When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered three stars or more from The Washington Post’s critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Amy Nicholson, Jen Yamato, Jessica Kiang, Michael O’Sullivan, Mark Jenkins, Michael Brodeur and Chris Klimek — identified by their initials below).
Throughout the year, we’ll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films that we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2024 are eligible for inclusion.)
If it weren’t filmed entirely using animated Lego blocks, “Piece by Piece” would be a fairly routine music documentary, in this case a profile of the protean hip-hop producer-performer Pharrell Williams. But it is filmed entirely using animated Lego blocks — absurdly, fascinatingly — so if you don’t count yourself a fan of Williams or even know who he is, your eyeballs still get a psychoactive workout. (PG, 93 minutes) — Ty Burr
Where to watch: In theaters
Jason Reitman’s movie is here to remind us what “Saturday Night Live” was like in the 90 minutes before it first aired on Oct. 11, 1975: an imminent disaster that almost no one expected to last more than an episode or two. Structured as a ticktocker, following the events on, behind and around Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center as the show gets closer to airtime, it’s as entertaining as a film can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia. If you were around for the first iteration of the show and weren’t too high, you’ll have a good time. (R, 109 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: In theaters
Saoirse Ronan plays a woman who has lost her youth to the bottle and awakens to realize she’s on the other side of it. Based on the 2016 memoir by the Scottish author Amy Liptrot, “The Outrun” is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by director Nora Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology. (R, 118 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: In theaters
A road trip across the United States turns into a testament to self-acceptance and allyship in this tender, heartfelt documentary starring “Saturday Night Live” veterans Will Ferrell and Harper Steele. After Steele comes out as trans, the two friends embark on a cross-country quest in a wood-paneled Jeep to reacquaint her with the America she’s always loved and hopes will continue to love her back. (R, 114 minutes) — Jen Yamato
Where to watch: In theaters
An existential black comedy delivered with flair, a steady gaze and two exceptional performances. Sebastian Stan plays a meek New Yorker afflicted with facial tumors who undergoes experimental treatment and emerges cured and handsome, and Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, plays his sunny, charming worst nightmare. Aaron Schimberg’s Kafkaesque fable mucks about in themes of identity and exploitation, fate and foolishness, but there’s a mystery at the center of the movie he knows better than to resolve. (R, 112 minutes) — T.B
Where to watch: In theaters
The second feature written and directed by the nervy French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”) is most definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you like your moral fables served up with a liberating lack of restraint, here’s your movie — a cautionary tale, starring Demi Moore, that suggests an EC horror-comic version of a “Twilight Zone” retelling of “Sunset Boulevard.” “The Substance” starts as a drama, but by the final act, it’s become a gory gonzo comedy — the logical end point of Botox Nation. (R, 140 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: In theaters
“Ocean’s” trilogy headliners George Clooney and Brad Pitt play off-the-books problem-solvers, each one strictly a solo act, who must figure out why they’ve been summoned to the same penthouse suite to get rid of the same corpse. Writer-director Jon Watts’s breezy crime caper is a pleasing, if largely predictable, lupine lark. (R, 108 minutes) — Chris Klimek
Where to watch: Apple TV Plus
An energetic charmer by the director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) takes the brand that’s been a trinket from Japan, a Saturday morning kids’ show and a hyper-sexualized blockbuster franchise, and whip-whomp-whoops it into a cartoon about the human soul — er, make that a sentient robot’s spark plug. With Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Jon Hamm and Laurence Fishburne voicing the various gizmos. (PG, 103 minutes) — Amy Nicholson
Where to watch: In theaters, and expected to stream Oct. 22
One of the least cinematic movies of the year and also one of the best. Writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s drama unfolds in a cramped New York apartment in which three women (Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne) await the death of their father, who is lying unseen in a back bedroom, hooked up to machines and mostly unconscious. There’s humor here, gallows and otherwise. But there’s also an overflowing heartful of feeling, approached from three different angles by three different people who all happen to love the same parent. (R, 101 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Netflix
