When searching for the latest and greatest cinematic offerings, the shifting distribution landscape makes one thing abundantly clear: No matter how badly we’d like for the big screen to be the place for the best movies, it’s simply not the case. Sure, the theatrical experience claims plenty of worthy films, but with on-demand video rental and the overwhelming number of streaming options—two areas where indie and arthouse cinema have been thriving as theaters shove them aside for more and more Marvel movies—alternative viewing methods bear consideration if you’re after a comprehensive list of the best new fare.
This list is composed of the best new movies, updated every week, regardless of how they’re available. Some may have you weighing whether it’s worth it to brave the theater. Some, thankfully, are cheaply and easily available to check out from your living room couch or your bedroom laptop. Regardless of how you watch them, they deserve to be watched—from tiny international dramas to blockbuster action films to auteurist awards favorites.
Check out the 10 best new movies movies right now:
Release Date: January 19, 2024
Director: Ava DuVernay
Stars: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Niecy Nash-Betts, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 141 minutes
In Origin, writer/director Ava DuVernay once again tackles complex themes about social injustice, posing the question: How do we confront oppression? To find the answer, DuVernay puts the spotlight on nonfiction author Isabel Wilkerson, the influential subject of a bold, galvanizing account of the interconnected roots of hate. Origin chronicles the research and life experiences of the Pulitzer-winning Wilkerson that inspired her bestselling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The film follows Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as a series of political and personal events lead her on expeditions to Germany and India to explore the concept of caste—a stratification system that divides society into a series of identity-based hierarchies. The murder of Trayvon Martin sets Wilkerson’s research in motion, stirring her investigation of how systemic racism in America relates to oppressive systems throughout the world. Like its subject, Origin adopts a journalistic lens, spending less time constructing Wilkerson’s own narrative and instead letting her historical inspirations speak for themselves. The film offers informative examples of caste systems throughout history and the individuals who defied them: A couple targeted by the Nuremberg Race Laws in Nazi Germany, Black anthropologists Elizabeth and Allison Davis, who co-wrote the revolutionary Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class in 1941 and B. R. Ambedkar, an Indian man born into the Dalit caste—the lowest caste of India—who, despite the adversity that faced him, drafted the Indian Constitution. DuVernay shows creative versatility in these interwoven sequences, building stakes and intriguing characters within these well-designed, thoroughly fleshed-out vignettes. With impressive costuming and scenic details, these fleeting and sentimental stories colorfully illustrate Wilkerson’s narration of the past. Among the many timelines and tragedies the film helms, Origin’s time spent exploring Wilkerson’s family and personal life secures an emotional anchor, divulging the taxing process of reviewing history, especially when one shares a connection with it. Wilkerson’s life, which unfolds tragically throughout the film, echoes her desire to recite history and reminds us that the events of the past live within us. DuVernay’s writing and Ellis-Taylor’s subtle yet full-bodied performance culminate in a warm, powerful protagonist tethered to her work as she reckons with the grief of history and her own losses. DuVernay has already documented history with projects like Selma and 13th, but Origin is her most daring feat yet. This tribute to Wilkerson instills the importance of questioning the oppressive systems established in the past, and looking inward towards our own place within these systems.–Sage Dunlap
Release Date: December 22, 2023
Director: Andrew Haigh
Rating: R
Runtime: 105 minutes
In All of Us Strangers, Haigh makes clear that loneliness need not confine itself to physically desolate landscapes. The solitary, melancholy Adam (Andrew Scott) seems reasonably well-off, though he insists to his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) that he’s not a particularly rich or famous type of writer. Still, he can afford a nice apartment in a London high-rise where, still, he feels removed from the world. For the moment, he and Harry appear to be the only tenants in the new building, and Adam’s job does afford him the ability to spend his days at home, alone. He only meets Harry when the younger man knocks on his door in a flirtatious, drunken stupor, assuming (correctly) that Adam is also gay. Adam is working on a screenplay inspired by his childhood years, which has him thinking about one likely reason contributing to his loneliness: His parents both died in a car crash when he was only 12. Seeking to reconnect with his roots, Adam is drawn back to his old neighborhood, a train ride away from London, and is surprised yet somehow not exactly shocked at what he eventually finds: His father (Jamie Bell) and mother (Claire Foy), living in their old house, just as he remembers it. He is aware of the