken homes and cannot fix his own life. When an ex-con resurfaces to reclaim his family, the job gets personal. The character study is sharp. The crime thriller bolted onto it is not.","title":"The Gateway","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"shang-chi-and-the-legend-of-the-ten-rings","tagline":"Shaun parks cars and sings karaoke in San Francisco. His real name is Shang-Chi, his father commands an ancient army, and the past he ran from has come to collect. Marvel finally makes a kung fu movie and remembers that kung fu movies need a reason to fight.","title":"Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"mogul-mowgli","tagline":"A British Pakistani rapper finally breaks through, then his body collapses on the eve of his first big tour. An autoimmune disease eats his muscles from the inside while he tries to figure out who he is. The illness is the easy part.","title":"Mogul Mowgli","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"faya-dayi","tagline":"In the highlands of Harar, Ethiopia, farmers harvest khat, the narcotic leaf that fuels the local economy and dulls the country's young men into a waking dream. Jessica Beshir films their labor and their longing in silver black and white. The high never lasts, and neither does the soil.","title":"Faya Dayi","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"cinderella","tagline":"A scrappy seamstress dreams of running her own dress shop while a reluctant prince dreams of escaping his crown. Kay Cannon swaps the fairy godmother for Billy Porter and the orchestra for a karaoke playlist. The dress is the only thing that fits.","title":"Cinderella","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"vacation-friends","tagline":"A buttoned-up couple meets a feral one on a Mexico vacation and makes the mistake of trading numbers. Months later the wild pair crashes the wedding, uninvited and undeterred. Some friendships you escape. This one books a flight.","title":"Vacation Friends","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"candyman","tagline":"Say his name five times into a mirror and he comes for you. A Black artist in gentrified Chicago digs up the legend and turns his own neighborhood's trauma into gallery art. The monster was never the man with the hook.","title":"Candyman","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-protege","tagline":"A retired assassin learns her mentor has been murdered and goes hunting for the people who did it. Standing between her and revenge is a smiling fixer who flirts as easily as he kills. The chemistry is real. The plot around it is not.","title":"The Protégé","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-night-house","tagline":"Beth's husband builds her a house on the lake, then rows out onto the water and shoots himself. Now she is alone in the place he designed, finding things he never told her about. Grief is the easy part. The hard part is what was hiding behind it.","title":"The Night House","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"reminiscence","tagline":"The seas have risen and Miami lives by night. Hugh Jackman runs a machine that lets people relive their memories, then a woman walks in and vanishes, and he dives into the past to find her. The film drowns in the same nostalgia it diagnoses.","title":"Reminiscence","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"habit","tagline":"Bella Thorne plays a party girl who scams her way into a Jesus-themed money laundering scheme and decides the only way out is to become the next coming of Christ. Janell Shirtcliff stages it as a feature-length perfume ad with a body count. The clothes are the only thing in focus.","title":"Habit","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"flag-day","tagline":"A con man drifts in and out of his daughter's life, lying to her even as she grows old enough to see through him. Jennifer Vogel loves her father and writes the truth about him anyway. Sean Penn casts his own kids and films it like a memory he cannot stop romanticizing.","title":"Flag Day","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"demonic","tagline":"Neill Blomkamp scans actors into a digital purgatory and sends a woman into her comatose mother's mind to confront the demon riding inside her. The technology is the most interesting thing in the room. That is the problem.","title":"Demonic","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"cryptozoo","tagline":"A cryptozookeeper travels the world capturing mythical creatures and locking them inside a sanctuary built to keep them safe. Dash Shaw paints the whole utopia by hand and asks whether a cage with good intentions is still a cage. The animation runs wilder than anything it gets wrapped around.","title":"Cryptozoo","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-lost-leonardo","tagline":"A painting surfaces at a New Orleans estate sale for $1,175. Fifteen years later it sells as a Leonardo da Vinci for $450 million. This documentary follows the money and finds that authenticity is whatever the right people decide to believe.","title":"The Lost Leonardo","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"respect","tagline":"Aretha Franklin learns to sing in her father's church and spends the next two decades fighting the men who want to manage her voice for her. Respect lines up every biopic beat like dominoes and knocks them down on schedule. Jennifer Hudson is the only thing in it as big as the woman it is about.","title":"Respect","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"free-guy","tagline":"Guy is a background character in a violent open-world video game. He wears the same blue shirt, drinks the same coffee, and gets robbed at the same bank every single day. Then he picks up a pair of sunglasses and realizes the apocalypse around him is the whole point.","title":"Free Guy","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"dont-breathe-2","tagline":"The Blind Man from the first film is back, this time raising a kidnapped girl in his fortified house. Then a crew of armed men show up to take her. The movie wants you to root for a serial killer because the new bad guys are worse.","title":"Don't Breathe 2","year":2021},{"rating":5,"slug":"coda","tagline":"Ruby Rossi is the only hearing member of a deaf family that runs a struggling fishing boat. She also has a voice good enough to leave them behind for. The film makes you feel the weight of that choice in both directions.","title":"CODA","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"in-the-same-breath","tagline":"Nanfu Wang points her camera at Wuhan as COVID erupts, then turns it on the United States and finds the same lies in a different language. Two governments, one playbook. The virus kills the body, but the propaganda does the real damage.","title":"In the Same Breath","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"vivo","tagline":"A music-loving kinkajou loses his partner and inherits an unfinished love song. He sets out across Florida to deliver it to the woman it was written for. The songs soar. The map underneath them is laminated.","title":"Vivo","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-suicide-squad","tagline":"Amanda Waller straps bombs to the necks of death-row supervillains and drops them on a South American island to level a secret facility. The mission is suicide and the squad is expendable. James Gunn turns a throwaway premise into the bloodiest cartoon a major studio will let him make.","title":"The Suicide Squad","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"swan-song","tagline":"Udo Kier plays a retired drag queen and hairdresser who slips out of his nursing home to style a dead woman's hair one last time. Todd Stephens builds a small-town odyssey around a man the world already filed away. After fifty years in the margins of other people's movies, Kier finally gets the close-up.","title":"Swan Song","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"john-and-the-hole","tagline":"A wealthy family wakes up one day and finds the parents and the teenage daughter gone. Their twelve-year-old son has put them in an unfinished bunker in the woods. He goes home to play house with their lives, and the movie watches him do it.","title":"John and the Hole","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"annette","tagline":"A stand-up comedian and an opera soprano fall in love and have a daughter who happens to be a wooden puppet. Leos Carax and the band Sparks turn the marriage into a sung-through opera about fame eating everything it touches. The puppet is the most human thing in it.","title":"Annette","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-green-knight","tagline":"A young knight takes a swing at a green stranger on Christmas Day and agrees to take the blow back in a year. The deal is a death sentence dressed up as honor. The whole film is the long walk to collect.","title":"The Green Knight","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"stillwater","tagline":"An Oklahoma roughneck flies to Marseille to spring his daughter from a French prison. He cannot speak the language, work the courts, or read the people he leans on. The investigation is bait, and the lonely man building a new life is the movie that actually shows up.","title":"Stillwater","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"nine-days","tagline":"An unborn soul interviews for the right to be born. A grim bureaucrat of the afterlife runs the test, grading candidates on how well they would survive a life they have never lived. The premise is audacious and the film almost gets all the way there.","title":"Nine Days","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"jungle-cruise","tagline":"A riverboat captain with a rigged routine and a secret guides a scientist up the Amazon toward a tree that supposedly cures everything. German soldiers and cursed conquistadors chase them the whole way. The ride is smoother than the movie.","title":"Jungle Cruise","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"enemies-of-the-state","tagline":"A young Air Force veteran turns whistleblower, claims the FBI is persecuting him, and flees the country. Then the documentary stops trusting him. Sonia Kennebeck builds a film that keeps pulling the floor out from under you.","title":"Enemies of the State","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"val","tagline":"Val Kilmer has filmed himself his entire adult life. Now throat cancer has taken his speaking voice, so his son reads the words while decades of old tape tell the story. A movie star edits his own life and decides which parts you get to see.","title":"Val","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"snake-eyes-g-i-joe-origins","tagline":"A mute orphan watches his father die, grows up fighting for cash, and gets pulled into a war between two ancient ninja clans. He swears revenge and lies to everyone to get it. Then the movie forgets it ever set that up.","title":"Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"old","tagline":"A family wanders onto a beautiful beach that ages them two years every hour. Childhood, marriage, and mortality collapse into a single afternoon. The concept is terrifying until Shyamalan explains it.","title":"Old","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"midnight-in-the-switchgrass","tagline":"Two detectives hunting a Florida serial killer cross paths with an undercover agent working a trafficking ring. The pieces of a real thriller are here. The movie never bothers to assemble them.","title":"Midnight in the Switchgrass","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"jolt","tagline":"Lindy carries a rare disorder that drowns her in rage, so she wears a vest of electrodes and shocks herself calm. When the one man who steadies her turns up dead, she stops shocking and starts swinging. The premise has voltage and the movie keeps shorting out.","title":"Jolt","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"joe-bell","tagline":"A father walks across America to lecture strangers about bullying after his gay son suffers for being himself. The walk is real. The movie is a guilt trip with a backpack.","title":"Joe Bell","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"charlatan","tagline":"Jan Mikolášek heals thousands by studying their urine in a glass flask. He has no medical degree and no warmth for the people who depend on him. When the Communists take power, the gift that made him famous becomes the thing that destroys him.","title":"Charlatan","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"ailey","tagline":"Alvin Ailey turns Black grief and the Texas church into modern dance and a company that outlives him. Jamila Wignot builds the film from his own voice and decades of archival footage. The dancing says everything the man refused to.","title":"Ailey","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"trollhunters-rise-of-the-titans","tagline":"Jim Lake Jr. has battled trolls, aliens, and wizards across three series. Now Arcadia faces the apocalypse, and every hero del Toro built gets one last stand. The titans are enormous, and the goodbye is rushed.","title":"Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"how-it-ends","tagline":"A comet is hours from ending the world, so Liza walks across Los Angeles to reach one last party and say her goodbyes. Her younger self tags along to force the honesty she has dodged for decades. It is a sweet end-of-the-world hangout that keeps saying goodbye and never builds to anything.","title":"How It Ends","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"space-jam-a-new-legacy","tagline":"LeBron James gets trapped inside the Warner Bros. server-verse and has to coach the Looney Tunes to victory to free his kidnapped son. The villain is a