5-Stars on Dan Heskett

Project Hail Mary

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

156 min | PG-13 | March 20, 2026 | Amazon MGM Studios

The best sci-fi film in a decade earns every minute of its runtime.

Rental Family

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

110 min | PG-13 | November 21, 2025 | Searchlight Pictures

Brendan Fraser as a too-big-for-Japan American finding himself through pretend families. My favorite movie of the year.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 20:30:00 +0000

★★★★★

145 min | PG-13 | November 26, 2025 | Netflix

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.

Final Destination: Bloodlines

Sun, 18 May 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

110 min | R | May 16, 2025 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Thunderbolts*

Sun, 04 May 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

126 min | PG-13 | May 2, 2025 | Walt Disney Pictures

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.

Mickey 17

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

137 min | R | March 7, 2025 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Companion

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 21:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

97 min | R | January 31, 2025 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Drew Hancock’s directorial debut is a nasty, clever thriller that earns its twists and never apologizes. Sophie Thatcher continues her winning streak.

The Brutalist

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 19:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

215 min | R | January 24, 2025 | A24

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.

Presence

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:30:00 +0000

★★★★★

84 min | R | January 24, 2025 | Neon

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.

One of Them Days

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 19:30:00 +0000

★★★★★

97 min | R | January 17, 2025 | Sony Pictures Releasing

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.

Nosferatu

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

132 min | R | December 25, 2024 | Focus Features

Robert Eggers remakes the vampire and makes you forget every bloodless franchise that came before.

A Real Pain

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

★★★★★

90 min | R | November 1, 2024 | Searchlight Pictures

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.

Anora

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

★★★★★

139 min | R | October 18, 2024 | Neon

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.

The Wild Robot

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 22:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

102 min | PG | September 27, 2024 | Universal/DreamWorks Animation

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.

Late Night with the Devil

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

★★★★★

93 min | R | March 22, 2024 | IFC Films

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.

Poor Things

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

★★★★★

141 min | R | December 8, 2023 | Searchlight Pictures

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.

The Holdovers

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

★★★★★

133 min | R | October 27, 2023 | Focus Features

A bitter classics teacher gets stuck supervising the prep-school boys with nowhere to go over Christmas. One troubled kid and a grieving cook are all the company he gets. Turns out the company is the point.

Killers of the Flower Moon

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

★★★★★

206 min | R | October 20, 2023 | Paramount Pictures

Oil money pours into the Osage Nation, and white men marry in to murder their way to the inheritance. Martin Scorsese tells the story from the side of the killers, not the lawmen. The result is an American crime story about love used as a weapon.

Oppenheimer

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

★★★★★

181 min | R | July 21, 2023 | Universal Pictures

J. Robert Oppenheimer builds the bomb that ends the war and then spends the rest of his life answering for it. Christopher Nolan stages the whole thing as a trial, not a triumph. The man who splits the atom learns that the people who run the country are the real chain reaction.

Licorice Pizza

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

133 min | R | November 26, 2021 | United Artists Releasing

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.

CODA

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

112 min | PG-13 | August 13, 2021 | Apple TV+

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.

Bo Burnham: Inside

Sun, 30 May 2021 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

88 min | R | May 30, 2021 | Netflix

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.

Quo Vadis, Aida?

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

104 min | NR | March 5, 2021 | Super LTD

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.

Judas and the Black Messiah

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

126 min | R | February 12, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures

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.

Time

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

81 min | PG-13 | October 9, 2020 | Amazon Studios

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.

Hamilton

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 20:00:00 +0000

★★★★★

160 min | PG-13 | July 3, 2020 | Disney+

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.