The best movies on Hulu (June 2021)

Streaming libraries expand and contract. Algorithms are imperfect. Those damn thumbnail images are always changing. But you know what you can always rely on? The expert opinions and knowledgeable commentary of The A.V. Club. That’s why we’re scouring both the menus of the most popular services and our own archives to bring you these guides to the best viewing options, broken down by streamer, medium, and genre. Want to know why we’re so keen on a particular show? Click the movie title at the top of each slide for some in-depth coverage from The A.V. Club’s past. And be sure to check back often, because we’ll be adding more recommendations as films come and go.

There are plenty of great classic films available as part of your standard Hulu subscription, but this list was first compiled of movies featured on The A.V. Club’s Best of the Year lists and ballots going back to 2010. We continue to update it as new movies are added to Hulu’s library.

Looking for other movies to stream? Also check out our list of the best movies on Netflix, best movies on Disney+, and best movies on Amazon Prime.

This list was most recently updated May 17, 2021.

What might a movie called ’71 be about? The Pentagon Papers? War between India and Pakistan? The release of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album? Had director Yann Demange taken a cue from Vincent Gallo (Buffalo ’66) and called his film Belfast ’71, no confusion would be possible. Arguably the most violent year in the history of the Troubles, 1971 saw riots (in response to mass internment of nationalists by British security forces) that prompted thousands to flee Northern Ireland, and culminated with the December 4 bombing of McGurk’s Bar, which killed 15 people. Demange’s film, a work of fiction, doesn’t dramatize any of these avspecific events, but it captures, with harrowing intensity, the chaos and terror of the era, depicting a single night during which a particularly green British soldier gets separated from his unit in the Catholic part of Belfast—a foul-up that practically amounts to a death sentence. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Danny Boyle jumpstarted both his terrific ’00s run and the undead revival with a concept that vexed some hardcore horror devotees: fast zombies. Far from anti-Romero sacrilege, though, this creative choice shifts the undead metaphor from shuffling, decaying remnants of society to a raw, untamed rage, here the result of a fast-spreading virus, another tweak of the established zombie formula. The title comes from the amount of time elapsed between the virus’s inception and the ravaged world that Cillian Murphy’s character discovers when he wakes up from a coma in an abandoned hospital—a terrific nightmare hook that wrings initial terror from scenes of deadly quiet. Appropriately, Boyle shot fast and furious with digital video to capture beautiful lo-fi visions of a post-apocalyptic London and beyond. Horror overtones echo throughout Boyle’s career, from Shallow Grave and Trainspotting to Sunshine and 127 Hours; in 28 Days Later, his talent for intensity boiling over into insanity comes through as loud and clear as it ever has. [Jesse Hassenger]

Available July 1; Leaving July 31

What resonates, in this smart but minor procedural, isn’t the harsh vision of a post-9/11 world, but the unglamorous depiction of governmental grunt work. Like Zero Dark Thirty, A Most Wanted Manunderstands national security as the purview of workaholics, men and women who have sacrificed personal lives for the sake of their duties. There’s something deeply sad about the relationship between Günther (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his second-in-command, Irna (Nina Hoss), who share a bantering rapport familiar enough to be called romantic. When they feign a kiss mid-film, pretending to neck to avoid detection, the squandered emotion becomes palpable: Personal satisfaction—happiness, even—is an impossibility for these committed intelligencers. Hoffman, slumping with defeat when not using his weight as a weapon, locates the tragedy of his disheartened hero. He also gets to let loose one last blue streak, bellowing with impotent frustration as only he could. The actor’s subtlety will be missed, but so will his way with an expletive. [A.A. Dowd]

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Across The Universe’s saving grace is its reckless energy and Taymor’s typically gorgeous imagery, whether she’s filming a straight-up dance sequence to “With A Little Help From My Friends” or a trippy surrealist nightmare in which the Army processes Anderson to “I Want You.” The film wavers between exhilarating and gimmicky, and the cast’s interpretations of the Beatles catalog vary between passionate and rote, but Across The Universe is consistent in one aspect: Its crazed ambition. When it falls, it falls far, but at least that means it’s reaching high. [Tasha Robinson]

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The Adventures Of Tintin makes for a solid ride, as it throws the pair into the midst of a vast whirligig of significant items lost and found, plots foiled and reconvened, and acquaintances ditched and recovered. (Among them, the twin incompetent lawmen Thompson and Thomson, voiced by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.) Spielberg directs with a keen eye for clarity, both visually and narratively: While the plot is dense and complex, the heroes’ goals are always clear, and the narrative plays fair with the mystery, drawing a straight, comprehensible line from one step to the next. (Far fairer than it plays with the laws of physics, which get mangled into unrecognizability, especially when comedy or excitement might result.) And the many action setpieces are carefully staged to be exciting and involving, but not confusing. Tintin falters a bit toward the end, spending so much energy on a large-scale fight that the small-scale battle that serves as a climax feels meager by comparison, and then pointedly setting up the sequels to come. But while it’s essentially just another slick Spielberg action machine, it’s operating effectively on all cylinders throughout. [Tasha Robinson]

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Shutting down conspiracy theorists probably wasn’t high on director Todd Douglas Miller’s to-do list when he was making the documentary Apollo 11. So just consider it a bonus that his film about the first manned moon landing is so immersive that it feels like it’s happening in real-time on screen—and definitively un-faked. Apollo 11 doesn’t run through the usual grainy footage that has been recycled from doc to doc: those well-worn shots of a booster rocket falling to Earth, Neil Armstrong exiting the “Eagle” module, the American flag being planted, Buzz Aldrin hopping around on the lunar surface, and the big final splashdown. Instead, Miller and a team of editors, historians, and government archivists have dug deep into the NASA and broadcast news vaults, finding angles and audio that in some cases no one has seen or heard in 50 years, if at all. Everything looks strikingly fresh… and overwhelmingly so. [Noel Murray]

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Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s spookily majestic sci-fi spectacle, is on a mission of multiple objectives. Focused on the nuts and bolts of interspecies communication, this is an unusually intelligent object from Hollywood, where science fiction is usually just a fancy word for an action movie set in space or the future. But there’s also a surprisingly affecting emotional core to Villeneuve’s enigma—a stealth poignancy woven into the fabric of its cerebral design. Arrival has come, like a visitor from the cosmos, to blow minds and break hearts. One does not generally attend a film from the director of Sicario expecting four-hankie catharsis. But Villeneuve is a chameleon: Having expertly imitated the sleek moodiness of David Fincher with his missing-kids potboiler Prisoners, the French-Canadian director conjures some Malickian grandeur here during an elegiac prologue, underscoring a family tragedy with the symphonic ache of Max Richter’s “On The Nature Of Daylight.” Based on an award-winning short story by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang, Arrival possesses a setup not so different from Sicario, given that it puts another highly skilled professional woman under the jurisdiction of dismissive, trigger-happy male superiors. But a more personal dimension is immediately plain, as Villeneuve introduces the extraterrestrial fleet through a reaction shot of his heroine, linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), gaping in muted disbelief at a lecture-hall television we don’t see. [A.A. Dowd]

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Enigmatic and often mesmerizing, super-saturated with color, drawn like a still plain ripped by brief, unexpected gusts of wind—The Assassin is one of the most flat-out beautiful movies of the last decade, and also one of the most puzzling. Returning to features after a prolonged absence, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien has made a martial-arts period piece like none other, keeping to the classic principles and conventions of wuxia—the storied Chinese genre of wandering warriors and codes of honor—while casting them in a mysterious light. Bold takes on popular genres generally set out to de-mystify, but Hou has accomplished the opposite. Washing away centuries of film and fiction, he envisions a tale from the Tang dynasty—about a deadly martial artist who must kill the man to whom she was once betrothed—as a window into the haunted otherworld of the mythic past. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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As its title indicates, The Assistant looks at a powerful serial abuser—at the patterns of exploitation, at the network of enablers he builds around himself over several decades—through the at-once limited and privileged perspective of someone very low on the totem pole of his empire. Her name is Jane (Julia Garner, Emmy-winning costar of Ozark) and for 87 minutes, we’re immersed in her professional world, a mundane and exhausting and sometimes degrading series of routines through which the undeniable evidence of transgression emerges. Perhaps dramatization is the wrong word. The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure. “First in, last out,” Jane is shown, in the wordless opening passage, climbing into a car in the dark early hours of the morning, making the long commute from Astoria to the cluttered Manhattan office building where she toils tirelessly seven days a week. We’ll see her turn on lights and electronics, open bottles of water, take phone calls, unclog printers, sign for packages, book flights and hotels, even babysit the children of women who come to meet with Him behind closed doors. [A.A. Dowd]

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Eliza Scanlen, best known abroad for playing little-sister roles in HBO’s Sharp Objects miniseries and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, stars as Milla, a sheltered 15-year-old cancer patient who falls immediately and hard for Moses (Toby Wallace), the scuzzy 23-year-old drifter who literally runs into her on a train platform in the opening scene. It’s obvious from the start that Moses is trouble, and not just because he looks like a Soundcloud rapper. He’s also a one-man illegal pharmacy who’s caught stealing pills from Milla’s psychiatrist dad Henry (Ben Mendelsohn) more than once before Henry invites him to move in. You read that correctly; after several attempts to keep him and Milla apart, Henry and his wife Anna (Essie Davis) invite Moses to come live with the family, as a comfort for their daughter in the last weeks of her life. Sure, Moses is a drug dealer. But so’s Henry, in his way. Both Murphy and screenwriter Rita Kalnejais view the grey areas of this unconventional arrangement both cuttingly and compassionately; their film is less cynical than Cory Finely’s Thoroughbreds but in the same polished black-comedy wheelhouse. In playing along with Milla’s fantasy of a great romance in her dying days, Anna, Henry, and Moses create a convincing replica of a happy family that’s both comically demented— “He’s a drug dealer!” Anna cries after first meeting Moses; “Don’t pigeonhole him like that!” her daughter snaps back—and oddly sweet. [Katie Rife]

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Comedians in middle age are not supposed to make movies like Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar. Kristen Wiig, the film’s star, producer, and co-writer, is around the age that fellow SNL luminaries like Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, and Eddie Murphy were when they decided to dip into more family-oriented comedies, try out more serious roles, and/or step back from the grind of superstar brand maintenance. Wiig, meanwhile, nearly a decade removed from her breakout hit Bridesmaids, has reunited with that film’s co-writer, Annie Mumolo, for something gloriously, exuberantly silly. Barb & Star throws into sharp relief just how infrequently a major comedy star makes a gag-heavy free-for-all that actually works. Wiig even takes on a makeup-heavy second role that recalls both Murphy and Myers—particularly the latter, as she essentially plays her own Sia-resembling version of Dr. Evil.

Not that Barb (Mumolo, also co-starring) or Star (Wiig) are aware of any archnemesis for most of the film’s run time. As a comic duo, they’re sort of a middle-aged Nebraskan version of Dumb And Dumber’s Harry and Lloyd or Beavis and Butt-Head—less because of their intelligence levels (they’re more daftly oblivious than stupid) than their soulmate-level shared sensibility. Though the movie gradually teases out a few key differences—Barb is a widow while Star is a divorcé; Barb is more fearful of new experiences; they each use a slightly different pronunciation of “caramel” despite their midwestern accents—these women live together, work together, and seem to spend nearly every other waking moment together. They share an enthusiasm for poofy mom haircuts, “full jewelry,” and culottes, among other signifiers for (caricatured) women of a certain age and socioeconomic position. [Jesse Hassenger]

Coming July 9

In the November 1939 issue of Detective Comics, six months after creator Bob Kane first introduced The Batman, Kane and uncredited collaborator Gardner Fox attached a two-page prologue to the otherwise unmemorable adventure “The Batman Wars Against The Dirigible Of Doom.” Subtitled “The Legend Of The Batman—Who He Is And How He Came To Be!” the intro reveals Batman’s previously untold origin story, taking him from a happy rich kid to a grim creature of the night in what must be the 12 most emotionally wrenching panels of comics’ golden age. In Batman Begins, which reboots the Batman film franchise eight years after the disastrous Batman & Robin, director Christopher Nolan (Memento), co-writer David S. Goyer, and star Christian Bale draw liberally from different periods of Batman’s history, but their film most resembles those two pages: It treats Bruce Wayne’s transformation into, as that story put it, a “weird figure of the dark” as a logical response to the darkness around him. [Keith Phipps]

Stream it now; leaving July 31

It’s hard to believe that a movie as defiantly odd as the horror-comedy Beetlejuice even got made by a Hollywood studio in the ‘80s, let alone that it became a substantial hit and a sleepover staple. The title character—a pasty-faced, hollow-eyed, green-teethed, bug-chomping corpse played by Michael Keaton—doesn’t make his first full appearance until halfway through the movie, and then comes roaring across the screen like a pop-eyed beast from a Tex Avery cartoon, belching and swearing and boasting. Chief among those boasts: that he can help recently deceased couple Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis scare away the hideous New York yuppies now inhabiting their charming country house. (Yes, Beetlejuice is pro-ghost.) Dry in tone, packed with grotesque sight gags, and surprisingly sweet at times, Beetlejuice never seems concerned with straightforward storytelling. First and foremost, it’s a funhouse ride. [Noel Murray]

Coming July 1

Like American Graffiti, The Big Chill belongs to a nearly forgotten time when culture metamorphosed so rapidly that it made sense to feel deeply nostalgic for the previous decade or two, which could feel like a whole different world. The film’s loose narrative involves a group of old college pals, now in their mid-30s, assembling for the funeral of another friend who’d committed suicide, then spending a couple of days collectively wondering what became of their former radical ideals. John Sayles had explored roughly the same idea a few years earlier in Return Of The Secaucus 7, but it was Lawrence Kasdan’s more accessible, Motown-fueled take that caught the public imagination, introducing and/or firmly establishing a handful of major actors in the process. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Big Fish is a Daniel Wallace adaptation and visual feast that recaptures the fairy-tale simplicity and wrenching emotional power of Edward Scissorhands. Told largely in flashbacks, Big Fish stars Albert Finney as a larger-than-life Southern patriarch who never lets the truth get in the way of a good yarn. Like his Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, director Tim Burton’s Big Fish largely takes place in a kaleidoscopic, fully formed, utterly benevolent universe that seems to have originated in its protagonist’s vivid imagination–which in this case isn’t that far from the truth. With such a world-class fantasist in the director’s chair, the question of which side of the fantasy/fact divide Big Fish will fall on is never in doubt. But Burton and company make an unbeatable case for the life-affirming power of make-believe. [Nathan Rabin]

