Movie theaters are officially back. As the cinematic offerings slowly return to the big screen compared to the streaming services and various digital rental retailers, we’re here to sort out what’s actually the best bang for your buck at the box office.
A new year and a new COVID variant are in full swing, so now might be a good time to exercise restraint even if there are bigger budget offerings hitting the big screen.
Of course, use your judgment when choosing whether to go back to the movies or not, but there’s an ever-growing percentage of vaccinated moviegoers who are champing at the bit to get back in front of the big screen. And I’m very happy to say that we’re back, here to help.
That said, things in theatrical distribution are a little strange right now, so apart from some big recent blockbusters, there’s a mix of Oscar-winners, lingering releases, indies and classics booked—depending, of course, on the theater. But thankfully, there’s been enough good movies actually released recently this year that you should have no problem finding something great to watch.
Check out the 10 best movies in theaters 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: February 2, 2024
Director: Molly Manning Walker
Stars: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Eva Lewis, Lara Peake, Shaun Thomas, Samuel Bottomley
Rating: NR
Runtime: 98 minutes
According to the laws of physics, whenever there’s a group of three teen besties, there’s always going to be imbalances, no matter how tight they seem. Add to the equation ungodly amounts of alcohol, older guys with bad intentions and zero sleep, and those imbalances will no doubt deepen. Case in point, in How to Have Sex, British babes Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis) and Skye (Lara Peake) travel to the Greek island of Malia for what the girls prematurely declare the “best holiday ever.” Tara is the funny, adventurous one; Em is the smart, practical one who planned the whole trip; Skye is the “experienced” naughty girl with mommy issues. It doesn’t take long for a group of older guys to come sniffing around their hotel room balcony, and soon they’re one big party family. Nor does it take long for Skye to reveal herself to be a snake, more than happy to throw Tara under the bus for scraps of male attention. For a first-time director, Molly Manning Walker hit an absolute home run with her actors. What could have easily been a rote, didactic PSA about consent and sexual assault is graced with nuance by a superb breakout performance from McKenna-Bruce. A good alternate title for How to Have Sex would have been How to Bury Your Pain to Keep the Party Going. All three girls leave the film the same way they entered it, whooping and hollering happily. Not too much has changed. The sexual politics are good, and the film is competently made, but aside from McKenna-Bruce’s performance, it’s a standard, morally direct tale about the dangers of toxic party culture.—Katarina Docalovich
8. Out of Darkness
Release Date: February 9, 2024
Director: Andrew Cumming
Stars: Safia Oakley-Green, Chuku Modu, Kit Young, Arno Lüning, Iola Evans, Luna Mwezi
Rating: R
Runtime: 87 minutes
Out of Darkness, the buzzy new horror film from director Andrew Cumming, begins with a kind of visceral allure even beyond the attractiveness of its high-concept. Lots of horror films deal with universal fears, of course, but with this film, set 45,000 years in the past, Cumming makes that subtextual universality into text. The aim is to deliver something that’s both a gripping throwback and a shockingly timeless exploration of human terror. Happily for horror fans, the film mostly hits the mark, and becomes a must-see genre film along the way. The story begins as a small band of hunter-gatherers arrive on the shores of a new land, hopeful that they’ll soon find a safe, bountiful place to call home. Headstrong Adem (Chuku Modu) leads them, convinced that he’s the only way any of them will survive, but his leadership has begun to feel a bit shaky. His pregnant partner Ave (Iola Evans) is getting weaker, his son Heron (Luna Mwezi) is worried, his brother Geirr (Kit Young) is starting to question things, and the resident group elder Odal (Arno Lüning) isn’t helping with his rising focus on superstition. At the center of it all, unsure of her role in this drama, is Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a “stray” whom Adem has always seen as an outsider who should just be grateful to be among them. Good horror films are often works of deceptive simplicity, and Out of Darkness‘ script, written by Ruth Greenberg from a story she co-crafted with Cumming and producer Oliver Kassman, weaves that idea into its narrative. Basically, we’re just watching a group of people cross a large expanse of land to get to the mountains, where safe caves presumably await them. It’s the same opening struggle that’s been applied to Westerns and adventure films since time immemorial, but it works, and not just because it’s a timeless narrative concept. What you’ll likely notice right away is that Out of Darkness possesses a mesmeric, melancholy beauty, as Cumming and his crew deliver windswept plains, dense forests, and ink-black night sequences (some of them strikingly lit by a green-hued aurora borealis) that make the landscapes feel untouched, pristine and thick with possibilities both hopeful and dangerous. The whole film, from the acting to the writing to the production design and the sound editing, is dialed into the very particular vibe Cumming is trying to create with this story, a film that’s as much about survival horror as it is about the fears that still linger with us now, fears that our evolutionary chain will likely never shed.–Matthew Jackson