strangeness, and so are his parents; they understand that they have not been with Adam all these years, and that their renewed time with him may be limited, subject to disappear at any moment. The reunited family tries not to focus on this, instead having tea and catching up with Adam’s adult life. Are his parents ghosts? Transposed memories? Hallucinations generated with unusual calm and rationality? Haigh, adapting a 1987 novel just called Strangers, does not commit to one particular explanation – even when it seems like maybe he has. Yet All of Us Strangers doesn’t have the watery, wishy-washy quality of the more precious strains of magical realism. In its way, it is as clear-eyed and upfront as it needs to be. The performances are note perfect, as they must be with such a small cast. For all its open-heartedness, All of Us Strangers doesn’t peddle easy uplift. The movie suggests that loneliness, isolation or ostracization – whether created by circumstance or intolerance – don’t heal like normal physical wounds, and that all the time in the world given over to that process wouldn’t necessarily feel like enough. A lot of movies attempt to replicate the experience of a dream; this one situates itself right on the edge, whether ecstatic or delirious or stricken, of waking up.–Jesse Hassenger
Release Date: December 8, 2023
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Stars: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael
Rating: R
Runtime: 141 minutes
Yorgos Lanthimos’ off-kilter, pastel-drenched Poor Things opens with static shots of silken embroidery. It is hard to ascertain the images themselves, threaded so neatly in a near-identical gray. But the slippery, elusive texture is integral to the film, which weaves together something thick and rich with detail. What follows is narrow in its focus and big and engulfing in its scale: The story of a young woman who must overcome the experiments enacted against her while embracing her changing body and irrepressible urges. As such, this adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s book of the same name is difficult to summarize, loosely following Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) as she grows to embrace adulthood despite the overbearing tutelage of her de facto father God (Willem Dafoe). Once introduced to the dashing and cocky Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella recognizes the pitfalls of her sheltered life and endeavors to travel around the world, experiencing life anew before marrying her father’s sweet and bumbling assistant Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Lying in the genre gulf between science fiction and straightforward drama, Poor Things also finds time to unleash Stone’s ability as a physical comedian, building a sticky, entrancing bodily language that lives somewhere between twitchy, childlike enthusiasm and mystical knowingness. She wanders through their eclectic family home with an unsteady gait, crashing into delicately hung porcelain displays and cackling rather than cowering at the destruction which follows. It is a deliciously amoral journey, the kind that has already secured Lanthimos ample praise over the course of his career. But this is perhaps the filmmaker’s most garish and confident endeavor, using Bella’s naive perspective to design a world so heightened that it exists somewhere between a nightmare and a dream. Somewhat surprisingly, Poor Things feels like it is in conversation with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, right down to Stone’s robotic, doll-like physique. Where Barbie feels shallow and tentative in its understanding of what it means to physically grow up, Poor Things is bold and radically (at times uncomfortably) honest. It will satisfy fans of Lanthimos’ previous work and perhaps win over new viewers who are desperate to engage in the kind of coming-of-age stories that propel the genre forward. —Anna McKibbin
Release Date: November 24, 2023
Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Stars: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi
Big G returns in utterly triumphant fashion in 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, which immediately feels like the most direct corollary to Gojira that the series has ever produced, while thoughtfully modernizing so many of its elements. Wisely, despite the transition to full-on CGI effects to bring Godzilla to life, the creators still capture his stiff, upright movement as it’s always been, the physical remnant of having been played by a man in a suit. Rarely, however, has the sheer mass of the monster been captured so vividly and terrifyingly as it is here, as we watch whole sections of roadway buckle and leap into the air after each of his thunderous footfalls–not to mention the incredible destructive spectacle of his atomic breath. This Godzilla is genuinely terrifying, a rampaging beast without an ounce of mercy or nobility to him. This likewise results in the odd situation where we actually find ourselves genuinely rooting for the human characters to vanquish and defeat Godzilla for once, a rare state of mind for the Godzilla series that is empowered by Minus One‘s sympathetic protagonist Kōichi Shikishima, a man trying desperately to find either a reason to live or the courage to die following the horrors of the second world war. He’s surrounded by salt-of-the-earth Japanese citizens who band together to overcome a truly impossible-seeming obstacle, with an unexpectedly hopeful depiction of human ingenuity and selflessness. An absolutely outstanding kaiju film in general, and one of the few to ever successfully make the human characters an effective center of the action.–Jim Vorel