rogue algorithm. The real product is the catalog.","title":"Space Jam: A New Legacy","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"roadrunner-a-film-about-anthony-bourdain","tagline":"Anthony Bourdain spends twenty years turning hunger into television. After he is gone, the people who loved him sit down to explain a man who never stopped running. Roadrunner does not catch him.","title":"Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"pig","tagline":"Rob Feld lives alone in the Oregon woods with a truffle pig and a buried past, until thieves take the animal and he walks back into Portland to find it. You brace for a revenge thriller. What arrives is a reckoning about the lives we settle for.","title":"Pig","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"escape-room-tournament-of-champions","tagline":"The survivors of the first murder room get pulled back in, this time onto a New York subway car rigged to kill. Minos runs a championship bracket of past winners, and the prize is staying alive. The puzzles are clever. The people solving them are not.","title":"Escape Room: Tournament of Champions","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"die-in-a-gunfight","tagline":"Ben and Mary are star-crossed lovers from feuding families, and the movie reminds you of that with onscreen text, comic-book panels, and a narrator who will not shut up. Their old flame reignites just as a jealous fiance and a hired gun close in. It is Romeo and Juliet with handguns and the IQ of a bumper sticker.","title":"Die in a Gunfight","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"gunpowder-milkshake","tagline":"Sam is a hired killer who breaks the rules of her syndicate to protect an eight-year-old girl. She teams up with her estranged mother and a library full of veteran assassins to survive the fallout. The cast is loaded and the colors pop, but the gun never finds anything to say.","title":"Gunpowder Milkshake","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"black-widow","tagline":"Natasha Romanoff goes on the run and finally faces the program that made her. Old wounds reopen and a fake family reunites for one job. The Avengers already told you how her story ends, which is the whole problem.","title":"Black Widow","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-tomorrow-war","tagline":"A future war against aliens is losing, so the military drafts civilians from the present and sends them forward in time to fight. A schoolteacher gets conscripted into a battle his future self is already part of. The hook is sharp, and the movie spends two hours dulling it.","title":"The Tomorrow War","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-forever-purge","tagline":"The annual night of legal murder ends at dawn. This year a movement decides it should never end and turns its guns on immigrants, the poor, and anyone they call un-American. The masks come off and the satire goes with them.","title":"The Forever Purge","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-boss-baby-family-business","tagline":"Tim and Ted Templeton are grown up and estranged when a magic formula turns them back into a kid and a baby for one more mission. A new Boss Baby in the family needs saving from a tech-guru villain. The premise exists so the first movie can happen again, louder.","title":"The Boss Baby: Family Business","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"summer-of-soul-or-when-the-revolution-could-not-be-televised","tagline":"In 1969, Harlem throws a summer music festival for the ages and a producer captures all of it on tape. The footage vanishes into a basement for fifty years while Woodstock takes the credit for the season. Questlove digs it out and hands the summer back to the people who lived it.","title":"Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"no-sudden-move","tagline":"Detroit, 1954. A career criminal takes a simple babysitting job that turns into a heist, and the heist turns into a death sentence. Everybody is double-crossing everybody, and the real thieves never get their hands dirty.","title":"No Sudden Move","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"zola","tagline":"A Detroit waitress meets a stranger over a diner counter and agrees to a weekend of dancing in Tampa. The money is real. The trip is something else entirely.","title":"Zola","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"werewolves-within","tagline":"Finn Wheeler is the new forest ranger in a tiny town that hates itself over a pipeline deal. A snowstorm traps everyone in the local inn, and something with claws starts picking them off. The werewolf is the least of their problems.","title":"Werewolves Within","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"sun-children","tagline":"A boy works the streets of Tehran to keep his family alive. A criminal sends him to a charity school for poor kids, not to learn but to dig for buried treasure beneath it. The treasure is the lie. The kids are the gold no one wants to count.","title":"Sun Children","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"mary-j-bliges-my-life","tagline":"Mary J. Blige revisits her 1994 breakthrough album twenty-five years later and walks fans through the depression and addiction buried in the songs. The candor is real. The film around it is a press kit.","title":"Mary J. Blige's My Life","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"i-carry-you-with-me","tagline":"Iván falls for Gerardo in Puebla, then leaves him to chase a kitchen and a life in New York. Heidi Ewing tells their true story across decades and one hard border. The romance burns hot, but the crossing is what makes it ache.","title":"I Carry You with Me","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"false-positive","tagline":"Lucy wants a baby, so she puts her body in the hands of a charming celebrity doctor and a husband who always takes his side. The pregnancy goes wrong, and every man in the room insists she is imagining it. The dread is real. The film just never decides what it is about.","title":"False Positive","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"f9","tagline":"Dom Toretto's long-lost brother surfaces with a plan to weaponize a global hack, and the crew has to stop him while reckoning with the family they buried. A car gets launched into space. The franchise has stopped pretending physics applies.","title":"F9","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-sparks-brothers","tagline":"Ron and Russell Mael make pop records for fifty years and stay famous mostly among other musicians. Edgar Wright corners every fan he can find and dares you to keep up with the catalog. It is a love letter written by someone who memorized the whole thing.","title":"The Sparks Brothers","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"summer-of-85","tagline":"A teenage boy in 1985 Normandy falls hard for the older boy who saves his life in a capsizing. The two spend one perfect summer together. The opening scene tells you it ends at a grave.","title":"Summer of 85","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"rita-moreno-just-a-girl-who-decided-to-go-for-it","tagline":"Rita Moreno wins the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy, and the Tony, then spends decades watching Hollywood reduce her to an accent and a flower in her hair. This documentary lets her tell it her way. The woman is more interesting than the format that contains her.","title":"Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"luca","tagline":"A sea monster boy sneaks onto land off the Italian Riviera and discovers he passes for human the second he dries off. He teams up with another runaway fish-out-of-water to chase a Vespa, gelato, and a whole summer of belonging. It is Pixar in a minor key, and it knows it.","title":"Luca","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"fatherhood","tagline":"An advertising guy loses his wife the day after their daughter is born and has to raise the girl alone. Kevin Hart drops the manic act and plays it straight. The grief is real. The screenplay is greeting-card.","title":"Fatherhood","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"hitmans-wifes-bodyguard","tagline":"Michael Bryce gets pulled out of forced retirement to babysit a hitman and his even louder wife across Europe. A vain billionaire wants to torch the continent's power grid, and Interpol thinks these three are the answer. The plot is just an excuse to point cameras at people screaming.","title":"Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"wish-dragon","tagline":"A Shanghai delivery kid finds a magic teapot and the deflated dragon inside owes him three wishes. He wants the rich girl he loved before money pulled her away. It is Aladdin with chopsticks, and it never once pretends otherwise.","title":"Wish Dragon","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-house-next-door-meet-the-blacks-2","tagline":"Carl Black moves his family into a gated suburb and learns the new neighbor is a vampire. Mike Epps panics. Katt Williams bares his fangs and does all the work the script refuses to do.","title":"The House Next Door: Meet the Blacks 2","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"peter-rabbit-2-the-runaway","tagline":"Peter Rabbit runs off to the big city and falls in with a gang of streetwise animals. Back home, a slick publisher wants to turn Bea's gentle stories into a global brand. The movie about selling out is itself the merchandise.","title":"Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"holler","tagline":"Ruth is a teenager in a dying Ohio town who tears copper and steel out of abandoned buildings to keep the lights on. A college acceptance dangles a way out, if she can survive long enough to take it. Holler knows that doing everything right is no match for a town built to keep you down.","title":"Holler","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"12-mighty-orphans","tagline":"A washed-out football coach arrives at a Fort Worth orphanage during the Depression and builds a team out of boys who have nothing. They have no shoes, no playbook, and twelve players total. The true story is stirring. The movie wrings it dry.","title":"12 Mighty Orphans","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"in-the-heights","tagline":"Usnavi runs a corner bodega in Washington Heights and saves every dollar to reopen his late father's beach bar in the Dominican Republic. Jon M. Chu turns Lin-Manuel Miranda's stage musical into a sun-baked block party about home and the people who build one. The dancing is better than the plot.","title":"In the Heights","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"undine","tagline":"A Berlin historian falls for an industrial diver. Her name is Undine, the water nymph cursed to kill the man who leaves her. Christian Petzold drops that myth into a modern city and dares you to figure out the rules.","title":"Undine","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-conjuring-the-devil-made-me-do-it","tagline":"A young man stands trial for murder and pleads not guilty by reason of demonic possession. Ed and Lorraine Warren leave the haunted house behind and chase a curse into a courtroom. The premise promises something new and then runs back to the same old tricks.","title":"The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"spirit-untamed","tagline":"Lucky Prescott leaves the city for a dusty frontier town and bonds with a wild mustang named Spirit. There is a defiant girl, a stubborn horse, and a runaway train. The horse has more personality than the screenplay.","title":"Spirit Untamed","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"flashback","tagline":"Fred Fitzell has a corporate job, a dying mother, and a memory he cannot place. A high school drug called Mercury lets him slip sideways through time, and a vanished girl named Cindy keeps pulling him back. The trip is more interesting than the destination.","title":"Flashback","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"all-light-everywhere","tagline":"Theo Anthony aims his camera at the people who aim cameras for a living. Body-cam vendors, surveillance contractors, and police all promise that more footage means more truth. Anthony spends the whole film proving that the lens hides as much as it shows.","title":"All Light, Everywhere","year":2021},{"rating":5,"slug":"bo-burnham-inside","tagline":"Bo Burnham locks himself in one room and builds an entire musical comedy special alone during lockdown. He writes the jokes, plays the parts, and films his own slow unraveling in the same frame. The funniest movie about a breakdown you will ever watch.","title":"Bo Burnham: Inside","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"cruella","tagline":"Cruella is the origin story of the woman who eventually wants to skin puppies for a coat. Disney hands her a tragic backstory, a punk makeover, and Emma Thompson to spar with. The clothes have more personality than the plot.","title":"Cruella","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"a-quiet-place-part-ii","tagline":"The world has gone silent and the creatures that hunt by sound are everywhere. A widow drags her children across a dead landscape toward the faint hope of other survivors. Staying alive means never making a noise, and this sequel knows exactly how to weaponize that.","title":"A Quiet Place Part II","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"riders-of-justice","tagline":"A man loses his wife in a train crash. Then a paranoid statistician shows up and tells him it was no accident. Markus is a trained killer with nothing left to lose, and a gang of bikers is about to find out what that costs.","title":"Riders of Justice","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"new-order","tagline":"A