4-Stars on Dan Heskett

Toy Story 5

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

102 min | G | June 19, 2026 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

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.

Masters of the Universe

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

141 min | PG-13 | June 5, 2026 | Amazon MGM Studios

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.

Is God Is

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

99 min | R | May 15, 2026 | Amazon

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.

The Sheep Detectives

Fri, 08 May 2026 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

109 min | PG | May 8, 2026 | Amazon MGM Studios

Hugh Jackman, a flock of sheep, and a murder. Craig Mazin writes it like it matters, which is why it works.

The Drama

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

105 min | R | April 3, 2026 | A24

A confession turns a love story into a controlled burn that nobody walks away from clean.

Hoppers

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

105 min | PG | March 6, 2026 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Pixar makes an original movie again. The premise is ridiculous. It works.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

134 min | R | February 13, 2026 | Briarcliff Entertainment

Gore Verbinski goes full throttle on AI paranoia and gets most of it right. Pacing stumbles but the vision holds.

Wuthering Heights

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

135 min | R | February 13, 2026 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Crime 101

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

140 min | R | February 13, 2026 | Amazon MGM Studios

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.

Hamnet

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

126 min | PG-13 | November 26, 2025 | Focus Features

A grief story that earns every tear without manipulating you into them. The rare prestige period piece that trusts its audience.

Song Sung Blue

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

132 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2025 | Focus Features

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.

Is This Thing On?

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

121 min | R | December 19, 2025 | Searchlight Pictures

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.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 18:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

96 min | PG | December 19, 2025 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

198 min | PG-13 | December 19, 2025 | 20th Century Studios

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.

The Housemaid

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

131 min | R | December 19, 2025 | Lionsgate

A domestic thriller that actually earns its twist. Amanda Seyfried is the reason to show up.

The Secret Agent

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

161 min | R | November 26, 2025 | Neon

Brazil’s military dictatorship gets the thriller treatment it deserves. The parallels to the present are not subtle. They don’t need to be.

Eternity

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

114 min | PG-13 | November 26, 2025 | Focus Features

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.

Zootopia 2

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

108 min | PG | November 26, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures

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.

Train Dreams

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

102 min | PG-13 | November 7, 2025 | Netflix

Denis Johnson’s novella gets the adaptation it deserves. Edgerton finally gets the role he deserves. Everybody wins.

Predator: Badlands

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

107 min | PG-13 | November 7, 2025 | 20th Century Studios

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.

Nuremberg

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

148 min | PG-13 | November 7, 2025 | Sony Pictures Classics

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.

Bugonia

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

119 min | R | October 24, 2025 | Focus Features

Lanthimos and Stone do their weird thing again. It works. Oscar bait, sure, but the kind that actually earns it.

Frankenstein

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

132 min | PG-13 | October 17, 2025 | Netflix

Del Toro finally makes his Frankenstein and it’s gorgeous. Too bad most people will watch it on a phone.

Black Phone 2

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

114 min | R | October 17, 2025 | Universal Pictures

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.

Good Fortune

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

108 min | PG-13 | October 17, 2025 | Netflix

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.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 19:30:00 +0000

★★★★☆

125 min | PG | September 12, 2025 | Focus Features

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.

Nobody 2

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

93 min | R | August 15, 2025 | Universal Pictures

Bob Odenkirk returns as Hutch Mansell on vacation with his family. Violence finds him anyway. Timo Tjahjanto directs with brutal efficiency.

Freakier Friday

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

98 min | PG | August 8, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures

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.

The Naked Gun

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 19:30:00 +0000

★★★★☆

85 min | PG-13 | August 1, 2025 | Paramount Pictures

Akiva Schaffer reboots Police Squad with Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr. The deadpan absurdity translates perfectly. This is what comedy reboots should be.

The Bad Guys 2

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

104 min | PG | August 1, 2025 | DreamWorks Animation

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.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

146 min | PG-13 | July 25, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures

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.

Eddington

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

185 min | R | July 18, 2025 | A24

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.

Superman

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

129 min | PG-13 | July 11, 2025 | Warner Bros. Pictures

James Gunn reboots Superman with sincerity and optimism. David Corenswet embodies the character without irony or apology. This is what superhero films should be.

28 Years Later

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

119 min | R | June 20, 2025 | Sony Pictures Releasing

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.