Coming July 1

Nineteen years after its debut, Mike Nichols’ modernized adaptation of La Cage Aux Folles strikes a somewhat awkward chord with the character of son Val (Dan Futterman), whose demand that Armand and Albert deny and repress their homosexuality makes him come off as a selfish, insensitive brat—and one who, ultimately, only embraces his parents’ true nature because he’s been left with no more deceitful options. Similar discomfort comes via Armand’s repeated attempts to hide the flamboyant Albert from view (note to future spouses: do not treat the love of your life like an embarrassment). Yet whereas those plot points now stick out like sore thumbs, Elaine May’s script otherwise remains amazingly sharp, generating consistent laughs from a bevy of clever one-liners and ever-more-awkward situations, all of which Nichols directs with his usual un-showy sharpness. Ultimately, though, The Birdcage remains a riot thanks mostly to its cast, from the stuffy Hackman and Wiest, to the exasperated Williams and showy Lane, to the colorful Azaria, playing a man whose absurd vivacity cannot be contained. [Nick Schager]

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On Jan. 30, 1972, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 13 Irish civil-rights activists were killed (and many more injured) when British soldiers opened fire on a peace demonstration that had turned unruly. From the opening minutes, the sick dread of inevitability hangs over director Paul Greengrass’ emotionally charged re-creation Bloody Sunday, as the two sides hold fast to their positions, refusing to swerve out of a game of chicken. The British authorities, acting on a decree to suppress all parades and processions—not to mention an underlying thirst to avenge its fallen soldiers—take a heavy-handed approach to breaking up the march; in response, the agitated demonstrators can only add to the chaos. (Only the audience seems to hear the most pragmatic officer ask the obvious question, “Why not let the march go ahead?”) Greengrass’ rigorous, you-are-there documentary style has earned the film comparison to Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece The Battle Of Algiers, which brought the French-Algerian conflict to life with stunning, unprecedented verisimilitude. At its best, Bloody Sunday produces the same chilling illusion of history writ large, clearly detailing the strategies of both sides, then blankly observing the conflict through unadorned, newsreel camera stock and the precise orchestration of large-scale chaos. [Scott Tobias]

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Like the eccentrically gifted border-patrol agent at its center, Border is a rare and special thing. It’s a highbrow surrealist cringe comedy with a grim police-procedural subplot, a tragic tale of star-crossed love between fairytale creatures, and a challenging philosophical thought exercise with unforgettably bizarre sex scenes. The less you know about the specifics of its plot going in, the better, but suffice to say that the screenplay from Ali Abbasi, Isabella Eklöf, and Let The Right One In’s John Ajvide Lindqvist won’t be replicated any time soon. [Katie Rife]

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To say Bound is a double-meaning title understates the way the Wachowskis thread the concept into the fabric of the movie, where Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon are bound literally, bound to each other, bound to the powerful men who control their destinies, and bound by their own ideas about what intimacy could mean for them. Since this is a crime film, getting unbound involves a plan to steal $2 million in mob money and run off together, but the Wachowskis remain conscious of how their theme is developing, even as they choreograph suspenseful setpieces with a “Look, ma!” flair that’s only occasionally distracting. The stakes are high, but to the Wachowskis’ credit, the question isn’t “Will they get away with the money?” but “Will they make it out together (with their lives and their tenuous trust intact)?” That’s a different level of engagement than the crime genre usually encourages. [Scott Tobias]

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Like William Friedkin’s underrated previous film, The Hunted, the relentlessly claustrophobic Bug strips its story down to the basics. A dramatically grunged-up Ashley Judd is all jangled nerves and edgy intensity as a hard-luck waitress with a drinking problem, a coke habit she can’t afford, a missing son, and an abusive ex-husband (Harry Connick Jr.) fresh out of jail and eager to pick up where he left off. Judd spies a brief respite from loneliness in the person of mysterious drifter Michael Shannon, an AWOL veteran with demons of his own. As in The Exorcist, Friedkin establishes a tone of hard-edged, almost documentary-style realism before ratcheting up the horror to nearly unbearable levels. Bug skirts camp ridiculousness throughout, especially during a fever-dream last act in which Judd embraces Shannon’s insanity with disconcerting conviction. Like a thinking man’s The Number 23, Bug seems to take place largely inside the demented psyche of someone with a loosening grasp on reality. At other times, Bug suggests Safe as remade by David Cronenberg, both in its biological, venereal horror, and in its paranoia about a contemporary world hopelessly corrupted by viruses, germs, and infections, literal and metaphorical. Judd and Shannon’s unnerving performances ensure that even when Bug leaps deliriously off the deep end, it remains rooted in the loneliness of two very sad people desperate for any kind of meaningful connection, no matter how mad or destructive. Even at its most preposterous—Friedkin’s latest rivals his Druid horror flick The Guardian for sheer lunacy—Bug remains disconcerting, real, and raw. It poignantly suggests that some lost souls would rather be crazy and doomed than alone. [Nathan Rabin]

Stream it now (leaving Jun 30)

A bone-dry comedy of class warfare. A perplexing missing-person mystery worthy of Hitchcock or Antonioni. An existential meditation on the little hungers and great hungers that drive us. There’s no single right way to classify Burning, so why not just call it the best movie of the year and leave it at that? Returning after an eight-year hiatus from filmmaking, South Korean master of the slow burn Lee Chang-dong (Poetry) did more than perfectly capture the subjective ambivalence of Haruki Murakami’s original short story, “Barn Burning.” In stretching it out to fill two-and-half perfectly paced hours, he also teased from his source material a wealth of new meanings and ambiguities, percolating through the love triangle of sorts that envelops an introverted writer (Ah-in Yoo), his hometown classmate-turned-crush (Jong-seo Jun), and her slick, wealthy new beau (Steven Yeun, rivetingly loathsome in a tricky role). You didn’t have to look hard to see a disturbing relevance in the film’s simmering stew of resentments, the working-class and explicitly male rage that boils over into a shocking climax. (Not for nothing does Donald Trump make a televised cameo.) But Burning’s power is more timeless that it is timely, located as it is in big questions without clear answers: real riddles of desire, longing, and motivation, none any easier to solve than the disappearance at the center of this captivating enigma. [A.A. Dowd]

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Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid might not have invented the modern buddy comedy, but it may as well have. While Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black was still toddling around playing cowboys and Indians, director George Roy Hill, cinematographer Conrad Hall, composer Burt Bacharach, stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford, and screenwriter William Goldman were meticulously crafting the gold standard for movies about rugged pals quipping and wisecracking their way through one perilous bonding situation after another. Goldman has criticized his Oscar-winning screenplay for being overly clever, which is akin to job applicants who cite their biggest flaws as “I’m too hard-working” or “I’m too much of a perfectionist.” But Goldman has a point. Butch Cassidy’s dialogue is so unrelentingly sarcastic and irreverent that the film sometimes feels like an especially sharp Mad Magazine parody of itself. In one of the special features included in the two-disc special edition, Hill is reported to have complained following a screening that people were laughing at his tragedy. But tragedies are seldom this glib. Then again, they’re seldom this fun or consistently entertaining, either. [Nathan Rabin]

Stream it now (leaving June 30)

[Harold] Ramis transformed the default rebelliousness and sneering sarcasm of the 1960s counterculture into a commercial comedy force, elevating (or reducing, based on your perspective) the intergenerational and interclass clashes of the era into a crowd-pleasing battle between slobs and snobs, one in which the filmmakers and the audience’s sympathies are never in question. (Here’s a hint: It’s not with the snooty country-club types with ascots and monocles.) That’s especially true of Ramis’ 1980 directorial debut, Caddyshack, which he co-wrote with National Lampoon’s Douglas Kenney and Bill’s brother Brian Doyle-Murray. With Caddyshack, Ramis plugged into the cultural zeitgeist with a ramshackle golf comedy crudely but effectively engineered to showcase the talents of four very different sensibilities: Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, and Ted Knight. [Nathan Rabin]

Coming July 1

Still Smokin’, [Cheech And Chong’s] fifth effort remains an improvement on the previous films under just about every vector of criticism. This film finds director Chong tentatively experimenting with form and structure, devoting the first half of the film to a comic mishap that sends the pair to Amsterdam for a Dolly Parton/Burt Reynolds film festival, and then shooting the second half as a stand-up concert documentary. If stoner comedy has a Stop Making Sense, this would have to be it; there’s a winning sense of spontaneity to the grainy footage of Cheech and Chong’s onstage set, bouncing around the theater and employing the occasional distorted exposure to nod to their countercultural roots. More exciting still, Still Smokin represents the series’ first effort to actually tussle with legitimate thematic concerns, forming cogent thoughts beyond a desire for the nearest bag of Lay’s. Most of the first half plays out as a Q&A between the esteemed European press and our dudes, affecting a Godardian aloofness as if they had just been kicked out of Cannes for taking bong rips in the bathroom of the Grand Palais. They deliver some strong one-liners (“A lot of people say we’re just in it for the drugs, but that’s true,” Cheech deadpans) and more than that, they confront their own growing public profile with more self-awareness than in the literally self-aware flourishes. They lampoon their own cult of celebrity, but there’s a genuine unease beneath the jokes as they reconcile the stardom they stumbled into with the enduring desire to remain a toasty slacker forever. Chong mutters that “responsibility’s a great responsibility, man” in Next Movie, and those words ring loud and clear over his semi-reluctant fame. [Charles Bramseco]

Chinonye Chukwu’s Clemency begins not with an act of mercy but a state-sanctioned death. The details are agonizing: a weeping mother clutching a rosary; the squeaking leather of the straps on a lethal injection table; a pool of blood forming around the needle transmitting first sedative, then poison. That horrifying introduction is in line with most movies about prison, which nearly exclusively focus on the dehumanizing experience of incarceration, from classics like Papillon and Cool Hand Luke to the more contemporary Starred Up and A Prayer Before Dawn. But Clemency subverts expectations with an unblinking exploration of how serving as a state-approved executor of the death penalty is its own form of degradation. Alfre Woodard captures with exquisite nuance the emotional and physical toll it might take on someone, spending years overseeing executions; she grounds the film, which otherwise strikes a balance between broad empathy and a pointed call for criminal justice reform. [Roxana Hadadi]

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Shot in a single location (director James Ward Byrkit’s house) with a tiny budget and a largely unknown cast, this fiendishly clever throwback to golden-age Twilight Zone mindfucks assembles eight yuppie friends for a dinner party and then unleashes hell when a comet passes over them. The power goes out all over the neighborhood, with the exception of a single house down the block; when a couple of guys go over there to check it out, they return with a box—which contains individual photos of the whole group, each with an unexplained number on the back—and a crazy story. Or do they return? Byrkit and Alex Manugian (who’s also part of the cast) devised a freaky exercise in escalating paranoia, then had the actors improvise their way through the narrative, not knowing what would happen next. Miraculously, the result plays like tightly scripted drama, building relentlessly toward a decisive moment for one character in particular. Those with a little layman’s knowledge of quantum physics will be extra prepared for the question Coherence ultimately poses: If there are an infinite number of things you could be doing with your life right now, why on earth are you doing that? (But keep reading, please.) [Mike D’Angelo]

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Early in the 21st century, a new wave of Romanian filmmakers like Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, and Corneliu Porumboiu began drawing international recognition for their gripping, docu-realistic dramas, addressing the power imbalances and the social dysfunction plaguing their country, post-Communism. The best way to describe Alexander Nanau’s documentary Collective is to say that it’s a non-fiction version of those new Romanian classics: like The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu or 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, but with real people. It’s a taut, intense procedural, with a resonant story that simultaneously follows a journalistic investigation and an attempt to fix a fatally dysfunctional medical bureaucracy—all while criminal organizations, corrupt politicians, and rabble-rousing television hosts work in concert to stymie any real reform. [Noel Murray]

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Colossal’s early April release date all but eliminated star Anne Hathaway from the 2017 awards-season conversation, which is a shame because she turns in a witty, sympathetic performance as Gloria, a self-destructive alcoholic who discovers that she has a psychic connection to the giant monster who started ravaging Seoul right around the time she moved back home in disgrace. At first, this high-concept sci-fi drama appears to be pushing a straightforward (and rather obvious) metaphor for alcoholism. But by the surprisingly moving final scene, Nacho Vigalondo, who wrote as well as directed the film, deftly pivots it into a much more interesting statement about toxic masculinity, as well as a character study of a woman taking back her life from the forces, both internal and external, that want to tear her down. [Katie Rife]

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Is it irony or just hypocrisy that Harry Caul, the professional snoop Gene Hackman plays in The Conversation, is obsessed with protecting his privacy? Maybe it’s neither. Maybe the guy’s just been doing what he does for long enough to know how easy it is to breach the firewall of someone’s personal life. Maybe a healthy supply of paranoia is just a side effect of becoming the “best bugger on the West Coast.” If there is an irony dripping off of Francis Ford Coppola’s suspense classic, it’s teased by the title itself: Harry spends the whole movie studying, dissecting, and decoding a single conversation, all the while remaining incapable of holding one himself. And it’s that failure, that inability to grasp the vagaries of human interaction, that causes him to miss a crucial detail—the most important clue—until it’s much too late. [A.A. Dowd]

Coming July 1

It’s no accident that the skyline of Gotham City figures prominently in so many scenes in The Dark Knight, the second Batman movie from director and co-writer Christopher Nolan. It’s seen from above when Batman glides from building to building, and from below as the Joker skulks through streets that the residents deserted in panic. But it’s just as conspicuously present in the film’s many scenes of executives and city officials meeting high above the general populace, like gods determining the fates of those below. Where Batman Begins was largely about the considerable personal toll exacted by its hero’s decision to fight back against the forces of evil while adhering to a code of honor, The Dark Knight expands those weighty themes to city scale. [Keith Phipps]

Stream it now; leaving July 31

The frustrations humming just beneath the surface of The Day Shall Come, the bitter and bracingly funny political satire from British dark-comedy master Chris Morris, are evident in its opening text: “Based on a hundred true stories.” If Morris’ first film, the implausibly hilarious suicide bomber farce Four Lions, deliberately raised questions about where its audience’s sympathies should land, his second feature is unequivocal. What else are we to make of a movie about a terrorist plot in which every single gun, rocket launcher, and dirty bomb ingredient is bought, paid for, and provided by the U.S. government? [William Hughes]

