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The White House Effect
(2024)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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It’s not easy to make an archival documentary... But “The White House Effect” is a good example of why it’s worth it, and why it’s worth preserving our archives, too.
Posted Oct 31, 2025
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Baahubali: The Epic
(2025)
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Nicolas Rapold
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This tenth-anniversary victory lap for the Baahubali story should attract fresh appraisals, and the deadly loyalty of the royal soldier Kattappa (Sathyaraj) lands with only greater force in our politically fraught era.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
(2025)
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Brandon Yu
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It’s hard not to be charmed by its warm existentialism (in a children’s film, no less) and its belief that the greatest wisdoms can be found in the way a child sees and learns.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Fire of Wind
(2024)
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Beatrice Loayza
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The film’s intriguing symbolism diminishes over time, but remaining is an elegant portrait of solidarity; a vision of workers enmeshed in the land that sustains them.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Hedda
(2025)
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Natalia Winkelman
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While DaCosta’s intelligence as a writer and director makes “Hedda” a standout film, her penchant for play makes it a delightful one.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Dracula
(2025)
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Manohla Dargis
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Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.
Posted Oct 30, 2025
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Auction
(2024)
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Manohla Dargis
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As “Auction” continues, issues of identity linger, and the movie quietly deepens.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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Coexistence, My Ass!
(2025)
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Ben Kenigsberg
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The film leaves the impression that, sadly, comedy may be one of the only paths to peace left in the region.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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Love+War
(2025)
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Jeannette Catsoulis
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Love + War chooses to go wide rather than deep, resulting in a movie that, while pleasingly dynamic, offers less psychological insight than the photographs she has gambled everything to take. And perhaps that’s as it should be.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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Ballad of a Small Player
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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Ballad of a Small Player contains a great story, but it’s bogged down by its trappings. Perhaps it just got a little too greedy.
Posted Oct 29, 2025
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Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
(2025)
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Ben Kenigsberg
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While some of the intra-family chats can seem self-indulgent or repetitive, there is real poignancy in hearing Amy, an actress herself, talk about the years she waited tables while her brother was becoming famous.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Regretting You
(2025)
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Natalia Winkelman
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It’s formulaic and predictable, with goofy writing and clumsy editing. The saving grace is the actors, who manage to perform even the most ridiculous lines with a straight face.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Queens of the Dead
(2025)
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Brandon Yu
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It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Last Days
(2025)
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Glenn Kenny
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“Last Days” manages to be thoroughly disquieting without overtly judging its subject.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
(2025)
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Nicolas Rapold
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While “Chainsaw Man” becomes a mighty struggle between superhuman forces, it’s also a psychological mapping of trust, breakdown and chaotic release.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Dream Eater
(2025)
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Beatrice Loayza
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Williams’s eerie performance flip flops from lovable goofball to raving ghoul, but Drumm’s artificial delivery only brings out the script’s clumsiness.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Bugonia
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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It’s ideal casting for Stone, with her anime-huge eyes and slightly otherwordly-wide grin, and her ability to flip between deadpan and vivacity on a dime.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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The Perfect Neighbor
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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“The Perfect Neighbor” deserves to be broadly seen, discussed and heeded.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Mistress Dispeller
(2024)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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Rather than leaning on caricatures or stereotypes, the film gives each person’s perspective a respectful hearing. The added element of Wang’s subterfuge is what keeps it all fresh.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Shelby Oaks
(2023)
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Jeannette Catsoulis
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A witchy crone, a possible incubus and an abandoned amusement park add up to not very much in “Shelby Oaks,” a derivative and dogged horror movie that reverts to rote with wearying regularity.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
(2025)
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Manohla Dargis
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The great surprise of “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain.
Posted Oct 23, 2025
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The Hand That Rocks The Cradle
(2025)
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Chris Azzopardi
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It’s clear this cradle has been rocked so hard that subtlety, taste and the potential for good camp have fallen out.
Posted Oct 22, 2025
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Good Fortune
(2025)
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Jeannette Catsoulis
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“Good Fortune” could have appeared a meanspirited swipe at one-percenters. Yet the cast is so amiable and smoothly in sync, and Ansari’s script so buoyantly paced, that the mood favors kumbaya over kill-the-rich.
Posted Oct 20, 2025
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The Mastermind
(2025)
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Manohla Dargis
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Here, the robbery is more of a beginning in a low-key funny and sharp look at a character -- as well as a larger world -- in thrall to narcissistic self-interest.
Posted Oct 20, 2025
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Truth & Treason
(2025)
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Glenn Kenny
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No matter its flaws, “Truth & Treason” is very well acted. Rupert Evans stands out as Erwin Mussener... His work, and that of Horrocks, keeps this uneven film watchable.
Posted Oct 18, 2025
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Köln 75
(2025)
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Ben Kenigsberg
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A movie that’s a little too eager to be liked. But it’s also tough to resist.