This tale of a milquetoast American family that mutely endures an awkward vacation at the country estate of their unhinged new acquaintances is the rowdiest horror flick in ages, a hilarious and venomous little nasty that cattle-prods the audience to scream everything its lead characters choke down. With James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy and Aisling Franciosi. (R, 110 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
This oddly dry and lovely documentary on New York City psychics and their clients is rigorously observational. There’s no spooky cinematography, no woo-woo technics, no pressure to believe in the afterlife. Instead, our souls are stirred less by the magic of ghosts than by the power of human connection. (Unrated, 110 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming
Ian McKellan plays a theater critic who hatches a plot to keep his job in 1930s London. At 85, McKellen doesn’t have many performances left in him, so any movie that lets the actor carve ham with such exuberant relish as “The Critic” is worth his time and ours. Anand Tucker’s British drama isn’t great art, but it is a good time, one that darkens steadily and satisfyingly as it goes. (R, 95 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming
It’s a tricky balancing act to find humor in stereotypes while seeing the human beings behind them, but “Between the Temples” walks the tightrope with wobbly yet confident grace. It matters that the movie’s very, very funny. It matters more that Carol Kane’s in it. She plays a retired music teacher who seeks a bat mitzvah; Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor at the local temple. (R, 111 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Teaming up with actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, writer-director JT Mollner (making his second movie after 2016’s “Outlaws and Angels”) has crafted a pseudo-surrealist serial killer tale that ensnares you in its opening moments and tightens its grip with every stylistic swing and subversive swerve. It’s unsettling and entrancing and altogether audacious. Amid a crowded summer of elevated horror, “Strange Darling” rises above. (R, 96 minutes) — Thomas Floyd
Where to watch: Apple, Prime Video
Unspooling with the slow burn of a thriller, this documentary by Ibrahim Nash’at reveals what became of the $7.12 billion worth of military hardware the United States left behind when it pulled out of Afghanistan. (Unrated, 91 minutes) — Michael O’Sullivan
Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming
India Donaldson’s short, sharp, subtle tale of a teenager on a camping trip with her father and his best friend. The title is, of course, eye-rolling teen-speak in response to an amusingly bad dad joke. But it also speaks to the process of a young woman honing her radar on the men in her orbit to learn what — and who — might be honest, safe and true. Who’s “the good one”? And how do you tell? (R, 89 minutes) — T.B
Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming
An American teen encounters peculiar horrors at a remote German resort in Tilman Singer’s kooky sci-fi genre hybrid that crackles with offbeat turns and creature scares as it unfolds against a backdrop of deceptively serene forests and cheeky Euro-kitsch. Hunter Schafer (“Euphoria”) stars in her first lead film role. (R, 102 minutes) — J.Y.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s compassionate documentary looks at a program that unites incarcerated men with their daughters for a dance party. It will leave you in a puddle of tears. (PG-13, 108 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: Netflix
A frenetic, funny, searingly angry film from Northern Ireland, wherein language — Irish Gaelic — serves as an active force of rebellion channeled through the beats and braggadocio of African American rap. The movie’s a rude, scruffy winner, a music bio/cash-in reconfigured as a deadly serious prank. It bears stressing that Kneecap is a genuine act, with rappers Naoise “Móglái Bap” Ó Cairealláin, Liam “Mo Chara” Óg Ó Hannaidh and JJ “DJ Próvái” Ó Dochartaigh all playing cheekily fictionalized versions of themselves. (R, 105 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Hormonal confusion, social insecurity, failed stabs at hipness and mortification on a daily basis are universal to the 13-year-old condition. The trick to coming-of-age movies is in the details — in letting the personal bring specificity to the universal while letting the universal illuminate the personal. It’s a balancing act, and writer/director/former teen disaster Sean Wang gets it mostly right in “Dìdi,” his fictionalized memory play of being a floundering Taiwanese American skate kid in 2008 Fremont, Calif. (R, 94 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
With the whole superhero racket on the ropes, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman seize the opportunity to prove the power of their own charisma. Nihilism is the dominant mood, but director Shawn Levy gets sentimental during the end credits with a stream of B-roll footage from past Marvel and X-Men flops. Once, these movies were mocked; now, they’ve taken on the warm sheen of nostalgia — this generation’s “American Graffiti,” a salute to feeling young and immortal that ends with the awareness that you either flame out too soon or limp on longer than you expected. (R, 127 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Martin Scorsese narrates this love letter to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, a.k.a. the Archers, whose films were among the most magical feats of celluloid ever to come out of the British Isles. Directed by David Hinton, the documentary allows Scorsese to demonstrate via film clips the lessons he applied from “The Red Shoes” to his own “Raging Bull” (1980) — “it’s dance, and you stay in the ring” — and from the Archers’ wartime epic “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (1943) to Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence” (1993). “Made in England” is more than a great filmmaker’s genuflection. It’s a way to connect the dots. (Unrated, 131 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Prime Video