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The rare Stephen King adaptation to capture the author’s signature sense of inexplicable, internal/external terror, The Dead Zone stands as one of David Cronenberg’s most straightforward and eerily effective early works. Trimming King’s source material down to its lean essence—and benefiting from the lack of his imaginative monsters, which never properly translate to the screen—the film concerns Maine schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken), who turns down an offer to stay the night with his girlfriend Sarah (Brooke Adams), subsequently gets into a traffic accident, and awakens from a coma five years later with the gift of second sight. Far from a blessing, however, the power proves to be a damnable curse, turning Johnny into a freak show whose time and attention is coveted by many, but only for their own selfish ends. As the man’s vision expands, his life shrinks down to nothing—an isolated existence which Cronenberg depicts through direction that routinely lingers on the empty silences between words and the distant whooshing of wintry New England wind. Cronenberg’s icy directorial detachment lends The Dead Zone a haunting creepiness, greatly amplified by Walken, whose halting verbal rhythms and glassy stare imbue Johnny with an alienated (if not outright alien) quality. [Nick Schager]

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Justin Simien’s career got off to an auspicious start with his debut feature, Dear White People. Though plagued by the unevenness of a first film, Dear White People also reveals Simien’s keen eye for observation and his sharp sense of humor. His characters—four black students at a fictional Ivy League college—may claim to have all the answers, but Simien smartly undercuts their moral authority with shades of gray; he’s more interested in raising questions about race and identity than in trying to answer them. Yet the film is not without its heart; it was a joy to recognize myself in the wonderfully flawed Sam White (Tessa Thompson), a young woman struggling to balance anger, activism, and art. [Caroline Siede]

Coming July 1

The Dictator keeps the gags coming as fast as it can manage, sometimes in big gross-out setpieces like an impromptu baby delivery, but more often in the general fusillade of hit-or-miss jokes that hit at a better-than-average rate. While Admiral General Aladeen certainly has a place in Baron Cohen’s gallery of human cartoons, the key point about The Dictator is that it’s a departure from his previous films and not another trip to the well. His needling instincts to shock and provoke are still present—and still merrily juvenile—but the film is both more conventional than Borat and Brüno and a more accommodating vehicle for different types of comedy. In reaching back to the past, Baron Cohen finds a viable way forward. [Scott Tobias]

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During the ’80s golden era of American action movies, there was a certain way these movies looked: burnished steel, gleaming sweat, bulging muscles that couldn’t possibly exist without chemical enhancement. The movies that people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were making looked nothing like real life. One fascinating thing about 1988’s Die Hard, quite possibly the best action movie ever made, is that it didn’t look anything like that. As played by Bruce Willis, McClane was something other than a steroidal superman. He was an ordinary human being, and kind of an asshole. As the movie opens, we see McClane grumpily huffing at his airplane seatmate, his affable cartoon-character limo driver Argyle, and finally at his estranged wife. He’s a New York cop who wants to remain a New York cop, and he can’t accept that his wife’s business career has taken off in Los Angeles or that she’s using her maiden name. Seeing her for the first time in months, he freaks out at her and then immediately realizes that he’s being an asshole when it’s too late to do anything about it. But fortunately for McClane, before he has a chance to make more of an ass out of himself, some terrorists show up. And all of a sudden, he’s his best self. [Tom Breihan]

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As an energetic montage at the beginning of The Donut King states, Los Angeles has a much higher percentage of donut shops than any other city in the U.S.—one for every 7,000 residents, as opposed to the national average of one per 30,000. And almost all of those donut shops are owned by Cambodian people, whose market dominance is so complete that even East Coast staple Dunkin’ Donuts struggled to break into Southern California in the ’90s. Remarkably—almost miraculously—this is all the work of one man: Ted Ngoy, who sponsored hundreds of refugees to come to the U.S. and gave them turnkey loans to run their own donut shops in the ’70s and ’80s. The first part of Gu’s documentary celebrates Ngoy, as well as the ingenuity and tireless work ethic of immigrants in general, with a vivid hybrid of biographical documentary and food porn set to colorful animation and a hip-hop beat. In fact, The Donut King plays much like an extended episode of Ugly Delicious, before diving into darker territory in its second half that actively dismantles the myths it spent the first hour building. And although this abrupt turn destabilizes the film’s structure in a way it never quite recovers from, it also makes The Donut King much more than simple food porn—not that there’s anything wrong with that, particularly when creative, mouthwatering treats like cronuts and emoji donuts are so lovingly showcased. [Katie Rife]

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The Coen brothers’ first breakout hit crystallizes all their strengths as writers and directors: The diamond-sharp plotting, the unparalleled gift for stylized language (in this case, the quotable dialect of native Minnesotans), the exacting control over every aspect of the production. What makes Fargo special, beyond the Coens working at the peak of their craft, is that it considers the crime thriller in moral terms, turning the bloody mayhem over a scheme gone wrong into a reflection on the bedrock values of home and family. The Coens sharply contrast the desires and temperaments of its two main characters: a car salesman (William H. Macy) who arranges to have his wife kidnapped to bilk ransom money out of his wealthy father-in-law, and a pregnant police chief (Frances McDormand) who waddles her way to the bottom of the case. In McDormand’s steady gumshoe, Fargo has an unforgettable hero who can piece together the clues without comprehending the crime.

Coming July 1; Leaving July 31

Apologies to Captain Marvel, the Avengers, and the kids of Shazam, but the best superhero story [of 2019] (on film at least) was Julia Hart’s intimate post-apocalyptic family drama. Anchored by the tremendous Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Hart’s film takes a bunch of familiar tropes and breathes new life into them by folding in issues of fear, addiction, and race. It’s also beautiful—give me Fast Color’s spare special effects over the bombastic blockbusters any day. [Allison Shoemaker]

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For the opening scene of Flight to have maximum impact, it’s probably best to go in knowing nothing about its protagonist’s profession, which is unfortunately revealed in the film poster, if not the title itself. Waking in an anonymous hotel room, Denzel Washington stares at the naked woman he bedded the night before, while his ex-wife calls him to argue about money. Bleary-eyed and surrounded by the remnants of a party only hours dead, he swigs the dregs from a beer bottle, stumbles around the room, does a line of coke to get straight. And then he eventually strides confidently into the hallway in his airline pilot’s uniform, to the tune of Joe Cocker’s “Feelin’ Alright.” Directing his first live-action film since 2000’s Cast Away, Robert Zemeckis paces it brilliantly, slowly ramping up the energy from hungover lethargy to coke-fueled confidence, while creating undercurrents of dread as Washington hits his stride. He looks the part of the perfect pilot, and he may feel all right, but beneath the surface, something has clearly gone wrong. Whatever his problems—and by the film’s end, they’ve been depicted in exhaustive detail—his confidence isn’t misplaced. There’s only one flight in Flight, what should be a routine morning transit from Orlando to Atlanta. It’s destined to be more harrowing than usual, however. As a new co-pilot (Brian Geraghty) looks on in concern after their plane takes off in the rain, Washington punches through a narrow corridor of clouds while traveling at a speed just on the right side of what’s considered safe. It’s how he flies and how he lives: pushing the limit but never going over, thanks to his perfect control. Then, as the plane nears its destination, events beyond Washington’s control take over. [Keith Phipps]

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Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting) stars as a laid-off Sheffield steelworker who devises an unusual scheme to better himself in this boisterous new comedy. Inspired by the popularity of a Chippendales appearance, Carlyle begins recruiting other unemployed men to form their own stripshow. That none of them, for various reasons, are really qualified to be taking off their clothes in public is the source for much of The Full Monty’s humor—most often in the form of some very funny physical gags—but the film has much more going for it than that one obvious joke would suggest. The Full Monty takes a harsh look at the state of post-Thatcher labor in Britain, portraying some of the humiliation involved with life on the dole. Carlyle’s attempts to win the respect of his young son, and some of the other men’s insecurity with their bodies—a rarely touched topic—are treated sensitively and incorporated seamlessly into the story. [Keith Phipps]

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An inspired spoof of and tribute to Star Trek, Galaxy Quest stars Tim Allen as the one-time star of the long-canceled, cultishly adored science-fiction show of the title, the captain of a fictional starship whose crew now finds its steadiest employment signing autographs at conventions and opening discount electronics stores. When guileless space aliens who believe the series’ episodes to be “historical documents” (imagine hardened Trekkies with an even looser grasp on reality) kidnap Allen and his crew, the group is forced to recall the lessons of its fictional past and band together to save the aliens’ fragile civilization, which is founded on the high-minded if occasionally illogical principles of the series. Director Dean Parisot (Home Fries) makes the most of Robert Gordon and David Howard’s Three Amigos-in-space screenplay, never letting the impressive special effects get in the way of a solid comedy that would have worked at half the budget. But the cast is what makes Galaxy Quest work. Allen suggests the two-dimensional actor who starred on Home Improvement more than the two-dimensional actor who played Captain Kirk, but the rest turn in deft comic performances. These include Sigourney Weaver as the series’ token woman, Daryl Mitchell as its aging wunderkind navigator, Sam Rockwell as a minor player (who died in episode 82) swept along for the ride, and the especially good Alan Rickman and Tony Shalhoub, respectively playing a sardonic British actor tired of being typecast in his Spock-like role and the ship’s sleepy-eyed tech sergeant. [Keith Phipps]

Let’s get this out of the way up-front: Aaron Katz’s low-key neo-noir about the thorny friendship between an actress (Zoe Kravitz) and her beleaguered assistant (Lola Kirke) is too subdued for a flashy payoff. But that doesn’t mean it lacks flash; this is Katz’s most visually distinctive film yet, awash in neon and street-light, creating a Los Angeles that gains a kind of clarity and personality at night, even when the characters are throw into a confounding mystery. The movie’s thematic concerns are more subtle, considering Hollywood morality with an enigmatic (and half-comic) flair that will strike some as insubstantial. But its mood and images linger. [Jesse Hassenger]

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Adapting Tracy Chevalier’s novel, Girl With A Pearl Earring seeks not so much to clear up the mysteries Johannes Vermeer’s painting as to capture more moments of pregnant ambiguity where lives find their potential, and to show the unspoken codes that keep that potential in check. As the film opens, its eponymous heroine, beautifully played by Scarlett Johansson, seems incapable of her immortal expression, or even of looking anyone else in the eye. A Protestant among Catholics, a woman in a man’s world, and a new servant in the established ranks of the busy, precariously prosperous Vermeer household, she keeps her hair covered and her head low. It takes time for her to develop any relationship at all with Vermeer (Colin Firth), and more time still for that relationship to blossom into something between infatuation and mutual admiration. When it does, Firth is struck by her beauty, but also by her instinct for color and composition, which has no outlet other than helping him. Making the transition from British television, director Peter Webber displays a great sense of understatement and a keen eye for careful framing, with cinematographer Eduardo Serra beautifully re-creating Vermeer’s signature play of shadow and light. Within Pearl Earring’s brisk running time, Webber sketches out the boundaries that money and tradition place around his characters’ lives, and shows how far their dreams overshoot those boundaries. Conveying a wicked sense of entitlement, Tom Wilkinson plays Firth’s patron as a man fully aware of the bottomless pit over which he dangles painter and subject alike, and equally aware that he need never speak of his power. Only the usually reliable Firth seems somewhat off, too much a brooding artist and too little a man. Yet this ends up working in the film’s favor, keeping the mystery of Vermeer intact until a final, offscreen gesture gives his most famous model a melancholy dignity to match the shroud of immortality. [Keith Phipps]

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There is no director more ideally suited to adapt Stieg Larsson’s best-selling potboiler The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo than David Fincher, and not just for the obvious reason that he knows his way around the serial-killer thriller. He’s equally adept at taking unwieldy chunks of exposition—like the lawsuits over the founding of Facebook or the leads (and blind alleys) in the investigation of the Zodiac killer or the gnarled family tree in Larsson’s book—and making it look like cinema of the first order. A typically Fincherian hero—the loner who retreats from family and society to burrow into a project—Daniel Craig stars as a Swedish journalist who seizes the chance to pivot out of highly publicized libel suit and into something new. Christopher Plummer, as the retired CEO of a large corporation, summons Craig to a remote island where he and members of his family live in luxury, and, more often than not, bitter estrangement. Plummer wants Craig to document the family’s history, but the focus of his investigation turns to the disappearance (and likely murder) of Plummer’s grand-niece 36 years earlier. As the case grows more complicated, Craig brings on an unconventional but brilliant research assistant in Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a young woman coarsened by her horrific experiences within the social system. [Scott Tobias]

Coming July 1

One might be inclined to label the movie as a series of elaborate misdirections, if it weren’t implicitly conditioning the viewer to mistrust its characters. Like the Paul Verhoeven movies it occasionally resembles, Gone Girl is a satire that doubles as tightly styled, perverse entertainment—a deconstructed thriller with a bop-bop-bop drum-machine pace, which builds to one of the sourest, most hopeless downer endings in recent memory. Fincher’s style—with its looming ceilings and motel-murder-scene lighting—can make something as simple as a man going out for a cup of coffee look like a procedural. Working off a script (by Flynn herself) that correlates suburban home life with a convoluted mystery, he has made a movie in which the lurid and the mundane look exactly alike, and where the underworld is represented by an abandoned shopping mall where suburbanites go to buy drugs. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Gretel And Hansel comes from Oz Perkins, the cult director who made a name for himself on the strength of two films, The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House. This was Perkins’ first film to receive a wide theatrical release, and so perhaps it’s to be expected that it would also be his most commercial one to date. Sort of. Though it moves at a much brisker clip, “commercial” is a relative term for a film where the camera lingers on a character pulling a lengthy tress of child’s hair from the back of her throat. The balance Perkins strikes in Gretel And Hansel is reminiscent of another contemporary arthouse horror director, Robert Eggers, whose films aren’t impossibly dense but are too slow for a decent chunk of the horror audience. In fact, screenwriter Rob Hayes borrows a favorite technique of Eggers’, employing stylized dialogue that takes a few minutes to get used to but eventually helps the viewer sink into the film’s world. Sophia Lillis stars as a teenage Gretel, whose name is put in front of her brother’s in the title for reasons that become clear later on. As the film opens, Gretel is looking for work as a servant, and nearly takes a job with a foppish landowner in makeup and sock garters until he asks her if her “maidenhead” is intact. This is the first of a handful of nods to the dangers of moving through the world in a female body, a theme that’s handled surprisingly well considering the film has both a male director and a male screenwriter. It’s also important to what happens after Gretel and her little brother, Hansel (Sammy Leakey), are sent away by their mother, who’s both unwilling and unable to feed them any longer. As in the fairy tale, they fall into the clutches of a sinister witch after nearly starving to death in the woods. But this witch (Alice Krige) lives in a wooden house instead of one made out of gingerbread and gumdrops. She also shows a special interest in Gretel, who seems to have an inborn talent for magic. [Katie Rife]

