Our Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP

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Saturday, July 1, 2017 at 2:11 a.m.

Courtesy Wilson Webb/TriStar Pictures Baby Driver: Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd, but set to music it just feels right. And unlike, say, a Fast and Furious flick, Wright’s movie delivers action that’s convincing and concrete — the cars seem real, even when the people don’t. This is the kind of pure pop confection that leaves you breathless with admiration for the director's supernatural command of his frame. But it might also leave you a little cold.

For more, read our review of Baby Driver. 1/16

Photo by Eric McNatt/Courtesy A24 It Comes at Night: A red door is, biblically speaking, a sign of protection, an echo of the blood rubbed on posts and lintels during Passover to keep God from smiting you and your home. But like most things that the Bible insists are positive, the red door also comes with an undercurrent of horror. Having to slaughter animals at twilight for your paint kind of mutes the jubilance of surviving.

For more, read our review of It Comes at Night. 2/16

Courtesy Vancouver Public Library Dawson City: Frozen Time: It’s a sign of hope that Bill Morrison, arcane found-footage wizard and poet of nitrate decay, is nearly a household name, with his films routinely feted at the New York Film Festival, showcased in the Venice Bienniale and, most brazenly of all, released onto actual movie screens. Using only archival materials, Morrison has cornered the market on a simple idea: how film reflects memory’s unreliability and time’s inexorable destruction.

For more, read our review of Dawson City: Frozen Time. 3/16

Courtesy Gunpowder & Sky Raising Bertie: Few films or lives boast a truth teller who makes the stakes more powerfully stark than Vivian Saunders does early in Raising Bertie, Margaret Byrne’s essential debut documentary. “We’re a quarter of a mile from the jail,” announces Saunders, the executive director at a small North Carolina high school for teen boys in trouble. “I often tell the boys, ‘You got a choice. You can be educated at 117 County Farm Road, or you can be educated at 219 County Farm Road.’”

For more, read our review of Raising Bertie. 4/16

Photo Nicola Dove/Courtesy 20th Century Fox My Cousin Rachel: The trailer for Henry Koster’s 1952 adaptation of My Cousin Rachel channels hysteria as the voice-over asks, “Was she woman or witch? Madonna or murderess?” Unfortunately, the film itself proved far tamer than the marketing suggested. The novel’s author, Daphne du Maurier, who also penned The Birds and the psychological thriller Rebecca, distanced herself from the project when she saw that 20th Century Fox planned to neuter her moody, mind-bending scenes and infuse them instead with romance.

For more, read our review of My Cousin Rachel. 5/16

Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal Il Boom: Among the most savage and surreal of Italian comedies, starring one of the country’s biggest stars and directed by one of its legendary filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom barely made a ripple when first released, in 1963, then sank so deep that it’s only now getting a proper release in the United States. Luckily for us, it has lost almost none of its bite.

For more, read our review of Il Boom. 6/16

Courtesy Kino Lorber Scum: Alan Clarke’s once-banned, twice-filmed Brit scandal, Scum, stands as one of the great films about boys and violence, about the allure and horror and inevitability of young toughs seizing power by smashing some skulls — and replicating, in their own private hellscape, the societal structures that have ground them down. Clarke first filmed his story, a dramatized shock-exposé of life in the U.K. delinquent-youth homes known as borstals, in 1977 for the BBC; his frank, even lurid depictions of racism, suicide and boy-on-boy rape proved too figgy for the Beeb’s pudding. Clarke’s social-problems drama edged perilously, rousingly toward exploitation thriller. The TV version shelved, Clarke remade the film, liberated from broadcast standards. It’s this bloodier, more brutal version of Scum, from 1979, that has been restored for a Kino Lorber release.

For more, read our review of Scum. 7/16

Courtesy Lionsgate The Big Sick: The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you'd have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it's hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star Kumail Nanjiani (who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Emily V. Gordon), it starts as a lighthearted, freewheeling opposites-attract rom-com and then heads into surprisingly grim territory — without ever betraying its wild sense of humor.

For more, read our review of The Big Sick. 8/16

Courtesy Amazon Studio/IFC Films City of Ghosts: What might be most horrific about the horrors exposed in Matthew Heineman’s overwhelming City of Ghosts is their familiarity. The film documents the efforts of citizen journalists to alert the world to ISIS’ ravaging of Raqqa, their Syrian hometown, which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his extremist followers seized four years ago. With cellphones, video cameras and spotty Wi-Fi, the courageous young men of Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently revealed the bloody truth of ISIS’ perversion of Islam. Here are public executions: bodies chucked from buildings, kneeling hostages shot on camera, men and women publicly flayed, heads spiked on a fence while the bodies rot below. It’s terrible to behold, but it, of course, is no surprise. It’s what any reasonably informed American knows is going on but likely chooses not to think about. City of Ghosts and Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently demand that you contemplate it — that you find within yourself the capacity for outrage.