The surprise of the summer is that “Twisters” checks almost every item on our blockbuster punch list, which is a lot more than a sequel that no one asked for deserves. Die-hard fans of the original 1996 “Twister” may regret that there are no poorly digitized flying cows this time around, but they may be too busy dodging airborne trucks, RVs, trolley cars and a movie screen showing the original 1931 “Frankenstein” to notice. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, the film stars Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. (PG-13, 122 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Charlie Plummer plays a rawboned, 21-year-old day laborer living in the Rio Grande Valley who takes a job at a remote ranch where he’s introduced to a community of gender-fluid rodeo riders. First-time feature film director Luke Gilford’s gentle coming-of-age story is at its openhearted, poetically inclined best when observing an alternate vision of the American West that’s no less possible for being radical (and no less radical for being possible). (R, 96 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Nerve-jangling and devilishly bleak, “Longlegs” is easily the front-runner for scariest movie of 2024. Maika Monroe stars as rookie FBI agent Lee Harker, whose uncanny intuition lands her on an assignment tracking an elusive serial killer dubbed Longlegs. With echoes of “Se7en,” “Zodiac” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” director Osgood “Oz” Perkins conjures atmospheric dread and wields Nicolas Cage’s most unhinged role to date like a weapon. When he finally unleashes him to skin-crawling effect, we’re face to face with one of the best new horror villains in years. (R, 101 minutes) — J.Y.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
The French provocateur Catherine Breillat gets her kicks with unnerving tales of sexual coercion, but this story of a woman’s affair with her underage stepson may be her most excruciating to date. To be clear: Breillat isn’t justifying the affair or, on a larger scale, telling a story with any universal resonance. She’s exploring how this particular sinner did the unforgivable — and then committed even more sins trying to cover it up. With Léa Drucker and Samuel Kircher. (Unrated, 104 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Netflix
Jake Paltrow’s soul-searching triptych of stories about the execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 doesn’t preach anything as simple as pacifist nonviolence; rather, it aims only to note that the scales of justice cannot balance one man’s sins against millions of people’s need for an appropriate (and legal) punishment. Few of the Israeli characters in the film are able to come to a moral and ethical agreement, and it’s likely the audiences exiting the theater afterward won’t either. (Unrated, 105 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
This startlingly good prequel finds the aliens hunting a terminal cancer patient with no delusions that she can rescue the planet. Bypassing all the usual heroic theatrics, she sets out to tiptoe up to Harlem for her favorite pizza. This quixotic trek is more about autonomy than gastronomy — a satisfying way to squish a global catastrophe into a human-size story. With Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn. (PG-13, 99 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
A phenomenal filmmaking debut by the MacArthur genius grant-winning playwright Annie Baker. Set in a bohemian enclave of Massachusetts during the summer of 1991, it’s a whisper of a movie about a people-pleasing single mother named Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and her guarded 11-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), who offers tough love as her mother shifts personalities to suit lovers and friends. Ziegler shoulders us through the story without ever getting too cute, while Nicholson’s performance could finally elevate her from character actress to star. (PG-13, 113 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
The Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”) clears the peanut gallery of fair-weather fans with this confident, three-hour trilogy of variations on themes of obsession, control and humiliation. His stock company includes Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and — the movie’s secret weapon — Jesse Plemons, and while the movie qualifies as maximum audience punishment, those with strong stomachs and a stronger sense of black comic irony may appreciate it. (R, 164 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