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What makes a religion, anyway? Historically, Christian churches have served as community centers for their congregants, provided those congregants conformed to a certain moral code. More recently, thanks to the evangelical movement’s (re)positioning of itself as the “moral majority” in the wake of Roe v. Wade, those functions have evolved into something blatantly political, as evidenced by that community’s hypocritical embrace of twice-divorced adulterer Donald Trump. So why not take the good parts of religion—the camaraderie, the organization—and use them to advance a more liberal moral and political agenda, one that values pluralism and bodily autonomy over all? And as long as you’re fighting back against creeping crypto-fascist theocracy, why not do it in the name of Satan? He has the best music, after all. That’s basically how The Satanic Temple came to be, as it’s depicted in documentarian Penny Lane’s film about the group, Hail Satan? [Katie Rife]

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While Cheech and Chong’s career is the exception that proves the rule, there was a time when Caucasians possessed an apparent monopoly on lead roles in dopey, lowbrow stoner comedies and raunchy teen-targeted fare. Happily, cinema and society have advanced to such a degree that now Asians, blacks, gays, and other minorities all have inept teen- and young-adult-oriented comedies to call their own. The wildly uneven but intermittently funny new feature-length fast-food commercial Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle fits squarely into this brave new paradigm. It boldly subverts stereotypes and challenges conventional wisdom by presenting affable Korean and Indian antiheroes who are just as sex-crazed, irresponsible, mischief-prone, and chemically altered as their white counterparts. Danny Leiner’s theatrical follow-up to 2000’s Dude, Where’s My Car?, which has enjoyed a surprising second life as a national punchline, Harold & Kumar stars John Cho and Kal Penn as twentysomethings with just two things on their minds: getting baked and grabbing White Castle food. [Nathan Rabin]

Stream it now; leaving July 31

Hell Or High Water is the kind of movie that makes you fall in love again with the lost art of dialogue, getting you hooked anew on the snap of flavorful conversation. Whenever one of its characters opens their mouth, you’re reminded of how flatly expositional or distractingly florid so much movie dialogue is, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s aiming for the wiseguy patter of Tarantino or Mamet. But in Hell Or High Water, everyone speaks with a plainspoken wit that provides even the most functional of scenes—say, an interview with a bank teller who’s recently been robbed—a charge of pleasure. “Black or white?” asks the officer investigating. “Their skins or their souls?” the victim retorts. These are cops, robbers, and struggling wage slaves, not poets or philosophers. But they all have a way with words, and hearing them exercise it is like guzzling a gallon of water in the desert. Two men do a good portion of the talking. They are Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), brothers heisting their way across sleepy, one-horse Texas. The Howard boys are not your typical bank robbers. For one, they hit only the registers, pocketing a modest few thousand from every score. For two, they’ve targeted a specific bank—a local company with a few branches scattered across the state. The regional nature of the crime spree keeps it out of federal jurisdiction; it falls instead on the desk of grizzled Texas Ranger Marcus (Jeff Bridges, because who does grizzled better?) a few days out from retirement. Marcus spots the pattern and suspects a motive beyond money. He and his partner, Alberto (a terrific Gil Birmingham), take chase. [A.A. Dowd]

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Sally Field, looking fabulous in cat-eye glasses and eccentric knits, stars as Doris, a sixtysomething woman who at the beginning of the film is living a lonely existence in Staten Island. Her mother, to whose care she has devoted much of her adult life, recently died, leaving her with little but her old-school leftist pal Roz (Tyne Daly) and her menial data-entry job to occupy her time. It’s the confluence of these two that inspires Doris to change things up, actually: After Roz takes her to a lecture by self-help guru Willy Williams (Peter Gallagher), Doris is motivated to pursue a relationship with her office crush, a recent L.A. transplant several decades her junior named John Fremont (Max Greenfield). Field keeps both hands firmly on the wheel as Doris, skillfully maneuvering through both the comedic and dramatic scenes like the two-time Oscar winner that she is. [Katie Rife]

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Hounds Of Love is a striking film, but it’s not a fun one to watch. Australian director Ben Young’s pseudo-true-crime character piece dramatizes the cycles that enable domestic abuse by taking them to their extremes, examining why someone would participate in the most heinous of crimes in an attempt to please their partner. Stephen Curry and Emma Booth star as John and Evelyn White, a working-class couple whose relationship revolves around the kidnapping, torture, and murder of young women; the majority of the film focuses on one of those women, headstrong teenager Vicki Mahoney (Ashleigh Cummings), and how her captivity disrupts the Whites’ sick domestic routine. Booth gives a standout performance as Evelyn, whose shattered psyche forms the broken heart of the film, and for a first-time director, Young shows remarkable control, giving Hounds Of Love moments of visual beauty to offset all of its emotional ugliness. [Katie Rife]

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Throughout the first two decades of his career, Newman alternated between smooth-talking pretty-boy roles and parts where he played troubled rogues, likable but dangerous. Newman received his third Best Actor Oscar nomination for Hud, in which he plays a rancher’s son who spends his days sexually harassing the family housekeeper while waiting for his dad to die so that he can claim his inheritance. And yet, even though the character is a total prick, Newman is strangely sympathetic, because he makes a life of drinking, roping, and not giving a damn look wholly defensible. [Read more]

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By now, the story of a self-destructive loner wagering it all for pride and glory has hardened into genre cliché, with just about every gambling flick of the last five decades—including The Hustler’s official sequel, The Color Of Money—offering some variation on the fatalistic maneuvers of Fast Eddie. But none of those lesser descendants have robbed The Hustler of its hard-nosed poetry, partially because few of them seem as fascinated by the psychology of their anti-heroes. For whatever else he is—addict, egomaniac, “poolroom bum”—Eddie is also an artist, capable of identifying the gifts of his opponent. “Look at the way he moves, like a dancer,” he whispers of Gleason’s “fat man,” and Newman—young and brash, his eyes alight with fascination—makes the movie’s obsession ours. [A.A. Dowd]

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From the opening minutes of Craig Gillespie’s unreliably narrated, glibly entertaining biopic I, Tonya, it’s clear that Margot Robbie has disappeared into the role of disgraced figure skater and pop culture punching bag Tonya Harding. It’s not a precise imitation: However hard the wardrobe and makeup teams have worked to deglamorize this glamorous Hollywood star, she still doesn’t look much like the person she’s playing—a truth reinforced by the obligatory, closing-credits appearance by the real Harding, conquering the ice in archival footage. But as she wraps her mouth around a cigarette, a cornpone accent, and some well-delivered profanity, Robbie channels the antagonistic, take-no-shit attitude of her infamous “character,” while adding notes of disappointment and even dignity missing from every headline or Hard Copy treatment of The Tonya Harding Story. In the process, the actor wrestles a rare role worthy of her abilities from an industry that’d just as soon keep her in bubbles. [A.A. Dowd]

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Raoul Peck’s docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, speaking in a voice so low and affected that he hardly sounds like himself. He doesn’t quite sound like James Baldwin either—or at least not like the mellifluous, twangy Baldwin seen in the old clips from talk shows and public affairs programs scattered throughout Peck’s film. Jackson sounds more like the author late at night, exhausted, half-whispering bitter truths into a tape recorder. I Am Not Your Negro could be considered one of the final statements from a great American writer, and it’s a sadly resigned one, summarizing centuries of overt and subtle racism and expressing a feeling of hopelessness. To say that this movie is as relevant now as it was when Baldwin was alive is no great analytical leap. The trends of these times would not have surprised the man himself. As repeated throughout Peck’s film, Baldwin never had much faith that black people could ever live in a United States where they’d wake up in the morning without at least some worry that they’d be shot dead by nightfall. [Noel Murray]

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Based on the book by Houston Chronicle journalist Steve McVicker, I Love You Phillip Morris marvels at the impulsive, diabolical brilliance of Steven Jay Russell (Jim Carrey), a.k.a. “King Con,” a multi-talented con artist who frustrated and embarrassed detectives and jailers for years. In a breathless series of scenes, it’s established that Steven, upon discovering he was adopted, became so motivated to impress his birth mother that he fashioned a straight-arrow life as a Georgia policeman, and a respected husband and father of two. When he finally meets his mother and is shown the door, Steven embraces who he really is—gay—and proceeds to build a new life in South Beach on embezzlement and fraud. While in prison, he meets Phillip Morris (Ewan McGregor), a sweet but taciturn love object, and his criminal exploits are pushed to another level. Beyond the aggressive black comedy, most of it funny and the rest compensated for via pacing, I Love You Phillip Morris examines the fascinating contradictions of a man who spun an elaborate web of lies in order to sustain a love that was fundamentally true. [Scott Tobias]

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Barry Jenkins’ dazzling adaptation of a 1974 novel by James Baldwin approaches the blossoming love between Tish (Kiki Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James) with great reverence, cinematographer James Laxton capturing the almost internal glow they radiate, as Nicholas Britell’s score swells and swoons. Yet an undercurrent of tragedy runs through even the film’s most sun-kissed moments, not just the ones of hardship. Baldwin’s story, remarkably adapted by Jenkins as his follow-up to the Oscar-winning Moonlight, looks upon the injustice laced throughout the lives of black Americans with the same steadfast gaze the film turns on its moments of tenderness. It’s all there, found in the blue skies; in Fonny’s sculptures; in the thoughtful performances of Layne, James, and standouts Regina King, Colman Domingo, and Brian Tyree Henry; and in the warmth that passes between two palms pressed together, even when they’re separated by glass. [Allison Shoemaker]

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In a world… where men have long dominated the voiceover profession… it’s nearly impossible for a woman to be heard. But one remarkable woman (Lake Bell) is determined to try… even if it means competing against a legend in the business… her own father (Fred Melamed). In addition to featuring perhaps the most novel milieu for a comedy since Tin Men was built around rival aluminum-siding salesmen, In A World… serves as a terrific introduction to the gifted Bell (Childrens Hospital), who wrote and directed the film in addition to playing the lead.

Coming July 9

At the end of Into The Arms Of Strangers, Mark Jonathan Harris’ moving documentary about the 10,000 Jewish children who fled to foster homes in England during WWII, the titles post a dispiriting reminder of the 1.5 million children who weren’t so fortunate. The overwhelming number offers a sense of perspective, but, like Schindler’s List, the film is less interested in probing the horrors of the Holocaust than in locating small, redemptive pockets of courage and humanity. Produced with the assistance of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, Into The Arms Of Strangers archives the heartbreaking testimonials of a handful of survivors, now in their 70s but each with vivid memories of the period. [Scott Tobias]

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A pacifist morality tale set during the height of the Cold War sounds more like a trip to school than fun for the whole family. But at its core, The Iron Giant is basically E.T. in reverse: same starry-eyed story of a boy befriending an alien, only here, it’s the boy’s simple wisdom that makes an impression on the alien, not the other way around. And while there’s no single image in The Iron Giant to match the iconic shot of children cycling in silhouette under the moonlight, there isn’t much difference between that flight and a young boy cradled into the palm of a 100-foot-tall robot, catching a bird’s-eye view of a seaside town in New England. The bond between boy and alien may just transcend the bond between boy and dog. [Scott Tobias]

Stream it now; leaving July 31

Diablo Cody won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Juno, and in the process became far more well-known than most screenwriters who don’t also direct. After publishing a blog and memoir about her time as an exotic dancer, Cody had her first script snapped up and produced in relatively short order; by the time the Oscars rolled around, a cruel and pointless backlash seemed overdue. The 18-month wait for Jennifer’s Body, then, must have been excruciating for anyone who drew their critical knives as soon as a quippy, pregnant teenager first said (horrors!), “Honest to blog.”

Cody’s actual horror comedy, stylishly directed by Karyn Kusama, stars Megan Fox as a teenage girl who becomes a literal boy-eater after she’s possessed by a demon. Fox drew additional attention to the project, through both the movie’s misguided, sex-heavy marketing campaign and a truly Herculean feat of misogyny that somehow allowed the female lead of two Transformers movies to bear the brunt of disdain for Michael Bay’s dumb toy/military commercials. Fox spouting slangy Diablo Cody teenspeak was apparently the perfect target in 2009; now she seems just plain perfect as Jennifer, tossing off Cody’s weirdest lines with hilarious nonchalance. One of the best runners is Jennifer’s habit of referring to all males as boys, as in her insistence that PMS was “invented by the boy-run media to make us look crazy.” It gets even Cody-er when a possessed Jennifer inexplicably suggests watching the forgotten Emma Roberts vehicle Aquamarine. (“It’s about this girl who’s, like, half-sushi.”) [Jesse Hassenger]

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Matthew McConaughey topped a resurgent 2012 as the eponymous character in Killer Joe, a redneck noir that bristles with sleazy wit. McConaughey plays a police detective who moonlights as a contract killer, a double life that gives McConaughey an advantage in investigative cover-ups (see also: Morgan, Dexter), but one that requires careful management so McConaughey doesn’t cross the streams. He’s utterly psychotic, but he keeps his anger and creepy peccadilloes in check while spending much of his time leveraging power and control from the desperate, greedy pond scum that requires his services. Whatever threat he poses is hidden behind the eyes. [Scott Tobias]

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Early in The Last Mistress, a quietly sinister period drama based on Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly’s scandalous 19th-century novel, a pair of old gossips discuss the engagement of a virginal aristocrat to a notorious libertine. They worry the naïve young woman is overmatched, but more ruinous still is the possibility of love: “In love,” one says, “the first to suffer has lost.” And with that, all the film’s period trappings can no longer hide the act that we’re in the world of Catherine Breillat, the French director behind Fat Girl, Romance, and other frank chronicles of bedroom politics. For Breillat, love and exploitation go hand in glove, because the more people give themselves over to each other, the more vulnerable they become. And once two people share that lasting a connection, a power struggle intensifies and the real suffering begins. [Scott Tobias]

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There were plenty of celebrated documentaries in 2018, but my favorite by far (which few of my colleagues even saw) was noted photographer Michael Dweck’s formally dazzling portrait of Long Island’s last surviving stock-car racetrack. This isn’t a subculture in which I have any inherent interest—quite the contrary, in fact—but The Last Race enthralled me by making it strange and beautiful. [Mike D’Angelo]