Elio

Sun, 22 Jun 2025 18:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

101 min | PG | June 20, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures

Pixar sends a space-obsessed misfit into the cosmos and remembers what made their early films special. This is heartfelt without being manipulative.

Materialists

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:30:00 +0000

★★★★☆

116 min | R | June 13, 2025 | A24

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.

How to Train Your Dragon

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

124 min | PG | June 13, 2025 | Universal Pictures

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.

Ballerina

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

124 min | R | June 6, 2025 | Lionsgate

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.

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

Sun, 25 May 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

170 min | PG-13 | May 23, 2025 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Lilo & Stitch

Sun, 25 May 2025 18:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

112 min | PG | May 23, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures

Dean Fleischer Camp remakes Lilo & Stitch with live actors and a CGI alien. The film captures the heart of the original without trying to improve what already worked.

The Accountant 2

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

132 min | R | April 25, 2025 | Amazon MGM Studios

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.

Sinners

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

138 min | R | April 18, 2025 | Warner Bros.

Ryan Coogler invents a new genre and dares you to look away. You won’t.

The Legend of Ochi

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 19:30:00 +0000

★★★★☆

99 min | PG | April 18, 2025 | A24

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.

Black Bag

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 20:30:00 +0000

★★★★☆

93 min | R | March 14, 2025 | Focus Features

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.

Last Breath

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:30:00 +0000

★★★★☆

93 min | PG-13 | February 28, 2025 | Peacock

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.

The Monkey

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

98 min | R | February 21, 2025 | Neon

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.

Paddington in Peru

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 15:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

106 min | PG | February 14, 2025 | Sony Pictures Releasing

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.

Heart Eyes

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 21:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

97 min | R | February 7, 2025 | Sony Pictures Releasing

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.

Bring Them Down

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

105 min | R | February 7, 2025 | Mubi

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.

Dog Man

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 15:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

89 min | PG | January 31, 2025 | DreamWorks Animation

DreamWorks adapts Dav Pilkey’s graphic novel with genuine respect for the source material and young audiences. Smart, fast, and surprisingly heartfelt.

Better Man

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

134 min | R | January 10, 2025 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Den of Thieves: Pantera

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

144 min | R | January 10, 2025 | Lionsgate

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.

A Complete Unknown

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

141 min | R | December 25, 2024 | Searchlight Pictures

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.

Babygirl

Wed, 25 Dec 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

114 min | R | December 25, 2024 | A24

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.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

110 min | PG | December 20, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Moana 2

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

100 min | PG | November 27, 2024 | Walt Disney Pictures

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.

Gladiator II

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

148 min | R | November 22, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Wicked

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

160 min | PG | November 22, 2024 | Universal Pictures

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.

Heretic

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

110 min | PG-13 | November 8, 2024 | A24

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.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

99 min | PG | November 8, 2024 | Lionsgate

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.

Conclave

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

120 min | PG | October 25, 2024 | Focus Features

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.

Smile 2

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

127 min | R | October 18, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

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.

We Live in Time

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

107 min | R | October 18, 2024 | A24

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.

Saturday Night

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

109 min | R | October 11, 2024 | Sony Pictures

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.

Terrifier 3

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

125 min | Unrated | October 11, 2024 | Cineverse

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.

The Apprentice

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

120 min | R | October 11, 2024 | Briarcliff Entertainment

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.

The Substance

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

140 min | R | September 20, 2024 | Mubi

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.

Transformers One

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

104 min | PG | September 20, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Speak No Evil

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

110 min | PG-13 | September 13, 2024 | Universal/Blumhouse

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.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

104 min | PG-13 | September 6, 2024 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Blink Twice

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

102 min | R | August 23, 2024 | Amazon MGM Studios

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.

Alien: Romulus

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

119 min | R | August 16, 2024 | 20th Century Studios

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.

In the Rearview

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

84 min | NR | August 16, 2024 | Film Movement

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.

Cuckoo

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

102 min | R | August 9, 2024 | Neon

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.

Deadpool & Wolverine

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

128 min | R | July 26, 2024 | Marvel Studios/Disney

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.

Twisters

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

122 min | PG-13 | July 19, 2024 | Universal Pictures

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.

Fly Me to the Moon

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

132 min | PG-13 | July 12, 2024 | Sony Pictures

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.