wedding for Mexico City's elite collapses as a violent uprising of the poor pours through the gates. The bride leaves the party to help a former servant and walks straight into the machinery of a coup. The revolution and the crackdown turn out to want the same thing from her.","title":"New Order","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"dream-horse","tagline":"A Welsh barmaid talks her hollowed-out mining village into pooling spare cash to breed a racehorse. The horse runs. The formula runs harder.","title":"Dream Horse","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"those-who-wish-me-dead","tagline":"A smokejumper haunted by the people she failed gets stranded in a Montana fire tower with a boy two assassins want dead. The forest is burning toward all of them. The setup runs hotter than the movie.","title":"Those Who Wish Me Dead","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"there-is-no-evil","tagline":"Mohammad Rasoulof made this anthology in secret while banned from filmmaking in Iran. Four stories ask what the state asks of ordinary men. The answer is that the executioner goes home and waters his plants.","title":"There Is No Evil","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-woman-in-the-window","tagline":"An agoraphobic woman drinks too much wine, watches her neighbors through the glass, and swears she sees a murder across the street. Nobody believes her. Neither will you.","title":"The Woman in the Window","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-killing-of-two-lovers","tagline":"A husband moves out, agrees to an open separation, and watches his wife start seeing another man. He spends his days being a good father and his nights deciding whether he can live with it. The gun shows up in the first scene.","title":"The Killing of Two Lovers","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"spiral-from-the-book-of-saw","tagline":"A killer starts murdering cops and leaving puzzle-box clues for the one detective everyone in the precinct already hates. Chris Rock plays it straight inside a franchise built on viscera. The premise has teeth. The movie pulls the punch.","title":"Spiral: From the Book of Saw","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"finding-you","tagline":"An American violinist heads to Ireland for a study-abroad semester and falls for a movie star shooting a fantasy franchise in her village. He is famous and shallow. She teaches him to be real. You have seen this exact movie before, and it had fewer leprechauns.","title":"Finding You","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"wrath-of-man","tagline":"An armored truck guard named H joins a cash-transport crew in Los Angeles. He is precise, cold, and far more dangerous than the job requires. The men he works beside have no idea what he is hunting.","title":"Wrath of Man","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"mainstream","tagline":"A washed-out drifter with a hatred of phones becomes the internet's favorite anti-influencer. The fame eats him alive. Mainstream wants to warn you about a culture it does not actually understand.","title":"Mainstream","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"here-today","tagline":"A dying comedy writer with early dementia befriends a singer who shows up to collect on a dead man's auction prize. They have nothing in common except a willingness to keep showing up. The friendship is real. The movie around it is not.","title":"Here Today","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"above-suspicion","tagline":"An FBI agent posts up in a dying Kentucky coal town and leans on a local woman to make his first big case. She gives him everything and expects a way out. He gives her a federal paycheck and a problem he needs to make disappear.","title":"Above Suspicion","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"tom-clancys-without-remorse","tagline":"A Navy SEAL loses everything to a Russian hit squad and goes hunting for the men who pulled the trigger. Michael B. Jordan throws himself into every fight scene like he believes in the movie. The movie does not return the favor.","title":"Tom Clancy's Without Remorse","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-virtuoso","tagline":"A nameless contract killer botches a job and gets handed a cryptic next target by his mentor. He stalks a small town diner trying to figure out which stranger he is supposed to shoot. The mystery is the only thing keeping the lights on, and it goes out early.","title":"The Virtuoso","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-disciple","tagline":"Sharad Nerulkar devotes his life to Hindustani classical music, chasing a purity his teachers preach and his idols recorded decades ago. He practices for years and waits for greatness to arrive. The film is honest enough to wonder whether it ever shows up.","title":"The Disciple","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"separation","tagline":"A failed comic book artist loses his wife and inherits a custody fight with her rich father. Then his ghoulish puppet creations start crawling around the house where his daughter sleeps. The puppets are scarier than the script, which is not a compliment.","title":"Separation","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"about-endlessness","tagline":"A man and woman drift over a ruined city while a voice catalogs the strangers below. Roy Andersson stages the whole of human existence as a series of motionless gray tableaux. It sounds like a slog. It plays like a miracle.","title":"About Endlessness","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"together-together","tagline":"A fortysomething man hires a twentysomething surrogate to carry the baby he is having alone. What he wants is not a baby. It is someone who has to stay.","title":"Together Together","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"mortal-kombat","tagline":"A cold-blooded ninja, a washed-up cage fighter, and a band of chosen warriors train to defend Earthrealm in a tournament to the death. The fights are brutal and the blood is real. Everything between the fights is filler.","title":"Mortal Kombat","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-mitchells-vs-the-machines","tagline":"A dysfunctional family roadtrip collides with a robot apocalypse when a spurned AI assistant decides humanity needs rounding up. The Mitchells are barely holding it together as a family. They are the planet's only hope.","title":"The Mitchells vs. the Machines","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"vanquish","tagline":"An assassin gets blackmailed into one last night of dirty work by a retired cop who holds her daughter hostage. She drives around a neon-soaked city collecting cash from drug dealers. The only thing the movie executes cleanly is itself.","title":"Vanquish","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"monday","tagline":"Two Americans meet at a party in Athens and fall into bed before they learn each other's names. The summer never ends and the consequences never stop. The fantasy lasts exactly as long as it takes for Monday to arrive.","title":"Monday","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"in-the-earth","tagline":"A scientist treks into the English woods to find a colleague during a pandemic. The forest has other plans, and the people living in it have already surrendered to them. Ben Wheatley turns a few actors and a patch of trees into a strobing fever dream.","title":"In the Earth","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"hope","tagline":"A filmmaker gets a terminal diagnosis two days before Christmas, with a houseful of kids and a marriage that went cold years ago. Maria Sødahl pulls the story from her own brush with death. The result earns its tears instead of demanding them.","title":"Hope","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"gunda","tagline":"Viktor Kossakovsky points his camera at a sow, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, and refuses to say a single word. No narration, no music, no message spelled out. Just animals living, and a filmmaker daring you to keep watching.","title":"Gunda","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"voyagers","tagline":"Thirty kids ship out on an eighty-six-year mission to colonize a distant planet. None of them will live to see it, and someone decides to stop taking the drug that keeps them calm. Turns out a spaceship full of horny teenagers with no rules is exactly as stupid as it sounds.","title":"Voyagers","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-unholy","tagline":"A washed-up reporter digs up a fake miracle in a small New England town and a mute girl starts hearing the Virgin Mary. The Church smells salvation. The movie smells like every possession picture you have already seen.","title":"The Unholy","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-man-who-sold-his-skin","tagline":"Sam Ali is a Syrian refugee who agrees to let a famous artist tattoo a visa across his back so he can finally cross into Europe. The price is that he stops being a man and becomes a painting people pay to see. Freedom arrives, and it comes shrink-wrapped.","title":"The Man Who Sold His Skin","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"shiva-baby","tagline":"A young woman juggling a sugar daddy and a directionless life walks into a shiva and finds both her ex-girlfriend and her benefactor already there. His wife and baby come too. The funeral is for someone else, but the corpse onscreen is her composure.","title":"Shiva Baby","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"godzilla-vs-kong","tagline":"Two titans get a title fight, and the movie knows it. Adam Wingard builds everything around the brawls and treats the humans as transportation between them. The monkey hits hard. The plot does not.","title":"Godzilla vs. Kong","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"nobody","tagline":"Hutch Mansell is a suburban pushover who eats insults and misses the bus. Then a home invasion flips a switch that should have stayed off, and the mild dad turns out to be a man with a body count. Turning the other cheek was always the act.","title":"Nobody","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"bad-trip","tagline":"Chris Carey falls for his high school crush and drags his best friend on a cross-country road trip to win her. The road, the strangers, and the chaos are all real. The marks just do not know they are extras in someone else's love story.","title":"Bad Trip","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-courier","tagline":"A British salesman with no training gets recruited to smuggle Soviet secrets out of Moscow at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The KGB does not extend professional courtesy to amateurs. Benedict Cumberbatch finds out the hard way.","title":"The Courier","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"zack-snyders-justice-league","tagline":"A dead Superman leaves Earth defenseless, so Batman assembles a league of gods to hold the line against an alien invasion. Zack Snyder finally gets his full vision restored, and it is enormous. The vision is the problem.","title":"Zack Snyder's Justice League","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-truffle-hunters","tagline":"Old men hunt the white Alba truffle in the forests of Piedmont, guarding their spots like buried treasure and trusting only their dogs. Buyers want the secret and the harvest. The men would sooner take it to the grave.","title":"The Truffle Hunters","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"raya-and-the-last-dragon","tagline":"A land called Kumandra has spent five hundred years tearing itself apart over the shards of a broken gem, and one warrior hunts the last living dragon to put it back together. The world Disney builds is gorgeous and specific. The lesson it teaches you can see coming from three kingdoms away.","title":"Raya and the Last Dragon","year":2021},{"rating":5,"slug":"quo-vadis-aida","tagline":"A UN translator in Srebrenica spends a few hours trying to use her position to get her husband and two sons inside the safe zone before the Serb army comes for them. She has the documents. She has the access. None of it is enough.","title":"Quo Vadis, Aida?","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"chaos-walking","tagline":"A boy lands on a colony world where every man's thoughts pour out loud as visible Noise, and there are no women left. Then a girl crashes from the sky, the only silent mind on the planet. The setup hands you a great movie. This is not it.","title":"Chaos Walking","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"boogie","tagline":"Alfred Chin can ball, but his parents, his rival, and his first girlfriend all want a piece of him. Eddie Huang crams a coming-of-age story, a romance, and an immigrant family drama into one undersized debut. The voice is real. The movie around it is not finished.","title":"Boogie","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-spongebob-movie-sponge-on-the-run","tagline":"SpongeBob's pet snail Gary gets snatched by a vain sea king, so SpongeBob and Patrick set off for the Lost City of Atlantic City to bring him home. Keanu Reeves shows up as a talking tumbleweed and plays it completely straight. The journey is more interesting than the reason for it.","title":"The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"coming-2-america","tagline":"Prince Akeem returns to Queens to find the bastard son he never knew he had and drag him back to Zamunda. The throne needs a male heir, and the script needs a reason to exist. It finds the first and fakes the second.","title":"Coming 2 America","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"tom-and-jerry","tagline":"A