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It’s been eight years since writer-director Debra Granik and writer-producer Anne Rosellini debuted their magnificent Winter’s Bone, and helped launch a then-teenaged Jennifer Lawrence to stardom. The thematically similar Leave No Trace may do the same for its 18-year-old star Thomasin McKenzie, who’s both magnetic and heartbreaking as Tom, the resourceful daughter of a mentally ill Iraq War veteran (Ben Foster). As the pair scavenges their way across the Pacific Northwest, looking for places to squat off the grid, McKenzie captures the young woman’s complicated dilemma: She wants to take care of her dad, even as she realizes that his damage may be irreparable. Leave No Trace is at once a wilderness adventure, a coming-of-age picture, and a sensitive portrait of a kid struggling to reckon with the realization that she may need to cut her family ties. [Noel Murray]

Coming July 4

One of the first things Aubrey Plaza says in The Little Hours is “Don’t fucking talk to us.” Anachronism, as it turns out, is the guiding force of this frequently funny, agreeably bawdy farce, which imagines what a convent of the grubby, violent, disease-infested Middle Ages might look and sound like if it were populated by characters straight out of a modern NBC sitcom. Plaza’s Fernanda, a caustic eye-rolling hipster nun born eons too early, sneaks out to get into mischief, using a perpetually escaping donkey as her excuse. Uptight wallflower Genevra (a priceless Kate Micucci) tattles relentlessly on the other women, reporting every transgression to Sister Marea (Molly Shannon, playing her dutiful piousness almost totally straight—she’s the only character here that could actually exist in the 1300s). And Alessandra (Alison Brie), the closest the convent has to a spoiled rich kid, daydreams about being whisked away and married, but that would depend on her father shelling out for a decent dowry. If the plague doesn’t kill them, the boredom will. When Plaza, Micucci, and Brie get smashed on stolen communion wine and perform a drunken sing-along of a wordless choral staple, like college girls sneaking booze past the RA and belting some radio anthem in their dorm, the true resonance of all this anachronism slips into focus: An itchy desire for a better life is something women of every century experience, regardless if their catalog of curses yet includes “fuck.” [A.A. Dowd]

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As a heist picture, Logan Lucky knows just how often to alternate straight exposition with cagey withholding. The full robbery blueprint is revealed slowly—new details are still twisting the narrative even after the big heist day has passed, perfect for Steven Soderbergh’s control-freak tendencies (once again, he shoots and edits himself). The snappy script by unknown (and possibly pseudonymous) newcomer Rebecca Blunt offers some Coen brothers-like dialogue, which Soderbergh complements with his compositions. Sometimes he gets a laugh just by how he positions the actors in the frame, and there are multiple gags predicated on the timing of explosions. [Jesse Hassenger]

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The Long Goodbye is actually one of the more plot-heavy films in Robert Altman’s filmography. Of course, Altman was a director who would frequently eschew traditional narrative in favor of pursuing a laid-back, hangout vibe, sometimes to his detriment. So to say that The Long Goodbye is plot-heavy is to say it actually has a plot, which is necessary on some level for any riff on the private-eye genre. But said plot is unspooled almost lackadaisically. Tension arises abruptly then fades away just as quickly. The ultimate solution to the mystery is pieced together in a couple of minutes, and the scenes in which protagonist Phillip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) actually puts two and two together are few and far between. Instead, Altman and his star lose themselves in a portrait of a ’70s Los Angeles that already feels faded, like a Polaroid left in the sun too long. The first 15 minutes of the film, which set the loose tone, concern Marlowe trying to get the right brand of food to feed his cat, who woke him up at 3 a.m. It’s glorious. [Emily VanDerWerff]

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There’s a scene early in Luce, a riveting psychodrama about race and preconceptions, that’s as tense as any thriller, and all it really comes down to is two people talking in a classroom, their deceptively polite conversation shading into passive-aggressive antagonism. One of the two is the title character, a beaming A-student played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. The other is his government and history teacher, Ms. Wilson (Octavia Spencer), the only instructor at their Virginia high school who ever seems to challenge the star athlete, debate-club champion, and soon-to-be valedictorian—though she, too, views him as an “important example to the school,” a Black kid who’s climbed his way to the top of the class. Harrison perfectly captures the poise and charisma of an academic golden child, the kind who knows just how to talk to adults, projecting sincerity and gratitude with just a touch of good humor, so as not to come off an unlikable, Tracy Flick-like overachiever. But the actor also lets us see, early and often, how that congeniality is a kind of front: a whole manufactured persona Luce can toggle on or off. And as Ms. Wilson carefully questions the promising pupil about an assignment he’s turned in that’s raised some red flags for her, his mask of ingratiation slips, just long enough for him to issue what sounds an awful lot like a veiled threat. It’s a remarkable, chilling performance: from Harrison, certainly, but also from his character, playing code-switching mind games with his teacher. [A.A. Dowd]

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The Man From Nowhere, the highest-grossing movie, foreign or domestic, in South Korea in 2010. (For comparison’s sake, America’s highest-grossing movie that same year was Toy Story 3.) The Man From Nowhere is a raw fucking film. It tells its story with an all-out intensity that no American action movie could ever hope to match. It gets complicated, but here are the broad strokes: A quiet, mysterious loner lives by himself in an apartment building and runs a pawnshop. The only person he ever talks to is one neighbor, a little girl whose mother is a reckless heroin addict. He acts annoyed whenever the little girl comes around, but he looks after her. The mother steals some heroin from some gangsters, and so they kidnap both the mother and the girl. And they’re not just drug traffickers; they’re also organ harvesters, and they plan to do some bad things to these poor people. So the pawnshop owner, who happens to be a former special forces assassin, has to take on this entire merciless criminal syndicate to get his friend back. [Tom Breihan]

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John Ford did more to shape the American Western than any other director; in every decade of his career, he led the charge to define and redefine it. By 1962, he didn’t have many films left in him, but The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance still provided a glimpse of future interpretations of the past. The late ’60s and ’70s found filmmakers demythologizing the Old West; with Liberty Valance, Ford beat them to it, offering a bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier by focusing on two strikingly different men who help one town choose law and order over the chaos of the open range. James Stewart stars as a lawyer from the East who doesn’t even make it to his new home in the town of Shinbone before his life savings is stolen. The robber is the notorious Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a gang leader given free rein to terrorize the locals in exchange for his work assisting a group of powerful ranchers. Penniless, Stewart takes a job washing dishes at a small restaurant staffed by Swedish immigrants; they include the lovely Vera Miles, an illiterate woman all but married to John Wayne, a goodhearted tough guy who runs a small horse farm and believes security means carrying a gun and being willing to fire it. As Stewart settles into town, he and Wayne strike up an occasionally uneasy friendship—Stewart advocates improvement through education and democracy, while Wayne clings to the tools that helped him tame the unsettled land. Neither fully acknowledges that only one will have a place in a more civilized Shinbone. [Keith Phipps]

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Rising quickly from a protegé of fashion editor Isabella Blow to creative director of Givenchy and owner of his own label, McQueen rose to prominence during a period where not just models but also fashion designers were becoming celebrities in their own right. He had an undeniable talent and a knack for getting the fashion gatekeepers that his work was designed to piss off to write him checks anyway. And he hated it—hated being famous, hated being respectable, hated pretty much everything but his dogs and working in his studio with the close-knit group of colleagues who were his only real friends. Those colleagues, along with members of McQueen’s family and former lovers, provide a rare, intimate look into the designer’s private world in McQueen, a film that’s refreshingly free of the gushing sound bites from sycophantic celebrities that too often dominate fashion documentaries. [Katie Rife]

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Following three families on an arduous journey through the Cascade Mountains via the Oregon Trail in 1845, director Kelly Reichardt adopts the austerity and pace of Gus Van Sant’s “death trilogy,” especially Gerry, which also conveyed the sheer ardor of traveling on foot to a water source that’s perpetually beyond the horizon. Yet Meek’s Cutoff isn’t a minimalist experiment: Instead, it advances a story full of tension and slow-burning suspense, as the fates of weary pioneers rest in the hands of two men of dubious intent. [Scott Tobias]

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From the house that fronted Hoop Dreams comes another absorbing, heartbreaking documentary about coming of age on the economic fringe of the American Midwest. It’s boards, not basketball, that the young subjects of Minding The Gap looked to as an escape hatch, back when they were teenagers delivering themselves, an afternoon at a time, from the shared trauma of their home lives. Bing Liu, the director, was one of them, a budding filmmaker shooting skating videos with his friends. Returning to his old stomping grounds of Rockford, Illinois, he catches up with these childhood companions, still haunted by the abuse they experienced as kids, which has shaped their adulthoods in ways both obvious and not. As usual, the Kartemquin long-term filming model pays enormous dramatic dividends. But Liu is just as interested in where these real lives have been as where they’re headed, because the two are intimately related—just one profound takeaway from his multifaceted portrait of boys growing into men, trying to outpace their demons along the way. [A.A. Dowd]

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Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, the series’ fourth film, charges director Brad Bird with the task, betting that the animator behind The Incredibles and Ratatouille would have similar luck with flesh and blood in his live-action debut. The bet pays off. And then some. Bird brings a scary amount of assurance to Ghost Protocol. His action scenes are clean, coherent, thrilling, and visceral, never more than in a mid-film sequence in Dubai that piles setpiece atop setpiece as the action moves in, around, up, and down the Burj Khalifa skyscraper—the tallest building in the world. As Tom Cruise clings to the side of the building using malfunctioning equipment, and a sandstorm looms in the distance, the question shifts from whether Bird can direct an action film to whether there’s anyone out there who can top him. [Keith Phipps]

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Rather than a didactic Martin Luther King Jr. biographical endeavor, this project about the African American experience from veteran director Sam Pollard is an in-depth examination of the bureau’s history as it relates to their surveillance of the pastor-turned-galvanizing-orator. In place of talking heads, Pollard deploys only the audio from MLK’s interviews, filling the screen instead with archival footage and photographs. For context, Pollard talks to some of King’s closest contemporaries, like Andrew Young and Clarence Jones, as well as as notable academics like Donna Murch and David J. Garrow. Their observations, opinions, and first-hand accounts are the building blocks of a pragmatic history lesson. The tone of MLK/FBI can be excessively solemn at times, though maybe that’s a preemptive measure—a reflection of how those wronged in this country are expected to present their arguments in level-headed fashion or be deemed too emotional and hence not “objective.” Never forget that white America polices even the way in which those who are othered choose to talk about their trauma. [Carlos Aguilar]

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Boys and girls on the precipice of adulthood kick a can around, blindfolded, playing some makeshift hybrid of soccer and Marco Polo to pass the unfilled hours. They live near an actual precipice, in a stone bunker carved into the top of a mountain and surrounded by clouds—their modest castle in the sky. By day, they perform military training exercises, but also just goof around and make out and eat mushrooms. By night, they dance around bonfires and scream toward a heaven they can almost reach out and touch. They’re somewhere in Latin America, possibly Colombia, though where exactly is never specified. For all intents and purposes, this foggy, isolated, high-altitude kingdom is Neverland. But there’s no Peter Pan around to fill their lives with meaning or magic. Going only by code names, like Smurf and Boom Boom, the young commandos do answer to someone: They’re at the bottom of a chain of command, the lowest-ranking grunts of a mysterious guerilla group called The Organization. But they’re also just kids—horny, confused, unsupervised kids, tasked with grave responsibilities they’re nowhere near emotionally mature enough to handle. That’s the reigning contradiction, maybe the tragic tension, of the gripping Monos. [A.A. Dowd]

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Spelled out in its broadest outlines, Monster’s Ball reads like a crude liberal fantasy worthy of the late Stanley Kramer (Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner): It’s a message movie about a white racist redeemed by the love of a poor black woman, who is, in kind, redeemed by his generosity. The action could have swayed toward unbearably turgid and patronizing, but director Marc Forster and his stellar cast transform Ball’s dubious premise into a surprisingly nuanced and resonant melodrama, bolstered by an unusually strong feeling for the crawling tenor of life in the Deep South. Though its vision of racial harmony appears too tidy and simple-minded at times, Monster’s Ball sticks closer to its characters than its message, smartly deferring any questions of authenticity to the actors. [Scott Tobias]

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With this expertly wrought period piece, Rick Alverson peels back the placid surface of midcentury Americana to reveal the squirming hotbed of anxiety, repression, and predation lying just beneath the “good ol’ days.” Good doctor Jeff Goldblum takes young ward Tye Sheridan on the road as he goes from hospital to hospital demonstrating his barbaric lobotomy technique; the banal horrors Sheridan witnesses along the way lay bare the ugliness of our national character. [Charles Bramseco]

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Concert films became more common as MTV (and later, DVDs) grew more popular. They used to be reserved only for the biggest stars; now it’s rare to find a band that hasn’t shot a concert. But that doesn’t make all concert films equal. Anyone can point a camera at Journey while the music plays. It takes talent to make a concert film a film. Enter Jonathan Demme, whose 1984 Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense took the form to a place that its predecessors (with the possible exceptions of The Last Waltz) had only suggested. Namely, he took it to the stage, putting viewers close enough to see the sweat drip off David Byrne’s brow, but maintaining just enough distance that it looked like art. The shots seemed composed but the action spontaneous, a balance that few directors ever find. Demme repeated the trick on a much smaller scale with the little-seen but priceless Robyn Hitchcock feature Storefront Hitchcock. With Neil Young: Heart Of Gold, he more or less splits the difference, capturing a Young performance before a small crowd at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. [Keith Phipps]

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Not since Blue Ruin has a movie gotten as much mileage out of having its hero fuck up as The Nice Guys does. Shane Black’s entertaining but shaggy homage to The Rockford Files-era detective series and mid-to-late 1970s cheese finds its offbeat gumshoe in Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a smartass with no sense of smell who tends to make bad guesses, lose guns, misread addresses, drink whatever’s handed to him, and defenestrate himself repeatedly; early on, he tries to break into a window, only to slice his wrist up so badly that he passes out from blood loss. Structured like a TV pilot, the movie partners March with Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), the Yoo-hoo-loving goon who broke the private eye’s arm just days before, in the search for a missing activist. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale is a Western revenge yarn of such heightened cruelty and suffering that it basically demands to be read as allegory. Westerns, as a rule, are violent, and that perhaps goes double for the Aussie ones, which tend to be more pitiless than their American cousins, stripping the genre of its romance and derring-do. Even by those standards, The Nightingale is tough to take. Set in the Oz of 1825, it confronts audiences with the full horror of colonialism, including enough scenes of sexual assault to warrant the trigger warning offered up before several screenings of the film. But while what we see and can never unsee over the course of a grueling two-plus hours is certainly extreme, it’s not gratuitous. That’s partially because Kent, who made the spectacular spookfest The Babadook, isn’t some B-movie shockmeister, rubbing our noses in ugliness for the sake of it. She’s pulled back the veil of awful history to find a cracked reflection of the modern world—and a corresponding, hard-won beauty in solidarity among survivors. [A.A. Dowd]

