Our Critics’ Picks for Movies to See ASAP

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Thursday, December 1, 2016 at 8 a.m.

Courtesy of Focus Features Loving: With films like Take Shelter, Mud and even this spring's somewhat uneven Midnight Special, Jeff Nichols has steadily built a filmography of terse beauty. With Loving, he tackles the kind of boldface subject matter that Oscar season feeds on: It’s a historical drama about the 1967 Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage. Which makes it perhaps even more impressive that Nichols stays true to his sensibility, avoiding the melodrama or the back-patting triumphalism you expect from such movies. Loving downplays the historical significance of its subject in favor of a quiet humanity. —Bilge Ebiri

For more, read our review of Loving. 1/15

Courtesy of Sundance Institute Manchester by the Sea: A master at creating the exceptional sad-sack prodigal son, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan asked this question in 2000’s sibling drama You Can Count on Me: What if the depressed guy doesn’t actually know he’s depressed? In that film, he inventively circumnavigates the genre to find an original entry point by building reality-based characters, and by showing the story equally through the eyes of the woman who had to deal with the returned man. Now, in Manchester by the Sea, he again paints the portrait of an emotionally stunted guy who hasn’t processed a painful death. Only now Lonergan’s asking: What if no one in this story even knows what depression is? The result is a poignant, surprisingly hilarious depiction of death, grieving and small-town life. —April Wolfe

For more, read our review of Manchester by the Sea. 2/15

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Arrival: Denis Villeneuve has a great eye — his images are at once elegant and forbidding — and he has honed the ability to immerse you in unreal, deeply unsettling worlds. He's at his best with mood pieces, when he's not trying to navigate through conventional story beats and resolutions. Which might be why Arrival, about the mysterious appearance of 12 floating extraterrestrial vessels in different corners of the world, is the best film the director has made so far: Its atmosphere is its story. —Bilge Ebiri

For more, read our review of Arrival. 3/15

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Allied: As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead. And maybe he sort of is — maybe he has to be. Pitt’s Max Vatan is a pinched, terse figure in the first act of Robert Zemeckis’ World War II thriller. —Bilge Ebiri

For more, read our review of Allied. 4/15

Courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures Moana: Maybe it was the agitated, election-induced state of mind I was in when I saw it, but Disney’s Moana feels like a movie about how easy it can be to give up, and how important it is not to. It’s funny, joyful and sweet, and yet running beneath everything is a sad counter-narrative about how the world always throws obstacles in your way, and how you could just turn your back and retreat. Perseverance in the face of defeat is a theme that runs throughout most children’s films, and popular cinema in general; writing gurus have codified the “all is lost” moment that comes in the third act of so many films, just before the hero's triumph, into modern screenplay structure. And yet I’ve never seen it worked so thoroughly in a Disney animated movie as it is here. But for all that, this also plays like the lightest Disney animated film in quite some time. —Bilge Ebiri

For more, read our review of Moana. 5/15

Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories Always Shine: Nice girls play by the rules. They turn their shoulders inward and nibble on the ends of their slim fingers, nervous about all those difficult thoughts in their heads. And their hair is always perfect and feathery like a baby bird on a collector's plate. If this description sounds angry, it is. That inflammatory attitude hangs heavy in the air of Sophia Takal's Always Shine, a psychological thriller about the implosion of two women — the naughty one and the nice one — each of whom wishes desperately that she could be the other. —April Wolfe

For more, read our review of Always Shine. 6/15

Courtesy of Oscilloscope Pictures The Love Witch: Anna Biller's ripe, vibrant The Love Witch is an act of reclamation — and love. In this out-of-time extravaganza of feminist-satanist serial-killer erotica, the writer-director-producer — plus editor and set and costume designer — has crafted the best kind of homage or parody, the kind that honors every thrill and quirk of the original while improving on it. Catch half a scene of The Love Witch and you might think it a glistening new print of some gem of ’70s parapsychological softcore. All those cultists, nude and chanting while their leader brandishes a knife; all those tight, tense zooms onto the eyes of man-killer Elaine (Samantha Robinson). —Alan Scherstuhl

For more, read our review of The Love Witch. 7/15

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Elle: Elle, adapted by David Birke from Philippe Djian’s novel Oh..., is, in a way, Paul Verhoeven's own hot take on his career. It stars Isabelle Huppert as a rape survivor named Michèle, a former literary editor who now develops fetid video games about goblins and trolls, concoctions conjoined from Lovecraft, Tolkien and the Marquis de Sade. —Greg Cwik

