The best movies on Netflix (July 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 movie? Click the 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 on Netflix, but this list is manly compiled of movies featured on The A.V. Club’s Best of the Year lists and ballots going back to 2010. Some newer (and much older) movies have been added over time as Netflix announces new additions to their library.

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

This list was most recently updated June 27, 2021.

A jingoistic fantasy marked by Harrison Ford’s best post-Indiana Jones action performance, Air Force One ups the Die Hard ante by making its one-against-many-terrorists hero the commander in chief. In Wolfgang Petersen’s rah-rah saga, President James Marshall (Ford) tells the world that America is done negotiating with terrorists, and is now re-committing itself to fighting injustice around the world. No sooner has he made that proclamation, however, than Air Force One is hijacked—with him and his wife (Wendy Crewson) and daughter (Liesel Matthews) aboard—by Kazakhstan villains led by Ivan Korshunov (Gary Oldman), whose aim is to secure the release of their homeland’s captured leader (Jürgen Prochnow). Refusing to depart the aircraft via an escape pod, Marshall instead embarks on a cat-and-mouse mission to thwart Korshunov and his band of gun-toting comrades, whose hatred of capitalism is almost as strong as their cartoonish Eastern European accents are thick. [Nick Schager]

Coming July 1

Read the rest of our Air Force One recommendation at this link

A towering symbol not just for the world of boxing, but for the world at large, Muhammad Ali isn’t anyone’s idea of an everyday boxer, but director Michael Mann’s skills are put to good use as he attempts to get behind the symbol in the new biopic Ali. Dramatizing the eventful decade between two upsets that won Ali heavyweight titles—his first encounter with Sonny Liston in 1964 and the Rumble In The Jungle with George Foreman in 1974—the film employs an episodic structure that focuses on key phases of his development, showing him as a brash young fighter, a spokesman for Black Power, a legal martyr for his refusal to be drafted for Vietnam, and an international icon. Will Smith plays Ali, and while the choice might seem odd, it proves inspired. Mann’s Ali, like its subject in his prime, seems incapable of making a false move. [Keith Phipps]

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The first film from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions is inherently political, but it’s more complex than agitprop. Following the reopening of a shuttered factory in Dayton under the new ownership of a Chinese auto-glass company, directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert offer a startling intimate look at the struggle to blend two working cultures. Never descending into xenophobia or condescension, their documentary makes the point that the issues matter because of the effect they have on the people. [Allison Shoemaker]

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Andrea Arnold presents a dynamic vision of young, weird America in American Honey, a sprawling road movie that winds its way from wealthy suburban cul-de-sacs to poverty-stricken trailer parks on a cross-country trip. Newcomer Sasha Lane stars as Star, an impulsive teenager who abandons her abusive home life to sell magazines town to town and door to door with some misfits she meets dancing to Rihanna in the middle of Kmart, including rat-tailed heartthrob Jake (Shia LaBeouf). Driving the barren highways of red-state America in a white-paneled van, the kids tell their stories in between swigs of vodka and hits of an ever-present joint, each of them a block in the patchwork quilt of the U.S. underclass. Arnold allows her actors—many of whom were cast off of the street—to improvise organic, loosely constructed scenes that bring a documentary feel to their adventures. Take the aesthetics of a Harmony Korine movie, but substitute the nihilism with boundless humanity, and you’ll come close to understanding American Honey’s wild charm. [Katie Rife]

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From its opening scene, Amy is almost more noteworthy for what it doesn’t do as a documentary than for the sad story of its famous subject. Director Asif Kapadia (Senna) opens his film not with a montage of talking heads spouting money quotes about Amy Winehouse, but with a home movie of teenage Winehouse hanging out with friends for someone’s birthday. A few of them begin tunelessly singing “Happy Birthday To You,” their voices fading when an off-camera Winehouse finishes the song with the kind of overstated flair possessed by someone who likes showing off her knockout pipes. [Kyle Ryan]

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For a very brief period in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Brazilian actress Sonia Braga looked poised to become a major Hollywood star. Her significant supporting role in Kiss Of The Spider Woman (1985), a Brazilian-American co-production that won William Hurt the Oscar for Best Actor and was nominated for Best Picture, got studio suits’ attention; a few years later, she appeared in Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War and Paul Mazursky’s Moon Over Parador (both of which, oddly, are set in fictional locations, with Milagro somewhere in New Mexico and Parador an entirely invented South American country). Neither film was a hit, and the same tepid box-office fate met her last big Hollywood showcase, The Rookie (1990). So it’s marvelous to see Braga setting the big screen ablaze—speaking her native language, for once—in Aquarius, a Brazilian drama constructed entirely around her. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Mike Myers’ temporally displaced super-spy/super-swinger became so ubiquitous—and his lines so endlessly parroted by would-be funny guys—that it’s easy to forget that Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery wasn’t a huge hit when it was released. And no wonder: It’s a curiously timed comedy, coming a good 30 years after James Bond parodies were anything close to culturally relevant. It also came at a rotten time in Myers’ career, following two huge duds, So I Married An Axe Murderer and Wayne’s World 2. It’s hard to believe the movie’s simple concept took him a full four years to develop, even given his alleged perfectionist tendencies, but it all paid off in the end: The movie became a big hit on its video release, and its sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me, was a box-office monster. In one of those goofy show-business ironies that crop up from time to time, it may have even helped rejuvenate the James Bond franchise by sparking interest in the super-spy genre among younger audiences.

Coming July 1

Read the rest of our list of 13 fictional spies made possible by James Bond at this link

It’s hard to imagine anyone being more perfect for the Marty McFly role than Michael J. Fox. In Back To The Future, Fox is small and squinty and breezily charismatic. Fox was 24 when he shot the film, but he was so good at stammering disbelief that he easily passes as a high schooler. On top of that, Fox was already famous for playing Alex P. Keaton, a sort of avatar of Reagan youth. The central conceit of Family Ties was that the aging-hippie parents can’t understand how their son has become a square and uptight young Republican. In the ’80s, a big part of the Republican sales pitch was a return to ’50s values. Marty McFly and Alex P. Keaton are two very different characters, but there’s still something primally satisfying about seeing this kid go back to the ’50s and learn that ’50s values are not what he thought. [Tom Breihan]

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Arriving four years after the original, Back To The Future Part II faced the difficult task of following one of the most beloved movies of the ’80s. And it’s successful, partly because it shifts focus. Whereas the original Back To The Future was, at its heart, a personal story about a kid learning to understand his parents, Part II is a straightforward time-travel adventure. Its shifting time-space continuum sends Doc Brown and Marty McFly to the future, then back to an alternate 1985, then back to the 1955 of the first film, with a trip to the Old West waiting in the wings. [Kyle Ryan]

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The name Obama is never once uttered in Barry, Vikram Gandhi’s minor-key presidential origin story. Only in the film’s final few minutes does the title character even call himself Barack—and then only in his head, reading a letter to his absent father. Dramatically announcing that some sprightly figure is actually a famous person before they were famous is an especially hackneyed biopic convention, but Barry doesn’t avoid it just to stay out of Walk Hard’s sphere of parody. It also does so because the young man we’re watching here—a smart, lonely college kid new to New York, and originally from “Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya—you name it”—is decades and miles removed from the commander-in-chief he’ll one day become. He’s not President Barack Obama yet. For the modest moments chronicled, he’s just Barry. [A.A. Dowd]

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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]

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Oz Perkins’ deeply unnerving directorial debut requires no “trick” to be properly appreciated, provided you like your horror slow-roasted to atmospheric perfection. All the same, it’s diabolically fun to pretend that The Blackcoat’s Daughter is actually a genre-jumping spinoff of one of the most acclaimed TV shows of the decade. Remember how Sally Draper spent the last couple seasons of Mad Men away at boarding school? Well, Blackcoat drops Kiernan Shipka, the young actress who played Sally, into a nearly identical academic setting. When no one comes to pick her up for holiday break (classic Don move), Shipka’s character falls under the influence of an unholy force. Or does she? It wouldn’t take too big of a mental leap to deduce that poor Sally, after years of repressed traumatic events (catching her father cheating, confronting a burglar), just totally snapped. Of course, one might hope for a brighter future for the eldest Draper kid than the strangely, powerfully sad denouement Perkins cooked for his terrific inaugural creepshow. [A.A. Dowd]

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Everyone knows the old saw about anthology movies being less than the sum of their parts; it’s a tale as old as the singing cowboy or the stagecoach ghost story. Joel and Ethan Coen should be especially familiar, having contributed to Paris, Je T’Aime and faced assumptions that The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs was really supposed to be a TV series. But it’s hard to imagine breaking their six Western mini-movies into a Netflix “season,” because they complement each other so gracefully. Set in a beguiling netherworld between unforgiving real-life grimness and heightened tall-tale pulpiness, the stories range from delightfully mordant musical slapstick starring Tim Blake Nelson to a heartbreaking gut-punch starring Zoe Kazan, to name just two standouts. Death haunts the whole thing, which builds toward the simultaneously hilarious and hushed “The Mortal Remains,” as satisfying and language-besotted a closer as the Coens have ever concocted. Their sometimes-fatalist outlook has seen them tagged as nihilists, a group they savaged as well as anyone in The Big Lebowski. But nihilists don’t put this much thought into endings. [Jesse Hassenger]

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To call Blue Ruin a “revenge thriller” would be accurate but somehow insufficient, as doing so makes it sound ordinary and crass. Some have already compared the film to the work of the Coen brothers, by which they must mean No Country For Old Men; the bloodshed comes nearly as fast and hard as it did there, and there’s a comparable focus on the details of life on the run—on staking out a location, or acquiring a weapon, or getting away from somewhere fast. But in its unusual cross section of moods, Blue Ruin rarely resembles anything but itself. Much of the singularity can be attributed to the film’s atypical hero, surely one of the year’s great characters. Actor Macon Blair makes Dwight driven but hapless, locating a lot of sly comedy in his imperfect foray into crime: He disables a vehicle, only to realize he needs it as a makeshift getaway car; later, he makes an amateur attempt to treat his own leg wound. (Don’t try his method at home.) But Dwight is also a lost soul, his face sunken with ancient grief, and Blair invests him with the reckless forward momentum of someone running on last-ditch desperation. [A.A. Dowd]

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From our list of the best movies of the ’90s:

When the Coen brothers followed up their Academy Award-winning breakthrough hit Fargo (a film deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by no less an authority than the United States National Film Registry) with a shaggy stoner lark about the world’s most unlikely and least qualified would-be shamus (Jeff Bridges as “The Dude,” the signature role of his magnificent career) and his mock-heroic quest to retrieve a missing rug that famously held the whole room together, it felt like one of the smartass brothers’ inside jokes. The film was released to mixed reviews, modest box-office, and widespread confusion before beginning a strange journey to becoming the cult film of the ’90s, the Rocky Horror Picture Show of its time. The Big Lebowski created an entire subculture of tongue-in-cheek “achievers” who dress up like the film’s characters and attend “Lebowski Fests” where they drink white Russians, bowl, and recite favorite lines. Like Bridges’ performance, The Big Lebowski only appears effortless: The slacker facade and shaggy-dog plotting—with its surplus of red herrings, dead ends, and seemingly pointless digressions—belie the film’s underlying meticulousness and manic perfectionism. Slow-motion shots of middle-aged men bowling are choreographed and scored as artfully as anything in Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre, in a comedy that gave pop culture one of its quintessential antiheroes and created an absurd and insanely detailed universe. Cult movies come and go, but like its hero, The Big Lebowski abides.