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Unless the political landscape changes significantly over the next few years, the number of Americans facing an old age like the one profiled in Nomadland will only continue to grow. A longtime resident of Empire, Nevada, Fern (Frances McDormand) watched her town shrivel up and die after the gypsum mine that employed the majority of the community shut down in January 2011. A dandelion seed left to float on the fickle winds of capitalism, Fern now lives in a custom van she calls “Vanguard,” traveling in search of temporary employment and a safe place to park overnight. In the winter, she packs boxes at an Amazon warehouse; in the summer, she fries burgers and cleans toilets at tourist attractions. Her pleasures are simple, her struggles immense. Her hair is short, her shoes sensible. She keeps moving so she doesn’t dwell on the past for long. In different hands, Fern’s story might be tragic. But while Nomadland director (and writer and editor and co-producer) Chloé Zhao is interested in the material realities of a sixtysomething widow living an itinerant lifestyle, she also brings a dignity to the film that verges on sublime. [A.A. Dowd]

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But while Not Fade Away is undeniably a mess, it’s a loveable kind of mess, where the missteps come from daring, not caution. Chase is covering well-trod ground, but he’s showing his own personal corner of it, lovingly filming the basements, street corners, and sandwich shops where he grew up. Then he ties it all to the transformative power of rock ’n’ roll, which the film’s narrator—Magaro’s romantic little sister—describes as filling ordinary kids with outrageous dreams. Chase deals with the mundane reality that squashes those dreams, but he doesn’t downplay the dreams themselves, which he keeps honoring throughout Not Fade Away, right up to an audaciously abstract final scene that rivals the end of The Sopranos for sheer nerve. [Noel Murray]

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As much as anyone, with the possible exception of Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda was the face of decency in American cinema–a gentle, blue-eyed beanpole who exuded a quiet authority that was never imperious, perhaps because his plainspoken drawl identified him as a man of the people. The Grapes Of Wrath, The Lady Eve, and Young Mr. Lincoln paint him as an unusually sturdy and even powerful figure, but with a trace of naïveté, unsullied by knowledge of corruption in the world. All of which helps make his shocking appearance in Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West one of the great introductions in film history. Hovering over a little boy after his henchmen slaughter the kid’s entire family, Fonda not only knows evil, but also embodies it in every inch of his towering frame. Unmoved by compassion or pity, he considers sparing the harmless boy, until one of his men reveals his name, which makes squeezing the shotgun trigger a cold-blooded practicality. But in Leone’s epic story of growing pains in the Wild West, Fonda is merely one of four larger-than-life figures who stand literally at the juncture of progress, fighting over a train line that stands to drag the lawless frontier into civilization. [Scott Tobias]

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When Robert Redford cast Mary Tyler Moore in the pivotal role of Beth for his 1980 directorial debut, he was accused of stunt casting. Redford had purchased the rights to Ordinary People while the novel was still in galleys, having sparked immediately to the story about a seemingly perfect upper-crust family that’s torn apart after the elder son dies in a sailing accident, leaving behind his troubled younger brother. Before Ordinary People, Moore had never played anything even close to the unsympathetic character that was Beth Jarrett—a perfectly coiffed, never-a-wrong-move suburban mother who’s incapable of giving her remaining child the compassion he so desperately needs. Timothy Hutton, making his Oscar-winning debut performance as her son Conrad, is as floppy and appealing as a Newfoundland puppy, which makes his mother’s distance all the more painfully acute. That Moore’s Beth remains affectionate with her husband, Calvin (Donald Sutherland, also playing against type), makes her inability to communicate with Conrad as fascinating as it is devastating. Moore injects an icy tension into their every scene together. [Gwen Ihnat]

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Andy Samberg stars as Nyles, a slacker doofus stuck at a destination wedding in Southern California, which he’s attending as the date of a bridesmaid. Blithely wandering the reception in a loud and very informal short-sleeve shirt, Nyles clearly doesn’t have any fucks to give. But he also seems to have a suspiciously premonitory sense of how the night will play out. And before long, Palm Springs reveals the reason for both: He’s stuck in a time warp, waking up every morning to find himself still in Palm Springs on the morning of the wedding. The film employs its magical conceit as a multi-purpose metaphor for a long-term relationship. The flip side, of course, is that monogamy can leave you feeling as stuck as the characters, living the same day over and over again, with only your significant other for company. But Palm Springs wears all that baggage lightly. It’s a sadly rare thing: a sweet, madly inventive, totally mainstream romantic comedy, buoyed by inspired jolts of comic violence (some of them provided by J.K. Simmons as another wedding guest with a very big bone to pick with Nyles). [A.A. Dowd]

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The last time Bong Joon Ho made a parable of class warfare, he set it aboard one hell of a moving metaphor: a train looping endlessly around a frozen Earth, its passengers divided into cars based on wealth and status, upward mobility achieved only through lateral revolution. Parasite, the South Korean director’s demented and ingenious movie, doesn’t boast quite as sensational a setting; it takes place mostly within a chicly modern suburban home, all high ceilings, stainless steel countertops, and windows instead of walls, advertising the elegant interior decoration within. But there’s a clear class hierarchy at play here, too; it runs top to bottom instead of front to back, vertically instead of horizontally. And though we’re watching a kind of warped upstairs-downstairs story, not a dystopian arcade brawler, Parasite races forward with the same locomotive speed as Snowpiercer, with plenty of its own twists and turns waiting behind each new door. [A.A. Dowd]

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Based on a short story by paranoid futurist Philip K. Dick, whose work inspired the similar Minority Report, John Woo’s smart thriller Paycheck may not intend to be political, but it’s marked as much by its era as post-Watergate thrillers like The Parallax View or Three Days Of The Condor. In considering a machine that works like a giant crystal ball, the film questions the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare, saying that once the future can be predicted with any degree of certainty, the world is destined to be destroyed. Of course, like most science fiction that contends with such fortune telling, Paycheck gets snared by the usual questions of free will versus predestination, raising all the unavoidable paradoxes that are impossible to resolve. But the inherent slips of logic do nothing to undermine the Dickian anxieties at the story’s core, which looks to the future in order to comment meaningfully on the present. [Scott Tobias]

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Possessor is a mindfuck without a safe word: a slick, nasty bit of science-fiction pulp that’s as interested in shredding nerves as buzzing the brain they’re attached to. The premise, a nightmare vision of bodies snatched and unwillfully weaponized, could have been extracted straight from the racing noggin of Philip K. Dick. But that author’s dystopian premonitions are just one aspect of its genre alchemy, a stylish mash-up of Ghost In The Shell, Inception, Under The Skin, and Olivier Assayas’ corporate-espionage thriller demonlover. And as it’s both written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of Canadian horror maestro David, it should probably come as no great shock that Possessor includes some truly gnarly mutilation of the flesh alongside the mental variety. [A.A. Dowd]

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In the indie dramedy Robot & Frank, Frank Langella plays Frank, a semi-retired jewel thief with a failing memory and a messy home, situated in a quaint small town in the not-too-distant future. And Peter Sarsgaard provides the voice of Robot, the technologically advanced butler/health-care worker Langella’s son James Marsden buys for him, so Marsden won’t have to spend 10 hours every weekend driving up from the city to check on his pop. Langella initially resents this meddling hunk of metal, and finds a sympathetic ear in his hippie daughter Liv Tyler, who rails against dehumanizing technology. But then, in typical buddy-movie fashion, Langella has a change of heart, once he realizes he can train Robot to help him pull a couple more big heists in his neighborhood. [Noel Murray]

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From the city that put America on wheels, then automated itself out of work, comes the future of law enforcement: a tragic hero whose resurrection and redemption are encased in Detroit steel. The cyberpunk saga of Officer Alex Murphy, Omni Consumer Products, and Delta City makes for the smartest stupid movie of the 1980s, all the big ideas rattling beneath its chassis contributing to a deafening din of glib commercials, T&A sitcoms, and nonstop gunfire. It’s a warning shot about American greed and violent cowboy justice that could only come from an outsider like Paul Verhoeven, whose near-future Motor City exposed the polluted, putrid soul of Ronald Reagan’s United States, then launched a goddamn franchise out of the toxic waste. RoboCop incriminates while it absolves: The satirical spikes and eminently quotable script—“I fuckin’ love that guy,” “Can you fly, Bobby?”, “I’d buy that for a dollar!”—can’t be separated from the extreme bloodlust. Dead or alive, you’re coming with RoboCop. [Erik Adams]

Coming July 1; Leaving July 31

The new converts are usually the most intense. Even those raised in an evangelical environment complete with speaking in tongues and creationist puppet shows (à la the subjects of the infamous Jesus Camp) can’t compete with the flinty fervor of an ex-addict who’s found God. Some even replace old vices with religion, in a kind of one-to-one swap of self-destructive obsession. Such is the case with the title character of writer-director Rose Glass’ first feature. Maud (Morfydd Clark), a home nurse with a troubled past, depends on her regular fix of communion with the divine in order to stay on her newfound righteous path. And when she doesn’t get it? Well, you’ll see. Saint Maud’s combination of talky chamber drama, Paul Schrader-esque character study, and visceral body horror is an ideal fit for A24. In fact, the film contains a scene that’s in direct conversation with an oft-quoted sequence from one of the distributor’s early “elevated” horror triumphs, The Witch. And if there’s no taste of butter for Saint Maud, that’s because her supernatural visitor is the Old Testament type of angel, the kind that inspires both transcendent awe and bone-shaking fear. [Katie Rife]

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The Sandlot, with its coming-of-age and sports-movie clichés, broke molds when it was released in April 1993. Director and co-writer David Mickey Evans went the Stand By Me route, centering the film on a young cast but setting it in an era more familiar to the parents in the audience. The movie sounds downright trite when distilled down to one sentence: An uncoordinated indoor kid learns to love baseball and make friends in the summer of 1962. A more detailed description would note that the uncoordinated kid accidentally loses his stepdad’s baseball signed by Babe Ruth, and he and his new pals spend most of the film attempting to recover the ball in between first kisses and “not too much, but some” trouble. As much as The Sandlot replays familiar tropes, the movie succeeds in part because it embraces the magical realism that remolds all our childhood memories into the lore we pass on to the next generation: the baseball the neighbor kid hit that never touched the ground; the scary house around the corner with the dog the size of a lion; hell, at one point the ghost of Babe Ruth even shows up. The Sandlot treats these surreal moments with all the seriousness of a fifth-grader—which is to say, it fully believes the myth. [Patrick Gomez]

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Bait and switch may be a reprehensible sales technique, but it often works wonderfully in movies. The indie comedy Save Yourselves! kicks off with what seems like a solid sitcom-episode premise: Extremely online couple Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Reynolds) decide to spend an entire week disconnected from the internet, focusing instead upon their in-person interpersonal dynamic. (The impetus for this experiment, typical of the movie’s droll sense of humor: Su, frustrated, knocks Jack’s phone out of his hand and across the apartment without warning, whereupon he turns to her and says with deep sincerity, “Thank you.”) To that end, the two Brooklynites borrow a friend’s isolated cabin upstate, bringing along their smartphones and laptops but vowing not to pick them up unless there’s a genuine emergency. It’s not too hard to guess what sort of jokes would emerge from this scenario, and severe tech withdrawal does briefly play a key role. The film’s true premise, however, involves the emergency that soon arises, since Su and Jack have cut the world off at the precise moment that it’s invaded by a hostile alien race. [Mike D’Angelo]

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In Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape Of Water, a mute janitor (a truly radiant Sally Hawkins) falls in love with a towering merman: She doesn’t mind his scales, and he doesn’t speak the language she can’t. But the real romance powering this baroquely whimsical Cold War fairytale isn’t the one between woman and fish, but rather a lifelong infatuation with movies themselves—with the flickering euphoria of classic cinema. Del Toro, the Mexican genre maestro behind Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy films, has ladled multiple fantasias from the bubbling cauldron of his superfandom. But with The Shape Of Water, he transmits obsession with his chosen medium both implicitly and explicitly, concocting a self-consciously old-fashioned curiosity that also pauses occasionally to marvel at a snippet of real Golden Age movie magic, like Bill Robinson dancing down the stairs with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel. It’s as close to Guillermo Del Toro’s Cinema Paradiso as we’re probably ever going to get, and it features one irresistibly resonant image: a creature of the black lagoon standing ramrod straight in an auditorium, basking in the glow of the silver screen, like a monster worshiping its maker. [A.A. Dowd]

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Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), the protagonist of She Dies Tomorrow, is not okay. When we first meet her, she seems fine enough—about as fine as any of us are in an era where anxiety and confusion are so prevalent that there’s a term for endlessly scrolling through bad news. She putters around her half-empty house still piled with moving boxes, occasionally stopping to lie on the floor or run her hands over the furniture. She pours herself some wine, picks out a sequin gown, puts it on, and sits down at her laptop to shop online for leather jackets (and, more curiously, cremation urns). It’s not until her friend Jane (Jane Adams) comes by and finds her blankly standing in her backyard holding a leaf blower that we realize how not okay Amy actually is, as she greets her friend with a barely audible, “I was thinking… I could be made into a leather jacket.” With its claustrophobic spaces and free-floating fear, She Dies Tomorrow is built around an eerily timely theme: existential dread as thought virus. Amy is gripped by the unshakable belief that she will die the next day, and everyone who encounters her becomes similarly convinced after only a few seconds of exposure. One character describes the feeling: “It’s like when you’re in New York City… in the summer, when you look up and there’s air conditioners everywhere, and you just know, ‘One of those is going to pop out and crash down on my head.’” The pandemic here is emotional, as first Jane, then everyone she meets, is visited by a psychedelic onslaught of color, sound, and pummeling flashing light. It’s sort of like being abducted by aliens while high on LSD, and it turns all who see and hear it into hollow shells of doom. [Katie Rife]