7. 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: January 26, 2024
Director: Lila Avilés
Stars: Naíma Sentíes, Juan Francisco Maldonado, Montserrat Marañón, Marisol Gasé, Saori Gurza
Rating: NR
Runtime: 95 minutes
Sol (Naíma Sentíes), the little girl at the heart of Lila Avilés’ Tótem, is obsessed with the bugs and birds that stretch across her family’s property. She seeks them out as fellow stragglers, trapped on the edge of the action. Like them, she skulks through dusty rooms and lurches across sunbaked cement—ignored by the adults and spotlighted by the curious camera. Tótem follows Sol and her father Napo (Juan Francisco Maldonado), who is terminally ill and celebrating what will likely be his final birthday. The details of this disease slide into obscurity, colored by our protagonist’s age-appropriate ignorance. Avilés is more concerned with the shape and sound of childhood, and across the 95 minutes (which covers one evening in the lives of this disjointed cast), she offers a nuanced take on the disparity and complication of being young in a world built to amplify grown-up problems. Their home is rife with movement and action, stirring with human and (the aforementioned) non-human life. Avilés almost treats this setting as a challenge, desperate to find ways of exploring each character’s internality amidst the chaos. It is a testament to the filmmaker’s skill that Sol’s perspective is prized above all. Her wide-eyed curiosity pours from the screen, the mystery of the family’s inner workings reflected in her thoughtful expressions. It is in Sentíes’ deeply felt performance that Avilés unknots the film’s tangled questions: What do adults remember about being a child? What do they forget? Which of these forgotten memories can be re-accessed? Most importantly, which elements of adulthood are comprehensible to the children who wander through, haplessly avoiding the interpersonal bombs which threaten to destabilize everything? Answers are evasive, stretching ominously in the background, and Tótem traverses this maze through the eyes of these characters, whose vision is narrowed by an oppressive grief. Such a succession of images breaks from the realistic and condensed timeline of Tótem to offer a poetic expression of loss.–Anna McKibbin
Release Date: February 2, 2024
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Stars: Mads Mikkelsen, Amanda Collin, Simon Bennebjerg, Melina Hagberg, Kristine Kujath Thorp, Gustav Lindh
Rating: R
Genre: Drama/Western
Mads Mikkelsen plays Ludvig Kahlen, a retired military officer living in 18th-century Denmark who’s hellbent on cultivating the Jutland heath, a stretch of land considered impossible to farm. If he can accomplish this seemingly undoable task, he’s been promised a noble title, a goal he chases with obsessive resolve. But beyond taming this infertile landscape, he also must contend with Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), a sadistic magistrate willing to spill blood to ensure he retains control over the region. As Kahlen spends every penny of his meager pension to cultivate this space, a stand-off brews between these men, each determined to get his way. While The Promised Land largely takes place on a relatively tiny plot of dirt in the Danish boonies, its filmmaking lends this struggle an expansive, David-versus-Goliath slant. Cinematographer Rasmus Videbæk and director Nikolaj Arcel contrast the breadth of the Jutland countryside against the smallness of our protagonist’s enterprise as he cuts through vast shrubland and tills acidic soil in what initially feels like a futile and hubristic effort. But what makes The Promised Land truly compelling is how it naturally grows into something else, as Kahlen nurtures a seed of doubt about his ultimate aims. Mikkelsen deftly embodies these turns with subtle gestures that bring out internal struggles, and it’s deeply satisfying to watch as his icy demeanor at least marginally melts. The toughness of these surroundings makes it feel all the more precious when he finds his unexpected connections. But, thanks to Mikkelsen’s performance and Kahlen’s characterization, even at the heights of their happiness, there is a genuine uncertainty around how things will break, a relative rarity in a storytelling landscape where the protagonist’s final decision often comes across as perfunctory and obvious. It all comes together to make The Promised Land a stirring historical epic that balances its grandiose framing with something surprisingly grounded and genuine. A bountiful harvest indeed.–Elijah Gonzalez
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: 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 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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