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Netflix’s strategy of buying up films and then ignoring them is always frustrating, but it can be fatal for a film like The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open. Released on the streaming platform in late November after a handful of festival dates, the first film from Ava DuVernay’s distribution company ARRAY is so unassuming, you might not even notice that it’s composed of a handful of long takes stitched together to create the illusion of a single shot. But this is also a movie with a lot to say about indigenous identity in the 21st century, told through the story of two native women—one middle class and white-passing, the other working class and dark-skinned—who meet one afternoon on a Vancouver street corner. Even critics seemed unaware of the film’s release; had more of them seen it, I bet it would have popped up on a number of best-of lists this season. [Katie Rife]

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When the title characters in 1967’s Bonnie And Clyde first lay eyes on each other, they smile in what seems like immediate recognition. They both consider themselves exceptional people bound for glory, and they’re each pleased to encounter a kindred egotistical soul who’s ready to act as an admiring mirror and enabler. Within seconds of that first encounter, they’ve already formed the mutual admiration society that will lead them through years of crimes, and straight to the grave. Granted, Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) is stark naked, and Clyde (Warren Beatty) is trying to steal her mother’s car, so they each have an extra reason for wry amusement. But the easygoing charm of that first meeting summarizes what made Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde so controversial upon its release, and what still makes it memorable today. Forty years ago, charming, likeable, fun criminals were a licentious shocker; today, they’re old hat, but Bonnie And Clyde still maintains its amiable charisma. [Tasha Robinson]

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Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s second film is a sprawling, energetic, audacious look at the porn industry of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Mark Wahlberg, in a performance that allows even “Wildside” to be forgiven, plays a young stud, with a talent clearly outlined by his tight jeans, who rises to the top of the industry only to let success go to his head. A large and universally excellent cast (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Heather Graham, William H. Macy) plays the extended family he joins. Though it’s incredibly stylish, Anderson and his cast never let Boogie Nights stray from its human center. For example, as a porn producer with artistic aspirations, Reynolds plays a character that could easily have been a caricature, but he conveys sleaze with heart so well that the threat never comes close to materializing. By taking on the porn industry, Anderson has chosen a subject that could easily be mined for cheap laughs. But while it’s very funny, Boogie Nights taps into something much deeper with its on-target depiction of the shifting political and social tides of the ‘70s and ‘80s and thoughtful relationships between characters. It’s a deeply satisfying movie. [Mike D’Angelo]

Coming July 1

Read the rest of our deep dive into Boogie Nights’ most memorable scene at this link

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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For years now, I’ve found it strange that there were only two or three good movies about the internet, the most important thing in the world. My wish for a film truthfully capturing all the connection, gratification, desperation, and despair of living online came true with this sophisticated thriller, in which a cam girl (Madeline Brewer, making a convincing argument for herself as a bona fide star) discovers that an automated doppelgänger has taken over her channel. There’s a lot to love here, from the low-key sex-positivity to the cringe comedy to the delectable supporting turn from former love witch Samantha Robinson. But I like Cam best as our most ruthlessly honest film about the nightmares of full-time freelancing. [Charles Bramesco]

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Alex, the “hero” of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, is one of cinema’s most repulsive protagonists, a thuggish punk who smirks his way through a series of rapes and beatings in the film’s first half. But as played by charming, boyishly handsome Malcolm McDowell, Alex is also likeable and even sympathetic, and Kubrick’s stylized direction during Alex’s most “ultraviolent” sequences comes dangerously close to glamorization. At least, that was the predominant opinion in the United Kingdom, where A Clockwork Orange was blamed for numerous copycat crimes, including a rape where the attackers sang “Singin’ In The Rain,” in direct imitation of the film. When death threats were made against Kubrick and his family, the director asked Warner Bros. to withdraw the film in England, and it wasn’t widely shown until after his death in 1998.

Stream it now (leaving July 31)

Read more about A Clockwork Orange and 15 other protested movies at this link

Not enough attention has been paid to The Clovehitch Killer, directed by first-timer Duncan Skiles, from a script by Cop Car co-screenwriter Christopher Ford, starring Dylan McDermott as a beloved small-town scoutmaster who may be a serial rapist and murderer. Lean On Pete’s Charlie Plummer plays the man’s son, in a story that unfolds in three distinct parts, each asking two unsettling questions: What if this seemingly upstanding, conservative Christian community leader is actually a dangerous criminal? And what is it about who he is and where he lives that might let him get away with something truly heinous? The Clovehitch Killer takes an unusually slow-paced and experimental approach to mystery and suspense, but it’s also a cogent critique of how “the culture wars” can provide a cover for someone whose sins are far beyond what his neighbors can imagine. [Noel Murray]

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The tradition of Black equestrianship goes back centuries, with historians now estimating that 25% of Old West cowboys were Black. Ricky Staub’s feature debut, Concrete Cowboy, continues the mission of bringing this storied subculture into the mainstream, casting Idris Elba as the unofficial leader of a group of Black urban riders and Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin as his estranged son. As the story begins, 15-year-old Cole (McLaughlin) is sent by his mother from Detroit to Philadelphia to spend the summer with his dad—and get away from the bad influences that led to his expulsion from school. Cole and Harp (Elba) barely know each other, and Harp seems more interested in taking care of his horse—who, in one of the film’s more surreal details, lives in the living room of Harp’s weathered row house—than his teenage son. The sight of Harp and his friends riding horses through the streets of North Philly is irresistible, however, even to a sullen adolescent. And so Cole begins his apprenticeship at the Fletcher Street Stables, home of the riding club whose real-life members make up much of the film’s supporting cast. [Katie Rife]

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James Wan’s previous film, Insidious, was a well-oiled shock machine, made in the spooky spirit of Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. Insidious, however, was a mere dry run to The Conjuring, a shudder-inducing haunted-house movie built on the foundation of an alleged true story. Set in the early ’70s, an era Wan evokes through careful period detail and a heavy coat of “look, it’s the past” sepia, the film dives into the real-life case files of Ed and Lorraine Warren, married paranormal investigators whose biggest claim to fame was the Amityville incident. The two are played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson and are introduced via an on-the-job prologue. (Wan gets bonus points for opening on the dead, fixed eyes of the world’s creepiest doll.) Following a thunderously portentous title card, which strains to position The Conjuring as this era’s answer to The Exorcist, the focus shifts to parents Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, who move their family of seven into a roomy Rhode Island farmhouse. The subsequent supernatural happenings—slammed doors, rearranged belongings, yanked limbs—are nothing audiences haven’t seen before, but Wan stages them for maximum heart-in-throat suspense. By tracking his camera through the entire home early on, he can play on viewers’ familiarity with the space. And he refuses to show a fearsome bedroom specter, opting instead to train his lens on the terrified preteen who can see it, pledging his allegiance to the power of suggestion. [A.A. Dowd]

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The Newman in Cool Hand Luke isn’t as chatty as the one of Hud, but under different circumstances, the surly egomaniac of Hud might have become the restless rebel of Luke. Newman won the hearts of the counterculture—and garnered his fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination—playing a devil-may-care dude who’s arrested for a silly crime and sent to work on a chain gang, where he spends his days charming his fellow cons while concocting clever escapes. Cool Hand Luke’s plot is pure allegory, but the character is fully human. He’s funny, quietly cocky, and he can eat 50 eggs. [Read more]

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Truth in advertising: Cop Car is almost entirely about a cop car. Parked on the outskirts of a wooded area, with no corresponding officer anywhere in sight, the vehicle is discovered by a pair of 10-year-old boys, Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford), who stumble onto it while running away from home together. Finding the keys, and possessing maybe one-sixteenth of a lick of sense between them, they immediately decide to take a joy ride, heading out onto the highway despite barely being able to see over the dashboard. Meanwhile, the car’s owner, Sheriff Kretzer (Kevin Bacon), has to scramble to recover it before anyone else with a badge learns that it’s been stolen. Or, rather, borrowed. [Mike D’Angelo]

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This exemplary low-budget noir that benefits from director Mike Hodges’ steely malevolence and bone-dry sense of humor. In an unusual opening screen credit, Hodges shares authorship with veteran writer Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell To Earth), whose script exposes the seedy world of mid-level British casinos while nursing a plot with many twisty convolutions. Sad-sack gamblers have always been a crime-genre staple, but Mayersberg’s simple change of perspective to the tuxedoed dealers across the table gives it a refreshing spin. The pallid, dead-eyed Clive Owen stars as a blocked writer who accepts a job as a casino croupier, manning the roulette wheel and blackjack table to earn his keep and gather material for a novel. An expert card sharp, he prides himself on his hard efficiency (40 spins an hour) and confesses to feeling “waves of elation” at watching suckers lose their money. As addicted in his own way as the degenerates he services, Owen gets lured into a robbery scheme by a seductive South African émigré (ER’s Alex Kingston) and her nefarious associates. Similar in manyways to David Mamet’s House Of Games, Croupier obsesses over the sleight-of-hand involved in the trade and how even a master “conjurer” can’t expect to stay on the right side of the odds forever. To add another layer of ingenuity, Owen’s omniscient narration is taken from his completed novel, providing a witty and bemused running commentary on his own misfortune. It may take several viewings to sort through all the tangled intricacies of the story, but Hodges and Mayersberg assure that every one is a sordid pleasure. [Scott Tobias]

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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]

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Though still grimly hilarious, Armando Iannucci’s historical farce The Death Of Stalin adopts a more serious tone than his TV series Veep and The Thick Of It. For this satirical recreation of bloody power grabs in the early 1950s Soviet Union, Iannucci sacrifices some punchlines in order to underscore the ferocity of Nikita Khrushchev (sharply played by Steve Buscemi), Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), and others. As with his television work, Iannucci is depicting high-stakes politics as the clumsy work of petty boobs, more interested in frat-boy pranks and cruel machinations than in good governance. [Noel Murray]

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The Hong Kong action movie Infernal Affairs has the sort of hook that would fill an arena in the rock world: Two police-academy graduates work as moles on opposite sides of the law—one as an undercover cop in the mob, the other as a gangster infiltrating the police department. Shot through by his most propulsive storytelling since Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese’s remake, The Departed, orchestrates such a perfect balance between these mirroring characters that the film achieves a kind of musical symmetry. And in a Boston neighborhood where all the little Irish boys grow up to be cops or criminals, the parallels between them are unmistakable; as Jack Nicholson’s hard-nosed kingpin puts it, “When you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?” In Scorsese’s world, such dreadful ambiguities coarsen the soul. [Scott Tobias]

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Two crucifixions loom over director Antonio Campos’ The Devil All The Time. The first is the one that killed Jesus Christ. The other is the one that World War II veteran Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) witnesses on the Solomon Islands, when he finds a fellow soldier who’s been flayed and strung up while still alive. When he returns from the war to his home in southeastern Ohio, Willard isn’t particularly religious. But the more he roots himself in his community, and the more he thinks about the terrible things he’s seen, the more fervently Christian he becomes. The story’s main focus is on Willard’s teenage son Arvin (Tom Holland), who endures a series of family tragedies that leave him as hardened as his dad. With no real long-term goals, Arvin mostly spends his days looking out for his own people—and especially his orphaned friend Lenora (Eliza Scanlen), who gets mercilessly bullied by the older boys at their school. Lenora is the daughter of the fiery preacher Roy Laferty (Harry Melling), who died under mysterious circumstances; she’s secretly being seduced by the new minister, Reverend Preston Teagardin (Robert Pattinson), who uses scripture to belittle and manipulate his congregation. Meanwhile, the whole area is being very loosely policed by the corrupt Sheriff Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan), whose own sister Sandy (Riley Keough) is one half of a couple who get their kicks by seducing lonely travelers and then murdering them. (Jason Clarke plays the other half.) In short: The Devil All The Time is a portrait of a place populated by creeps and abusers, where the police and the church offer little refuge. [Noel Murray]

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Divines, written and directed by French-Moroccan filmmaker Houda Benyamina, rivals Girlhood as a portrait of combustible banlieue femininity, emanating raw energy and scrappy good humor even as it builds to an unexpectedly tragic and horrifying finale. The film also showcases a potentially star-making performance by Oulaya Amamra, who happens to be the director’s younger sister. Chosen despite a cattle call in which Benyamina looked at over 3,000 other young women, Amamra is so arrestingly alive onscreen that thoughts of nepotism seem ludicrous. [Mike D’Angelo]