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There’s no director more qualified to shoot a Rolling Stones concert film than Martin Scorsese, who has used the band’s music to galvanizing effect on many occasions, from Robert De Niro’s swaggering entrance to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in Mean Streets to his “Gimme Shelter” intro to The Departed. And yet the question lingers: Why now? The band is at least a quarter-century past its prime, so how urgent and relevant could its five-billionth rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” possibly be? And a high-ticket benefit event for the Clinton Foundation at New York’s Beacon theater ain’t exactly Altamont, is it? The chances of something spontaneous happening in such cloistered environs are about as likely as someone flubbing their lines at a Cats matinee. Of course, Scorsese knows all these limitations up front, so he’s turned Shine A Light into a buoyant, light-hearted encore of a movie, paying tribute to the Stones as indefatigable elder statesmen who still go out every night and put on a great show. [Scott Tobias]

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Suffering has long been characterized as a woman’s lot, canonized in the form of Catholic saints and celebrated in literature and art. (Pablo Picasso merely made it explicit when he said, “Women are suffering machines.”) To defy this edict will bring further misfortune, leaving only two choices: either smile and let your soul die piece by indignant piece, or embrace the darkness and learn to enjoy it. Josephine Decker’s Shirley is about a woman who opted for the latter: Shirley Jackson (played here by Elisabeth Moss), author of high-school staple “The Lottery” and the oft-adapted The Haunting Of Hill House.  Mocked by her peers, mistreated by her husband, and burdened by mental illness, Jackson lived with the psychic evils that lurk in her writing. But for Decker, what’s important about Shirley’s misery is how she used it to fuel her work. [Katie Rife]

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In the opening moments of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, a man and a boy exchange a nod that’s at once solemn, playful, and astonishingly efficient. It tells us that these two are connected, practiced, that they’re here to work, but that the work is fun. They’re stealing, and it’s a necessary but enjoyable ritual. That density of meaning runs throughout Shoplifters, which explores how families can be both chosen and needed, built on love and formed for convenience all at once. It’s a film of gentleness and compassion, brought to life by an ensemble of actors as committed to the playfulness and poetry of ordinary life as the director who brought them together. Like a practiced thief, Shoplifters knows how to direct your attention; it’s more than capable of sneaking in while you’re distracted and lodging somewhere behind your ribs, never to leave again. [Allison Shoemaker]

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Silence, Martin Scorsese’s long-in-the-works adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s same-titled novel about a Jesuit priest searching for his former mentor in shogun-era Japan, is a truly religious piece of filmmaking, in that it looks for meaning in the contradictions and absurdities of faith, instead of its assurances. One might call it a movie of dark ironies or a black comedy without jokes or even the anti-Goodfellas, as the two films complement each other in unexpected ways. Submitting his camera to primeval landscapes, and foregoing his usual Marty’s Favorites playlist in favor of an almost instrument-free ambient soundtrack that qualifies as film music only in a conceptual sense, Scorsese presents a world that is daunting in its mystery, cruelty, and symbolism. As the purest exploration of the director’s great Catholic themes (completely free of New York influences, unlike his earlier The Last Temptation Of Christ), it’s inevitably something of a challenge. It is slow and solemn in stretches and often remote, but it rewards patience with a transcendent epilogue that departs from the main character’s point-of-view to find a glimmer of meaning. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Based on the best-selling novel by Scott Smith (who also wrote the screenplay), A Simple Plan both simplifies and brings into focus the already simple and effective thriller. Two farm-town brothers (Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton) and their friend (Brent Briscoe) discover a bag stuffed with $4.4 million and decide to hold onto the contents until springtime, when the coast is clear. Almost immediately, greed and insecurities get to work, and the plan begins to unravel. The premise is older than The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, and A Simple Plan may remind some of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, particularly for the way both films set bloody, sudden violence against the snow-covered Midwest. But where the Coens’ breakthrough film was often cold, and sometimes mean-spirited and cynical, Sam Raimi’s film beats with a human heart. [Joshua Klein]

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When Quentin Tarantino coined the term “hangout movie,” he was describing one of the greatest Westerns ever made: Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks’ 1959 masterpiece, which kills most of its running time just laying low with a small-town sheriff and the motley posse he’s assembled to guard a jailhouse, eavesdropping on their conversations as they dig in their spurs and chew the cud. The film, talky and at times nearly plotless, brought the Wild West to life in a different way: These weren’t just mythic archetypes we were watching but complicated people, with personalities and hang-ups and whole interior lives. The Sisters Brothers, a Western directed by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Dheepan) and adapted from the acclaimed novel by Patrick DeWitt, spans a larger geographic radius than Rio Bravo—it’s a kind of road picture, ambling across two states, instead of plunking us down in (basically) a single locale. Nevertheless, there’s a strong whiff of Hawks’ classic in the movie’s conception of its titular outlaws as neurotic chatterboxes. It’s something of a hangout Western, too, and its pleasures mostly come down to the company we get to keep with the characters and the actors easing into their eccentricities. [A.A. Dowd]

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Skyfall doesn’t forget it has to be an exciting spy film above all, but from its first scene, it ratchets up the drama in ways that have little to do with action. Stumbling into a mission gone wrong into Turkey, Bond (Daniel Craig) finds a badly wounded agent. He wants to stay and help, but M tells him to pursue the enemy instead. After pausing, briefly but noticeably, he does what he’s told. Then, at the end of one of the most breathless opening sequences in the series, another agent (Naomie Harris) does what M tells her to do, leaving Bond in a position where others can assume he’s dead. He isn’t, because that would make for a short movie. But he isn’t entirely himself either, and when he’s drawn out of retirement by the actions of Javier Bardem—playing an embittered ex-agent who doubles as a dark reflection of what Bond might have, and might still, become—he isn’t the same man anymore. [Keith Phipps]

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Danny Boyle is an accomplished stylist whose films (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, etc.) always bear distinctive visual stamps. But style often overtakes substance in his movies, leaving the impression that his hapless characters are rattling around inside a Rube Goldberg world of wild visual setpieces that confine and control them. Boyle’s latest, Slumdog Millionaire, is no exception: Its story leaps about wildly in time and space and, as if afraid that his viewers might get too complacent with a merely fractured timeline, Boyle splinters it, adding split-second memory-images and flash-forwards into scenes to shake them up further. The story is sometimes less about the characters than about how they’re framed within a gloriously composed shot or a furiously jumpy scene. And yet Slumdog Millionaire features the simplest story Boyle has ever told, which may explain why its many pleasures are so pure. [Tasha Robinson]

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When The Social Network was released in 2010, some questioned whether David Fincher’s film was being too hard on poor Mark Zuckerberg. Nine years later, as Facebook’s true (and truly alarming) potential to undermine democracy is finally under discussion, it seems the real question is whether the movie was harsh enough. It certainly turned out to be prescient: As well as warning against putting too much power in the hands of the petty and vindictive, The Social Network also diagnosed the bitterly misogynist, perpetually aggrieved cancer metastasizing throughout nerd-bro tech culture while most observers were still in the thrall of millennial techno-utopianism. In retrospect, the film also turned out to be a clearing house for young actors whose careers were at a turning point in 2010, including Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, and Rooney Mara, who would go from supporting character to star in Fincher’s next film, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (Speaking of transitions, the film was also the first to feature a full score from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.) One thing about The Social Network that hasn’t changed is the remarkable skill with which Fincher spins suspense out of abstract ones and zeroes, even if Aaron Sorkin’s snappy dialogue doesn’t feel as fresh as it used to. [Katie Rife]

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Watching Some Kind Of Heaven, an entrancing new documentary about life in a massive Florida retirement community, the mind may drift to a whole library of movies about the plastic unreality of suburban life. Partially, that’s because the film’s director, 24-year-old Lance Oppenheim, plainly takes some cues, visual and tonal, from touchstones of the genre. But it’s also because his subject, the so-called “Disney World for retirees,” was essentially built from the same psychic blueprint as those films: the nostalgic dream image of an unblemished American yesterday, a boomer paradise more imagined than remembered. What Oppenheim has found, in his first feature film, is a real place every bit as art-directed as Blue Velvet or Edward Scissorhands or American Beauty. It’s like a movie set the size of Manhattan—a Hollywood facsimile of the midcentury high life you can actually move into. [A.A. Dowd]

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Strange things can happen when you’re stuck in a house with someone. It’s a lesson people all across the world are learning right now, and it’s one Nancy Meyers already taught us way back in her 2003 romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give. Against her better judgment, brilliant but neurotic fiftysomething playwright Erica Barry (Diane Keaton) falls for chauvinistic sixtysomething playboy Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson) after he’s ordered to recuperate from a heart attack at her Hamptons beach house. The two couldn’t be more different, and yet their semi-isolation leads to a passionate affair. Between the pajama parties, midnight pancakes, spontaneous crying sessions, and a salute to medical professionals via Keanu Reeves as one of cinema’s dreamiest doctors, Something’s Gotta Give has never felt more relevant. [Caroline Siede]

Stream it now; leaving July 31

It’s hard to imagine a cinematic depiction of Oakland, California as grabby or arresting as Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You. Though it uses real locations from the city, Riley’s version depends less on particular landmarks or geography than the filmmaker’s eye for which quotidian details can be nudged into the realm of absurdity—and how to pull them back down to the ground. It’s a push-pull best depicted by the movie’s visualization of a job at a rundown call center: When Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) places a cold call, the movie briefly throws him and his workstation into the personal space of whoever he’s speaking with, sort of a physicalized split-screen that thrusts him back into the bleak office space when the conversation ends. It’s a neat trick that emphasizes both the intrusiveness of cold calling and the discomfort the caller might feel, all while keeping the scenes of call-center drudgery from becoming as dull as the actual work. [Jesse Hassenger]

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Heartless evildoers receiving their ironic comeuppance have been a horror staple since the days of EC Comics. The indie horror anthology Southbound puts a contemporary spin on this tradition, presenting five tales of irreversible decisions and their gruesome consequences. Sometimes the lessons in these mini-morality plays are ploddingly obvious—especially when Larry Fessenden explicitly explains them in his cameo role as a radio DJ—but then again, the same can be said for Tales From The Crypt. Set against the bleak landscape of the Southwestern desert, the segments overlap on several levels. Besides the Monty Python-style transitions, in which characters from one episode appear in the next, the movie also maintains a certain stylistic consistency throughout, which has its pluses (the segments share a timeless feel, à la Bates Motel) and minuses (shaky hand-held camerawork is an unfortunate constant). Regardless, that cohesion is a credit to the creative forces behind the film, and a welcome change from the wild inconsistencies of horror anthologies like the ABCs Of Death series. [Katie Rife]

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Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, one of the best-regarded sci-fi sequels of all time, and pretty much the undisputed champion of Star Trek movies. Making a sequel of an episode of the TV series in a way that makes it perfectly accessible for neophytes, Khan is somewhat less stylish than Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it’s a lot more exciting, with a great villain in Ricardo Montalban’s Khan and a strong emotional core based on the friendship between William Shatner’s Kirk and Leonard Nimoy’s stoic half-Vulcan, half-human Spock. [Jesse Hassenger]

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By the time the series picked back up with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991, there was no further delaying or sidestepping the inevitable: Everyone in the original cast was much older, verging on elderly, and the movie sets most of the original crew a few months away from retirement from duty on the Enterprise (though Sulu now captains his own ship). The characters have lived long enough to see the dawn of a new era where peace with the Klingons may be achievable. But when the Enterprise is framed for the assassination of a Klingon leader that may derail the peace talks, Kirk and Bones are thrown into mining prison while Spock leads sort of a locked-room mystery on the ship, trying to figure out the true culprit. Bringing Star Trek: The Motion Picture director Nicholas Meyer back into the fold, The Undiscovered Country restores the series’ graceful balance between acknowledging the characters’ past-prime lot in life and sending them on cool adventures anyway. It’s a lovely send-off for the original cast members that’s nonetheless not all that consumed with the task; this is a Star Trek story first and a swan song second. [Jesse Hassenger]

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Given the general dreariness of Star Trek Into Darkness, and the fact that J.J. Abrams was handing the reins over to director Justin Lin, there was little reason to expect much from the third film in this rebooted series. But co-screenwriters Simon Pegg and Doug Jung delivered a refreshing reminder of how fun and inspiring a Star Trek movie can be by telling a simple planet-hopping/supervillain-thwarting adventure story, anchored by plenty of scenes where the crew of the Enterprise gets to talk and joke and bicker. Add in sweet homages to the franchise’s past and overt paeans to hopefulness and teamwork, and this was far and away the most satisfying of 2016’s summer blockbusters: a ray of rainbow-colored light cutting through an oft-gray year. [Noel Murray]

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The waning days of young summer friendship are charted with incisive depth and wiseass humor in Stand By Me, Rob Reiner’s superlative dramatization of Stephen King’s novella “The Body.” As in its source material, Reiner’s story concerns four best friends who, on Labor Day weekend 1959, learn the whereabouts of the corpse of a missing schoolmate, and set out on foot through the forests and countryside that surround their Castle Rock, Oregon hometown to find it. Their story is one told in flashback by Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss as an adult, Wil Wheaton as a kid), who narrates his memories of this fateful trip alongside his three pals: Chris (River Phoenix), who’s seen by locales as a troublemaker thanks to his ne’er-do-well brother; Teddy (Corey Feldman), whose “loony” WWII vet father cruelly burned his ear and saddled him with a nutjob reputation; and Vern (Jerry O’Connell), the pudgy sidekick who suffers the brunt of Teddy, Chris, and Gordie’s profane jabs and insults. Theirs is a ribald, authentic rapport, full of name-calling, manhood challenges, and other assorted teasing and ridicule that rings true to the many ways boys bond through verbal abuse. In its campfire tales of puking, and its races to avoid being run over by speeding trains, the film proves to be a touching depiction of adolescent camaraderie. All four of them damaged by familial traumas—most clearly Gordie, whose parents have emotionally shut him out after the death of his favored older brother (John Cusack)—the four kids set out on their odyssey driven by a shared morbid curiosity. Yet Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon’s script subtly suggests that what really motivates them all is an interest in confronting, first-hand, their own mortality. To that end, Stand By Me, rife with panoramas of its protagonists dwarfed by their natural surroundings and imperiled by towering older bullies (led by Kiefer Sutherland), also becomes a melancholy portrait of youthful vulnerability, and the way in which friendship is often the strongest shield against life’s many hazards. [Nick Schager]