Posted Oct 17, 2025
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Black Phone 2
(2025)
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Brandon Yu
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While the sequel realizes the need to connect the rest of its ghostly parts, it becomes overlong in spots, bogged down by stiff explication. Instead, the movie’s engine is mostly in its new scares.
Posted Oct 16, 2025
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John Candy: I Like Me
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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For the most part, this is a movie about a man who was talented, funny and famous, and also generous, beloved and loving, and who believed you could be all of those things at the same time without internal conflict.
Posted Oct 10, 2025
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TRON: Ares
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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So ranked against other "Tron" feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it's appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than Legacy.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Kiss of the Spider Woman
(2025)
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Elisabeth Vincentelli
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At least Condon captures the dancers’ full bodies and emphasizes long, or longish, takes, which helps Sergio Trujillo’s choreography take over the full screen, as it should.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Urchin
(2025)
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Beatrice Loayza
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Urchin doesn’t break the mold, but it’s a confident, quietly affecting drama that strikes above the standard character study.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE
(2025)
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Manohla Dargis
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Few jokes and smiles are cracked in “A House of Dynamite,” a deadly serious what-if movie that follows American government and military personnel, among others, after an unidentified ballistic missile enters national airspace.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Mr. K
(2024)
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Calum Marsh
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Mr. K is a species of European art film I had assumed was long extinct: mannered, self-consciously quirky, with an offbeat sense of humor and a visual style that’s both fusty and surreal
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
(2025)
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Jeannette Catsoulis
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Wrenching and at times suffocating, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
(2024)
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Ben Kenigsberg
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Its subject is not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also how the news was mediated for Swedish viewers by a dominant broadcaster with a mandate for impartiality.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Roofman
(2025)
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Natalia Winkelman
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Here is a protagonist who clearly straddles the line between right and wrong; the trouble is that in “Roofman,” that line wobbles, leaving the movie somewhere between a fun-loving caper and a finger-wagging morality tale.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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After the Hunt
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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From start to finish, After the Hunt sets its audience adrift on a sea of unmoored signifiers, flailing to keep up with all the arm-wavey gestures at academia and bourgeois morality and ethics,providing nothing beneath to hold it all together.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Soul on Fire
(2025)
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Sheri Linden
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Bad things happen to good people in “Soul on Fire,” whose mix of dire calamity and spiritual opportunity manages to be affecting despite the dashes of unabashed schmaltz.
Posted Oct 09, 2025
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Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape from Now
(2025)
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Glenn Kenny
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The movie chronicles eventual triumphs that are invariably tinged with sadness. Through it all, Osbourne’s devotion to his family, his fans, his bandmates and, yes, his art is palpable.
Posted Oct 07, 2025
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The Alabama Solution
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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Bringing several types of filmmaking, amateur and professional, together for a movie like this makes that message all the more powerful.
Posted Oct 03, 2025
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Anemone
(2025)
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Manohla Dargis
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The problem is that as “Anemone” continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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Good Boy
(2025)
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Erik Piepenburg
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This is assured horror filmmaking. Heartbreaking too..
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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The Smashing Machine
(2025)
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Alissa Wilkinson
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Much more interesting is the friendship between Kerr and Coleman, which would have made a fascinating focal point for the film. All the elements are there.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue
(2025)
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Ben Kenigsberg
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It would be easy to dismiss the movie’s perspective as limited and jingoistic, but “The Road Between Us” never pretends to offer more than an in-the-moment chronicle of a violent clash.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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Steve
(2025)
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Natalia Winkelman
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In hewing closely to Steve, the whole affair takes on a grating note of self-sacrifice, of perseverance through suffering
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
(2025)
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Manohla Dargis
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Anchored by Orwell’s writing — and Damian Lewis’s calm, intimate voice-over — Peck charts the writer’s life in tandem with world-shattering events, focusing on when he was working on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published in 1949.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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The Librarians
(2025)
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Sheri Linden
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From its superb opening-credits sequence paying tribute to card catalogs of yore to its sharp selection of vintage clips and intimate reportage, “The Librarians” is as well-crafted as it is profoundly alarming.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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The Ice Tower
(2025)
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Jeannette Catsoulis
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There’s menace in this movie’s beautiful illusions, and Hadzihalilovic, who reveres silent cinema, presents some of her most trancelike scenes entirely without dialogue.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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Fairyland
(2023)
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Glenn Kenny
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This moving film’s sense of hometown pride is subtle but apt.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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Bone Lake
(2024)
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Calum Marsh
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Pigossi and Hasson are grounded and believable, while Nechita and especially the extra-smarmy Roe, are more exaggerated and engrossing, with an over-the-top magnetism that has a creepy edge.
Posted Oct 02, 2025
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