Longlegs

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

101 min | R | July 12, 2024 | Neon

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.

MaXXXine

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

103 min | R | July 5, 2024 | A24

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.

A Quiet Place: Day One

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

99 min | PG-13 | June 28, 2024 | Paramount Pictures

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.

Kinds of Kindness

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

164 min | R | June 21, 2024 | Searchlight Pictures

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.

The Bikeriders

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

116 min | R | June 21, 2024 | Focus Features

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.

Green Border

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

152 min | NR | June 21, 2024 | Kino Lorber

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.

In a Violent Nature

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

94 min | R | June 14, 2024 | IFC Films

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.

Inside Out 2

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

100 min | PG | June 14, 2024 | Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar

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.

20,000 Species of Bees

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

127 min | NR | June 14, 2024 | Film Movement

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.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

115 min | R | June 7, 2024 | Sony Pictures

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.

Robot Dreams

Fri, 31 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

102 min | NR | May 31, 2024 | Neon

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.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Fri, 24 May 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

148 min | R | May 24, 2024 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Fri, 10 May 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

145 min | PG-13 | May 10, 2024 | 20th Century Studios

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.

The Fall Guy

Fri, 03 May 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

126 min | PG-13 | May 3, 2024 | Universal Pictures

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.

Evil Does Not Exist

Fri, 03 May 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

106 min | NR | May 3, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films

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.

Challengers

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

131 min | R | April 26, 2024 | Amazon MGM Studios

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.

Abigail

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

109 min | R | April 19, 2024 | Universal Pictures

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.

Civil War

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

109 min | R | April 12, 2024 | A24

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.

Monkey Man

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

121 min | R | April 5, 2024 | Universal Pictures

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.

The First Omen

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

120 min | R | April 5, 2024 | 20th Century Studios

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.

The Beast

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

146 min | NR | April 5, 2024 | Sideshow / Janus Films

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.

La Chimera

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

131 min | NR | March 29, 2024 | Neon

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.

Immaculate

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

89 min | R | March 22, 2024 | Neon

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.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

164 min | NR | March 22, 2024 | Mubi

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.

Arthur the King

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

107 min | PG-13 | March 15, 2024 | Lionsgate

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.

Cabrini

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

145 min | PG-13 | March 8, 2024 | Angel Studios

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.

Kung Fu Panda 4

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

94 min | PG | March 8, 2024 | Universal/DreamWorks Animation

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.

Love Lies Bleeding

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

104 min | R | March 8, 2024 | A24

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.

Dune: Part Two

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

166 min | PG-13 | March 1, 2024 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Drive-Away Dolls

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Ordinary Angels

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

117 min | PG | February 23, 2024 | Lionsgate

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

About Dry Grasses

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Io Capitano

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Taste of Things

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Perfect Days

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

124 min | PG | February 7, 2024 | Neon

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

Sometimes I Think About Dying

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Tótem

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Land of Bad

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

110 min | R | January 25, 2024 | Lionsgate

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

Origin

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Mean Girls

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Beekeeper

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Settlers

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

101 min | NR | January 12, 2024 | MUBI

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

American Fiction

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Teachers' Lounge

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

All of Us Strangers

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Zone of Interest

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Anselm

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Boy and the Heron

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Godzilla Minus One

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

89 min | NR | November 24, 2023 | Greenwich Entertainment

Seven women crowd into an Estonian smoke sauna and tell the truth. They confess assaults, fears, and shames they have carried for decades. The steam hides their faces so the words can finally come out.

Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

240 min | PG | November 22, 2023 | Zipporah Films

Frederick Wiseman points his camera at a French restaurant that has held three Michelin stars across four generations of the same family. No narration, no interviews, just hands and knives and the quiet terror of a standard that never relaxes. It is a documentary about beauty, and about how much labor that beauty costs.

Monster

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

125 min | PG-13 | November 22, 2023 | Well Go USA

A mother notices her son acting strange. A teacher gets blamed. A friendship hides in plain sight. The truth keeps moving depending on who tells it.

Fallen Leaves

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

81 min | NR | November 17, 2023 | Mubi

Two lonely Helsinki workers meet at a karaoke bar and try to build something out of bad luck and worse habits. Aki Kaurismäki strips romance down to glances, jukebox songs, and a stray dog. It is the warmest film ever made about people who can barely speak.