For more, read our review of Elle. 8/15

Courtesy of Medoc/Shanghai Eternity Iron Moon: In the deeply moving documentary Iron Moon, filmmakers Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue explore the language and lives of five of China's so-called "worker-poets," including Xu Lizhi, who jumped to his death at age 23 from the factory where they make iPhones. The other artists profiled do equally numbing work in coal mines and assembly lines, and like Xu — and all true poets — have no choice but to set pen to paper. "I am the dusty factory wall, and the ivy that climbs it," writes Dawn Wu, 33, who spends her days sewing dresses in an airless factory; in another poem, she imagines one of the sundresses she's made being worn by a happy young Westerner: "Unknown girl. I love you." —Chuck Wilson

For more, read our review of Iron Moon. 9/15

Courtesy of A24 Films The Monster: The Monster is a stunningly simple but fierce horror film that departs from the genre's fast-paced contemporary tendencies (including director Bryan Bertino's own The Strangers) in favor of the seeping dread of old-school horror. It's a full-fledged monster movie, but Bertino delays the reveal until halfway through the film, writing the first half like a thrilling play in a confined space; his two leads are tit for tat, arguing and trading cutting remarks until they realize how high the stakes are. —April Wolfe

For more, read our review of The Monster. 10/15

Courtesy of Cohen Media Group Daughters of the Dust: It took Julie Dash more than a decade to make her oneiric and lush mythopoetic masterwork, Daughters of the Dust, which, after premiering at Sundance in 1991, became the first feature directed by an African-American woman to receive a wide theatrical release. The movie returns in a 2K restoration, the colors and textures of this immensely sensuous project (originally shot on 35mm by Arthur Jafa) more vibrant than ever. —Melissa Anderson

For more, read our review of Daughters of the Dust. 11/15

Courtesy of Huayi Brothers I Am Not Madame Bovary: According to Forbes, Fan Bingbing last year made $17 million — more than any actress on the planet not named Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston. The Chinese megastar likely is most familiar to American audiences for a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but she's front and center in I Am Not Madame Bovary — a movie too offbeat to brighten her star much over here, but one worthy of attention for the same reason. —Michael Nordine

For more, read our review of I Am Not Madame Bovary. 12/15

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics The Red Turtle: This dialogue-free French/Japanese animated fable — a low-key adventure about an unnamed shipwrecked beardo who falls in love with nature — might serve as a potent antidote for post-election depression. The legion of animators, led by Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli production company, inspires awe for the great outdoors with hand-drawn charcoal illustrations of lush bamboo forests and crystalline shorelines. Everything on the island, from the rustling of leaves to the buzzing of cicadas, encourages Beardo — and us — to slow down to the pace of stargazing and crab chasing. —Simon Abrams

For more, read our review of The Red Turtle. 13/15

Courtesy of IFC Midnight Evolution: Watching Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s mesmerizing sci-fi arthouse stunner, Evolution, I thought of the paintings of surrealist René Magritte — a few in particular: The Collective Invention (1934) and The Human Condition diptych (1933, 1935). The former features a creature — the bottom limbs of a woman and the body of a fish — lying peacefully on a white sandy beach. The latter depict windows through which calm blue skies and waters seem within reach — until you look closer and see that they might only be too-perfect paintings (within paintings) of those pretty things. It’s OK if you don’t know anything about art. Just know that there’s something off, something a little scary and claustrophobic, despite the serene and airy surfaces. Evolution, a story about an island of little boys being raised by a colony of pallid mothers, is just as gorgeously unnerving. —April Wolfe

For more, read our review of Evolution. 14/15

Courtesy of Mubi Baden Baden: This vigorously inventive French import shows up America's young-folks-kinda-maybe-starting-to-get-it-together comedies as the pre-fab product they are. Writer-director Rachel Lang, in her feature debut, strips away all formula and falseness from this story of a vibrantly aimless young French woman's bumbling 20s, never promising us that a love connection or professional breakthrough is going to give her life a shape that society might feel good about. —Alan Scherstuhl

For more, read our review of Baden Baden. 15/15

Our Critics’ Picks for Movies to See ASAP

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for the best films of November 2016. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen.

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