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For a movie where someone says “motherfucker” every few seconds, Dolemite Is My Name is surprisingly wholesome. The film is a biopic about stand-up comedian and blaxploitation leading man Rudy Ray Moore, an Arkansas native who, after several failed attempts at becoming famous, finally succeeded by combining the rhythms of traditional African American storytelling with the sexually liberated energy of the early ’70s on raunchy X-rated “party records” with titles like Eat Out More Often. And as such, any film about Moore’s life that didn’t include wall-to-wall dirty jokes would be a disservice to his foul-mouthed legacy. At the same time, however, Dolemite Is My Name posits Moore’s story as a feel-good inspirational tale about outsiders succeeding despite all odds. And while Moore’s sexuality was more complex than this movie lets on, characterizing him as an underdog who forces Hollywood to notice him through sheer talent and force of will is right on. [Katie Rife]

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Back in the late 18th century, while England was dealing with rebellion in its colonies and a call for greater democratization at home, Georgiana Spencer married William Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire, and via her husband’s Whig-affiliated circle of associates, she began taking an interest in politics, primarily by supporting the career of future prime minister (and lover) Charles Grey. In Saul Dibb’s The Duchess—adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher from Amanda Foreman’s biography Georgiana—Keira Knightley plays the duchess as a freethinking fashion plate, admired by the ladies of London for her sense of style and her insistence that there’s no such thing as “freedom in moderation.” But her domestic situation tests her public calls for universal liberty, as her husband—played with creepily calm menace by Ralph Fiennes—reminds her that she has no real power in their relationship. He can sleep with whomever he wants, and squelch her ambitions at any time, just by threatening to take away her children. To some extent, The Duchess recalls Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, in that it’s about bed-hopping and courtly ritual during a time of revolution. Dibb isn’t interested in delivering an audience-unfriendly art film, though. His Duchess is thoroughly populist and middlebrow, full of all the high wigs, thick powder, perfect diction, and straightforward dialogue that define bodice-ripping prestige pictures about silently suffering souls. Knightley’s brand of muted iconoclasm has always been well-suited to just these kind of coach-and-corset movies, and as a result, the story of her character’s fall from idealism to practicality becomes fairly moving. [Noel Murray]

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Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, now following Jaws in a pristine (though less revelatory) deluxe Blu-ray edition, draws on the director’s memories as a child of divorce, when he created an imaginary friend to keep him company. Spielberg and his screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, have channeled those memories into a open-hearted piece of storybook science fiction, but the fundamentals of E.T.—the reason why everyone talks about it making them cry—have nothing to do with the marvels of outer space and interstellar connection, or even the touching vulnerability of the creature itself, as it struggles to survive on an uninhabitable planet. The core theme of E.T. is home, and the journey of the film, taken in literal synchronicity by the young hero and his alien friend, is about them helping each other find it. It’s a common story told on a celestial scale. [Scott Tobias]

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Before Coming To America, before The Nutty Professor, and long before Norbit, Eddie Murphy proved he could occupy the skin of multiple characters without the aid of elaborate prosthetic work. Raw, his 1987 blockbuster stand-up movie, remains the fullest showcase of the comedian’s gift for impression. Over a long, consistently hilarious set at Felt Forum in New York, Murphy imitates Michael Jackson, Mr. T, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, an Italian hothead, a Jamaican lothario, an African trophy wife, philandering guys, gold-digging women, and—in the film’s showstopper of a final bit—his own inebriated, self-aggrandizing father. He’s a one-man Saturday Night Live, and there’s a control of inflection and facial expression on display that marks Murphy as one of the great comics of his generation. It’s no wonder the full show was never released in an audio-only format. Simply hearing Eddie perform would do no justice to his animated, physical approach to the craft. [A.A. Dowd]

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Voracious readers of the late David Foster Wallace, an author of massively ambitious fiction and casually revealing nonfiction, could be forgiven for regarding a movie about his life with some skepticism. How, after all, could one normal-sized film hope to capture the spirit and legacy of a writer who many came to regard as a voice of his generation? Wouldn’t any attempt to get into his famously bandana-wrapped head feel insufficient, at least compared to the sheer volume of work Wallace himself produced on the subject? But that’s the gentle genius of The End Of The Tour, James Ponsoldt’s witty and poignant new gabfest. Not only does the film productively narrow its time frame, dramatizing just five days in the life of the revered wordsmith, it also unfolds from an outside perspective—that of the reporter who accompanied Wallace on the final leg of the Infinite Jest book tour. The result is less portrait of an artist than snapshot of a brief, meaningful encounter, shared between two men enjoying different stages of professional success. That one of these men happens to be a modern literary hero is almost, if not quite, incidental. [A.A. Dowd]

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Compared to their last film, the genre-bending Spring (2015), Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless is positively straightforward—but only in the sense that you can comfortably call it a sci-fi drama. The subject matter, a heady brew of quantum physics, time travel, doomsday cults, and callbacks to the filmmakers’ earlier movies, is both convoluted and ingeniously applied, allowing The Endless to intrigue rather than confound. Keeping the whole thing grounded are Benson and Moorhead, starring as brothers who return to the rural California UFO commune where they grew up. There, they discover that while flying saucers may not be real, there’s definitely something uncanny going on in the scrub-covered hills around them. [Katie Rife]

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Horror fans and art-film aficionados alike have struggled some with what to make of writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s debut film, which is disgusting enough for gore-hounds and pretty-looking enough for aesthetes, but which doesn’t push either the genre or prestige buttons especially hard. That, though, is exactly what makes this story of a lonely, psychopathic farm-dweller such a kick. At only 76 minutes, Pesce’s stark black-and-white nightmare lingers just long enough to leave a strong impression, without forcing itself into any confining boxes. The Eyes Of My Mother is ultimately a darkly alluring vision of one deranged human’s struggle to engage with others, and striking for how it keeps taking the most appalling narrative turns possible. Does it have a deeper point to make? Maybe not. But that doesn’t matter as much as how melancholy and uncomfortable an experience the movie is. [Noel Murray]

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In Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen each play men aching for redemption. Langella’s Richard Nixon longs to rehabilitate his public image after the long national nightmare of Watergate and a tidal wave of bad press and public derision. Sheen’s David Frost, in turn, wants to prove to a snickering world that he’s more than just a blow-dried entertainer, at home chatting with starlets and celebrities, but woefully out of his league conducting a makeshift prosecution of a former president of prodigious intellectual gifts and ferocious intensity. Ron Howard directed the film, but its auteur is undoubtedly playwright-screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Deal, The Last King Of Scotland), who continues his ongoing exploration of the 20th century as filtered through crucial interpersonal relationships. [Nathan Rabin]

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Every once in a while, a particularly effects-heavy blockbuster gets singled out as being particularly post-actor, usually due to a reliance on CG imagery. David Lowery’s A Ghost Story earns that distinction better than most, but it uses only a common bedsheet to obscure its central performer. Casey Affleck plays a musician who dies, then returns to haunt his lover (Rooney Mara) and their house as a stereotypically garbed specter, visible only to the audience. As the ghost cannot or will not leave his former home, the world moves on without him. The film initially resembles a close-up study of relationship strife and grief, but as it drifts forward in time, it turns into something both sweeping and unknowably intimate. Lowery continues to separate his actors with blocking, a taller 1.33 frame, a Will Oldham monologue, and, as ever, that bedsheet, yet the effects aren’t entirely isolating. Quite to the contrary: This is one of the year’s most transporting experiences. [Jesse Hassenger]

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Is it possible to talk about the fascinating and complex universe of black hair without dealing with race and identity? That’s the question posed by Good Hair, director Jeff Stilson and co-writer/producer/narrator/star Chris Rock’s charming new comic exploration of African-American hair. The film is filled with sadly telling moments, like a black beauty student telling Rock that she’d have a hard time taking a job applicant seriously if he had an afro, yet its tone is one of amusement rather than indignation. Rock is an entertainer, not a polemicist, and Good Hair will never be mistaken for a college course in African American Hair And Racial Identity, though it does stress the pain women will endure and the exorbitant prices they’ll pay to keep up with follicular trends. To the film’s subjects, paying thousands for a complicated, high-maintenance weave is less a luxury than a necessity, even for those low on the socio-economic scale. Borrowing moves from Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, Good Hair alternates funny, candid talking-head interviews with famous folks like Nia Long, Ice-T, Al Sharpton, and Raven Symone with prankish stunts like Rock trying to sell African-American hair on the street and an extended trip to the Bronner Brothers Hair Show. During the climactic Hair Show competition, stylists battle in flamboyant production numbers that take showmanship to comic extremes, from a fuzzily conceived bar scene involving an aquarium and underwater hair-styling to a dizzy spectacle involving more or less an entire marching band. [Nathan Rabin]

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Abel Ferrara’s downtown Manhattan is long gone, replaced with sterile, half-filled high rises and wildly overpriced bistros. But there’s still plenty of grit left on the streets of New York City. You just have to travel to the outer boroughs, as directors Josh and Benny Safdie did for their frenetic crime drama Good Time. The film pulses with the energy of the city as manic scumbag Connie (Robert Pattinson, practically unrecognizable in a dirty hoodie and ratty goatee) fumbles his way through a hastily conceived rescue mission after his disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) gets arrested at the end of a foot chase following a botched bank robbery. The breakneck pace and scuzzy desperation of Connie’s quest gives the film—which takes place entirely over the course of one night—a certain fun-house quality, enhanced by the delirious close-up cinematography, aggressively stylized lighting, and synthesizer score. The fact that part of it literally takes place in an amusement park doesn’t hurt, either. [Katie Rife]

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There’s something not quite right about David (Dan Stevens), the title character of Adam Wingard’s wickedly entertaining thriller The Guest. At a glance, he seems like the model man in uniform—a polite, soft-spoken war veteran, blessed with both the all-American good looks and aw-shucks charisma of Chris Evans’ heroic Steve Rogers. Arriving without notice on the doorstep of the Petersons, to “look after” the family of his fallen brother-in-arms, David ingratiates himself immediately: The bereaved parents (Sheila Kelley and Leland Orser) see a little of their slain son in this accommodating visitor, while their meek youngest child, Luke (Brendan Meyer), gains a protective, surrogate older brother. Only teenage daughter Anna (Maika Monroe, a terrific Final Girl) senses what the audience does about this mysterious soldier, though her judgment is quickly clouded by a rush of hormones, the only sensible response to such rock-hard abs and old-fashioned congeniality. Who but the most iron-willed could resist the charms of this dashing military man? [A.A. Dowd]

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The first half of Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy As Lazzaro unfolds in a sharecropping tobacco farm known as Inviolata, its name (literally, “inviolate”) redolent of a place pure and untouched, sheltered from the ravages of time. When the film opens, an electric light bulb—that enduring marker of human progress—is being shuttled through a house in which there are evidently too few. Though it’s soon clear that we are in a secluded pocket of rural Italy, a viewer would be forgiven for mistaking precisely when this tale takes place. And that’s no accident, since the Italian director’s beatific third feature (which took the Best Screenplay award at Cannes, alongside Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces) fully evokes a sense of temporal dislocation—a feeling of being unstuck from the flow of history—and in doing so, clarifies our very relationship to modernity. [Lawrence Garcia]