May December

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

117 min | R | November 17, 2023 | Netflix

Natalie Portman plays an actress who moves in with the woman she is about to portray on screen. Twenty years ago that woman seduced a seventh grader, served her time, and married him. Portman wants the truth, and the truth is the one thing nobody in this house can afford to give.

The Disappearance of Shere Hite

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

118 min | NR | November 17, 2023 | IFC Films

Shere Hite sold millions of copies of a report that told women the truth about their own bodies. Then the culture decided she never mattered and wiped her off the record. Nicole Newnham digs up the proof of both.

A Still Small Voice

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

93 min | NR | November 10, 2023 | Abramorama

A chaplaincy resident at Mount Sinai spends her days sitting with the dying and the terrified. The work demands she absorb other people’s grief without drowning in it. She is drowning.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

92 min | PG | November 3, 2023 | A24

A Black girl grows up in rural Mississippi, and the film tells her life not as a story but as a series of sensations. Raven Jackson builds it from mud, river water, fingertips, and skin. It asks you to feel a life instead of follow one.

Four Daughters

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

108 min | NR | October 27, 2023 | Kino Lorber

A Tunisian mother loses two of her daughters to Islamist radicalization. Kaouther Ben Hania hires actresses to play the missing girls and to stand in for the mother when the memories cut too deep. The reenactment is the autopsy.

Priscilla

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

113 min | R | October 27, 2023 | A24

A fourteen-year-old girl on an Army base in Germany meets the most famous man in the world. He picks her, grooms her, and reshapes her into the woman he wants. The fairy tale is the cage.

Beyond Utopia

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

116 min | PG-13 | October 23, 2023 | Roadside Attractions

Beyond Utopia follows a North Korean family as they run for the border with a pastor and a chain of brokers as their only lifeline. Madeleine Gavin builds the escape in real time, from footage shot on the run. The terror is that none of it is staged.

The Pigeon Tunnel

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

92 min | PG-13 | October 20, 2023 | Apple Original Films

John le Carré, the son of a con man turned master of spy fiction, sits down with Errol Morris for one last interview. Two men who built careers on deception circle each other for the truth. The interview is the interrogation.

To Kill a Tiger

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

128 min | NR | October 20, 2023 | Netflix

A 13-year-old girl is gang-raped in a village in Jharkhand, India. Her father refuses to let the case disappear into bribes, threats, and pressure to marry her to an attacker. He takes on his entire community to put three men in prison, and the camera never looks away.

The Delinquents

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

190 min | NR | October 18, 2023 | Mubi

A bank teller steals the exact sum he needs to never work again, then turns himself in to serve a short sentence while a nervous coworker hides the cash. Rodrigo Moreno stretches that scheme into a wandering anti-capitalist comedy about time, work, and the hours a job quietly steals from you. The robbery is the easy part, and freedom turns out to be the harder crime.

Anatomy of a Fall

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

151 min | R | October 13, 2023 | Neon

A wife stands trial for the death of her husband, who fell from the top floor of their isolated chalet. Their half-blind son is the only witness, and what he saw is not what he remembers. The truth is the one thing the courtroom can never recover.

The Eternal Memory

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

85 min | NR | August 11, 2023 | MTV Documentary Films

Augusto Góngora builds a career preserving Chile’s memory of the dictatorship. Now Alzheimer’s takes his own, one name at a time. His wife becomes the last place he still exists.

Passages

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

92 min | NR | August 4, 2023 | Mubi

Tomas finishes a film, sleeps with a woman at the wrap party, and tells his husband about it the next morning like he is reporting the weather. Then he decides he wants both of them. Passages watches a charming man burn through everyone who loves him and call it freedom.

Kokomo City

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

73 min | R | July 28, 2023 | Magnolia Pictures

Four Black trans women who do sex work sit down and talk. They talk about clients, danger, money, and the men who want them in the dark and deny them in daylight. D. Smith hands them the mic and gets out of the way.

The First Slam Dunk

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

125 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | GKIDS

A point guard the size of nobody takes the floor against the best team in Japan. The game runs the length of the film, but the story is everything that happened before tipoff. Takehiko Inoue adapts his own manga and turns a basketball game into a movie about grief.

Barbie

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

114 min | PG-13 | July 21, 2023 | Warner Bros. Pictures

A doll achieves consciousness in a plastic paradise and goes looking for the woman playing with her in the real world. Ken tags along and discovers patriarchy. One of them takes the lesson too far.