June Squibb is a delight as Thelma Post, an elderly widow who hands over $10,000 to phone scammers pretending to be her beloved grandson in distress. Once the scam is exposed, she sets out to find the criminals, along the way subverting movie clichés about little old ladies by making the character fiercely individualistic and no one’s victim. Richard Roundtree co-stars, in his final performance before his death. Writer-director Josh Margolin based the title character on his own grandmother, but she’s so fabulous, you kind of want her to be your grandmother, too. (PG-13, 97 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the New Jersey record store he worked at as a teen, weaving together a brilliant, discursive documentary that incorporates themes of holding on to the past and letting go. (Unrated, 96 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
An immersion in the life and times of the fictional Vandals, a Chicago motorcycle gang that evolves over the course of the 1960s from a working-class racing club to a criminal outfit involved in drug-running, extortion and murder. Phenomenal performances include Tom Hardy as the club’s president and alpha dog, Austin Butler as a silent hog-riding heartthrob, and Jodie Comer as the neighborhood girl who gets swept off her feet. (R, 116 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Will Smith seems wary of having too much fun in his apology blockbuster, but Martin Lawrence flings himself into the film’s wackiest gags and his high spirits defibrillate the franchise. Turns out the Bad Boys films needed less swagger and more dorky, goofy joy. This fourth installment isn’t reinventing the wheel — it’s just mounting shinier rims. (R, 115 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
An anxious cheerleading drama by first-time director D.W. Waterson that doesn’t waste a breath before proving that rah-rah is a real sport. Starring rising talents who do their own backflips, this tense, literally hair-pulling film is as grim and obsessive as the girls. Meanwhile, their coach (Evan Rachel Wood) glowers. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
How did a young girl in the dystopian future grow up to become Imperator Furiosa, the fierce warrior who took on the entire Wasteland in 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road”? In this fifth installment of the franchise, director George Miller builds an epic prequel with Anya Taylor-Joy at the wheel, but also shifts into a different gear to weave an unexpectedly elegiac origin tale of survival and revenge. Chris Hemsworth plays Dementus, the vainglorious dictator of a roving biker legion. (R, 148 minutes) — J.Y.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
A blast of pure pleasure and one of the year’s best films, with devilish comic energy and a star-making turn at its center. That star is Glen Powell, who displays wit, sex appeal and crack comic timing in his loosely factual portrayal of a nerdy college professor who moonlights as a technical adviser for police sting operations. When he’s drafted to step in for the sketchy undercover cop who usually plays the fake killer-for-hire, the mild-mannered academic reveals he has a gift for posing as an ice-cold assassin. (R, 115 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Netflix
A sticky-sweet comedy about two best friends bound by an almost hive-inducing intimacy. The directorial debut of actor Pamela Adlon (“Better Things,” “Californication”), this gross-out comedy about childhood friends turned overwhelmed moms hits you with the same surge of mixed emotions as a hug from a grubby toddler. Starring Ilana Glazer, Michelle Buteau and Hasan Minhaj. (R, 104 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Japan’s Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”) has emerged as one of the world’s finest working directors, but his movies can be frustratingly hard to encapsulate. “Evil Does Not Exist” may be his most haunting film yet. It takes place in a rural village north of Tokyo, and in its deceptively unfocused fashion, it frets about the encroachment of city life. An undercurrent of foreboding edges toward outright unease before exploding in an ending that presents a challenge to anyone who prefers stories wrapped up neatly. (Unrated, 106 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
A sturdy new entry in the revived Planet of the Apes franchise. But, like its three predecessors, it’s a fascinating case of content following form wherein CGI chimps, gorillas and orangutans are more breathtakingly hyper-real than ever and humans have become increasingly two-dimensional. Taking place 300 years after the events of the last three “Apes,” the new film centers on Noa (Owen Teague), a young simian that most audiences will be willing to follow wherever he and his primate friends want to take us. That’s good, because “Kingdom” has been announced as the first chapter in a new trilogy. (PG-13, 145 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
