Movie recommendations from critics Justin Chang and Kenneth Turan.
Annihilation
Natalie Portman plays a biologist who joins an allfemale expedition into the heart of an environmental disaster zone in this eerily beautiful and hypnotically unsettling mind-bender from “Ex Machina” writerdirector Alex Garland. (Justin Chang) R.
Let the Sunshine In
Juliette Binoche gives a marvelous performance as a middle-aged divorcee looking for love in all the wrong places, but Claire Denis’ exquisite and soulful romantic comedy defies every expectation of that premise. (Justin Chang) NR.
A Quiet Place
John Krasinski’s thrillingly intelligent post-apocalyptic horror movie, in which he stars with Emily Blunt as a couple trying to protect their family from monsters who hunt by sound, is walking-on-eggshells cinema of a very high order. (Justin Chang) PG-13
The Rider
Brady Jandreau, a Lakota cowboy from South Dakota, enacts a version of his own harrowing story of loss and recovery in writer-director Chloé Zhao’s stunningly lyrical western, a seamless and deeply moving blend of narrative and documentary film techniques. (Justin Chang) R.
RBG
One of the great services that this clear-eyed and admiring documentary on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg provides is to emphasize not just her work on the court but how extraordinarily influential she was before she even got there. (Kenneth Turan) NR.
You Were Never Really Here
This grim, artful New York crime thriller about a tormented thug-for-hire (a rivetingly contained Joaquin Phoenix) confirms writer-director Lynne Ramsay (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) as one of the most exciting and exacting film stylists of her generation. (Justin Chang) R.
Zama
The Argentinian writerdirector Lucrecia Martel makes a welcome return to feature filmmaking with this feverishly brilliant tale of European colonialism and its discontents, starring a superb Daniel Giménez Cacho as a Spanish magistrate in late 18th century Paraguay. (Justin Chang)