Coming July 1; Leaving July 31

In Harry Macqueen’s quiet road trip drama Supernova, grief is not something that begins with death or even significant loss. For Tusker (Stanley Tucci), a writer living with an accelerated form of dementia, early signs of grief occur in the passenger’s seat of an old RV during a trip through rural England with his longtime partner, Sam (Colin Firth). At first glance, the scene isn’t especially revelatory—Tusker and Sam lightly debate the virtues of regular maps over satellite navigational systems and squabble over Sam’s slower-than-strictly-necessary driving, just like any settled couple would. But as we watch Tusker’s control slowly slip through his grasp, we realize that we’re watching a man mourn what he once was, a bright star collapsing too soon. “I’m becoming a passenger,” Tusker helplessly observes at a particularly pivotal moment of the story. “And I’m not a passenger.” By the end, Supernova isn’t necessarily a tale about a couple’s attempt to make the best of their last moments but about two people coming to grips with one’s mortality. Macqueen approaches the messy reality of letting go with measured sorrow, unrestrained tenderness, and even moments of joy. [Shannon Miller]

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Put in charge of a 50-mile highway stretch near the Canadian border, a ragtag unit of Vermont State Troopers spends its days harassing motorists, hazing a rookie, and pulling practical jokes on the local police force. As the governor’s office threatens to close his operation down, gruff-but-lovable chief Brian Cox prods his men into exposing a drug-smuggling operation before the local cops break the case. Their strongest lead is a shipment of hashish stamped with the visage of Johnny Chimpo, a heroic pro-Taliban monkey from a cheap Afghani cartoon show (“Afghanistanimation!”). The patrolmen don’t allow this assignment to occupy too much of their time, and neither does the movie, which happily dispenses with the story when it can find something more enjoyable to do. [Scott Tobias]

Coming July 1

So many movies perform grotesque contortions (or extraordinary acts of denial) to avoid showing their characters at work, at least if their jobs aren’t cop, lawyer, or secret agent. And who can blame them, really? A lot of work is a soul-crushing slog, something that Support The Girls understands intuitively—so intuitively that writer-director Andrew Bujalski doesn’t need to sink his characters into a swamp of misery to acknowledge the drudgery of working at Double Whammies, sort of a poor man’s Hooters in the Texas suburbs. Applying a one-crazy-day structure to a day that isn’t all that crazy, Bujalski follows Lisa (Regina Hall), the restaurant’s manager, as she plays boss, dutiful employee, counselor, and mother, depending on which crisis she’s addressing. Hall, in exactly the kind of performance that’s too grounded and true to receive the awards attention it deserves, shows deft command of the subtle differences between our various selves—work, family, uncomfortable fusions of the two—that so many working people are forced to navigate. Yet for all of its dead-end realism, this is also a warm and funny movie, with boundlessly charming supporting turns from Haley Lu Richardson, Shayna McHayle, and Dylan Gelula. Workplace drudgery doesn’t preclude glimmers of humanity—and humanity doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, as the movie’s perfectly open final shots indicate. [Mike D’Angelo]

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A dark cityscape opens Sweeney Todd, Tim Burton’s adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, but a baby-faced sailor (Jamie Campbell Bower) seems not to notice the gloom. Dismissing all the glories he’s seen in his travels, he cheerily decides that there’s “no place like London,” in a voice chipper enough to force the sun to shine. But Sweeney Todd isn’t that kind of musical. It needs a different kind of hero, and Bower is soon forced out of frame by the more troubled face of Johnny Depp, who sings, “You are young. Life has been kind to you… You will learn.” Life was once kind to Depp’s Sweeney Todd. As a younger man, he was a successful barber with a beautiful wife and child. But the evil Judge Turpin (a perfectly cast Alan Rickman) decided to take Depp’s family as his own, and had Depp arrested and deported. After more than a decade in exile, the newly bloodthirsty Depp returns to reclaim what’s his, or failing that, punish those who took it away. [Keith Phipps]

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There’s no scarier plausible scenario than slowly losing your mind, especially when you’re at least partially aware that it’s happening. In Jeff Nichols’ masterfully suspenseful Take Shelter, Michael Shannon plays a husband (to a steely, fantastic Jessica Chastain) and father whose visions/hallucinations of world-ending storms take a slow-motion toll on his sanity and his family. Shannon’s edgy intensity sells the story of a man so brittle and delusional (maybe) that he could snap at any second, but whose problem has a real-world solution: at least in his mind, a backyard storm shelter. It’s a thriller with no real antagonist, only the threat of a psyche that’s threatening to create a monster. [Josh Modell]

Coming July 1

It’s strange to return to The Terminator after years of sequels that resemble it only in overarching narrative. The original is small, spare, unforgiving, and closer in spirit to creeping horror than shoot-’em-up action on the sliding genre scale. Set pieces, like the Terminator’s grisly rampage through an ill-equipped police station, inspire more pit-of-the-stomach dread than adrenaline rush. The nocturnal timeframe also enhances the supernatural terror of the material, as do gory shots of the villain performing surgery on himself. Even the fiery finale resembles the final scenes of a slasher movie more than the slam-bang climax of a Hollywood blockbuster. The film’s real special effect is its marquee star. Conan The Barbarian had already catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger into the limelight, but it was The Terminator that made him an action hero. His take on the character isn’t robotic, exactly; he’s remorseless but not quite emotionless, judging from the occasional flare of volcanic, bestial anger. Cameron sees more of an alien quality in Schwarzenegger’s iron-thick accent, halting delivery, and impossible physique; he’s the mechanical man as hostile new species—and Schwarzenegger, draining his eccentric star persona of any warmth, has never been so frighteningly well-utilized. (In fact, the series as a whole has made marvelous use of the actor, finding menace, humor, and even poignancy in his superhuman otherness.) [A.A. Dowd]

Coming July 1; Leaving July 31

Parody, in its purest form, is an act of both mockery and appreciation. True masters of the practice possess a bone-deep understanding of their targets; they skewer because they love—or at least, because they’ve done their homework. Judging from the sublimely silly They Came Together, director and co-writer David Wain is a closet connoisseur of the modern romantic comedy. About midway through the film, he offers a spot-on approximation of one of the genre’s many tropes: As Norah Jones coos sweet nothings on the soundtrack, the happy couple—played by Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler—canoodle through a Manhattan montage, making pasta for two, swimming through a pile of autumn leaves, and horsing around at a fruit stand. Everything about the scene, from its compositions to its editing to its wordless performances, is uncannily familiar. There are actual jokes, too, including an agreeably absurdist punchline, but they’re almost unnecessary. Seeing clichés mimicked this skillfully is plenty hilarious. [A.A. Dowd]

Coming July 1

The amoral morass of crime coverage is a black lagoon from which this contemptible creature emerges. Suzanne’s personality has absorbed everything garish, inauthentic, and nasty about television in an effort to conquer it. She knows full well that sex sells, jumping into bed with a network executive while on her honeymoon after she gets the faintest whiff of career advancement. In a pinch, she’s all too willing to traffic in ugly profiling, referring to Jimmy and his friends (Alison Folland and a pre-fame Casey Affleck) as “a bunch of 16-year-old losers who grew up in trailers, whose parents sit around drinking and screwing their cousins.” She’s entirely free of redemptive qualities—precisely the sort of challenge Kidman was eager to sink her incisors into. Today, Suzanne looks like the most resolutely unsympathetic figure in a C.V. well-stocked with complicated and prickly characters. Currents of villainy flow through Kidman’s career, but she’s never plumbed a pit as bottomless. [Charles Bramesco]

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South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho found a fresh take on the zombie-breakout flick by narrowing and elongating its shape; he constrains most of the action to a single high-speed rail, challenging a band of human survivors to safely pass from car to car. Yeon clearly establishes the rules governing his flesh-eaters early on and works within them well (one clever set piece involving a climb through the luggage racks will leave one’s nails in shreds), though his humans don’t have that same thought-through quality. (Pregnant woman and dutiful husband? Check. Workaholic dad and precocious young daughter? Check. Tragic teenage lovers? Check.) But a zombie movie content not to aspire to any loftier subtextual readings needs little more than a skilled choreographer of action, and there’s plenty of evidence that this film had one in Yeon. Ooh, do “demons in a submarine” next! [Charles Bramesco]

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Two Of Us is a romantic drama that often plays more like a horror movie: A woman hides behind a shower curtain. A pan sizzles for an unnervingly long amount of time. A figure emerges from the shadows to smash up a car. Director Filippo Meneghetti establishes the unusual tone of his debut feature in a striking opening sequence that seamlessly blends memory and nightmare, as two girls play a surreal game of hide and seek until one of them disappears. The burden of love is the fear of loss, and that unease is compounded when it’s tied to the inability to live as your authentic self. Meneghetti understands that loving someone isn’t just a joyous experience. It’s an anxiety-inducing one, too. [Caroline Siede]

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Before Lost In Translation established Sofia Coppola as one of the foremost authorities on boredom and ennui, her dreamy debut—an adaptation of the celebrated novel by Jeffrey Eugenides—offered a radical, haunting portrait of girlhood and thwarted puberty draped in floral print and soft pink. Who were the Lisbon girls, and why did they decide to take their own lives? These questions linger in the minds of a group of neighborhood boys, whose perspective we adopt as they struggle to understand these mythical young women and their fiery ringleader, Lux (a luminous Kirsten Dunst). Countering the inadequate words of her male narrator, Coppola steeps the film in intoxicating, impressionistic imagery—white dresses with grass stains, a sweater clinging to a bare shoulder, glossy magazines and sluggish bodies spread out on a carpet. The Virgin Suicides is that rare coming-of-age film in which the mystery of the teenage girl coexists with a palpable understanding of what it feels like to be one, stifled and yearning for more. [Beatrice Loayza]

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In a culture where truth is malleable, spite and greed are celebrated, and unimaginable atrocities are reduced to just another fleeting set of stimuli, how could you not be exhausted? A similar sense of existential fatigue permeates Vox Lux, The Childhood Of A Leader director Brady Corbet’s film starring Natalie Portman as a pop star whose inner life is a sinkhole she vainly attempts to fill with booze, drugs, and flippant cruelty. It’s a more cynical, and arguably more realistic, depiction of the unique malignancies of fame than 2018’s other Oscar-baiting pop musical, A Star Is Born. [Katie Rife]

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Pure evil proves an elusive matter for a provincial policeman to investigate in the Korean film The Wailing, a supernatural thriller that veers between caustic comedy and blood-soaked horror over the course of its operatically intense two and a half hours. It’s anyone’s guess why the film’s otherwise peaceable rural-village setting has lately seen a rash of grisly murders. Yet perhaps the most mysterious thing about The Wailing has to do with the spell it casts rather than with the mechanics of its plot. The Wailing might be a somewhat meandering and nonsensical genre recombination, but that spell never breaks over its lengthy running time. [Benjamin Mercer]

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The naturalistic camerawork, gritty urban environments, or brutal setting of mixed-martial-arts fighting may mislead viewers away from the truth: Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior is a man-weepie of the highest Hollywood order, a would-be Rocky for an empire in decline. It’s irresistible, but how could people resist when Warrior comes packing double-barreled underdog arcs in the form of brothers played by Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton? They’re estranged from each other, but not as much as they’re estranged from their alcoholic father (Nick Nolte), who terrorized them and their mother until she ran away with her younger son, prompting her husband to eventually get sober. Hardy is a distraught former Marine who washes up on his dad’s Pittsburgh doorstep and starts training at the local MMA gym, beating the consciousness out of what turns out to be a highly ranked fighter in what was meant to be a casual sparring match. Edgerton is a Philly physics teacher and family man struggling to pay the bills, a former UFC pro who moonlights in parking-lot matches for extra cash to throw an upside-down mortgage. These two archetypes of bruised American masculinity are played by a Brit and an Australian, and played well—particularly in the case of Hardy, who’s been poised for stardom since 2009’s Bronson. He’s riveting here, a little boy lost with the hulking build of a minotaur; his dialogue would scarcely fill a few pages, but his character speaks volumes with his fists. [Allison Willmore]

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We Are What We Are, a loose remake of the Mexican film of the same title, takes the original’s basic premise—a creepy family gets thrown into disarray when one of the parents unexpectedly dies—and invests it with rural Gothic atmosphere. Directed and co-written by underrated genre specialist Jim Mickle (Stake Land), it plays less like a contemporary horror film than an increasingly gruesome drama, building to a climax—completely original to this version—where the movie’s core themes are expressed through grotesque imagery. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Country music has a long history of brazen women doggedly persevering over daunting personal and societal odds. As far back as 1952, Kitty Wells shredded the hypocrisy of sexual double standards in her song “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” and Loretta Lynn had already given birth to three children when she taught herself to play the guitar in 1953, at the age of 21. Rose-Lynn (Jessie Buckley), the protagonist of Tom Harper’s new social-realist musical drama Wild Rose, has a life story that’s similar to those of her idols: She’s in her early 20s, fresh off of a 12-month prison sentence on drug charges, and trying—but mostly failing—to reconnect with her 8-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. Her disapproving mother Marion (Julie Walters) wants Rose-Lynn to give up her dream of becoming a country (not “country and western”) singer. But to Rose-Lynn, country music is “three chords and the truth.” And you can’t deny the truth. [Katie Rife]

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Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann was conscientious about largely keeping Shakespeare’s language intact in his present-day adaptation of Romeo And Juliet; he just packs in contextual modernizations to make the lines make sense. For instance, the opening narration (“Two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene…”) comes in the form of a news broadcast. And a line of shotguns and handguns bear brand names like “Sword,” so a character can still cry, “Give me my longsword, ho!” but then snatch up something less antiquated than a pointy piece of steel. Luhrmann’s nervy, glammy version of the play seems fueled by Ecstasy and adrenaline; his characters speed-swim through a backdrop of fast-cut montages and dreamy, druggy setpieces. The acting is often huge and over the top, and the tone flails around wildly, but who’s to say it wasn’t the same in Shakespeare’s day, when half of any given play was aimed directly at the groundlings?

Coming July 1

Characters reminisce about the ’90s, wear Pixies T-shirts, and maintain collections of hand-painted action figures in Young Adult, all in line with what viewers might expect from a film that reunites Juno’s writer and director, Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman. What’s different this time around? They’re on the sidelines, gazing with bewilderment, dislike, and/or awe at their heroine, played by Charlize Theron as the type of girl who once upon a time walked all over them. Though her character’s high-school glory days are almost two decades behind her, she’s dredged them up with an unstable determination that attests to the years of disappointment that followed them. It’s an empathetic but bravely brittle portrait of an aging queen bee that showcases a nuanced performance from Theron as a woman too used to being admired to admit how lonely and desperate she’s become. [Alison Willmore]

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