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Quentin Tarantino’s stubbornly theatrical, three-hour-long snowed-in Western is a difficult movie by a director who’s not known for making them. Keeping action to a minimum up until the intermission, it then explodes into the nastiest, most gruesome and nihilistic violence of Tarantino’s career, before ending on a disquieting note of hope. This is the writer-director’s take on the promise of American ideals, even more so than Django Unchained, for which it was originally intended as a sequel. (Hence the protagonist, an anti-heroic black bounty hunter who, in the movie’s post-Civil War setting, is about the age Django would be.) Who could have guessed, in the days of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, that Tarantino would become an overtly political filmmaker? [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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A vision of the modern West that ranks up there with No Country For Old Men, the offbeat, entertaining, and elemental Hell Or High Water made for an unlikely breakthrough for the gifted Scottish director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Starred Up). Two bank-robbing brothers are pursued by a couple of lawmen across a landscape dotted with wildfires and foreclosures. Hearkening back to the creative wild days of 1970s American cinema, Mackenzie’s direction strikes a perfect balance between the relaxed atmosphere and eccentricity of the West Texas setting and the tension and desperation of the characters; his long takes put viewers in the moment and never feel ostentatious. The screenplay (by Sicario’s Taylor Sheridan) has earned well-deserved praise for its dialogue, but is just as impressive for the richly novelistic structure it gives to a fairly straightforward tale of crime and pursuit. Full of evocative detours, memorable bit characters, and potent reminders of the West’s legacy of theft and exploitation, the film builds to an epilogue that more than earned its place on our list of the year’s best scenes. And we haven’t even mentioned the cast. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Steven Soderbergh’s filmography is dotted with portraits of people who are very good at what they do professionally, from Brad Pitt’s constantly eating con artist in the Ocean’s franchise to Gina Carano’s thigh-smothering operative in Haywire. In High Flying Bird, Soderbergh applies that same interest to the high-powered world of the NBA, where everyone is grasping for power and paper. During a six-month lockout, agent Ray Burke (André Holland) plans to revolutionize how basketball is played. His vision is of organized labor, worker solidarity, and profound upheaval, and Moonlight playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney deftly moves Ray from penthouse offices to community courts as he criticizes each component of this multibillion-dollar system. “They invented a game on top of a game,” says Bill Duke’s Coach Spencer of the capitalist structure of professional sports. How High Flying Bird dismantles that makes it one of Soderbergh’s most urgent films in years. [Roxana Hadadi]

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“When I decided to do Coachella, instead of me pulling out my flower crown, it was more important that I brought our culture to Coachella.” Though she chuckles warmly at her joke, there is a quiet power couched in Beyoncé’s mission for her historic 2018 festival set, stated roughly 32 minutes into the Netflix documentary Homecoming: A Film By Beyoncé. The idea of carving out a space at the largest music event of the year—one that is not-so-secretly consumed by a predominately white audience—to unabashedly celebrate black culture might ring as too ambitious of an undertaking for most to seriously entertain. But as we witness throughout this vibrant documentary, the journey isn’t exactly for the faint of heart and can be an upward climb for even the most time-tested of legends among us. [Shannon Miller]

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By now, the story of Martin Scorsese has become legend: As an asthmatic kid, he watched from his bedroom window in Little Italy as other children played on the street, and he retreated into the fantastical worlds conjured up by filmmakers like Alexander Korda. Based on Brian Selznick’s popular illustrated book The Invention Of Hugo Cabret, Scorsese’s enchanting Hugo burnishes that legend, filtering a whimsical half-fiction about silent pioneer Georges Méliès through a childhood of loneliness salved by the movies. In other words, it’s both a movie about young Scorsese and a movie that young Scorsese would have loved, while also bearing the distinct signature of the filmmaking world’s most passionate historian and preservationist. [Scott Tobias]

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Hunt For The Wilderpeople, an enjoyably goofy adventure that manages to bring some freshness to the moldy “cantankerous adult reluctantly bonds with adorable kid” subgenre. Starring Sam Neill as the cantankerous adult, the film plays a bit like Jurassic Park minus Lex and dinosaurs, mining humor from the incongruity of its odd-couple pairing and basic fish-out-of-water elements, plus some Flight Of The Conchord-ish wit. [Mike D’Angelo]

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The horror renaissance continued unabated in 2016, as films like The Witch, The Invitation, The Eyes Of My Mother, Under The Shadow, Don’t Breathe, brought increased respectability to this frequently disrespected genre. But one of the year’s most singular horror movies, I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House, still slipped through the cracks. Maybe it was the unwieldy title. Maybe it was the fact that the movie, an immersive sensory experience, went straight to Netflix. I’d wager the real reason Oz Perkins’ one-of-a-kind ghost story was slept on or even disliked (average grade from the A.V. Club comment community: C+) is that it’s entirely out of step with contemporary horror conventions and trends. It’s an exercise in pure unsettling atmosphere—one so off-kilter that it seems downright haunted itself. A small cult following, as opposed to widespread popularity, is probably apropos for something this rewardingly unusual. [A.A. Dowd]

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I Care A Lot writer-director J. Blakeson sees the plight of senior citizens ground beneath the wheels of bureaucracy as the jumping-off point for a black comedy of escalating aggression. The result is something one could facetiously, but accurately describe as I Love You Phillip Morris crossed with I Saw The Devil, with a little The Psychopath Test for added flavor. Rosamund Pike stars as Marla Grayson, a con artist and stone-cold sociopath who reins over what she thinks is the perfect scam: A professional guardianship service that specializes in watching over elderly people left in the care of the state. If you’re thinking, “but that sounds nice, actually,” that’s the point: Under the angelic cover of social work, Marla and her business/life partner Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) are bleeding their clients dry like vampires in tailored pantsuits. A legal guardian also has control of their ward’s assets, you see, and Marla and Fran’s game is to pay a corrupt doctor (Alicia Witt) to declare someone mentally incompetent and scuttle them off to a prison-like nursing facility before any distant relatives notice what’s happening. And if the person objects to Marla and Fran selling their house and draining their bank account? They’re not fit to make their own decisions. It’s right there on their chart. [Katie Rife]

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The best animated film of 2019 is partly about a luckless, lonely young man falling in love, and partly about a severed hand that’s slowly crawling across a city filled with small-scaled dangers. The two pieces complement each other, frequently pushing I Lost My Body toward the poetic and metaphorical. But the movie is also just beautiful and exciting on a moment-to-moment basis—as both a low-key romance and as a gory thriller. [Noel Murray]

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“It’s good to remind yourself that the world’s larger than inside your own head,” Jake (Jesse Plemons) says to Lucy (Jessie Buckley) early into I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Charlie Kaufman’s maddening plunge down the rabbit hole of his boundless imagination. Is Kaufman assuring us or himself? By the end of this strange movie—possibly his most uncompromising and discombobulating, which is really saying something—we have no guarantee that the world it depicts exists outside of someone’s head. The question may just be whose? It’s a head trip in the form of a road trip. Jake has invited Lucy, his girlfriend of just a few weeks, to come meet his parents in downstate New York, a long drive through worsening weather. The two are smart and anxious millennials; they talk in heady references, though often at instead of to each other. They seem more superficially compatible than Joel and Clementine, the once and future lovers of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but a breakup may still be imminent. Lucy is thinking of ending things, after all—something she tells us repeatedly through a running internal monologue that keeps getting stepped on by intrusions of chitchat. (One is reminded that Kaufman does voice-over more cleverly and purposefully and emphatically than almost anyone working today.) [A.A. Dowd]

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Whether it’s a responsible choice to turn a real-life disaster into a stunning special effect—or to depict the natives of Thailand as “obstacles,” as opposed to people who’ve just had their own lives upended—is worth debating further. But The Impossible ultimately isn’t about the tsunami and its victims per se; it’s about this one family, and their resourcefulness in the face of disaster. Bayona’s tsunami sequence is bound to garner accolades—and rightfully so, since it’s 10 of the most harrowing minutes in recent film history—but the film is filled with smaller but no less gripping scenes of the characters scrambling toward each other, agonizingly slowly, amid a landscape of wreckage and strangers. On the whole, The Impossible is a superb example of the “man against the elements” film, driven by the panic that sets in when one family member fears never seeing the others again. With that as his starting point, Bayona deftly pushes the audience’s buttons. [Noel Murray]

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An easy way to determine the year’s most underrated movies is to ask, “What was the scariest horror movie?” Perhaps their reputation as the team responsible for Saw pitted film critics against them, but director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell didn’t get enough respect for Insidious, a clever play on the haunted-house movie that’s steeped with cheeky references to Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, but stakes out its own scrap of horror territory. Though it’s concept better demonstrated than explained, the use of astral projection in Insidious gives a nice sliver of originality to a film that’s otherwise devoted to the back-to-basics creaks and displacements that have long defined the genre. It pays homage to horror-movie classicism while amplifying its effects. [Scott Tobias]

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In 1992, Chris McCandless was found dead by some moose hunters in the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley, marking a tragic end to an extraordinary journey across the American landscape. Jon Krakauer’s wonderful book Into The Wild—and its deft new film adaptation by writer-director Sean Penn—reveals a young man of inspiring vision and dogged contradiction, driven at once by his angry rejection of consumerist society, his despair over personal betrayals, and an infectious love of the natural world. Working with the great French cinematographer Eric Gautier, Penn follows McCandless’ zig-zagging trail through the more remote outposts in the continental United States, from a grain operation in Carthage, South Dakota to the geographical accident that is California’s Salton Sea. Played by Emile Hirsch, who never quite connects to the role (perhaps by design), McCandless began his journey shortly after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta, when he gave away his $25,000 savings to charity and drove off in his beat-up Datsun, looking for adventure. Inspired by authors like Thoreau and Jack London, he tramped around the country with minimal resources, popping up occasionally to work odd jobs, but only to scrape together the materials he needed to survive on his own. His ultimate goal was to make it up to Alaska, but a few months after heading off into the wilderness, a couple of critical mistakes cost him his life. [Scott Tobias]

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One day, Martin Scorsese will die. That’s a difficult thing to accept—difficult because it will be a staggering loss for film culture, but also pretty hard to even believe. Scorsese, at a very spry 77, was everywhere in 2019: igniting a debate about what is or isn’t cinema; inspiring autumn hits so indebted to his style that he should have received royalties; executive-producing two of the other movies on this very list and piecing together a lost Bob Dylan concert. And yet to watch The Irishman, his gangster opus to end all gangster opuses, is to be constantly reminded of the promise of mortality—his, ours, everyone’s. Make no mistake, this is a remarkably brisk three and a half hours, dramatizing half a century of organized crime through dark-comic confrontations (and an outsized Al Pacino performance) so deliriously funny, they’ve already generated a whole library of memes. But right from his opening shot, a morbid parody of the Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, Scorsese foregrounds the inevitable. And his film becomes, in its magnificently bleak final stretch, a meditation on the true consequences of the mob life, the ignoble end awaiting men like Henry Hill, Sam Rothstein, and the film’s own protagonist, mafia hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro, weaponizing the sleepiness of his latter-day work into a devastating portrait of moral absence). One of the many ironies of the movie is that it uses distinctly modern means—from de-aging technology to streaming-platform resources—to eulogize a time-honored genre and the careers of the artists who shaped it. But however firmly Scorsese has planted himself on the vanguard, however relevant and vital and, yes, alive he remains as an artist, his latest triumph is a stark acknowledgment of what’s coming. If we’re lucky, The Irishman says, we get to pick out our own coffin. Watching the movie, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Scorsese has picked his. [A.A. Dowd]

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Of all the iconic moments in Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 science-run-amok blockbuster, there’s one that functions as a perfect microcosm for the film’s legacy and appeal. It’s the early scene in which the characters—and, by extension, the viewers themselves—first catch sight of one of the park’s prehistoric attractions, a towering brachiosaurus. Logistically, it doesn’t make much sense: Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) and the rest of the visitors would surely have seen the mighty beast long before they pulled up right beside it. As movie magic, however, the sequence is beautifully staged, beginning as it does with Grant and Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) lurching out of their seats, shedding hats and sunglasses along the way, to gawk at the impossible. They can’t believe their eyes—and neither could moviegoers, who had never seen special effects this… special before. “You crazy son of a bitch, you did it,” stammers Dr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), neatly articulating the awe and disbelief of just about everyone in the audience. Spielberg had done it. He had brought back the dinosaurs. [A.A. Dowd]