cat and a mouse take their feud to a fancy Manhattan hotel during a celebrity wedding. The animation is hand-drawn over live action, which is the one bold idea here. Then the movie hands the spotlight to the people.","title":"Tom \u0026 Jerry","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-vigil","tagline":"A lapsed Hasidic man takes a one-night job watching over a dead body. The corpse comes with a passenger. He should have stayed in his support group.","title":"The Vigil","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-united-states-vs-billie-holiday","tagline":"Billie Holiday sings a song about lynching, and the federal government spends years trying to cage her for it. Andra Day vanishes into the role and sings every note herself. The performance is electric, but the movie around it never finds the same key.","title":"The United States vs. Billie Holiday","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-father","tagline":"An aging man refuses the caregiver his daughter has hired. His memory is collapsing, and the film locks you inside the wreckage with him. You do not watch dementia here. You get lost in it.","title":"The Father","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"night-of-the-kings","tagline":"A young pickpocket lands in MACA, a prison outside Abidjan that the inmates run themselves. On the night of the red moon, the dying boss names him Roman and orders him to tell a story to the whole cell block. When the story ends, he dies.","title":"Night of the Kings","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"billie-eilish-the-worlds-a-little-blurry","tagline":"Billie Eilish records a debut album in her brother's bedroom and becomes a global pop star at seventeen. R. J. Cutler's camera never leaves her side. The access is total, and the hard questions are nowhere.","title":"Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"silk-road","tagline":"Ross Ulbricht builds the dark web's biggest drug bazaar from a laptop and a libertarian fantasy. A washed-up DEA agent claws onto the case to save his own career. The movie wants to be two stories and commits to neither.","title":"Silk Road","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"i-care-a-lot","tagline":"Marla Grayson is a court-appointed guardian who strips elderly wards of their freedom and drains their assets, all under a judge's signature. She picks a wealthy retiree who looks like the perfect mark. The mark has connections that will make Marla regret the choice.","title":"I Care a Lot","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"flora-and-ulysses","tagline":"A cynical ten-year-old revives a squirrel that comes back with superpowers. It can fly, type poetry, and understand every word she says. The real magic trick is using the rodent to glue a broken family back together.","title":"Flora \u0026 Ulysses","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-world-to-come","tagline":"Two married women on neighboring farms in 1856 fall in love across the fence line and the frozen ground. Abigail keeps a diary, and the diary keeps the secret. The romance is familiar, but the cold and the dread are specific.","title":"The World to Come","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-mauritanian","tagline":"Mohamedou Ould Slahi sits in Guantanamo Bay for years and is never charged with a crime. A defense lawyer fights to free him while a prosecutor builds the case to kill him. The story is damning, but the movie settles for a courtroom drama.","title":"The Mauritanian","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-map-of-tiny-perfect-things","tagline":"Two teenagers wake up to the same day, over and over, and decide to map every fleeting perfect moment in it. The structure has been done to death since Groundhog Day woke up in Punxsutawney. This one knows the loop is a trap, and so do its kids.","title":"The Map of Tiny Perfect Things","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"minari","tagline":"A Korean immigrant family plants a farm in rural Arkansas and bets everything on dirt nobody else wanted. Jacob chases the American dream while his marriage and his savings drain into the ground. The miracle is how small Lee Isaac Chung keeps it.","title":"Minari","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"land","tagline":"A woman loses everything and flees to a Wyoming mountain to live alone with no electricity, no phone, and no plan to survive the winter. A stranger finds her near death and refuses to let her die. Grief gets a postcard backdrop.","title":"Land","year":2021},{"rating":5,"slug":"judas-and-the-black-messiah","tagline":"The FBI recruits a car thief named Bill O'Neal to infiltrate the Illinois Black Panthers and get close to chairman Fred Hampton. He climbs the ranks, earns the trust, and feeds the Bureau everything. The title tells you how it ends.","title":"Judas and the Black Messiah","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"french-exit","tagline":"Michelle Pfeiffer plays a Manhattan widow who has spent her fortune to zero and chooses to blow the rest in Paris rather than economize at home. She brings her grown son, an aging cat that houses her dead husband, and a frozen heart she refuses to thaw. Pfeiffer is electric, and the film keeps falling asleep around her.","title":"French Exit","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"barb-and-star-go-to-vista-del-mar","tagline":"Two inseparable friends from Soft Rock, Nebraska leave their furniture-store jobs and culottes behind for a pastel resort in Florida. There they walk straight into a supervillain's plot to murder the whole town with weaponized mosquitoes. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo built a live-action cartoon and committed to it without blinking.","title":"Barb \u0026 Star Go to Vista Del Mar","year":2021},{"rating":1,"slug":"music","tagline":"A newly sober drug dealer becomes the sole guardian of her nonverbal autistic half-sister. A pop star directs. The result is a vanity project that mistakes a teenager's neurology for a mood board.","title":"Music","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"two-of-us","tagline":"Two retired women have loved each other for decades from across a hallway, hidden from a family that thinks they are just neighbors. They plan to sell up and move to Rome to live in the open. Then one of them can no longer keep the secret, and the closet turns into a cage.","title":"Two of Us","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"little-fish","tagline":"A pandemic deletes human memory the way a hard drive fails. Emma and Jude are newlyweds when the disease starts wiping Jude, and she fights to keep their marriage on record before he forgets her face. The metaphor is enormous and the movie is small and sad.","title":"Little Fish","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"bliss","tagline":"Owen Wilson gets fired, ruins his life, and meets a woman who tells him the world is a simulation and none of it counts. The pitch sells itself as a mind-bender about addiction and denial. Then it explains the magic crystals and the spell breaks.","title":"Bliss","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"rocks","tagline":"A teenage girl comes home to an empty flat and a note from her mother. Now she has a little brother to raise and a secret to keep from everyone who could take him away. The miracle is how much life she squeezes in between the panic.","title":"Rocks","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"true-mothers","tagline":"A married couple adopts a baby boy after years of failed fertility treatment. Six years later a young woman appears at their door, claims to be his birth mother, and asks for money or her son back. Naomi Kawase takes a thriller premise and lets it dissolve into something slower and sadder.","title":"True Mothers","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-little-things","tagline":"A burned-out deputy and a rising detective hunt a serial killer through 1990 Los Angeles. The case is a pretext. The movie is really about the things that get inside a cop and never wash out.","title":"The Little Things","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"saint-maud","tagline":"Maud is a hospice nurse who has found God and decided her terminally ill patient's soul is hers to save. Amanda is a dying ex-dancer who finds the whole thing amusing until she doesn't. Devotion this total has nowhere to go but down.","title":"Saint Maud","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"palmer","tagline":"An ex-con returns to his Louisiana hometown and ends up caring for a neglected neighbor kid who likes dolls and dresses. The bond is genuine and the lead turn is quietly committed. The screenplay just hits every beat you can see coming from the opening reel.","title":"Palmer","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"nomadland","tagline":"Fern loses her job, her town, and her home when one factory closes. She packs a van and drives into the American West to live as a nomad and chase seasonal work. It is a road movie for everyone the economy left on the shoulder.","title":"Nomadland","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"malcolm-and-marie","tagline":"A director and his girlfriend come home from his premiere, and the celebration curdles into an all-night fight about who owns the story he just turned into a movie. Two people who love each other take turns aiming for the soft spots. The performances are real. The screenplay is a grudge.","title":"Malcolm \u0026 Marie","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"dear-comrades","tagline":"Lyuda Semina believes in Stalin, the Party, and the workers' paradise. Then the army opens fire on striking workers in her town and her daughter vanishes into the bodies. The system she worships hands her the bill.","title":"Dear Comrades!","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"beginning","tagline":"A Jehovah's Witness congregation in rural Georgia gets firebombed during a sermon. The film barely cares about who did it. It cares about the wife left behind, and what every man in her life expects her to swallow.","title":"Beginning","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"notturno","tagline":"Gianfranco Rosi spends three years filming ordinary life along the war borders where Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon meet. No dates, no battles, no narration. Just the quiet that violence leaves behind, beautifully shot and impossible to hold onto.","title":"Notturno","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"no-mans-land","tagline":"A retired Texas rancher and his son are mending a fence along the Rio Grande when a panicked night goes wrong and a boy ends up dead. Jackson runs south into the country he was raised to fear. The movie wants to atone for a sin it cannot stop committing.","title":"No Man's Land","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"identifying-features","tagline":"A young man leaves a Mexican village for the United States and never arrives. His mother refuses the official story that he is dead and walks into the country's open wound to find the truth. What she finds is worse than a grave.","title":"Identifying Features","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-marksman","tagline":"A retired Arizona rancher and Marine sniper finds a Mexican boy and his mother at his fence line, running from a cartel. He buries the mother and drives the kid north toward Chicago with killers on his bumper. Liam Neeson has made this drive before, and the road is getting familiar.","title":"The Marksman","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-dig","tagline":"Suffolk, 1939. A dying widow hires a self-taught excavator to open the burial mounds on her estate, and they haul an Anglo-Saxon ship out of the soil as the war closes in. It is a film about what you leave behind, and it has the patience to let that sink in.","title":"The Dig","year":2021},{"rating":4,"slug":"mlk-fbi","tagline":"J. Edgar Hoover decides Martin Luther King Jr. is the most dangerous man in America and turns the full machinery of the FBI against him. Wiretaps, hotel-room bugs, an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself. The film proves the conspiracy was real and signed by the federal government.","title":"MLK/FBI","year":2021},{"rating":2,"slug":"locked-down","tagline":"A divorcing couple rides out the first lockdown in the same house, one firing employees over video calls and the other reciting poetry to no one. Then they decide to rob Harrods. The heist is the excuse. The marriage is the crime scene.","title":"Locked Down","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-white-tiger","tagline":"Balram Halwai is born poor and decides poverty is a cage he can pick the lock on. He charms his way into a job driving for the family that owns his village, then studies them like prey. The servant's grin is the most dangerous thing in the room.","title":"The White Tiger","year":2021},{"rating":3,"slug":"pieces-of-a-woman","tagline":"A home birth goes wrong. A woman loses her newborn daughter and spends the next year refusing to grieve the way everyone around her demands. Vanessa Kirby holds the whole thing together by shutting down.","title":"Pieces of a Woman","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"wonder-woman-1984","tagline":"The year is 1984 and a magic stone grants any wish you want. Diana wishes Steve Trevor back from the dead, and a broke con man wishes to become the stone itself. Everybody gets what they want, and the bill comes due.","title":"Wonder Woman 1984","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-dissident","tagline":"A Saudi journalist walks into a consulate to collect