Release Date: January 19, 2024
Director: Phạm Thiên Ân
Stars: Lê Phong Vũ, Nguyễn Thịnh, Nguyễn Thị Trúc Quỳnh, Vũ Ngọc Mạnh
Rating: NR
Runtime: 178 minutes
Having a kid irrevocably changes a person’s life, and those changes are doubled when the kid arrives orphaned by tragedy. Two lives in flux, and the new parent is responsible for shepherding a little one through formative grief, on top of traditional parenting duties. But Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ), the laconic protagonist of Phạm Thiên Ân’s first feature, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, handles this abrupt charge with laid-back ease, as if his every experience has prepared him for the circumstance of his sister-in-law’s death and subsequent custodianship of his nephew, Đạo (Nguyễn Thịnh). Most people would be rattled by these events. Thiện rises to the occasion with preternatural nonchalance. His comfort with this solemn trust is not by any means the movie’s most fantastical quality. Ân follows in the footsteps of the greats of slow cinema, notably Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, both in terms of taking his sweet time allowing Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’s story to breathe, and in terms of judiciously applying surrealist brushstrokes to an aesthetic that verges on neo-realist. Static compositions provide structure for Ân’s hypnagogic digressions; there is a rigid formality to much of the filmmaking here, and from that flows a handful of languid sequences that flirt with otherworldliness. Ân obscures God’s presence in the world through meticulous, thoughtful filmmaking. This is perhaps the intent behind Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’s combination of long takes and still frames: To force the audience to look at each image for minutes at a time like they’re poring over a Where’s Waldo? book, combing for proof of the Alpha and the Omega in Saigon’s neon lights and unfeeling concrete, or deep-green jungles teeming with life. The second half of the film follows Thiện on the road to find his estranged brother, and if a three-hour jaunt through Vietnam in search of faith and family sounds like an insurmountable challenge, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is anything but. It’s a journey jammed with pleasures we can all appreciate, and canopied by questions we all ask.–Andy Crump
5. Ferrari
Release Date: December 25, 2023
Director: Michael Mann
Stars: Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell, Patrick Dempsey
Rating: R
Runtime: 131 minutes
More casual appreciators of director Michael Mann might have understandably wondered if he was permanently locked into a late-period For Mannheads Only phase of his career. But you don’t need to be a Blackhat apologist to vibe with Ferrari; in fact, some of his most dedicated followers might blanch at the very lack of neon-dotted opportunities for pure cityscape viewing. Structurally, Ferrari is closer to an Aaron Sorkin-style compressed biopic, following the famous Italian carmaker (Adam Driver) during a time of personal and professional crisis. His mistress Lina (Shailene Woodley) wants him to claim their son with his famous name; doing so would risk the wrath of his powerful wife Laura (Penelope Cruz), who he needs to keep his company from bankruptcy. In the midst of all this, he can secure his future as a manufacturer of race cars if his team triumphs at a major (and dangerous) cross-country race. Mann, working in a more classical mode than his digital-forward experiments, transcends this year’s crop of brand-name-as-protagonist business-plan cinema by turning Enzo Ferrari into one of his haunted, taciturn control-seekers, juxtaposing the freedom of the road with its technological limitations (and personifying it with the cars’ artist-creator). Driver, steering through soulful reflection and deadpan humor, proves true to his name.–Jesse Hassenger
Release Date: February 9, 2024
Director: Trần Anh Hùng
Stars: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 136 minutes
While ASMR is most heavily associated with the pleasures of sound, it would be nothing without the aesthetics. The way a cake spatula smooths a dollop of buttery frosting; the way egg noodles gleam under a coating of soy sauce. It might sound reductive to compare Vietnamese-French director Trần Anh Hùng’s lyrical work with a social media fad, but there is now an entire micro-industry dedicated to the way human beings have always lusted after the sensual impressions of food, an idea which is as much in conversation within The Taste of Things as that of the romance between its two leads. If there were no plot at all, The Taste of Things could still very easily coast on the visual and auditory pleasures of its subject: The culinary arts, to which Trần’s camera and microphone dedicate sumptuous displays of rich textures and decadent sizzles of in-process cookery, much of it spearheaded by veteran kitchen cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Taking place in late 19th century France at the estate of the so-called “Napoleon of Culinary Arts” Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), The