Our Critics’ Picks for Movies to See ASAP

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Tuesday, January 3, 2017 at 9:50 a.m.

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Toni Erdmann: Delving into microeconomics and macroaggressions, Toni Erdmann, the dynamite, superbly acted third feature by writer-director Maren Ade, is social studies at its finest. This quicksilver, emotionally astute comedy operates in many different registers and moods: Whoopee cushions and gag teeth are part of the fun, but so too is a piquant dissection of father-daughter bonds and of the sinister banality of corporate consultancy. In the filmmaker’s no-nonsense humanism, mortification motors the plot so that a modicum of dignity can be restored. —Melissa Anderson

For more, read our review of Toni Erdmann. 1/9

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Silence: Silence takes place in 17th-century Japan, when Christians were sailing from Europe to spread the good word — not that their hosts wanted to hear it. It centers on two such priests, fathers Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver) of Portugal, who receive the demoralizing news that their mentor, one Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), has finally relented after years of violent persecution in the land of the rising sun and publicly renounced his faith. And so they set off on a slow boat to the other side of the world, bringing with them only what they can carry on their back and in their hearts. —Michael Nordine

For more, read our review of Silence. 2/9

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox Hidden Figures: Accepting the Welt Literature Prize in Berlin on Nov. 10 of this year, novelist Zadie Smith said, “Time travel is a discretionary art: a pleasure trip for some and a horror story for others.” She was speaking, of course, of the conviction among so many white people that there's a better world ahead if we can just return to the past. She noted, “For a black woman the expanse of livable history is so much shorter” than it is for the Make America Great Again crowd. “What would I have been and what would I have done — or more to the point, what would have been done to me — in 1360, in 1760, in 1860, in 1960?” That thought echoes in a joyous declaration from Janelle Monáe just six minutes into the candied history pageant Hidden Figures. The film's leads, a trio of African-American mathematicians employed at NASA to perform advanced calculations in the early days of the space program, have just turned around a shakedown traffic stop from a cracker cop. —Alan Scherstuhl

For more, read our review of Hidden Figures. 3/9

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics Julieta: Both a film noir and a candy-colored confection, Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta is one of the most absorbing films he’s made in years. It’s also, perhaps, one of the saddest: Its bright hues and vivid textures offset a deep, unshakable melancholy. Based on a trio of Alice Munro short stories, Julieta follows the title character (played in middle age by Emma Suárez) as she discovers that her long-lost daughter, Antía, now an adult, may have resurfaced. Delving back into her own painful past in order to understand how things went wrong between her and her child, Julieta relates to us how, as a young woman (now played by Adriana Ugarte), she met Antía’s fisherman father, Xoan (Daniel Grao), and wound up in an odd marriage born of grief, betrayal, passion and resentment. —Bilge Ebiri

For more, read our review of Julieta. 4/9

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Fences: Fences puts black lives in the center of their own stories. But for as much as we theater nerds know and love the play, the fact remains that most African-Americans have not felt invited to the theater to see it. This screen adaptation, a wide release starring and directed by Denzel Washington, one of this country's last true movie stars, is vital because it has the potential to reach marginalized communities. But it also stands as an aching, lyrical, performance-driven masterpiece in its own right, a film so intense and engrossing that movie theaters really should screen it with an intermission. —April Wolfe

For more, read our review of Fences. 5/9

Courtesy of the Orchard Neruda: “Art is a lie that tells a truth,” Pablo Picasso once said. The aphorism animates Pablo Larraín’s canny and vigorous Neruda, a sidelong biopic of the preeminent Chilean poet and politician, featuring a brilliant Luis Gnecco in the title role, that’s equal parts fact and fiction. (Larraín’s film also reanimates the Cubist titan, here featured in a small but crucial role as one of Neruda’s most passionate defenders.) As in Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012), his trilogy about the trauma of the Pinochet regime, Larraín, born in Santiago, Chile, in 1976, takes an oblique approach to his subject, one of his country’s most exalted heroes — a strategy that renders the past always labile and dynamic, never static and turgid. —Melissa Anderson

For more, read our review of Neruda. 6/9

Courtesy of Sundance Selects I, Daniel Blake: Sure, we've all become desensitized to screen violence, but that doesn't mean we can't be shocked. Ken Loach's quietly furious I, Daniel Blake will likely jolt you with its depiction of a different kind of killing: the paperwork, on-hold music and long-wait rigmarole a widowed English woodworker endures while trying to secure the benefits he’s due after a heart attack. The setting is Newcastle, and the wheels that grind him are the National Health's, but the awed frustration translates. Loach is taking aim at all bureaucracies whose impersonal character is for the bureaucrats more feature than bug. It's not the overworked "health care professional" sitting across from Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) who is denying the claim he's entitled to — it's the point-system questionnaire that she hands him whose hands truly are dirty. —Alan Scherstuhl

For more, read our review of I, Daniel Blake. 7/9

Courtesy of Rialto Pictures The Lion in Winter: “Henry was 18 when we met, and I was queen of France. He came down from the north to Paris with a mind like Aristotle and a form like mortal sin. We shattered the Commandments on the spot.” So declares Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn) about her estranged husband, England’s King Henry II (Peter O’Toole), toward whom she still feels passion despite the fact that he’s kept her locked away in France for 10 long years. As 1968's The Lion in Winter — which is enjoying a 4K digital restoration and rerelease — opens, it is 1183, and Henry summons Eleanor to “Christmas court,” where few gifts will be exchanged but many nefarious plots will be hatched, all with the goal of confirming an heir to Henry’s throne. (The eldest son has died.) —Chuck Wilson

For more, read our review of The Lion in Winter. 8/9

Autlook Films Sales Ghostland: The Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa is home to the hunter-gatherer tribes whom anthropologists long ago dubbed "bushmen." (The Gods Must Be Crazy starred Kalahari bushmen, whose speech features click and pop sounds.) The documentary Ghostland visits one group, the Ju/'Hoansi of Namibia, who these days receive tourists as a sort of "living museum" to supplement the tribe's livelihood in the tough times since the government outlawed killing game 25 years ago. —Daphne Howland

For more, read our review of Ghostland. 9/9

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 December 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, or they may go into wider release in January.

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