The hazy neon vibes are immaculate and the suburban horrors are existential in this latest from writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, whose 2022 breakout feature “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” skyrocketed the rising indie auteur into the queer horror canon. It’s election night 1996 when an introverted seventh-grader bonds with an older girl over a tantalizing supernatural YA series that airs after bedtime. What results is a cautionary tale against the dangers of dissociative escape and a gently loving rejoinder reaching through its own screen to those who need it. Schoenbrun blurs the lines between reality and fantasy with an intoxicating, Lynchian flair. (PG-13, 100 minutes) — J.Y.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Helmed by stuntman-turned-director David Leitch, this action-comedy-romance-mystery is heavy on the flipping cars, high-speed chase scenes and plummets from tall buildings. Not surprisingly, plot is the least important thing here. Surprisingly, the quieter romantic comedy scenes are the best. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt take a clever meta-blockbuster about the behind-the-scenes making of a blockbuster and give it warmth, intimacy, idiosyncrasy and laughs. (PG-13, 126 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
From Oscar-winning filmmakers Andrea Nix Fine and Sean Fine (“Inocente”) comes a chilling documentary that draws upon a trove of news and personal footage to immerse viewers in the sounds, sights, sensations and shock of Jan. 6, 2021. A discreetly ominous score by H. Scott Salinas rumbles beneath the sounds of chaos that culminate in the breaching of the Capitol by a mob estimated at 10,000 and the invasion of its corridors by 1,200 rioters. Civics lessons rarely come this disturbing or this convincing. (Unrated, 111 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
The third installment in Ken Loach’s unofficial trilogy of films set in austerity-era Northeastern England — said to be the final movie from the 87-year-old social realist filmmaker — is a fittingly poignant last act: clear-eyed, compassionate, fueled by righteous anger yet still somewhat hopeful. (Unrated, 113 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Writer-director Alex Garland doesn’t investigate how this war started or how long it’s been going on or whether it’s worth fighting. His lean, cruel film is about the ethics of photographing violence, and those blinders make it charge forward with gusto. The film feels poetically, deeply true, even when it’s suggesting that humans are more apt to tear one another apart for petty grievances than over a sincere defense of some kind of principles. Starring Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. (R, 109 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
A slick, sexy, hugely entertaining, tennis-themed romantic triangle that offers three young performers at the top of their games under the guidance of Luca Guadagnino, a director who gives them room to swing in all senses of the word. The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor play rising tennis stars; Zendaya is their coach, holding down the center with her furiously knitted brow. (R, 131 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
An art-house audience pleaser, based on an actual historical incident, that slaps a veneer of tea-cozy classiness over cartoonish characters and changing social values. In a dingy English seaside town in 1920, someone has been sending anonymous poison-pen letters to church lady Edith (Olivia Colman) — written in language so obscene that it’s practically an art form — and suspicion quickly falls on the foul-mouthed Rose (Jessie Buckley), a single mother freshly arrived from Ireland. The movie is good fun and surprisingly obvious — a slapstick comedy of manners that only hints at darker human urges. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Either the silliest movie you’ll see in 2024 or one of the most unexpectedly affecting, but, like the meme says, why not both? A year in the life of a family of Bigfoots — Bigfeet? — it functions simultaneously as slow-motion slapstick, a very hairy nature documentary and a melancholy portrait of creatures not unlike us as they confront their own disappearance from the Earth. With no narration and no dialogue beside grunts, hoots and warbles, the movie effectively puts an audience on the same (big) footing as the characters. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Nathan Zellner. (R, 89 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video
Two-time Oscar winner Ennio Morricone, who died in 202o at the age of 91, was a composer and arranger of music that helped define what it sounds like to go to the movies. Now, director Giuseppe Tornatore — who worked with Morricone for nearly all his films, including 1988’s “Cinema Paradiso” — turns an overdue spotlight on the composer behind the legendary scores of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Thing” and more than 500 others. At nearly three hours, “Ennio” is a long haul, exhaustive without ever becoming exhausting. Though it could definitely survive edits, its length feels like the product of genuine ardor and care. (Unrated, 156 minutes) — Michael Brodeur
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube
Hollywood’s superhero blockbuster business has grown creatively stale, but Vera Drew’s irreverent renegade opus is just the antidote the genre desperately needs. Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale in which Drew stars as Joker, a closeted trans woman and aspiring comedian who leaves her Smallville hometown for a dystopian Gotham City. Her film is the cinematic coup of the year, finally delivering the boundary-obliterating antiheroine Hollywood deserves. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — J.Y.
Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming
The Iranian French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi has the eyes of a silent film heroine and the face of a Modigliani. In repose, she can convey a sense of sorrow that feels both elegant and timeless, but in “Shayda,” that stillness is fraught with specific threat: the anguish of a woman fleeing an abusive husband. Made with a striking sensitivity to mood and moment, the film marks a strong debut for Iranian Australian writer-director Noora Niasari, who mines her own experience and that of her mother for a gripping yet tender suspense drama. (PG-13, 117 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Antiquity and the modern day sit side by side in the films of Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, permeating each other with the timelessness of a folk tale passed around a campfire. The writer-director’s latest concerns a raffish band of working-class tombaroli — grave robbers — who dig up ancient Etruscan artifacts and sell them on the black market, but the movie’s also a meditation on the tension between romanticizing the past and profiting from it. Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer. (Unrated, 132 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Rose Glass’s gorgeously pulpy film is a grisly delirium of female rage and romance in which queerness is neither a liability nor a simple fact of life that deserves respect: It’s a goddamn superpower. Kristen Stewart, in a skeevy mullet and a sleeveless tee, plays a gym manager who falls in crazy, scuzzy love with a bodybuilding drifter (Katy O’Brian). There are pyrotechnics and sucked toes and a jaw beaten clean off a skull. In terms of graphic gore, the head-stomping scene in “American History X” and the corpse-splitting moment in “Bone Tomahawk” need to scooch over on the podium. (R, 104 minutes) — Jessica Kiang
Where to watch: Apple, Google Play, Prime Video, Fandango
Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (“Belle Époque”) and artist/co-director Javier Mariscal celebrate the spirit of Brazilian bossa nova and the ghosts of artists who live on only in recordings and archival interviews. But this animated documentary’s central ghost remains touchingly and frustratingly unknowable: Francisco Tenório Júnior, a gifted pianist, considered by his peers as one of the best of their generation, who disappeared in 1976 while on tour in Argentina. “They Shot the Piano Player” doesn’t unravel a mystery so much as confirm a tragedy. (PG-13, 103 minutes) — T.B.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Film as family therapy and family therapy as film. This gripping and format-stretching documentary by writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania brings actors into the household of a Tunisian mother named Olfa and her two youngest daughters, both teenagers. The three women play themselves alongside two professional actors filling in for the girls’ two missing siblings — what happened to them will unfurl, one twist at a time. (Unrated, 110 minutes) — A.N.
Where to watch: Netflix
The premise is perfectly simple: Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) lives in Tokyo, where he cleans bathrooms, approaching his job with the same care and detail he gives to the tree seedlings he’s nurturing in his modest, sparsely furnished apartment. The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor (the film bears more than a whiff of Jim Jarmusch at his most wryly absurdist). But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams behind the drudgery reveal themselves. (PG, 123 minutes) — Ann Hornaday
Where to watch: Prime Video
Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”), this documentary take on comic Steve Martin is broken into two feature-length installments, titled “Then” (94 minutes) and “Now” (97 minutes). The first and lesser half is pretty standard stuff, covering in enjoyable but repetitive detail the period of Martin’s gradual stand-up ascendancy to selling out stadiums. The much more engaging “Now” dips in and out of Martin’s movie career, includes interviews (Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Lorne Michaels) and delivers candid moments with Martin’s bestie, Martin Short. (TV-MA, 191 minutes in two parts) — J.K.