Taste of Things focuses on its residents. For Dodin and Eugénie, cooking is an erotic, romantic, intimate act. After the first meal of the film is enjoyed by Dodin and some colleagues, they all bemoan Eugénie’s welcome yet absent company at their dinner. Eugénie assures them she is speaking to them through her food. While Eugénie prepares a lavish spread for Dodin and his friends, she momentarily loses herself, seemingly to the understandable exhaustion that comes with dancing and careening through a hot kitchen. DP Jonathan Ricquebourg glides the camera around Eugénie and co., giving the banquet preparation a sense of precise choreography akin to ballet, all the way to the angle at which a wooden spoon slips through a pan of rich, creamy sauce. Throughout the narrative’s drama, the chemistry between Binoche and Magimel is as palpable as the food that their characters prepare together. And while the film remains free of explicit sex or nudity (though, one scene cheekily parallels Binoche’s nude silhouette with the curvature of a poached pear), the insinuations and implications carried by the appearance, sound and intent behind the cooking are far more sensuous. The Taste of Things is abundantly, if maybe overwhelmingly, accessible; it’s not particularly challenging to watch a film that’s quite literally as gratifying as a home-cooked meal.–Brianna Zigler
Release Date: November 10, 2023
Director: Wim Wenders
Stars: Kôji Yakusho, Yumi Asô, Tokio Emoto
Rating: NR
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Actor and recently christened Cannes Film Festival award-winner Koji Yakusho introduced my New York Film Festival screening of his new Wim Wenders-helmed film, Perfect Days (which shares its name with the Lou Reed song it samples) with a plea. He implored us to make use of Tokyo’s magnificent public restrooms if we were ever to visit the city. I was struck not only by the multitude of public restrooms ready for use at a moment’s notice in Tokyo, but the quality of these restrooms. I digress—because in real life these same public restrooms might not have a person like Hirayama (Yakusho) to take care of them. Hirayama is a quiet, solitary man who revels in the bare-bones simplicity of his life, happy to wake up before the sun creeps out and start his day of making toilet bowls sparkle. Hirayama chooses his words so carefully that most of the time he does not speak at all, especially when paired with his motormouthed “Tokyo Toilet” cohort Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who practically speaks for him, but establishes Hirayama’s persistent peace of mind. When Hirayama is not spending the bulk of his time tending to bathrooms, he’s taking photos of the sun, peeking behind the trees, with an old Olympia film camera, or showering at the public bathhouse, or digging up saplings to repot in his home, or listening to his ancient cassette tapes of Lou Reed and Nina Simone. But the rhythm of the man’s tranquil day-to-day is interrupted when his teenage niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) drops by his tiny apartment for an unannounced visit, having run away from her mother, Hirayama’s estranged, wealthy sister. Though directed by the German Wenders, Perfect Days’ co-writer, Takuma Takasaki, admitted before my screening that the film made him appreciate Tokyo, a city he knows and loves very well already, even more. It’s clear that Wenders has an extensive rapport with Japan’s capital, and his camera (cinematography credited to Franz Lustig) lovingly paints the city as a place defined by its coexistence between urbanism and nature—like Hirayama attempting to coexist in simplicity against the demands of the 2020s. Still, there is despair and heartache tucked into the sentimental folds of the frame, all of which is carried masterfully by the great Koji Yakusho. Perfect Days revels in its ambient minimalism as much as its own protagonist, though something is missing. One might ask for more from Perfect Days, a film that finds itself a bit too understated in its understatement. But sometimes it is just nice to be reminded that there are pockets of beauty in a world which does all it can to extinguish them—like finding a store that doesn’t make you buy something in order to get a code to use the bathroom.—Brianna Zigler
Release Date: November 17, 2023
Director: Todd Haynes
Stars: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
Rating: R
Runtime: 113 minutes
Partway through Todd Haynes’ May December, actor Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is asked how she chooses her roles by a group of high school drama students. Elizabeth is in town to research her upcoming lead role in a ripped-from-the-tabloids independent movie, a part she hopes will be statement enough to eclipse the work she’s currently recognized for (playing a veterinarian on a show called Norah’s Ark, just one of screenwriter Samy Burch’s winky little jokes about the biz). Her next part is decidedly not as family friendly: Elizabeth is set to play Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a former teacher who made the news 20 years ago for having a sexual relationship with and subsequently marrying one of her seventh-grade students, Joe (Charles Melton). May December offers up a tantalizingly ambiguous answer to the question posed during that drama class visit. As she insinuates herself into the Atherton-Yoos’ life—tagging along with Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) as they shop for prom dresses, taking notes on the makeup brands Gracie uses, shadowing Joe at work—we begin to wonder whether Elizabeth’s devotion to the role comes only from a desperate desire to be taken seriously as an actor, or if there’s something deeper and darker lurking within. Burch’s script—and Portman’s brilliantly cryptic performance—keep these possibilities balanced on a fine edge. We’re never completely sure if Elizabeth is just going ultra-Method when, for example, she complains that the boys auditioning for the part of young Joe aren’t “sexy enough,” or when she visits the pet shop stockroom where the couple were first discovered and simulates the sexual encounter that led to Gracie’s arrest. The disturbing possibility that the two women are secretly more alike than Elizabeth lets on only grows when she talks to the drama students about sex scenes—telling them that, sometimes, the acting is in pretending she’s not enjoying them. That smudging of the line between Gracie and Elizabeth physically manifests in the gradual converging of their appearances in cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt’s inspired Bergman-esque images. May December is a film of great tonal delicacy, as Haynes, Burch and their actors delicately modulate the film between high camp and twisted psychological drama. Pulling off such a seemingly incongruous blend of sensationalism and sincere thoughtfulness is no easy task, but writer and director miraculously find a way to ease the tension between style and substance—and, what’s more, manage to deliver wry commentary on the way we consume scandals at the same time.–Farah Cheded
Release Date: November 22, 2023
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Stars: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Aimyon, Yoshino Kimura, Shōhei Hino, Ko Shibasaki, Takuya Kimura
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 124 minutes
Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live? is a time capsule, preserving the virtues of the society it was made and circulated in. It’s about how to live as a good person in this world, about the childhood experience of discovering difference, disparity, and loss—and, thus, turning to philosophy. The influence of the text is apparent in Miyazaki’s work at Ghibli. While the protagonist of his latest film, Mahito (Soma Santoki), is styled around Miyazaki’s childhood, Miyazaki himself appears as he is today more directly in the figure of Mahito’s granduncle (Shōhei Hino), a man who built a mysterious library on the family estate decades ago before disappearing into his stories forever. The Boy and the Heron, released in Japan with the same name as Yoshino’s novel, becomes a firm reminder of the need to grow up, but one that recognizes the importance of the ephemeral experiences of childhood. Unlike Miyazaki’s semi-biographical 2013 swan song The Wind Rises, the quasi-autobiographical The Boy and the Heron is styled as the fantasy Bildungsroman that he became famous for—with a mature, edgier bent. The opening sequence depicts a 1943 firebombing, rendered with striking animation that entirely breaks with the art style of the rest of the film, veering into the abstract. Mahito’s ill mother dies in the flames. Afterwards, the 12-year-old moves to the countryside as his father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura), an industrialist contributing to the war effort, remarries his late mother’s younger sister, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). Unlike the bucolic farmland of My Neighbor Totoro that imagines a space closer to nature or the remnants of a nostalgic past in Spirited Away that facilitates its fantastical traversal, the impetus for Mahito’s journey is an act of self-harm. The spirits find Mahito, feverish and delirious, on the family’s rural estate. A particularly nettlesome gray heron (Masaki Suda) harasses the boy, drawing him towards the site of his coming-of-age journey. His guide hereafter is apprehensive, the fantasies tainted with death and decay. From here, the script (trans. Don Brown) is perhaps Miyazaki’s best. Sharing its outline with all these past films, The Boy and the Heron utilizes a different narrative mode: The mythic. This is a fantasy world that deals in archetypes instead of history orientated by the polemics of fascists and philosophers. Everything is handled with delicate ambivalence, all implicit, the intentions left ambiguous. It is an open text begging to be read. Some may get the impression the film says nothing at all, but The Boy and the Heron is ultimately something more enduring than an edification. Synthesizing the virtues Yoshino wrote of a pre-war Japan with the terror of growing up in its collapsing empire, Miyazaki draws the world in its entirety. Through decades of refining his craft and iterating on this familiar story, Miyazaki has honed The Boy and the Heron into a platonic form—the kind held by Mahito’s philosopher-storyteller granduncle, who creates whole worlds with his small stone building blocks. To see The Boy and the Heron is to see Miyazaki. The film is as complicated as the man it is about, and this is what makes The Boy and the Heron a masterwork. I can see him still writing his stories, still drawing his airplanes.–Autumn Wright
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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