When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her. more »
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Between the Temples
A cantor in a crisis of faith finds his world turned upside down when his grade school music teacher re-enters his life as his new adult Bat Mitzvah student. more »
Blink Twice
When tech billionaire Slater King meets cocktail waitress Frida at his fundraising gala, he invites her to join him and his friends on a dream vacation on his private island. As strange things start to happen, Frida questions her reality. more »
The Evil Dead
Alongside the budding slashers of the early ‘80s arose a film that shamed them with its gushing creativity and unruly wit. Sam Raimi was all of 20 when he took the college-kids-on-a-trip horror trope and flooded it with giddy energy and fake bodily fluids, inaugurating a franchise and a career that have more than delivered on th more »
The War of the Worlds
Martians have invaded Earth, and there’s absolutely no way to stop them. That’s the complete plotline of this vintage sci-fi classic, which is both more gorgeous and way more of a downer than you probably remember. Its effects may not measure up to raised-on-CGI standards, but the imagination behind its design still captivates. more »
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife. more »
Starman
John Carpenter responded to the box-office failure of his 1982 masterpiece The Thing in part by making its precise opposite. Here, Jeff Bridges’ extraterrestrial is a benign tourist who grows on (not in) Karen Allen’s earthling widow by taking on the form of her dead husband. Carpenter shot his oddball sci-fi romance on location more »
The Front Room
It tells the story of a newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing, estranged stepmother. more »
The Searchers
As American as racism and violence. John Ford’s national landmark includes all the silly side quests endemic to a studio film of the era, including a song and a romantic subplot. But the monomaniacal focus of John Wayne’s damaged avenger as he tracks down his kidnapped niece lends it a terrible power. And if you’re looking for a more »
Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders’ camera dwells on the deserted contours of the American Southwest for most of the first hour, but the landscape that stays with you is that of Harry Dean Stanton’s face. Watching his haunted wanderer slowly come back to life, reconnect with people, and confront what set him adrift in the first place constitutes one o more »
The Critic
Ian McKellen stars as a powerful London theater critic who becomes entangled in a web of deceit and murder. more »
Seeking Mavis Beacon
Investigates the disappearance and reexamines the legacy of one of the most influential Black women in technology. more »
The Lavender Hill Mob
The late Alec Guinness has been retconned into a kindly screen eminence thanks to his Star Wars canonization as Old Ben Kenobi, but he was a wily actor full of dark currents. Exhibit A: this Ealing Studios heist comedy, which benefits enormously from his ability to telegraph complex motives from behind a milquetoast expression a more »
The Substance
A fading celebrity decides to use a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself. more »
Office Space
Flair. TPS reports. The red Swingline stapler. Mike Judge’s takeout on work in general, and the cube-farm culture of white-collar labor in particular, was so dead-on and scathing that it provided a whole new set of terms and concepts to mock and undermine them. Since it was famously a failure at the box office and only became be more »
Within Our Gates
Oscar Micheaux’s landmark debut is no mere curio of cinema history. The oldest surviving feature film by a Black director jumps back and forth over the Mason-Dixon line as our heroine (Evelyn Preer) works to uplift the race and faces love and family troubles of her own. Micheaux captures many startling moments of century-old hum more »
Scanners
David Cronenberg’s breakout leveled-up artistically as well as at the box office. Despite an inert lead performance from Stephen Lack, Scanners depicts a reality full of weaponized psychics at war but also disturbingly recognizable corporate conspiracies and house-of-mirrors paranoia. While the director’s work is best known for more »
A Woman Under The Influence
The role that made Gena Rowlands a legend. John Cassavetes wrote his wife the role of an unconventional homemaker at odds with her working-stiff husband (Peter Falk), and she seized it with every cell. As engrossing and timeless as her deeply felt performance may be, its essential humanity forces a reckoning that’s even more po more »
3 Women
Shelly Duvall was an acting genius, and Robert Altman’s dreamlike tour de force presents the most eloquent proof. Her clueless single working gal is so blithely bluff that she impresses a rube (Sissy Spacek) fresh off the bus even as she otherwise inspires snickers on- and off-screen. But hidden depths lurk in these characters, more »
A Different Man
After undergoing a facial reconstructive surgery, Edward becomes fixated on an actor in a stage production based on his former life. more »
Joker: Folie à Deux
Failed comedian Arthur Fleck meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn, while in Arkham State Hospital. Upon release, the pair embark on a doomed romantic misadventure. more »
Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made some of the greatest films ever, period, including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death, the latter two coming to the Charles revival series later this fall. In this adroit doc, Martin Scorsese spends a couple of hours enthusing in illustrated and intimate deta more »
Chungking Express
The crazy thing about Wong Kar-wai’s international breakout is that it doesn’t really become the film people love and remember until about halfway through. Not that the opening star-crossed encounter between Brigitte Lin’s blonde-wigged moll and Takeshi Kaneshiro’s detective is forgettable—far from it. But once heartbroken Tony more »
Black Narcissus
A bloody miracle. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger conjured the high Himalayas entirely on British soundstages and created a torrid, visually rapturous exploration of duty and suppressed passion amid a colony of British nuns (led by Deborah Kerr). Jean Simmons dons brownface to play a local, but the film’s essential theme o more »
Rushmore
Before there were “Wes Anderson films,” Wes Anderson made an unexpected sophomore breakout so rich, so sparkling, so tonally perfect that it bought him the freedom to make whatever he wanted . . . which was Wes Anderson films. Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, and Oliva Williams sweetly play real people with pr more »
Young Frankenstein
“Mel Brooks” and “refined” usually don’t appear in the same sentence, but paying homage to the Universal horror universe provided an elegant monochrome frame to elevate his Borscht Belt shtick. A murderer’s row of ‘70s cinema second bananas—Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Kenneth Mars, Marty Feldman, Terri Garr, and Peter Boyle— more »
A Real Pain
Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the odd-couple's old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history. more »