Where to watch: Apple TV Plus
Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shattering, Oscar-winning portrait of a family living next door to Auschwitz is really two movies in one: the film that audiences see on-screen — a bucolic domestic drama, filled with children, gardens and daily rituals — and the movie we conjure in our minds, with images of emaciated bodies, shaved heads and screams barely audible above the clinking teacups and cooing babies. Adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, the film is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless. (PG-13, 106 minutes) — A.H.
Where to watch: Max
Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed. (PG-13, 135 minutes) — A.H.
Where to watch: Prime Video
A radiant Juliette Binoche plays Eugénie, a gifted cook who for the past 20 years has been running the kitchen of a 19th-century epicurean named Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). No one breaks a sweat in “The Taste of Things” — they glow. No one swears or yells “Corner!” or “Yes, chef!” — they whisper, or simply deliver an approving glance of gustatory satisfaction. This is the anti-“Bear,” a sensuous fantasia of gastronomical pleasure less redolent of the Beef than “Babette’s Feast.” (PG-13, 134 minutes) — A.H.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Born two months before the Nazis surrendered, celebrated German artist Anselm Kiefer grew up amid his homeland’s rubble. Destruction still compels and even delights him, as Wim Wenders demonstrates in his epic 3D documentary. The colossal spaces Kiefer inhabits and transforms are ideal for Wenders’s approach, which conveys the physicality of the artist’s work and places the viewer virtually within the maelstrom of creation. It’s a fascinating, if somewhat unnerving, place to be. (Unrated, 93 minutes) — Mark Jenkins
Where to watch: On demand
The title of this promising writing-directing debut from Molly Manning Walker is something of a misdirect. Her startlingly intimate portrait of teenage girls in search of the endless party while on summer holiday in Greece is more accurately described as a tutorial in how not to have sex, i.e., when you’re young, inebriated, feeling pressured or vulnerable to manipulation. In its frankness and often frightening candor, it’s of a piece with coming-of-age dramas like “Thirteen” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” with a dash of “Spring Breakers.” (Unrated, 90 minutes) — A.H.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated, migrant-themed drama fashions a hero’s journey that feels utterly of the moment: inspired by the true stories of African immigrants, but told in a way that features episodes of both harrowing verisimilitude and hallucinatory magic realism. It’s a film that is gorgeous at times yet also tough to watch. (Unrated, 121 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: On demand
Despite the title of Germany’s Oscar submission, the primary setting is a sixth-grade classroom, where things have gone missing lately. As school officials attempt to get to the bottom of the thefts, that classroom becomes a mirror of the outside world, with all its diversity, divisions and discontents. The film is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias. Its larger message is also one worth hearing, if not exactly news: In an age of cancel culture, the classroom is a battlefield. (PG-13, 98 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: On demand
As subdued in tone and emotion as the neutral beige and brown ensembles favored by its mousy, office-worker protagonist (Daisy Ridley), this film offers an unconventional love story: one less about the thrill of romance than about the terror — and ultimate release — of connection. Director Rachel Lambert delivers its story with a reserve that is made up for by a genuinely affecting tenderness for its flawed yet searching characters. It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell. (PG-13, 91 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: Prime Video
This sweet, off-kilter comedy offers a sly satire of today’s polarized world. Written and directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, and focusing on Bhutan’s preparations for the democratic elections first held in 2008, it shares the same wry spirit and gentle tension between tradition and modernity that characterized the Bhutanese-born, American-trained filmmaker’s heartwarming Oscar-nominated 2019 film, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” but with some added bite. (PG-13, 112 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: Prime Video
This rebooted hybrid of the hit 2004 movie “Mean Girls” and the Broadway stage musical it spawned wisely doesn’t try to simply adapt for the screen something that worked onstage and wouldn’t translate to film. Yes, it’s got songs (by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin), but they feel abridged and ever so slightly diminished, delivered more in the context of the original narrative of viral shaming, which has been tweaked for our TikTok times. The remake is sharp, well-acted and funny, and there are a few surprises for “Mean Girls” cultists. (PG-13, 105 minutes) — M.O.
Where to watch: Paramount Plus