a marriage document and never walks out. Bryan Fogel traces the murder back to a crown prince and the surveillance machine that hunted Khashoggi's friends across continents. The men who ordered it are still running the country.","title":"The Dissident","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"soul","tagline":"Joe Gardner finally lands the jazz gig of his life. Then he falls down a manhole and dies. Pixar spends the next ninety minutes arguing about whether the gig ever mattered.","title":"Soul","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"promising-young-woman","tagline":"Cassie spends her nights pretending to be too drunk to stand, waiting for the nice guy who offers her a ride home to show what he really wants. By day she works a coffee counter and lets her medical-school dropout look like a tragedy. The men keep failing the test, and she keeps score.","title":"Promising Young Woman","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"pinocchio","tagline":"Matteo Garrone strips the Disney varnish off Collodi and returns Pinocchio to its grim Italian roots. A wooden boy lies, wanders, and suffers for it at the hands of con men and worse. This is a fairy tale with the cruelty left in.","title":"Pinocchio","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"one-night-in-miami","tagline":"Cassius Clay wins the heavyweight title and spends the night in a Miami motel room with Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke. Four icons argue about what their fame is actually good for. Regina King turns a single room into a battlefield.","title":"One Night in Miami...","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"news-of-the-world","tagline":"Five years after the Civil War, a former Confederate captain rides across Texas reading newspapers aloud to townsfolk for a dime a head. He takes charge of an orphaned girl raised by the Kiowa and points her toward family she does not remember. Paul Greengrass shoots a Western with the precision of a man who has never made one, and it shows in both directions.","title":"News of the World","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"sylvies-love","tagline":"A struggling singer working in her father's Harlem record shop falls for a saxophonist who takes a summer job behind the counter. Then careers and time pull them apart. Eugene Ashe bets that a sincere, unironic romance can still hold a modern audience, and the bet mostly pays off.","title":"Sylvie's Love","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"monster-hunter","tagline":"Artemis and her unit chase a vanished team into a sandstorm and come out in a world ruled by monsters the size of buildings. Paul W. S. Anderson turns a Capcom game into one long chain of soldiers versus claws. The monsters land. The movie does not.","title":"Monster Hunter","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"hunter-hunter","tagline":"A family lives off the grid in the deep woods, trapping fur and convinced a wolf is hunting their catch. Then a wounded stranger turns up at the edge of their land. The wolf is the least of their problems.","title":"Hunter Hunter","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"greenland","tagline":"An astronomer-killing comet is headed for Earth, and a structural engineer gets a government text telling him his family has been selected for shelter. Then he has to actually get them there. The disaster is the easy part.","title":"Greenland","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"fatale","tagline":"A married attorney has a one-night stand in Vegas, then watches a detective investigate a break-in at his home. She is the woman from the hotel. The trap closes from there.","title":"Fatale","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"wild-mountain-thyme","tagline":"Two Irish farm families share a fence and a lifetime of things left unsaid. Rosemary loves Anthony. He cannot say it back, and the film never figures out why that should take so long.","title":"Wild Mountain Thyme","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"wander-darkly","tagline":"Adrienne survives a car crash, or maybe she does not. The film drops her into a scrambled tour of her own failing relationship and dares her to figure out which memories are real. Sienna Miller and Diego Luna hold it together while the timeline falls apart around them.","title":"Wander Darkly","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-midnight-sky","tagline":"A dying scientist in the Arctic tries to warn a returning spacecraft that Earth is no longer worth coming home to. George Clooney directs himself as a man racing his own mortality across the ice. The end of the world has rarely felt this tired.","title":"The Midnight Sky","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"songbird","tagline":"A mutated COVID-23 locks society indoors for a fourth straight year, and an immune courier races across a sealed Los Angeles to reach the woman he loves through a bolted door. The pandemic is real. The movie treats it as scenery.","title":"Songbird","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"im-your-woman","tagline":"Jean has a nice house, a baby she did not give birth to, and a husband whose job no one names. Then he vanishes, armed men show up, and she is told to run with a bag of cash. It is a gangster movie that keeps the camera on the woman the gangster left behind.","title":"I'm Your Woman","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"farewell-amor","tagline":"Ekwa Msangi reunites an Angolan immigrant with the wife and daughter he left behind seventeen years ago. They share a Brooklyn apartment and almost nothing else. The reunion is the easy part.","title":"Farewell Amor","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-prom","tagline":"Four self-absorbed Broadway stars descend on small-town Indiana to defend a lesbian teen barred from bringing her girlfriend to prom. They are there to fix their public image, not the girl. The cause is real. The movie is a billboard.","title":"The Prom","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"half-brothers","tagline":"A workaholic Mexican aviation executive learns his estranged American half-brother exists, then gets dragged across the border on a scavenger hunt their dying father designed. The two men hate each other on sight. The movie wants you to believe a road trip fixes that in an afternoon.","title":"Half Brothers","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"another-round","tagline":"Four burned-out Danish teachers test a theory that humans are born with a blood alcohol level half a percent too low. They decide to fix the deficit at work, during the school day, in the name of science. The experiment goes exactly as well as you would expect.","title":"Another Round","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"all-my-life","tagline":"Jennifer and Solomon fall in love and start planning a wedding. Then a terminal diagnosis turns the engagement into a race against the clock. The film knows exactly which heartstrings it wants to pull, and it yanks every one of them.","title":"All My Life","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"76-days","tagline":"The pandemic seals Wuhan inside its own hospitals, and the cameras stay in the red zone with the people who cannot leave. No narrator, no experts, no politics. Just the work of keeping strangers alive.","title":"76 Days","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"uncle-frank","tagline":"Frank Bledsoe teaches literature in New York and keeps a whole life hidden from his South Carolina family. His father's death forces a road trip home with his college-age niece and the partner nobody back home knows about. Some closets come with a long driveway.","title":"Uncle Frank","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-croods-a-new-age","tagline":"The Croods, a family of prehistoric cave dwellers, stumble into a walled paradise run by an evolved, smug couple who think they're better. Two clans collide over property lines and parenting. It is loud, it is bright, and it is exactly what you expect.","title":"The Croods: A New Age","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"ma-raineys-black-bottom","tagline":"A blues recording session in 1927 Chicago becomes a pressure cooker over one sweltering afternoon. Four musicians wait in a rehearsal room while their star keeps the white men upstairs waiting. Everyone in this band is fighting for a piece of something, and the band is the one place where that fight has nowhere to go.","title":"Ma Rainey's Black Bottom","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"happiest-season","tagline":"Abby plans to propose to her girlfriend over Christmas. Then she learns Harper never came out to her conservative family. The holiday gets longer.","title":"Happiest Season","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-last-vermeer","tagline":"A Dutch forger sells fake Vermeers to the Nazis and gets charged with collaboration for it. His only defense is proving he is a liar. Guy Pearce has a blast. The movie around him does not.","title":"The Last Vermeer","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"sound-of-metal","tagline":"A metal drummer starts losing his hearing and watches the only life he knows slip out from under him. The film does not treat deafness as a tragedy to be cured. It treats it as a new world he refuses to enter.","title":"Sound of Metal","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"run","tagline":"A teenage girl raised in total isolation by her mother starts to notice that her medications do not match her symptoms. The pills are green when they should not be. What she finds in the pharmacy bag changes everything.","title":"Run","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"collective","tagline":"A nightclub fire kills dozens. Then the survivors start dying in hospitals that should have saved them. A team of sports reporters pulls the thread, and the whole rotten state unravels.","title":"Collective","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"wolfwalkers","tagline":"An English girl in occupied Ireland hunts wolves with her father until she meets a girl who is one. Their friendship sets the wild forest against the walled town that wants it gone. Cartoon Saloon draws the cage and the freedom by hand, and the hand wins.","title":"Wolfwalkers","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-climb","tagline":"Two friends ride bikes up a mountain in France. One of them confesses he has slept with the other's fiancee. The friendship survives. The wedding is a different question.","title":"The Climb","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"mank","tagline":"Herman Mankiewicz lies in a Victorville bed with a broken leg, drinking, dictating the screenplay that becomes Citizen Kane. David Fincher builds a movie about Old Hollywood out of his late father's script. It is a love letter written in acid.","title":"Mank","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"freaky","tagline":"Millie Kessler is a bullied high schooler running from a masked killer called the Butcher. His cursed dagger swaps their bodies instead of ending her life. Now she has 24 hours to switch back, and the only person who can stop a serial killer wearing her face is a serial killer wearing his.","title":"Freaky","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"hillbilly-elegy","tagline":"J.D. Vance gets a law school dinner crisis and flashes back to his Appalachian childhood and his drug-addicted mother. Ron Howard turns a memoir about class and poverty into a parade of slammed doors and screaming matches. The misery is loud and the meaning is nowhere.","title":"Hillbilly Elegy","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"coded-bias","tagline":"An MIT researcher discovers that facial-recognition software cannot see her dark-skinned face until she puts on a white mask. From that one glitch, the film builds a case against the algorithms already deciding who gets a job, a loan, and a place to live. The machines are not neutral. They learned from us.","title":"Coded Bias","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-life-ahead","tagline":"Sophia Loren returns to the screen as Madame Rosa, an aging Holocaust survivor who minds the children of prostitutes in a seaside Italian city. A twelve-year-old Senegalese boy robs her, then ends up living under her roof. Two people the world threw away decide to keep each other.","title":"The Life Ahead","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"let-him-go","tagline":"A grandmother and her retired-sheriff husband leave Montana to bring their grandson back from the family that swallowed him. The Weboys do not give children back. What starts as a custody dispute ends in fire.","title":"Let Him Go","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"spell","tagline":"A high-flying Atlanta lawyer survives a plane crash and wakes up in a stranger's attic, his leg shattered and bound by an old woman who calls herself a healer. She practices hoodoo. He just wants to walk again. The premise has teeth, but the movie keeps pulling its punches.","title":"Spell","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"his-house","tagline":"A South Sudanese couple survives the boat crossing and lands in a crumbling council house on the edge of England. The asylum system tells them to assimilate and be grateful. The thing that followed them across the water has other plans.","title":"His House","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"come-play","tagline":"Oliver is a nonverbal boy with no friends and a monster that lives inside his screens. The creature is lonely too, and the glass is the door it comes through. The scary part is not