For more, read our review of City of Ghosts. 9/16

Courtesy Screen Media Films The Bad Batch: Ana Lily Amirpour's comic post-apocalyptic action-drama offers little explanation of what exactly its "bad batch" is, or how the members of its motley, unfortunate tribe of humans wound up banished to a desert wasteland. Instead, Amirpour lets her camera linger on a sign warning that everything beyond a 10-foot-high metal fence is no longer the concern of United States, while Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), a young woman in watermelon-print short-shorts, gazes at a note that some prison guards have given her. "Find Comfort," it reads. But nothing in this harsh terrain even remotely suggests comfortable. Amirpour's instinct is to let her scenes speak for themselves. The Bad Batch needs no lengthy setup because its premise is already vivid in our collective imaginations — it's the waking nightmare of what America could become, a worst-case scenario in which all the president's promises have been fulfilled, and undesirables are banished to godforsaken places ravaged by climate change and climbing temperatures. Somehow, it's also funny.

For more, read our review of The Bad Batch. 10/16

Courtesy Courtesy Array The House on Coco Road: Quick, tell me everything you know about Grenada. If you’re over the age of 35, you probably remember Ronald Reagan’s thin lips pronouncing the country’s name with a dangerous emphasis on the first two syllables, essentially weaponizing the word, conjuring images of an explosive device with a pulled pin just waiting to detonate. That’s the official American version of the Caribbean island’s modern history, one dominated by the assertion that Grenada’s government was working in tandem with communist Cuba to become a military base. According to Reagan, it was necessary to bring the “spirit of freedom” to Grenada, in the form of a military strike. But that’s not at all what was happening, argues Netflix documentary The House on Coco Road, by director Damani Baker, who was living in Grenada at the time of the invasion.

For more, read our review of The House on Coco Road. 11/16

Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal Le Trou: “Our cell is a bit special. … We’ve got a lot to lose.” That’s what inmate Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel) hears when he arrives in crowded Cell 6, Block 11 in Paris’ La Santé Prison. His new cellmates — four of them, all crammed into a tiny room that they also share with stacks of cardboard — are tough, stern men, each doing hard time. And, as they reveal to Gaspard after making sure he can be trusted, they’ve decided to dig their way out via the sewer system. Jacques Becker’s 1960 masterpiece Le Trou, one of the most gripping of all French films, catalogs the methodical way this group of terse, no-nonsense prisoners goes about this daring, nearly impossible escape.

For more, read our review of Le Trou. 12/16

Courtesy Al Jazeera America In Transit: The sweet, slight In Transit — like the journeys it documents, on Amtrak's Empire Builder Chicago-to-Seattle line — is all about connections, about people moving on to new lives or going back home to old ones, about what happens when American strangers have so much time to kill that they can't avoid talking to one another. The film (directed by Albert Maysles and collaborators from the Maysles Documentary Center) opens with two young wanderers taking turns detailing their ramblin'-life philosophies: "You know what's scary? Staying where you are!" The filmmakers catch travelers chatting, the conversations often profound and deeply personal. For all that big emotion, the film is also fleet and light, interested in everyday train problems — of course a little boy loses his shoes — and life on the plains. The oil boom has remade Dakota life, and we meet many young men working in that business, usually far away from family or lovers.

For more, read our review of In Transit. 13/16

Courtesy Film Movement Harmonium: You can’t be blamed for wondering, quite a while into Koji Fukada’s Harmonium, just exactly what kind of movie it is. Tense family melodrama? Middle-age infidelity thriller? Study of repression? Psycho-vengeance genre spree? All of the above? Maybe the measured, calm, withholding pace of the film, particularly in its first half, should be its own ominous clue. Pots with tight lids eventually blow.

For more, read our review of Harmonium. 14/16

Courtesy Konrad Waldmann Mali Blues: The steady, stinging pluck of Bassekou Kouyaté’s ngoni, the traditional, lutelike African stringed instrument, suggests dust hitting your face on a Sahel wind at dusk, when the day at last starts to cool. An innovator within his tradition, Kouyaté has rigged his ngoni’s cowskin body with pickups and a wah-wah pedal, tingeing that wind with psychedelia, with distortion and drone, an electric blast from the Niger Delta. In his playing the meditative meets the rhapsodic; the ancient ways edge toward the Western pop that long ago grew out of them. Tragically, senselessly, rather than being officially celebrated in his homeland, Kouyaté, like all the great Malian musicians featured in this doc, finds himself unable to play in large portions of it.

For more, read our review of Mali Blues. 15/16

Courtesy Strand Releasing The Ornithologist: Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues has called The Ornithologist, which follows a lone bird expert in a remote northern part of the country, an “adventure film.” It’s a genre he fantastically destabilizes to encompass martyrdom, transmigration of the soul, and wild revelers cavorting in Mirandese, a nearly extinct language spoken in his country and one of five heard in this invigorating shape-shifter.

For more, read our review of The Ornithologist. 16/16

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 June 2017. 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 the coming months.

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