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The Lost World is just refreshingly short on pretense. It’s a monster movie, pure and simple, with nothing on its mind except which of the human characters (and even cute animals! Spielberg did retain some of the brutality from Schindler’s List) are going to become dinosaur chow. There are no melancholy conversations over ice cream; no long stretches of patronizing exposition about the vicious nature of a dinosaur we’ll be seeing in action half an hour later; no laughably superficial explanations of chaos theory. There’s just running and screaming, plus some chomping. Furthermore, the film’s big set pieces—the trailer on the cliff, the raptors in the grass, the compys that should have eaten Richard Attenborough in the first film eating a different slimeball in this one—are vintage Spielberg, blessed with a spatial-temporal precision that few of the folks directing today’s blockbusters can muster. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Unfolding with the inevitability of a bad dream, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is Lanthimos’ darkly intense, almost biblical spin on one of those thrillers about a yuppie family terrorized by a vengeful stalker. It’s like Cape Fear by way of The Shining, just in the same absurdist register as all of the Greek director’s trips to the Twilight Zone. To say where the plot goes would be unfair, but it involves a mysterious malady, an impossible choice, and a terrible reckoning. Those up on their Greek tragedy may recognize the outline of Iphigenia’s tussle with Artemis—a dispute that began, hint hint, with a slain deer. But you needn’t know for mythology to recognize a false deity, courting comeuppance by deciding who lives and who dies. [A.A. Dowd]

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In Andrew Dominik’s previous film, the superb revisionist Western The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, he staged the last days of an iconoclastic gangster with a strong feeling for how his story could take root in the American imagination. Dominik’s follow-up, Killing Them Softly, makes that subtext text, wondering aloud what makes America America, and exploring the greed and avarice that cannot be extricated from the freedom and opportunity that’s supposed to make the country great. While it isn’t unusual for nasty little genre movies like Dominik’s stylish heist thriller to smuggle such themes under the surface, Killing Them Softly makes them startlingly explicit. All the criminal mayhem that composes it—an audacious robbery and the bloody retribution that follows—is mere prelude to a thesis statement, support for a grim assessment of the country on the eve of the 2008 Presidential election. [Scott Tobias]

Streaming June 28

Writer-director Greta Gerwig accomplishes something extraordinary with Lady Bird: a story that’s both hyper-specific and universally relatable. The film takes place in Sacramento, California over the course of the 2002-2003 school year, where 17-year-old Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) dreams of ditching what she calls “the Midwest of California” and escaping to New York City. Gerwig cradles Lady Bird’s story like a delicate baby robin, allowing the tension between her characters to arise organically and daring to make them refreshingly, well, ordinary. And although it’s also frequently hilarious, Gerwig derives real emotional impact from Lady Bird’s strained relationship with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), whose desire to protect her daughter from disappointment manifests as a tendency towards cutting, critical remarks. It’s a film deftly attuned to the tedious cycles of teenage life, an age where the present feels like a heavy weight pressing down on your chest and the future like a cloudless blue sky that goes on forever. [Katie Rife]

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“Life can change in the blink of an eye” is one of those clichés that sounds more hyperbolic than it really is. While it may seem dramatic to suggest that actual milliseconds can radically alter the trajectory of a person’s existence, the daunting fact remains that life is delicate and fickle. The late playwright August Wilson explored as much in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in which one man’s trauma and hubris leads to a tremendous, lightning-quick fall from grace. At its core, Wilson’s 1982 play is a tragic allegory about the extremely tenuous nature of the Black American Dream, and how, for too many in this country, prosperity comes down not just to hard work but also righting larger wrongs and overcoming systematic roadblocks. To that end, an ostensibly minor setback can be catastrophic for someone reliant on sweeping success for basic survival—a reality Wilson explores through the figure of Levee, a young, ambitious trumpeter who, over the span of mere hours, loses everything: his job, his love interest, and, via creative theft, much more. Ma Rainey’s is the ballad of a promising talent whose rising star is unceremoniously dimmed. That aspect takes on fresh significance—a uniquely cruel irony—in George C. Wolfe’s new adaptation. After all, Levee is played by Chadwick Boseman, in his final screen role. The film has more than its share of toast-worthy elements, from its sharp ensemble to its dutiful nods to 1920s Chicago and Old Hollywood, courtesy of Tobias A. Schliessler’s illuminating cinematography. But the appearance of the actor, in one last tremendous star performance, only enhances the material’s tragic power. [Shannon Miller]

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Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills, like its predecessor Machete (and the fake trailer between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse movies that birthed it), concerns itself equally with comedy and over-the-top action, constantly tweaking the dosage so as not to tilt too far in one direction. Machete Kills is gleefully ridiculous, one-upping the first movie’s jokes, blood, and even its massively heightened self-awareness. No matter how Rodriguez would like to pitch it, Machete Kills isn’t really an homage to exploitation movies as much as it’s a parody of them. Its tongue is jammed so far in its cheek that it scans, at least in parts, like an Austin Powers movie, albeit one with multiple beheadings and disembowelings. Which isn’t to say it’s no fun—in fact, it delivers pretty much exactly what it sets out to.

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Like a Kurosawa samurai movie with Ford Falcons taking the place of horses, George Miller’s 1979 directorial debut Mad Max uses the grim possible future of “a few years from now” as the setting for a gritty action film whose visceral thrills arrive fused to a deepening bleakness. Not quite post-apocalyptic in the style of its sequels (The Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome), Mad Max imagines a time in which civilization hasn’t so much collapsed as wound itself down. Cops and criminals vie for control of the roads, and from the film’s first breathless chase scene, between a hapless highway patrol and an AC/DC-quoting “terminal psychotic,” it looks like the criminals have the edge. Only Mel Gibson, given the best entrance since Clint Eastwood in A Fistful Of Dollars, has the ability to stand in the way, and from the start Miller links that ability to an appetite for self-destruction. [Keith Phipps]

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Read the rest of our Mad Max review here

In Noah Baumbach’s most complete picture to date, the stalwart indie filmmaker combines the vivid slice-of-life vignettes of Frances Ha with the unflinching self-examination of The Squid And The Whale. He also tells a rich and provocative story, about two basically decent people who suffer mightily once they turn their irreconcilable differences over to the rough justice of family court. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson—joined by an all-star cast of supporting players—are at their best, bringing such nuance to their characters that the audience can see both why this couple fell in love and why they have to split. But Marriage Story is really Baumbach’s show, as he takes what he’s learned from Brian De Palma and The New Yorker short stories, breaking the arc of a messy divorce down to a series of riveting set pieces. [Noel Murray]

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Shot on a 65mm canvas, The Master takes a format usually reserved for the grandest spectacles and deploys it to startlingly intimate ends; the true landscape of the film isn’t a battleground or the outer reaches of the galaxy, but the contours of Joaquin Phoenix’s face. Though no less ambitious than previous Paul Thomas Anderson period pieces like Boogie Nights or There Will Be Blood, The Master forgoes their sprawl in favor of intense chamber drama, focusing on the titanic struggle between two men rather than the clash of armies. It’s a feisty, contentious, deliberately misshapen film, designed to challenge and frustrate audiences looking for a clean resolution. Just because it’s over doesn’t mean it’s settled. [Scott Tobias]

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Menashe Lustig brings warmth and a lumpen charisma to Menashe’s lead role, giving life to a film based in part on his own experiences as a Hasidic Jew. It would’ve been easy for documentarian Joshua Weinstein to make Menashe into a melodrama about heroes and villains: the misunderstood free spirit versus the stodgy pillars of the community. Instead, the model here is more the classics of docu-realism, like Little Fugitive, or anything by the Dardenne brothers. The focus is largely on the fascinating and strikingly filmed visual contrasts of an old-fashioned people against a modern city. [Noel Murray]

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No one second-guesses like Noah Baumbach; his characters would wonder aloud what they could have done to make the proper best-of list with a wryness belying their insecurities. Meyerowitz, loosely structured as a series of short stories, bears some superficial resemblance to the films of Baumbach’s pal Wes Anderson, particularly The Royal Tenenbaums, but it inverts the family dynamics of a ne’er-do-well father parenting stunted child geniuses. Harold Meyerowitz (Dustin Hoffman) is like a Tenenbaum kid in dotage, half-ignoring his successful but non-glamorous children, and Baumbach captures both the affection and the unpleasant reality of dealing with a middling-at-best parent whose frail humanity remains in full view. This movie isn’t as snappy as his collaborations with Greta Gerwig, but it’s very funny and beautifully acted, particularly by a career-best Adam Sandler as a stay-at-home dad who dotes on his smart teenage daughter. No second-guessing is needed for me to call this yet another Baumbach career highlight. [Jesse Hassenger]

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The story of a woman (Emayatzy Corinealdi) who drops out of her metropolitan medical school to be closer to the remote prison where her husband (Omari Hardwick) is serving an eight-year term, is an uncommonly thoughtful, accomplished realization of familiar form, and a reminder of why that form exists in the first place. With unfussy lyricism and a hard-nosed lack of sentiment, director Ava DuVernay sets Corinealdi on the fine line between loyalty and self-sacrifice, wondering at what point, if any, her devotion to maintaining her marriage might slide into simple foolishness. When a bus driver (David Oyelowo) begins, subtly but persistently, to explore the limits of her commitment, she rebuffs him, but her curiosity is piqued—less because of loneliness or sexual desire, though those certainly factor in, than because she herself wonders how strong she is, and whether strength consists in shutting out temptation or facing it up close. The power of Middle Of Nowhere is cumulative, conveyed in sustained tone and deepening character rather than bravura sequences or explosive confrontations. But its lack of pyrotechnics doesn’t translate to a paucity of feeling. If anything, it’s more affecting for the leisurely way it rolls out its story, allowing each step to resonate before moving on to the next. [Katie Rife]

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The film that introduced the American movie-going public to the virtues of Lyonnaise potatoes, Midnight Run is also the finest comedic work of Robert De Niro’s career—a feat immeasurably aided by his partner-in-squabbling, Charles Grodin. One of the all-time great bickering-buddy comedies, Martin Brest’s 1988 film charts the odyssey of De Niro’s bail bondsman as he endeavors to first nab, and then escort from New York to Los Angeles, Grodin’s accountant, who—having stolen millions from Dennis Farina’s Vegas mobster—is wanted by gangsters, a rival bounty hunter, and FBI agent Yaphet Kotto. After Grodin feigns a fear of flying, the chain-smoking De Niro is forced to travel by train, bus, car, and foot to return his captive to L.A., along the way getting into scuffles with dogs and shootouts with the feds and criminals. Grodin, who believes himself to be a righteous man intent on redistributing Farina’s money to the needy, engages in constant deadpan needling of his profane, increasingly fed up guardian. Grodin’s calmness and fussiness is a perfect match for De Niro’s cursing-mad exasperation, and the two are expertly served by an episodic story that throws one laughably aggravating roadblock after another in their path. [Nick Schager]

Coming July 1

Read the rest of our Midnight Run recommendation at this link 

In the opening scene of Midnight Special, two armed men sneak a boy out of a motel room and into a customized ’72 Chevelle before peeling off into the dusk. The mulberry sky turns blue-gray with twilight, and then pitch black. The driver hits a toggle switch wired behind the steering wheel, cutting off the headlamps and taillights. The car disappears into the darkness. It will be about 40 minutes before the viewer even finds out how the men, Roy (Michael Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton), know each other, though by then they will have ditched the Chevelle for a plumber’s white Ford Econoline van and, later, an Isuzu Trooper. Midnight Special is very particular about its cars, just as it’s very particular about its setting—the gas stations, motels, and working-class suburbs of the Bible Belt—and the cautious speech of its characters. In every other respect, Jeff Nichols’ compelling sci-fi chase film is terse and elliptical, showing little and telling less. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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Actors are capable of sinking into many roles, but icons like Clint Eastwood are another story: His range is limited, but within those limits, his aura suggests a history and gravity that’s more powerful than mere performance. In his beautiful boxing drama Million Dollar Baby, Eastwood allows the gentle masculinity of his recent roles to seep into the entire movie, creating a haunted tone that transforms an underdog sports film into something as intimate as a whisper. With its down-and-out characters and dramatic interplay of darkness and light, the film has the texture of a somber palooka noir like Robert Wise’s The Set-Up, but it’s touched by a dogged optimism that’s anathema to the genre. Though conventional in many respects, it feels like no other boxing film ever made, due largely to Eastwood’s unmistakable presence on both sides of the camera. [Scott Tobias]