the monster. It is the device every kid already holds.","title":"Come Play","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-craft-legacy","tagline":"A teenage girl moves to a new town and discovers three classmates have been waiting for a fourth witch to complete their coven. They induct her, bend reality, and start remaking the boys around them. The premise has teeth. The movie files them down.","title":"The Craft: Legacy","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"city-hall","tagline":"Frederick Wiseman points his camera at the government of Boston and lets it run. Permit hearings, parking enforcement, a Thanksgiving turkey giveaway, a marijuana dispensary zoning fight. This is what democracy actually looks like when nobody is performing for a vote.","title":"City Hall","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-empty-man","tagline":"A retired cop takes a missing-persons case in suburban Missouri and finds a teenage urban legend waiting at the end of it. Blow into a bottle on a bridge for three nights and the Empty Man hears you. The bottle turns out to be the least of his problems.","title":"The Empty Man","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"over-the-moon","tagline":"A grieving girl builds a rocket to the moon to prove a goddess of lost love is real. What she finds up there is a neon pop diva stuck in the same grief she is running from. The movie has a real heart buried under a scavenger hunt it did not need.","title":"Over the Moon","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"borat-subsequent-moviefilm","tagline":"Borat returns to America to deliver a bribe and ends up offering his teenage daughter instead. The disguise still works on real people who have no idea they are in a movie. The joke is no longer Borat. The joke is the country.","title":"Borat Subsequent Moviefilm","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"after-we-collided","tagline":"Tessa and Hardin break up, then circle each other through parties, jealousy, and grand gestures that pass for passion. The film mistakes a man who reads your texts and explodes for romance. It wants you to swoon at the thing a restraining order is built to stop.","title":"After We Collided","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"roald-dahls-the-witches","tagline":"A boy and his grandmother check into a seaside hotel that happens to be hosting a convention of child-hating witches led by Anne Hathaway in full hiss. The premise is pure Roald Dahl menace. The movie sands every sharp edge off it.","title":"Roald Dahl's The Witches","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-kid-detective","tagline":"Abe Applebaum is the most famous kid detective his small town has ever produced. Two decades later he is thirty-two, drinking through the afternoon, and still running the same sad office his parents pay for. Then a real murder walks in the door.","title":"The Kid Detective","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"martin-eden","tagline":"Martin Eden is a self-taught sailor who decides to become a writer to win a bourgeois woman and the class she was born into. Pietro Marcello transplants Jack London from California to Naples and lets the ambition rot from the inside. The dream costs more than the man can ever pay.","title":"Martin Eden","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"love-and-monsters","tagline":"Giant monsters have inherited the Earth and Joel Dawson has spent seven years hiding from them in a bunker. Then he hears his old girlfriend's voice on the radio and decides to walk eighty-five miles of killing ground to find her. Love makes you stupid, and stupid is how you meet a crab the size of a house.","title":"Love and Monsters","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"honest-thief","tagline":"A retired bank robber decides to come clean for the woman he loves. The FBI agents he confesses to would rather keep the money than close the case. Liam Neeson punches his way through another one of these, and the autopilot is showing.","title":"Honest Thief","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"alone","tagline":"A pandemic turns the population into raging zombies and traps a slacker alone in his apartment. He has no food, no plan, and a dwindling phone battery. The siege is real. The movie is not.","title":"Alone","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"totally-under-control","tagline":"Alex Gibney builds a forensic timeline of the early American pandemic response while the pandemic is still killing people. The witnesses worked inside the system as it failed. They saw the crash coming and nobody touched the brakes.","title":"Totally Under Control","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"nocturne","tagline":"A driven music student finds a notebook that belonged to a dead classmate, and her piano playing starts to improve overnight. The price is her sister, her sanity, and maybe her soul. Talent this sudden always comes with a bill.","title":"Nocturne","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"evil-eye","tagline":"A mother becomes convinced that her daughter's perfect new boyfriend is the reincarnation of the man who once tried to kill her. She might be paranoid. She might be right. The movie cannot decide which possibility is scarier, and that indecision is the whole problem.","title":"Evil Eye","year":2020},{"rating":5,"slug":"time","tagline":"A wife spends two decades fighting to free her husband from a sixty-year prison sentence. She films herself the entire time. The result is less a story about a crime than a record of the years a system steals.","title":"Time","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-lie","tagline":"A teenage girl tells her parents she pushed her best friend off a bridge. They decide to protect her instead of calling the police. Every choice they make to cover it up digs the hole deeper, and the film mistakes that hole for suspense.","title":"The Lie","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"black-box","tagline":"A man wakes from a car crash with no memory of his wife, his job, or his own daughter. A neurologist offers to hypnotize him back to himself, and something is waiting in the dark behind his eyes. The premise has teeth, even when the twist shows its hand early.","title":"Black Box","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet","tagline":"David Attenborough has spent a lifetime filming the natural world. Now he sits down to deliver his witness statement on what humanity destroyed while he watched. The diagnosis is devastating. The cure is a TED talk.","title":"David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"vampires-vs-the-bronx","tagline":"Three Bronx kids notice their neighborhood vanishing one bodega at a time. The new buyers smile too much, avoid daylight, and want everyone out. Turns out gentrification has teeth.","title":"Vampires vs. the Bronx","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-forty-year-old-version","tagline":"Radha is a Harlem playwright who got named a promising new voice before thirty and has produced nothing since. Approaching forty, she decides to reinvent herself as a rapper. Radha Blank wrote it, directed it, and stars in it, and she makes starting over look like the only honest option left.","title":"The Forty-Year-Old Version","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"spontaneous","tagline":"High school seniors start spontaneously exploding into clouds of blood. No cause, no warning, no cure. Brian Duffield turns a teen-massacre premise into the most clear-eyed movie about grief in years.","title":"Spontaneous","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"possessor","tagline":"A corporate assassin hijacks other people's bodies to carry out her kills, then walks away clean while the host takes the fall. Tasya Vos has done it so many times that her own identity is starting to slip. Brandon Cronenberg makes a body-horror film about losing yourself one job at a time.","title":"Possessor","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"on-the-rocks","tagline":"A successful entrepreneur suspects her husband is cheating. Her charming, exasperating father insists on investigating, and turns the whole thing into a martini-fueled stakeout across Manhattan. The mystery is a pretext. The real subject is a daughter who never stopped waiting for her father to take her seriously.","title":"On the Rocks","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"dick-johnson-is-dead","tagline":"Kirsten Johnson's father is dying slowly. So she kills him over and over on camera, with stunt doubles and fake blood, to rehearse the loss she cannot stop. It is the most loving thing a daughter has ever filmed.","title":"Dick Johnson Is Dead","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-glorias","tagline":"Julie Taymor turns Gloria Steinem's memoir into a four-actress, magic-bus odyssey through one woman's life on the road. Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander split the title role across the decades. The ambition is real. The focus is not.","title":"The Glorias","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-trial-of-the-chicago-7","tagline":"Seven men go on trial for crossing state lines to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The government wants a conviction. Aaron Sorkin wants a standing ovation, and he engineers one whether the history earns it or not.","title":"The Trial of the Chicago 7","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-last-shift","tagline":"Stanley has worked the overnight shift at a fast-food joint in Michigan for decades. Now he is training his replacement, a young Black writer on probation, before he retires to Florida. The film wants to be about both men. It only ever belongs to one.","title":"The Last Shift","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"kajillionaire","tagline":"Old Dolio Dyne has spent twenty-six years as the third member of her parents' grifting operation. A charming stranger joins the crew and accidentally shows her what affection looks like. Miranda July turns a small-time heist movie into the story of a woman robbed of love her entire life.","title":"Kajillionaire","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-way-i-see-it","tagline":"Pete Souza spends eight years a few feet from Barack Obama with a camera. Dawn Porter turns his archive into a feature-length argument that the country lost something it cannot get back. The photographs are the evidence and the eulogy.","title":"The Way I See It","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-nest","tagline":"A British broker moves his American family into a Surrey manor he cannot afford, chasing a deal that will fix everything. The deal never comes. Turns out the haunted house was the marriage all along.","title":"The Nest","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"antebellum","tagline":"A successful Black author wakes up on a Civil War-era plantation, enslaved, brutalized, and unable to escape. The film promises a horror story built on a twist. The twist is the only idea it has.","title":"Antebellum","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-secrets-we-keep","tagline":"A Romanian immigrant in postwar America hears a whistle and a laugh and becomes certain her new neighbor is the Nazi who assaulted her and killed her sister. So she knocks him out and chains him in the basement. The question is whether she grabbed the right man, and the movie is too eager to answer it.","title":"The Secrets We Keep","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-broken-hearts-gallery","tagline":"Lucy keeps everything from her exes. A ticket stub, a tie, a tooth. When her latest breakup leaves her sleeping in a stranger's car, she turns her hoarding into a gallery where other people dump their heartbreak too.","title":"The Broken Hearts Gallery","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"rent-a-pal","tagline":"David is a lonely man in 1990 who cares for his ailing mother and pays a video service to find him a wife. Then he finds a discarded VHS tape of a man named Andy who promises to be his friend. The tape talks back, and David starts to listen.","title":"Rent-A-Pal","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-social-dilemma","tagline":"The people who built the engagement machines at Google and Facebook sit down to explain how it works. They engineered your compulsion on purpose and sold your attention by the pound. The confession is more convincing than the dramatization wrapped around it.","title":"The Social Dilemma","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"all-in-the-fight-for-democracy","tagline":"Stacey Abrams loses a governor's race to a system designed to make her lose. The film follows the wreckage back two hundred years to the same hands building the same machine. It is a history lesson with a body count, and the body is American democracy.","title":"All In: The Fight for Democracy","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"my-octopus-teacher","tagline":"A burned-out filmmaker starts free-diving in a freezing South African kelp forest and befriends an octopus. It sounds like a setup for self-help nonsense. It turns out to be something stranger and harder to shake.","title":"My Octopus Teacher","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"mulan","tagline":"A young woman cuts her hair, straps on her father's armor, and rides off to war pretending to be a man. Niki Caro trades the cartoon's songs for sweeping wuxia battles and golden vistas. The pictures are gorgeous. The person inside the armor never shows up.","title":"Mulan","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"guest-house","tagline":"Randy Cockfield gets out