20 Days in Mariupol

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

94 min | NR | July 14, 2023 | PBS Distribution

Mstyslav Chernov and a small Associated Press team are the last international journalists left inside Mariupol when the Russian army surrounds it. For twenty days they keep filming while the bombs fall and the lies pile up. The camera is the only thing left telling the truth.

Afire

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

103 min | NR | July 14, 2023 | Sideshow / Janus Films

A blocked novelist holes up at a seaside house to finish his book and finds it already full of people who refuse to leave him to his misery. A wildfire creeps closer while he sulks. Christian Petzold makes self-pity look like the most dangerous thing in the woods.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

164 min | PG-13 | July 12, 2023 | Paramount Pictures

A rogue artificial intelligence learns to think for itself, and the world’s intelligence agencies want to weaponize it. Ethan Hunt wants it destroyed. The fate of the world hangs on a two-piece key and a man who refuses to stop running.

Earth Mama

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

101 min | R | July 7, 2023 | A24

Gia is pregnant, broke, and fighting to win back the two kids the foster system already took. The state wants proof she can be a stable mother and gives her no way to become one. Savanah Leaf’s debut watches the machine grind without ever blinking.

Past Lives

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Reality

Mon, 29 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

You Hurt My Feelings

Fri, 26 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

93 min | R | May 26, 2023 | A24

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

It Ain't Over

Fri, 12 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Fri, 12 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Starling Girl

Fri, 12 May 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

32 Sounds

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

95 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | Abramorama

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

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

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

R.M.N.

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

The Eight Mountains

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Judy Blume Forever

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Little Richard: I Am Everything

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Other People's Children

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Trenque Lauquen

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

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

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

Joyland

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

127 min | NR | April 7, 2023 | Oscilloscope Laboratories

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.

Showing Up

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

107 min | R | April 7, 2023 | A24

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.

A Thousand and One

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

116 min | R | March 31, 2023 | Focus Features

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.

John Wick: Chapter 4

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

170 min | R | March 24, 2023 | Lionsgate

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.

The Quiet Girl

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

95 min | NR | February 24, 2023 | Super LTD

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.

A House Made of Splinters

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

87 min | NR | February 21, 2023 | Giant Pictures

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.

Return to Seoul

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

119 min | R | February 17, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics

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.

The Blue Caftan

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

122 min | NR | February 10, 2023 | Strand Releasing

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.

Full Time

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

88 min | NR | February 3, 2023 | Music Box Films

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.

Godland

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

143 min | NR | February 3, 2023 | Janus Films

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.

Close

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

104 min | PG-13 | January 27, 2023 | A24

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.

One Fine Morning

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

112 min | R | January 27, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics

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.

After Love

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

89 min | NR | January 20, 2023 | Vertigo Releasing

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.

Saint Omer

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

123 min | PG-13 | January 13, 2023 | Super LTD

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.

Alcarràs

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

120 min | NR | January 6, 2023 | MUBI

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.

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

112 min | PG | December 30, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics

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.

Living

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

102 min | PG-13 | December 23, 2022 | Sony Pictures Classics

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.

No Bears

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

107 min | NR | December 23, 2022 | Sideshow / Janus Films

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.

Children of the Mist

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

92 min | NR | December 16, 2022 | Film Movement

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.

Last Film Show

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

110 min | NR | December 2, 2022 | Samuel Goldwyn Films

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.

Sr.

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

90 min | R | December 2, 2022 | Netflix

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.

The Eternal Daughter

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

96 min | PG-13 | December 2, 2022 | A24

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.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

122 min | NR | November 23, 2022 | Neon

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.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Wed, 23 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

139 min | PG-13 | November 23, 2022 | Netflix

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.

Bad Axe

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

100 min | NR | November 18, 2022 | IFC Films

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.

EO

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

88 min | NR | November 18, 2022 | Sideshow / Janus Films

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.

Is That Black Enough for You?!?

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

135 min | R | November 11, 2022 | Netflix

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.

The Fabelmans

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

151 min | PG-13 | November 11, 2022 | Universal Pictures

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.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

117 min | PG | November 9, 2022 | Netflix

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.

Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

104 min | R | October 27, 2022 | Apple TV+

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.

Aftersun