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The family melodrama A Monster Calls alternately conforms to expectations and defies them, which is probably why it’s proved divisive during its early run on the festival circuit. Some called the film unsophisticated, saying that it makes well-meaning but obvious observations about how grief affects the young. Others connected with it on such a deep level that they couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be moved. In a way, the confusion over what this movie is meant to be—and who’ll want to watch it—befits a story that’s so tough to take at times, about an imaginative child coping with the unimaginable. In a literal sense, the “monster” in A Monster Calls is an enormous fire-breathing tree-beast, with the voice of Liam Neeson, who comes at night to haunt a preteen boy named Conor O’Malley (played by Lewis MacDougall). Five minutes into the film, though, as Conor’s shuffling pills around and listening to coughing fits from his mother, Lizzie (Felicity Jones), the title’s meaning quickly changes, as The Monster clearly comes to represent something else. And it’s nothing quite as obvious as “the real monster is cancer” either. There’s a bit more to what A Monster Calls is saying about how the process of dying transforms the living. [Noel Murray]

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In the broadest sense, Moonlight could be called a movie “about being black” or “about being gay” or even “about being raised in the drug-ravaged Liberty City neighborhood of Miami.” But writer-director Barry Jenkins treats identity as more of a prism than a lens in his adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unproduced play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. In three haunting vignettes, set years apart, Jenkins examines the complicated urges and influences within a young man, Chiron, as a friendly dope-pusher (beautifully played by Mahershala Ali) offers the kid some guidance, and an affectionate classmate helps awaken his sexuality. From moment to moment, Moonlight is small in scale. But its various echoes and callbacks coalesce into an at-times sweet, at-times heartbreaking portrait of someone who hesitates to articulate his desires. [Noel Murray]

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The best murder mysteries start small and build outward, becoming less about the crime and more about the community where the crime took place, and the evolving psyches of the investigators. Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother starts with the fairly pathetic case of a mildly developmentally disabled adult accused of killing a promiscuous teenage girl from an uncaring family. Then the movie expands to take the measure of the small South Korean town where the murder took place, and of the woman who sifts through clues in order to learn the truth. The woman (played by the remarkable Kim Hye-Ja) is the mother of the accused, and seeking more than vindication for her boy. She brought this kid into the world and taught him how to conduct himself, and if he actually killed somebody, then maybe he’s merely the murder weapon, and she’s the culprit. [Noel Murray]

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“His name is mud” isn’t a likely expression for a film to make literal, but writer-director Jeff Nichols—whose previous film, Take Shelter, repeatedly featured the protagonist and his family taking shelter—doesn’t shy away from bluntness or directness. Yes, Matthew McConaughey is Mud, a laconic ne’er-do-well hiding from the authorities on a small island off the Southern coast after killing a man in anger. The movie, however, isn’t so much about him as it is about the pair of teenage boys, Tye Sheridan (from The Tree Of Life) and Jacob Lofland, who happen upon him there and get drawn into his efforts to reconnect with his childhood girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon) back on the mainland. Sheridan, in particular, deeply identifies with McConaughey’s ostensibly pure love—a sense of kinship that blinds the boy to the real danger his friendly outlaw chum represents. And as if that isn’t enough potential mayhem, Joe Don Baker, playing the dead man’s understandably pissed-off father, is gearing up for some serious vigilante justice. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Drawn from the pages of Hillary Jordan’s 2008 international bestseller, Mudbound has the heft—the narrative and thematic meatiness, the thicket of characters and subplots and years-spanning incident—of a book you can’t put down. But if the film is novelistic in its sprawl, maybe sometimes to a fault, it’s written in poetry as well as prose. For Dee Rees, writer and director of the tender (if dramatically overfamiliar) Sundance sensation Pariah, this handsome literary adaptation is a big leap forward in scope and craft—a sophomore swing for the fences. But Rees’ singular sensibilities haven’t dimmed with the expansion of her ambitions. They still glow brightly, illuminating Jordan’s vision of hardship, simmering conflict, and racial inequity in 1940s Mississippi. [A.A. Dowd]

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Rom-coms have happy endings. That fact is such a given that it’s often preemptively held against the genre. Why see a movie when you already know exactly how it’s going to end? It’s ironic, then, that one of the most beloved rom-coms of all time challenges the very nature of what we want from a happy ending. The all-around delightful My Best Friend’s Wedding—more so than maybe any other romantic comedy—benefits from not knowing exactly where things are going. The 1997 film stars Julia Roberts as Julianne Potter, a commitment-phobic restaurant critic who’s sent into a tailspin when she learns her longtime best friend—and one-time college hookup, whom she made a pact to wed if neither were married by 28—Michael O’Neal (Dermot Mulroney) is about to marry the bubbly, 20-year-old White Sox heiress Kimmy Wallace (Cameron Diaz). When Julianne confesses her love and impulsively kisses Michael, it doesn’t make him realize he’s in love with her. It only helps him confirm he’s actually in love with Kimmy. And even though she’s heartbroken, Julianne sets about righting her wrongs, ensuring the wedding goes off without a hitch. There are plenty of meta rom-coms and rom-com parodies, but My Best Friend’s Wedding is something unique. It’s a deconstruction of the romantic comedy genre that’s also a fully functioning, agreeably mainstream version of one. [Caroline Siede]

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Georgian writer-director Nana Ekvtimishvili (In Bloom) brings a rare subtlety and sensitivity to this ironically titled domestic drama. Ia Shughliashvili stars as a middle-aged woman named Manana, who one day decides to move out of the crowded apartment she shares with her grown children, her inattentive husband, and assorted in-laws. My Happy Family’s minimal plot mostly follows the family’s efforts to shame her into returning—or at least to understand why she left. What makes the movie so resonant is that Manana’s choice feels so obvious. Leaving aside her clan’s various personality defects and moral failings, the heroine’s clearly much more content in her own place, with no responsibilities, listening to her own music, staring off her own balcony, eating sweets. Ekvtimishvili turns simple solitude into a fantasy more powerful than any science-fiction story. [Noel Murray]

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Director Clint Eastwood’s film adapts a Dennis Lehane novel, keeping its careful attention to how place, family, and local customs shape personalities–and how an instant can change all that. Another unspeakable incident, the brutal killing of Sean Penn’s 19-year-old daughter, reunites the childhood friends as men. Heading the investigation, Kevin Bacon discovers that a number of locals have no alibi for the night of the crime, but none more suspiciously than Tim Robbins, whose natural meekness starts to look a lot like guilt. In outline, Mystic River is little more than a standard police procedural, but Eastwood and screenwriter Brian Helgeland follow Lehane’s lead, letting the action play out at a pace which reveals the murder as a community tragedy which crashes the past against the present. The actors match the gravity of their surroundings, Robbins balancing barely concealed anger with unconcealed pain, Penn beautifully capturing a man who’s fought his way into goodness, and Bacon finally finding a role that makes the most of his gift for understatement. It works so well as a showcase for their performances (and those of supporting players Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney, Laurence Fishburne, and relative newcomer Tom Guiry), and as a study of their aluminum-sided world, that the inevitable revelations of the mystery plot almost sidetrack a film that’s more about fragile lives than clues and plot twists. Eastwood knows this, however, and he ultimately lets observations on character, community, and the tidal patterns of tragedy shoulder a burden an ordinary murder mystery never could. [Keith Phipps]

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Christmas Vacation may be one of the most realistic, albeit exaggerated, cinematic depictions of what celebrating Christmas is like for many families. Where most holiday features are high-concept or supernatural, set pieces here involve shopping or sledding; even if you don’t blanket your house with lights like Clark, the trouble he has getting his decorations up and working is relatable, and funnier as a result. The film has become a perennial favorite, as important as It’s A Wonderful Life in many families’ December repertoires, because it shows the holidays as wonderful and taxing in equal measure. It understands the desire to be with extended family, but also the inherent frustration of sharing space with visitors and in accommodating everyone’s different schedules and tastes. (“I’ll be outside for… the season,” Clark decides as the in-laws descend.) Though it lacks scenes where the Griswolds attend holiday parties or bake cookies, this is about as close as Hollywood has gotten to putting everyday Christmas traditions on screen. In its sweetness and humor, this is the Vacation where John Hughes’ imprint is most visible. (He wrote the screenplay; the director is Jeremiah Chechik, who mostly does TV now.) [Ryan Vlastelica]

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Nightcrawler is well worth seeing just for Jake Gyllenhaal’s spectacularly creepy performance. Blinking as little as possible and speaking every line with robotic conviction, he makes Louis the sort of person who discovered early in life that it’s possible to get away with nearly anything so long as one couches one’s words in the right tone, except that he has a truly warped notion of what the right tone is. Even the most obnoxiously persistent door-to-door salesmen have nothing on this guy, who treats everybody he encounters as an obstacle to be politely mowed down with bland verbiage derived from corporate jargon. It’s a mesmerizing turn from an actor who, while frequently quite good, has never really had a breakout role until this one. Nightcrawler gave him a chance to make a lasting impression, and he takes full, fanatical advantage. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Fusing the themes of a classic Hong Kong action movie with the mayhem of a modern Indonesian martial-arts flick and enough gore to satisfy fans of extreme, midnight-circuit horror, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us takes “heroic bloodshed” to a new level of indescribable, gut-splattered ickiness. As is often the case, the symbol of innocence takes the form of a little girl: Joe Taslim is the dangerous killer who’ll stop at nothing to protect her; his The Raid co-star Iko Uwais is the former gangland partner sent to take him down. But the real central conflict in this panorama of death and dismemberment is between the archetypal, coded characters and the heaps of bloodied, chopped-up bodies they leave in their wake. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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“I’m too cynical to be an artist,” muses a character at around the midpoint of Nocturnal Animals, the second feature by the fashion designer Tom Ford, perhaps winking to the audience of this arch and self-conscious film. For Nocturnal Animals takes dilettantism as a principle; Ford, who previously directed A Single Man, is a mimic and an unapologetic aesthete, and his liberal adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel Tony And Susan operates on the cusp of satire, playing with insincerity and indulgence as it conveys the workings of a reader’s imagination. Its three interrelated stories reflect and obscure one another in equal measure: a Los Angeles drama about the ennui and mores of the modish rich, focused on a gallery owner married to a nearly bankrupt businessman; a violent thriller about a family man seeking revenge against Texas hicks, which is actually a novel manuscript by the gallery owner’s estranged first husband; and a failed romance, set in the early years of the relationship between the former couple, childhood friends from Texas who reconnect in New York. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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With The Old Guard, Love & Basketball and Beyond The Lights director Gina Prince-Bythewood helms an action-fantasy hybrid that takes the beauty marks—and warts—of each genre and creates a sequel-starter for Netflix. The film follows an idealistic cadre of heroes who all share a common thread: They can live for centuries. The titular group is led by Andy (Charlize Theron), with Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) making up the rest of the crew. When a new immortal warrior, Nile (Kiki Layne), joins them, she sparks a reckoning with the Guard’s ideals—and the rosy picture they try to uphold. Greg Rucka pens the screenplay, refashioning his own graphic novel and doing as much to retain tone and character agency as Gillian Flynn did for her Gone Girl adaptation, for example. In a past life, this would be a standard B-movie shoot-’em-up. But, as Prince-Bythewood presents it, The Old Guard is an effective and tender bundle of contradictions, a franchise launchpad about (among other things) endings. [Anya Stanley]