of prison, discovers his best friend sold the family home, and decides the guest house is his now. He throws parties, wrecks the place, and dares the new owners to evict him. The squatter outstays his welcome, and so does the movie.","title":"Guest House","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"feels-good-man","tagline":"Matt Furie draws a mellow cartoon frog for a comic about post-college slackers. The internet turns it into a hate symbol and a court case. Feels Good Man watches the artist try to reclaim something that stopped being his the moment it went viral.","title":"Feels Good Man","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"tenet","tagline":"A nameless operative learns that bullets can fall back into the gun. He gets pulled into a war fought across the timeline against an oligarch who can erase the future. The plot is impossible to follow on a first watch, and Nolan dares you to feel it instead.","title":"Tenet","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-mole-agent","tagline":"An 83-year-old widower goes undercover in a Chilean nursing home to catch the staff abusing a resident. He turns out to be a terrible spy and an excellent listener. The case he cracks is the one nobody asked him to investigate.","title":"The Mole Agent","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-personal-history-of-david-copperfield","tagline":"Armando Iannucci turns Dickens loose and lets Dev Patel sprint through a life that keeps reinventing itself. Orphans, swindlers, and eccentrics pile up around him. The result is a Victorian novel that moves like it just had three espressos.","title":"The Personal History of David Copperfield","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-new-mutants","tagline":"Five teenage mutants wake up locked in a hospital that doubles as a cage. Their powers are out of control and something in the building wants them dead. The premise is a horror movie. The result is a franchise placeholder that forgot to be scary.","title":"The New Mutants","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"rogue","tagline":"Megan Fox leads a mercenary squad on a hostage rescue across the South African bush. The mission collapses and the rescuers become the hunted. Then the lions show up, and the people turn out to be the easy part.","title":"Rogue","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"im-thinking-of-ending-things","tagline":"A young woman drives through a snowstorm to meet her boyfriend's parents at a remote farmhouse. She is thinking of ending things. Charlie Kaufman makes you sit inside that thought until you forget whose thought it is.","title":"I'm Thinking of Ending Things","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"centigrade","tagline":"A couple wakes up in their SUV, buried alive under a Norwegian avalanche, with no signal and a baby on the way. The walls are tight, the air is thin, and the marriage is already cracked. The premise traps you. The movie just leaves you stuck.","title":"Centigrade","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"bill-and-ted-face-the-music","tagline":"Bill and Ted are middle-aged and the song that unites the universe still doesn't exist. Now reality is collapsing and they have a few hours to write it. Naturally, they decide to steal it from their future selves instead.","title":"Bill \u0026 Ted Face the Music","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"tesla","tagline":"Ethan Hawke plays Nikola Tesla as a man too far inside his own head to win the war he started. Michael Almereyda builds a biopic that keeps tripping its own period costume on roller skates and smartphones. The result is a brilliant man rendered as a closed door.","title":"Tesla","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"chemical-hearts","tagline":"Henry Page is seventeen and has never had anything worth writing about. Then Grace Town transfers in with a cane and a grief she will not name, and Henry decides her pain is exactly the material he has been waiting for. He wants a muse. She is a person.","title":"Chemical Hearts","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"boys-state","tagline":"A thousand Texas teenage boys gather to build a mock government from scratch in a single week. They split into two parties, run campaigns, and fight for the governorship. The result is the cleanest X-ray of American politics you will ever see.","title":"Boys State","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-thousand-cuts","tagline":"Maria Ressa runs a newsroom that won't print the lies Duterte's drug war is built on. The state answers with arrest warrants and a troll army built to drown her. The cuts are small, legal, and meant to bleed a free press to death.","title":"A Thousand Cuts","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"la-llorona","tagline":"Jayro Bustamante takes the weeping-woman legend and aims it at a Guatemalan general who ordered the slaughter of the Maya. A new servant named Alma arrives in his house as the dead refuse to stay quiet. The myth was always about guilt, and Bustamante names the guilty.","title":"La Llorona","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-secret-dare-to-dream","tagline":"A widowed mother of three meets a mysterious handyman who believes the universe gives you what you think about. He fixes her roof and rewires her optimism. The Secret turns a self-help bestseller into a feature-length affirmation.","title":"The Secret: Dare to Dream","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"summerland","tagline":"A reclusive writer on the wartime Kent coast gets saddled with an evacuee boy and a heart she would rather keep frozen. The folklore she studies turns out to be the grief she has buried. The coastline does more work than the screenplay.","title":"Summerland","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"she-dies-tomorrow","tagline":"A woman wakes up certain she will die tomorrow. The certainty is contagious. Everyone she tells catches it like a cold, and the dread spreads through her friends until the whole movie is sick with it.","title":"She Dies Tomorrow","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"calm-with-horses","tagline":"Douglas \"Arm\" Armstrong is an ex-boxer turned enforcer for a rural Irish crime family. He is loyal to the wrong people and gentle with the wrong people, and the two cannot coexist forever. The film asks what a violent man owes the people he loves, and answers in blood.","title":"Calm with Horses","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-rental","tagline":"Two couples rent a beautiful coastal house for a weekend getaway. The host gives them a creepy feeling, the cell service drops out, and the secrets they brought with them start to surface. By the time they figure out the real threat, paranoia has already done most of the work.","title":"The Rental","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-painted-bird","tagline":"A boy sent to the countryside to survive the Holocaust loses his parents and wanders alone through a landscape of peasants who decide he is a demon. Every village he reaches finds a new way to brutalize him. It is three hours of unbroken cruelty, shot in beautiful black and white, and it never once lets you breathe.","title":"The Painted Bird","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"palm-springs","tagline":"A wedding guest wakes up on the same November day over and over. Then a stranger gets stuck in the loop with him. Eternity is more bearable when someone else is trapped in it too.","title":"Palm Springs","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"bloody-nose-empty-pockets","tagline":"A Las Vegas dive bar pours its last drinks while the regulars drink it dry. Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross shoot a fiction like a documentary and dare you to tell the difference. The bar is fake. The drunks are not.","title":"Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"greyhound","tagline":"A first-time captain leads a convoy across the North Atlantic into the Black Pit, the dead zone where the U-boats wait and no aircraft can reach. Tom Hanks spends two days on the bridge fighting an enemy he can barely see. The tactics are gripping. The man giving the orders stays a stranger.","title":"Greyhound","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"mucho-mucho-amor-the-legend-of-walter-mercado","tagline":"Walter Mercado wore capes that could pay a mortgage and beamed astrology into millions of Latino homes for decades. Then he vanished. This documentary tracks down the icon in his final years and asks what happened to the man inside the sequins.","title":"Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"relic","tagline":"An elderly woman vanishes from her crumbling house. When she returns, something is wrong with her, and something is wrong with the walls. Natalie Erika James makes a horror film about dementia where the monster is the disease.","title":"Relic","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"john-lewis-good-trouble","tagline":"John Lewis spends a lifetime getting arrested on purpose and calls it good trouble. Dawn Porter follows the civil-rights icon as the voting fight he bled for in 1965 comes back to court. The film loves him too much to challenge him.","title":"John Lewis: Good Trouble","year":2020},{"rating":5,"slug":"hamilton","tagline":"Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a founding father's life into hip-hop and casts actors of color as the white men who built America. Thomas Kail films the original Broadway production and drags the camera up onto the stage. It does not film the show so much as catch it alive.","title":"Hamilton","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"welcome-to-chechnya","tagline":"In Chechnya, the government runs a campaign to round up, torture, and disappear gay men. A small group of activists smuggles the survivors out before the police or their own families can kill them. The camera follows people who cannot afford to be seen.","title":"Welcome to Chechnya","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"my-spy","tagline":"A hulking CIA operative blows an operation and gets stuck on surveillance duty in a Chicago apartment. The nine-year-old he is supposed to watch catches him on camera and blackmails him into spy lessons. You have seen this movie. You have seen it better.","title":"My Spy","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"irresistible","tagline":"A burned-out Democratic strategist sees a video of a plainspoken Wisconsin farmer defending immigrants and decides he is the future of the party. He hauls a flood of consultant cash into a tiny mayor's race to prove it. The point is that this is grotesque, and the film agrees so loudly it forgets to be funny.","title":"Irresistible","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"eurovision-song-contest-the-story-of-fire-saga","tagline":"Two Icelanders from a fishing village chase a lifelong dream of winning the Eurovision Song Contest. Will Ferrell sulks behind a fake accent while Rachel McAdams sings her heart out. The songs believe in the dream more than the comedy does.","title":"Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"athlete-a","tagline":"A teenage gymnast reports a serial abuser to USA Gymnastics, and the people sworn to protect her bury it to protect the brand. A reporting team at the Indianapolis Star pulls the thread until the whole machine comes apart. The girls were never the product. The medals were.","title":"Athlete A","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"miss-juneteenth","tagline":"Turquoise Jones won Miss Juneteenth years ago and it bought her nothing. Now she spends money she does not have to put the same crown on her teenage daughter. She is selling a dream she already knows the price of.","title":"Miss Juneteenth","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"disclosure-trans-lives-on-screen","tagline":"Sam Feder hands the camera to trans actors, historians, and filmmakers and asks them to watch a century of Hollywood depicting people like them. Laverne Cox anchors it. The footage does the indicting.","title":"Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"babyteeth","tagline":"A terminally ill teenager falls hard for a twitchy small-time drug dealer her parents would never let through the door. Her mother medicates, her father prescribes, and the whole family pretends control is still on the table. Shannon Murphy takes the dying-girl movie and refuses to let it behave.","title":"Babyteeth","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"7500","tagline":"A co-pilot seals the cockpit door when hijackers rush the plane. Protocol says he keeps it shut no matter who is screaming on the other side. The premise is a vise, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt sweats through every minute of it.","title":"7500","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"you-should-have-left","tagline":"An older man, a younger wife, and a quiet daughter take a modernist rental in the Welsh hills that does not measure right. The walls run longer inside than out, the hallways loop, and the house knows exactly what Theo did. The movie just doesn't trust you to be scared by it.","title":"You Should Have Left","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-king-of-staten-island","tagline":"Scott Carlin is twenty-four and going nowhere on Staten Island. He smokes weed, gives terrible tattoos, and still grieves the firefighter father who died when he was a kid. Then his mother starts dating a firefighter, and the grief stops being theoretical.","title":"The King of Staten Island","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"da-5-bloods","tagline":"Four Black Vietnam veterans go back to the country that nearly killed them, chasing the bones of a lost brother and a crate of buried gold. Spike Lee uses the heist to expose the bigger theft. America sent these men to die for a freedom it never handed them.","title":"Da 5 Bloods","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"artemis-fowl","tagline":"A twelve-year-old criminal mastermind discovers that fairies are real and kidnaps one to ransom his missing father. Kenneth Branagh adapts a beloved book series into a digital blur of exposition and weightless action. The film mistakes plot for story.","title":"Artemis Fowl","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"think-like-a-dog","tagline":"A twelve-year-old inventor builds a gadget that lets him hear his dog's thoughts. His parents are quietly splitting up, so naturally the dog becomes the family therapist. The premise writes the lesson before the kid plugs anything in.","title":"Think Like a Dog","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"shirley","tagline":"A young couple moves in with the famous horror writer Shirley Jackson and her domineering husband. What starts as a guest arrangement turns into a psychological experiment with no clear test subject. The house has rules, and the rules are designed to break you.","title":"Shirley","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"mighty-oak","tagline":"A band manager loses her teenage guitarist son in a crash. Years later she decides a ten-year-old guitar prodigy carries his soul and rebuilds the band around the kid. The movie thinks this is heartwarming.","title":"Mighty Oak","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-high-note","tagline":"A burned-out music legend coasts on greatness tours and her overqualified assistant wants to produce. The assistant is right about the music and wrong about her place. The movie likes everyone too much to let that hurt.","title":"The High Note","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"on-the-record","tagline":"Drew Dixon was a rising music executive at Def Jam until Russell Simmons assaulted her and her career evaporated. Decades later, she has to decide whether to break the silence that protects powerful men. The film knows exactly what that silence costs.","title":"On the Record","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"im-no-longer-here","tagline":"Ulises and his crew slow cumbia records to a crawl and dance to the wreckage in baggy clothes and towering sculpted hair. Then cartel violence runs him out of Monterrey and dumps him in Queens, where nobody has ever heard the music that made him who he is. Fernando Frías de la Parra builds a quiet elegy for a subculture nobody was watching disappear.","title":"I'm No Longer Here","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-painter-and-the-thief","tagline":"Someone steals two of Barbora Kysilkova's paintings off a gallery wall. She tracks down the thief and asks to paint him. What starts as forgiveness becomes an obsession that runs in both directions.","title":"The Painter and the Thief","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-lovebirds","tagline":"A couple on the brink of breaking up runs over a man on a bicycle and lands in the middle of a murder. They spend one frantic night trying to clear their names before the police pin it on them. The plot is an excuse to watch two funny people argue.","title":"The Lovebirds","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"survive-the-night","tagline":"A disgraced surgeon and his retired-sheriff father settle into a quiet night at the family ranch. Two wounded brothers force their way in and demand the doctor save the one bleeding out on the kitchen table. The hostages have more conviction than the movie does.","title":"Survive the Night","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"body-cam","tagline":"A traffic stop ends in death and the dashboard footage shows something that cannot exist. Renee works the night shift in a department that would rather she stop asking questions. The dead do not file complaints, but they do leave evidence.","title":"Body Cam","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"scoob","tagline":"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.","title":"Scoob!","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"valley-girl","tagline":"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.","title":"Valley Girl","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"arkansas","tagline":"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.","title":"Arkansas","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-wretched","tagline":"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.","title":"The Wretched","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"beastie-boys-story","tagline":"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.","title":"Beastie Boys Story","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"trolls-world-tour","tagline":"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.","title":"Trolls World Tour","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"resistance","tagline":"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.","title":"Resistance","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"crip-camp-a-disability-revolution","tagline":"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.","title":"Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"deerskin","tagline":"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.","title":"Deerskin","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-roads-not-taken","tagline":"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.","title":"The Roads Not Taken","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-hunt","tagline":"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.","title":"The Hunt","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"never-rarely-sometimes-always","tagline":"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.","title":"Never Rarely Sometimes Always","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"i-still-believe","tagline":"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.","title":"I Still Believe","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"bloodshot","tagline":"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.","title":"Bloodshot","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-wild-goose-lake","tagline":"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.","title":"The Wild Goose Lake","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-way-back","tagline":"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.","title":"The Way Back","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-burnt-orange-heresy","tagline":"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.","title":"The Burnt Orange Heresy","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"swallow","tagline":"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.","title":"Swallow","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"onward","tagline":"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.","title":"Onward","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"first-cow","tagline":"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.","title":"First Cow","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"bacurau","tagline":"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.","title":"Bacurau","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"wendy","tagline":"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.","title":"Wendy","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-whistlers","tagline":"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.","title":"The Whistlers","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-invisible-man","tagline":"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.","title":"The Invisible Man","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"vitalina-varela","tagline":"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.","title":"Vitalina Varela","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-call-of-the-wild","tagline":"Harrison Ford goes north to the Yukon and finds a dog. The dog is a computer. The wilderness is a hard drive.","title":"The Call of the Wild","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"emma","tagline":"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.","title":"Emma.","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"brahms-the-boy-ii","tagline":"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.","title":"Brahms: The Boy II","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"corpus-christi","tagline":"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.","title":"Corpus Christi","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-photograph","tagline":"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.","title":"The Photograph","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"sonic-the-hedgehog","tagline":"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.","title":"Sonic the Hedgehog","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"portrait-of-a-lady-on-fire","tagline":"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.","title":"Portrait of a Lady on Fire","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"fantasy-island","tagline":"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.","title":"Fantasy Island","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"downhill","tagline":"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.","title":"Downhill","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-shaun-the-sheep-movie-farmageddon","tagline":"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.","title":"A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"the-lodge","tagline":"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.","title":"The Lodge","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"birds-of-prey-and-the-fantabulous-emancipation-of-one-harley-quinn","tagline":"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.","title":"Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"and-then-we-danced","tagline":"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.","title":"And Then We Danced","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-rhythm-section","tagline":"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.","title":"The Rhythm Section","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"the-assistant","tagline":"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.","title":"The Assistant","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"gretel-and-hansel","tagline":"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.","title":"Gretel \u0026 Hansel","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"beanpole","tagline":"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.","title":"Beanpole","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"the-turning","tagline":"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.","title":"The Turning","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-last-full-measure","tagline":"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.","title":"The Last Full Measure","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-gentlemen","tagline":"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.","title":"The Gentlemen","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"a-sun","tagline":"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.","title":"A Sun","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"dolittle","tagline":"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.","title":"Dolittle","year":2020},{"rating":3,"slug":"bad-boys-for-life","tagline":"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.","title":"Bad Boys for Life","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"underwater","tagline":"A drilling crew at the bottom of the Mariana Trench feels the floor crack open. The water comes in, and so does something living in the dark. The premise is a haunted house with eleven kilometers of ocean for a ceiling.","title":"Underwater","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"three-christs","tagline":"A psychologist gathers three asylum patients who each believe they are Jesus Christ and puts them in a room together. His theory is that three messiahs cannot survive looking each other in the eye. The premise is a knife, and the movie keeps holding it by the blade.","title":"Three Christs","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"like-a-boss","tagline":"Two best friends run a cosmetics company that is drowning in debt, and a beauty mogul offers to bail them out while quietly plotting to tear them apart. The cast can do anything. The movie asks them to do nothing.","title":"Like a Boss","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"les-miserables","tagline":"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.","title":"Les Misérables","year":2020},{"rating":1,"slug":"inherit-the-viper","tagline":"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.","title":"Inherit the Viper","year":2020},{"rating":2,"slug":"the-grudge","tagline":"A cursed house collects the dead across years, families, and detectives, and the curse spreads to anyone who steps inside. Andrea Riseborough leads a loaded cast straight into the rot. The house takes everyone and the movie keeps nothing.","title":"The Grudge","year":2020},{"rating":4,"slug":"better-days","tagline":"A quiet, bullied student preparing for China's brutal college entrance exam crosses paths with a young street thug. He becomes the only person who protects her. Their alliance forms in the gap that adults and institutions refuse to fill.","title":"Better Days","year":2019}]