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To quote Twin Peaks: “What year is this?” After more than four decades languishing in post-production limbo, Orson Welles’ final project arrives like a missive from a bygone era. No less than a Herculean act of reconstructive surgery, The Other Side Of The Wind tells an ostensibly familiar tale of protégé (Peter Bogdanovich’s Brooks Otterlake) surpassing mentor (John Huston’s Jake Hannaford), here in the context of ’70s-era Hollywood. But it’s also a delirious, wildly entertaining implosion of unstable meta-text, filled with nonstop callbacks, withering bon mots, and thinly veiled send-ups of then-contemporary personalities, not to mention some of the most electric (and unabashedly libidinous) filmmaking of Welles’ legendary career. Shifting freely between black-and-white footage and lurid color photography, it’s a veritably prismatic object, a kind of cracked crystal that’s all the more fascinating for its supposed flaws. Putting it on a year-end list feels inadequate. [Lawrence Garcia]

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Opening with a diagnosis of cancer that’s soon revealed to be terminal, Paddleton more or less amounts to an hour and a half of slow-motion assisted suicide. Sound like fun? Remarkably, this low-budget two-hander—arriving on Netflix just a few weeks after its Sundance premiere—manages to generate a fair number of laughs, even as it does full justice to the scenario’s underlying gravity. Written by Alex Lehmann (who also directed) and Mark Duplass (who also plays one of the two lead roles), Paddleton takes its emotional cue from Terms Of Endearment, expanding that film’s final stretch into an entire feature and replacing mother-daughter bonds with the deep but usually unspoken love shared by two male buddies. A bit of cheating is necessary to achieve the stripped-down dynamic that Lehmann and Duplass apparently wanted, but the payoff is an atypically intimate portrait of testosterone-fueled friendship. [Mike D’Angelo]

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The cinéma vérité horror film/mockumentary Paranormal Activity paradoxically feels more like a sequel to The Blair Witch Project than that film’s actual sequel. Like an ideal follow-up, Paranormal Activity takes the same basic premise—amateur filmmaker documents own descent into paranoia and terror at the hands of sinister unseen forces—in a bold new direction. Where Project got a lot of mileage out of the archetypal campfire-story spookiness of the wilderness where its hapless filmmakers got lost, Paranormal Activity derives much of its power from juxtaposing supernatural otherworldliness with the mundanity of the apartment where its action takes place. At best, Paranormal Activity makes the banal and commonplace deeply unsettling. The film’s resemblance to Blair Witch extends to unknown lead actors who are realistic and convincing enough to come off as shrill and unpleasant. After all, people are seldom at their best when confronted by dark powers beyond their comprehension. [Nathan Rabin]

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“This is my private life,” cries Danny Elfman in the Oingo Boingo song of the same name. “Come and get me out of here.” That’s more or less how Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) feel in Tamara Jenkins’ long-awaited third feature, which explores in minute, often excruciating detail this infertile couple’s Herculean efforts to either conceive or adopt a child. Jenkins apparently went through a lot of this herself (which partially explains why it’s been 11 years since The Savages), and she expertly threads the needle, finding ways to make her ordeal both scrupulously accurate and enormously entertaining. And the narrative that gradually emerges, in which Rachel and Richard become surrogate parents to their college-age niece (Kayli Carter), who volunteers to be an egg donor, beautifully conveys the idea that love and guidance don’t necessarily require a traditional family structure, and that sometimes we find what we’re looking for without even realizing it. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Helen Mirren speaks with flawless, imperious diction throughout The Queen, but it’s worth noting how much acting she does between lines. As Queen Elizabeth II, she reaches several turning points during the course of the film, most of them taking place when she’s alone and silent, or as another character natters on about protocol, propriety, and what tradition states obviously must be done. Meanwhile, Mirren has already accepted that changing times have sent “what must be done” out the window. [Keith Phipps]

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Atom Egoyan may never make another movie as great as Speaking Parts, Exotica, or The Sweet Hereafter, but at least he’s finally figured out how to craft satisfying trash. Remember’s log line is breathtakingly dopey: A Holocaust survivor (Christopher Plummer) suffering from dementia leaves his nursing home in an effort to track down and kill the Auschwitz commander who murdered his family seven decades earlier, even though he can barely recall his own name from moment to moment. Egoyan leans into the absurdity, treating the material more like an exploitation flick than the prestige drama that Plummer’s magisterial presence in the lead role would suggest. When the film was released in March, the alt-right hadn’t yet penetrated national consciousness; a key scene, featuring Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris as a proud neo-Nazi, probably has even more of a disturbing charge now than it did in those comparatively innocent days. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Alfonso Cuarón followed up his blockbuster science-fiction picture Gravity with something unexpected: an intimate, semi-autobiographical slice-of-life, set in early ’70s Mexico City. Even more surprising? Roma has just as much cinematic panache as the director’s previous fantasy films and sex comedies. Shot in dreamy black-and-white (with Cuarón himself serving as cinematographer), the film tracks the dissolution of a marriage, as well as the social changes in Mexico, all through the eyes of one middle-class family’s maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). In long, astonishingly well-choreographed takes, Cuarón creates the impression of a larger world rushing by outside the window of an increasingly dysfunctional home. But his camera keeps finding its way back to Cleo, as she manages the smaller domestic dramas—including some of her own—while quietly contemplating what gives her life meaning. [Noel Murray]

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Based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a manga-doodle that draws from the wellspring of popular culture, viewing youthful infatuation through a filter of indie rock, action comics, and a selection of classic arcade and Nintendo games. It’s a series steeped in irony, bestowing magnificent powers on an ineffectual Canadian who can barely muster the courage to talk to a girl, yet reluctantly does battle with her ex-boyfriends. There’s perhaps no better director to bring it to the screen than Edgar Wright, whose Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz are similarly informed by a culture-addled mind, and he brings a great elasticity to Scott Pilgrim, which stretches the medium to accommodate O’Malley’s comic-book universe. [Scott Tobias]

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Politically, there are no shades of gray in Shadow, the latest from Hero and House Of Flying Daggers director Zhang Yimou. You’re either on the side of the patriotic freedom fighters who dream of liberating the walled city of Jingzhou from its occupiers, or you’re on the side of the spoiled, cowardly king of Pei (Zheng Kai), who glorifies his own selfish inaction in the form of an epic poem called “Ode To Peace” painted on screens placed around his throne room. Morally, things are a bit murkier. “Some things don’t have a right and wrong,” says the wife of the king’s right-hand man Commander Yu (Chao Deng, in a dual role), who has been secretly training a body double to take his place in court and on the battlefield ever since a festering combat wound forced him onto the sidelines of both. Visually, the film is nothing but shades of gray—so much so that the tones of the actors’ skin, and the blood pouring from their wounds, are the only other colors in Yimou’s palette. [Katie Rife]

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In Singapore of 1992, Sandi Tan and her two best friends decided to make an independent road film with their enigmatic filmmaking teacher Georges Cardona. Inspired by American independent auteurs of the era, their film, Shirkers, was poised to create a new national cinema. But at the end of filmmaking, Cardona absconded with the footage, never to be seen again. More than 25 years later, Tan recovered the footage (sans sound) and crafted a memoir-style documentary about the turbulent making of the film and its aftermath, effectively reclaiming it from the hands of her sociopathic mentor. While the story of Shirkers fascinates in its own right, Tan’s film also serves as a tribute to underground artists of yore. Tan and her friends, with their clandestine videotape syndicate and international zines, were countercultural pioneers when and where that still meant something. The Shirkers documentary feels as much like a handcrafted relic from another era as its original, lost-and-found inspiration, which makes its Netflix release all the more ironic. [Vikram Murthi]

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Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a U.S. marshal summoned to Shutter Island after a female patient mysteriously disappears. As DiCaprio and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) make inquiries of the patients and staff, they’re baffled first by the seeming impossibility of the woman leaving a locked cell and slipping past security, and second by her escape off a rock that makes Alcatraz look like the county pen. All investigative avenues appear to lead to Ben Kingsley, the Dr. Moreau of this experimental facility, who treats his inmates as patients rather than criminals, but seems to be hiding a darker agenda. For his part, DiCaprio brings his own share of personal baggage: He’s haunted by memories of liberating Dachau, and his wife’s death in an apartment fire. What begins as a simple missing-person procedural slowly morphs into full-on psychological horror, as more disturbing revelations come to pass and the stress on DiCaprio starts eating away at his nerves. Director Martin Scorsese renders his hero’s nightmares in vivid Technicolor flashbacks and dream sequences that insistently bleed into reality and cloud his judgment. Scorsese’s talent for aligning the audience with a single character’s obsession pays off brilliantly as Shutter Island unfolds, and potent single-scene turns by Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson draw it further into the darkness. Shutter Island may initially seem like a nerve-jangling genre piece in the Cape Fear mold, but it’s more like Scorsese’s The Shining, a horror show where it’s sometimes hard to tell the haunted from those doing the haunting. [Scott Tobias]

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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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Spotlight dramatizes, in step-by-step fashion, how a group of reporters at the Boston Globe exposed the massive child-sexual-assault scandal in the Catholic Church, proving not just that pedophilia was a widespread problem among the clergy, but also that the conspiracy to cover up the abuse reached at least to the archbishops. The investigation began in the summer of 2001, when new Globe editor Marty Baron (played here by Liev Schreiber, as a man of integrity but little warmth) cajoled the Spotlight department—a small investigative unit, charged with producing bigger pieces over longer timeframes—into looking deeper into the settled case of an accused Catholic priest. As they quickly discovered, the problem was much bigger than one man of the cloth. By the time the story was printed, in January of the following year, the paper had confirmation of more than 75 priests in Boston alone who had assaulted children and were then protected by the church. [A.A. Dowd]

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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]

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A bit like Funny Games without the scolding, the minimalist home-invasion thriller The Strangers doesn’t take many words to describe: isolated vacation home. Masked tormenters. Helpless couple. And yet it’s precisely the film’s spare, disciplined, back-to-basics horror effects that lend it a sustaining chill; if the audience knew any more about who “the strangers” are and why they’ve chosen this house, this couple, and this night to do their worst, then a lot of the tension would dissipate. Making a frighteningly assured debut, writer-director Bryan Bertino understands the fundamentals thoroughly, and he has the patience to hold back and keep the tension hanging where a lesser director might have gone for the cheap shock. Many of the film’s shots and scenes go on several beats longer than expected, just to stoke a near-unbearable feeling of anticipation and dread. As a filmmaker, at least, Bertino seems to have more in common with the perpetrators than the victims. [Scott Tobias]

Coming July 1

Read the rest of our The Strangers review at this link

Even the MTV generation didn’t know what to do with Streets Of Fire. With its flimsy, Western-inspired plot and all the chemistry of a wet washcloth between romantic leads Diane Lane and Michael Paré, Walter Hill’s 1984 “rock ’n’ roll fable” bombed at the box office and flopped with critics (save for Roger Ebert, who gave the film one of its few positive reviews). Plans for a trilogy were scrapped by a humbled Universal, and the film soon faded from popular memory, where it’s ironically been eclipsed by a hit song from its soundtrack. But like many exercises in knowing kitsch, it’s only improved with age.

Perhaps the ne plus ultra of the ’80s-does-’50s aesthetic, Streets Of Fire takes such classic symbols of midcentury Americana as Studebakers, corner diners, and black leather motorcycle jackets and drenches them in New Wave neon, creating an alternate dimension—“another time, another place,” as an opening title card declares—that’s familiar, but still ineffably strange. It’s a world where ’80s punk coexists with ’60s soul and everyone talks in slang straight out of a ’50s B-movie, where the lone gunslinger wears a duster designed by Giorgio Armani and the baddest guy in town can be laid low by a well-placed sock in the jaw. There’s a certain innocence to the film, the dream of a 13-year-old boy who fell asleep at the drive-in as directed by one of American cinema’s boldest and most kinetic visual stylists. [Katie Rife]

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The winning new teen romp Superbad was written by Evan Goldberg and Judd Apatow’s protégé Seth Rogen, and directed by The Daytrippers’ Greg Mottola, but it still feels like the concluding film in Apatow’s trilogy of raunchy, big-hearted, improvisation-heavy comedies about man-children torn between the pleasures of eternal adolescence and the relentless pull of adult responsibility. The stars and sensibility get younger with each successive film: The 40-Year-Old Virgin’s middle-aged Steve Carell gave way to twentysomething Knocked Up star Rogen, and now teenagers Jonah Hill and Michael Cera step in as co-dependent buddies facing the end of high school and scary/exciting college careers pulling them in separate directions. [Nathan Rabin]

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Much of the success of Terminator 2 is in the elegance of the storytelling. Director James Cameron sets it all up beautifully, introducing all his key characters one by one, slowly pushing them all to the point where they’ll intersect. Schwarzenegger’s foe, the shape-shifting T-1000, is understated but deadly compelling. Robert Patrick’s face is all planar surfaces, he runs with a freaky sense of focus, and he projects a dispassionate authority that allows him to slip through society more easily than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sarah Connor, the previous movie’s hero, has had a rough time since we’ve seen her pregnant, driving off into an electrical storm. She’s all hair sweat and sinew and feral intensity. She’s been committed to a mental institution because she won’t stop telling everyone that the end of the world is coming, but also because she’s legitimately disturbed and unstable. Whenever Linda Hamilton goes full-tilt in T2, it’s magic: holding the Drano-filled needle to the psychiatrist’s neck, scolding her son for being dumb enough to come save her, screaming cuss words at the family of the man she’s just shot. Hamilton should’ve won the Oscar that year. She wasn’t even nominated. [Tom Breihan]

Coming July 1

Read the rest of our look back at how Terminator 2: Judgement Day became the biggest movie of 1991 at this link

Coming from a veteran of British intelligence, le Carré’s fiction offers a counterpoint to the glamorous spy tales of Ian Fleming and others. In his books, espionage is a high-stakes game of bluffs and double-bluffs played by unsmiling men in sparsely appointed rooms. Here, Gary Oldman plays one of the most famous of those unsmiling men, frequent le Carré protagonist George Smiley, a British-intelligence lifer who, as the film opens, has been forced into semi-retirement following the high-profile failure, and subsequent death, of his mentor (John Hurt). When it becomes apparent that a mole remains in place in a position of power back at “The Circus,” Oldman doesn’t get to enjoy his time off for long. [Keith Phipps]

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Mere hours into his first day of training for a position in an elite anti-narcotics branch of the Los Angeles Police Department, Ethan Hawke’s view of the streets begins to change. Specifically, he starts to see them through the hazy, clouded high of PCP-dusted marijuana, a drug forced on him at gunpoint by his potential new boss, veteran cop Denzel Washington. Is Washington giving Hawke a crash course in the realities of his new beat, or simply revealing himself as a bad lieutenant of the worst kind? For much of its run time, Training Day plays directly off this disturbing ambiguity, leading a tour of the thinly guarded border between cops and criminals. Far removed from the innate goodness of most Washington roles, it’s a remarkable performance, landing somewhere between Dirty Harry and Orson Welles’ petty tyrant from Touch Of Evil. A penetrating screenplay by David Ayer helps make it possible. Ayer’s previous efforts (The Fast And The Furious, U-571) never suggested Training Day’s command of characters in moral twilight, and the similarly blossoming director Antoine Fuqua rises to the script’s challenges. Given a showcase for acting and writing, Fuqua brings a relaxed, quietly stylish approach to much of Training Day. As goes the director, so goes his other leading man. Once more apt to deliver a collection of youth-in-rebellion gestures than a performance, Hawke has been developing into a far more interesting actor since The Newton Boys and, especially, Hamlet. His ability to hold his own against Washington says all that needs saying. [Keith Phipps]

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Expanding the frenetic, panic-attack-inducing cinema of Good Time with novelistic ambition, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie created a thrilling study of one man’s compulsive self-destruction with this tragicomedy about a hustling Manhattan jewelry dealer (Adam Sandler, in the best performance of his career) who owes a fortune in gambling debts. Already on the brink of implosion, Sandler’s Howard Ratner can’t stop making bets, convinced that his financial (and personal) salvation will come by way of a grapefruit-size lump of Ethiopian black opal. He’s reckless, neurotic, self-deluding, an addict, equal parts sucker and scammer—and perhaps more like us than we’d care to admit. Packed with memorable supporting characters (and impressive turns from newcomers like Julia Fox, Keith Williams Richards, and NBA star Kevin Garnett, who plays himself), Uncut Gems establishes the Safdies as masters of anxious existential grit; their style of overlapping dialogue and tension feels like the unlikely fusion of Robert Altman and Abel Ferrara. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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There’s a moment in Under The Shadow where the heroine does something that people in haunted-house movies almost never do: She grabs her child and bolts straight out the front door. Recent additions to the genre have devised some clever justifications for keeping the characters planted, ranging from financial incentive to house arrest to the explanation that the haunters will simply follow the haunted to their new digs. But Under The Shadow cuts through all that noise, allowing its scared-witless protagonist to make a sensible break for it. Trouble is, this young mother lives in Tehran circa 1988, and in her instinctive dash for safety, she fails to cover her head with a hijab. Forget abandoning the haunted house. How many horror movies feature someone fleeing the unholy terror in their home, only to be arrested for not wearing proper attire in public? [A.A. Dowd]

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Unfriended, a fiendishly clever fright flick, may be the most ingenious addition to the “horror movies that present themselves as raw documentary footage” genre since the original Paranormal Activity. The film unfolds entirely within the frame lines of a teenage girl’s laptop screen, its characters squeezed into the tiny boxes of a group video chat, its protagonist toggling frantically between various browsers as her evening web time becomes an online nightmare. There’s some precedent for this premise—last year’s Open Windows attempted something similar, as did the Joe Swanberg short in V/H/S—but the filmmakers here completely commit to their gimmick, turning its limitations into benefits and exploiting the chosen technology for maximum effect. In the process, they hit the refresh button on the entire found-footage format. [A.A. Dowd]

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With An Inconvenient Truth, documentarian Davis Guggenheim and former vice president Al Gore set out to save the world from an environmental cataclysm beyond the imagination of even Roland Emmerich. With his muckraking new exposé Waiting For Superman, Guggenheim wants to make sure we have a society worth saving. Having tackled global warming, he’s now moved on to another important issue: turning around a failing public-school system that should be the shame of our nation. Waiting For Superman surveys a grim academic realm where powerful teachers’ unions reward apathy and treading water, rather than innovative thinking or excellence, and the only test where American students consistently score high is on academic self-confidence. We aren’t No. 1, but we labor under the delusion that we represent the apex of academic accomplishment. With outrage, sadness, and compassion, Guggenheim examines the root causes of this public-school meltdown and offers suggestions for breaking the gridlock afflicting our educational system, most notably in the form of charter schools unbound by the institutional inertia that’s killing our schools. [Nathan Rabin]

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Even (maybe especially) for a practiced Sanderologist, a new Happy Madison picture getting uploaded to Netflix does not inspire much genuine hope for a good time. Imagine my surprise, then, that Adam Sandler enlisted his old pal Robert Smigel to make his best broad comedy in at least a decade—a funny and sweetly grounded story about a couple of dads hitting assorted bumps in the lead-up to their kids’ wedding. Smigel ditches most of the usual Sandler hangers-on, keeps the best ones (Rock, Dratch, Buscemi), and makes a movie rooted in the specifics of suburban Long Island, rather than the latest Happy Madison-favored resort. [Jesse Hassenger]

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A title card at the outset reads, in full, “The Witch: A New-England Folktale.” Technically, in fact, it’s The VVitch, with two capital V’s (more or less interchangeable with the letter “U” for centuries) instead of the modern “W.” These details matter, because Robert Eggers’ singularly creepy debut derives much of its power from stringent period accuracy. Set early in the 17th century, among a Puritan family that’s been exiled to a solitary existence in the woods, it features dialogue taken directly from diaries and court records of the era, creating an additional layer of distance that heightens the already pervasive feeling of strangeness. For those not disturbed by this alienation effect, there’s also an infant-snatching (and -devouring) witch, as the title promises, along with escalating paranoia, multiple crises of faith, hallucinatory madness (culminating in one brief but unforgettable shock), and a literally diabolical goat called Black Phillip. In the end, The Witch poses a question that some found irresponsible, but that makes first-rate nightmare fuel: What if the women who were hanged in Salem a few decades later were, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy? [Mike D’Angelo]

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Winter On Fire: Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom represents a new breed of documentary that reflects this major upheaval. Commissioned by Netflix and directed by Russian filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, Winter On Fire isn’t the first doc about the Euromaidan protests that took place from November 2013 to February 2014, nor necessarily even the best; Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan, which covers similar territory, was released in the U.S. almost exactly a year ago, to rave reviews. But where Maidan focuses on the protesters themselves (emphasizing a “behind the scenes” portrait of solidarity), Winter On Fire, which employed a dozen cameras shooting constantly for three months, provides what almost literally amounts to a blow-by-blow account of the entire nightmarish showdown, assembling so much harrowing footage that one can do little but gape in horror. There’s a huge difference between seeing 20 or 30 upsetting seconds on the evening news every so often and watching a gradual descent into sheer anarchy, as it happens. [Mike D’Angelo]

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Running a mammoth four hours, this investigative whatsit (now available as a six-part Netflix series after a limited theatrical release) has zero interest in maintaining a strict line of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. Much of Wormwood consists of Errol Morris’ usual probing interviews, digging into the details of a cold case dating back to 1953. This time, though, the Thin Blue Line director’s speculation about events takes more concrete form, with actors like Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, Tim Blake Nelson, and Bob Balaban acting out scripted scenes (written by Steven Hathaway and Molly Rokosz) that are intercut with the talking heads and archival footage. Cinema has been moving toward a hybrid form for ages, but leave it to a longtime innovator like Morris to push it this far. [Mike D’Angelo]

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A lot has changed since the heyday of teen sex comedies in the early ’80s—not least the revelation that adolescent girls are just as horny as their male counterparts. Projects on the big screen (The To Do List) and the small (Big Mouth) plumb the depths (pun intended) of puberty’s lustful purgatory from a female perspective. But you’d be hard pressed (pun also intended) to find a masturbation comedy as sweet and sensitive as Yes, God, Yes. Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer stars as Alice, a good girl who attends church with her dad every Sunday and is sincerely worried that she’s going to hell because she stumbled into a dirty AOL chat one afternoon after school. The film shares its early-’00s setting and softly lit Catholic-school milieu with Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. And like that film, this is a semi-autobiographical project for writer-director Karen Maine, who first made the film-festival scene as a co-writer of Obvious Child. But Yes, God, Yes is positively sex-crazed compared to those movies, though it focuses less on actually doing the deed than the single-minded desires that drive teenagers to distraction. [Katie Rife]

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Buried deep within the grim worlds of most zombie movies lies an unlikely streak of wish-fulfillment. Granted, a zombie-ruled hellscape offers plenty of disadvantages to the living, but it also includes the giddy promise of a world where the rules have been thrown out the window, and survivors can treat abandoned stores, amusement parks, and homes like their own private treasure chests—assuming, of course, that they don’t get eaten in the process. The winning new road movie/horror-comedy Zombieland runs with this conceit, most gloriously during an extended sequence featuring a mystery guest star indulging in hilarious self-parody. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a meek young man whose preternatural cautiousness allowed him to survive a zombie apocalypse that wiped out most of humanity. Eisenberg goes it alone until he runs into a gun-toting, Twinkies-obsessed roughneck (Woody Harrelson) whose badass exterior belies a sentimental side. These unlikely zombie hunters join forces with a sister-act pair of small-time grifters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) and head to a southern California amusement park, where hideous ghouls may eat their brains, but at least they won’t have to wait in line for rides. (Anyone who has spent time at Disneyland knows that’s a fair trade-off.) [Nathan Rabin]

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