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.
10. Inu-Oh
Release Date: August 12, 2022
Director: Masaaki Yuasa
Stars: Avu-Chan, Mirai Moriyama
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 98 minutes
As the earth rocks beneath the dancing of the great Inu-Oh, there’s no doubt an epic tale is unfolding. Director Masaaki Yuasa’s musical drama Inu-Oh combines classical biwa instrumental sounds with energetic crowds you’re more likely to see at a rock concert than 14th-century Japan.
9. Prey
Hulu Release Date: August 5, 2022
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Starring: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope
Rating: R
Runtime: 100 minutes
Filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator prequel Prey succeeds by daring to embrace what prior sequels did not: Simplicity. The basics of Predator cinema boil down to skull trophies and rival combat, but most of all, the thrill of an uninterrupted hunt. With brutal ease, writer Patrick Aison translates Predator codes to hunter-gatherer dichotomies in Native American cultures. There’s nothing scarier than the laws of natural hierarchies on display in their most elemental forms, and that’s what Prey recognizes with menacing regard. Trachtenberg understands what Predator fans crave, and executes without mercy.
8. The Sea Beast
Release Date: July 8, 2022
Director: Chris Williams
Stars: Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Jared Harris, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Dan Stevens, Kathy Burke
Rating: PG
Runtime: 115 minutes
When cartographers allowed their senses of imagination and self-preservation to fill the unexplored regions of their maps, they used to warn of creatures like lions, elephants and walruses. Creatures beyond understanding, with teeth and trunks and tusks easy to caricature into danger. But we mostly remember that when you sail to the faded edge of knowledge, there be dragons. The Sea Beast deftly hones this ancient human fear into a sharpened spear tip, striking at ignorance.
7. When I Consume You
Release Date: August 16, 2022
Director: Perry Blackshear
Stars: Libby Ewing, Evan Dumouchel, MacLeod Andrews
Rating: NR
Runtime: 92 minutes
Perry Blackshear’s new film When I Consume You would’ve been a splendid title for a Shudder cooking show: Creatures of the night gorily prepare expired ingredients using eldritch techniques perfected by the old gods themselves. But it suits the film nicely, too, adopting multifaceted malice as Blackshear judiciously doles out new plot bulletins minute by minute. “When I consume you” is a macabre declaration, then a threat, then a promise that carries the weight of inevitability. Your consumption is guaranteed—an assurance of doom rather than a possibility. The “you” are the Shaw siblings, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Will (Evan Dumouchel), survivors of a hardscrabble childhood now making their way as adults.
6. Girl Picture
Release Date: August 12, 2022
Director: Alli Haapasalo
Stars: Aamu Milonoff, Eleonoora Kauhanen, Linnea Leino
Rating: NR
Runtime: 100 minutes
Growing up can be brutal. Especially when you’re at what Finnish director Alli Haapasalo describes as the “liminal” age of 17 or 18—aware enough to know you want more, young enough not to know how to get it. In Haapasalo’s beautifully designed, emotionally honest Girl Picture, three teenagers who are not exactly girls and not yet women look for love, sex, belonging and, most importantly, the strength of their own voices to carry them through a moment in limbo.
5. Funny Pages
Release Date: August 26, 2022
Director: Owen Kline
Stars: Daniel Zolghadri, Matthew Maher, Maria Dizzia, Josh Pais, Marcia DeBonis
Rating: R
Runtime: 86 minutes
The reverse pageantry of Owen Kline’s directorial debut Funny Pages is the greatest kind of eyesore: Mildewy abodes, nudie comix, stinkpots, creeps and hermits. In this inverted fairy tale, produced by the Safdie brothers and Frownland’s Ronald Bronstein, teenage cartoonist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) jilts his upper-crust New Jerseyan suburb to drop out of school after the untimely death of his teacher and mentor, Katano (Stephen Adly Guirgis). Katano was a creep, his last breathing moments spent trying to coax Robert into his front seat after stripping nude in a lesson on art modeling and caricature.
4. The Territory
Release Date: August 19, 2022
Director: Alex Pritz
Rating: PG
Runtime: 83 minutes
The violent claw of colonization continues to raze Indigenous land well into the 21st century, a point made startlingly clear in Alex Pritz’s urgent documentary The Territory. Though the fight against climate change and genocide has been a lifelong effort amid various Indigenous groups around the globe, this lean, visually striking film focuses on the the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people, living in a verdant expanse in the Brazilian Amazon that sees its once vast perimeter shrinking exponentially each day.
3. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Release Date: June 24, 2022
Director: Dean Fleischer-Camp
Stars: Jenny Slate, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann, Isabella Rossellini
Rating: PG
Runtime: 89 minutes
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On gives us the opportunity for a delicate, whimsical and poignant escape that will make you feel stronger, taller and better for it on the other side. Who knew that a one-inch shell with shoes on would be our existential savior this summer? If you were poking around YouTube about a decade ago, you might have been witness to the viral introduction of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
2. Nope
Release Date: July 22, 2022
Director: Jordan Peele
Stars: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun
Rating: R
Runtime: 130 minutes
Among his most amusing directorial quirks, Jordan Peele appreciates the melodrama of a good biblical citation: 2019’s killer doppelgänger vehicle Us tirelessly invokes Jeremiah 11:11 and his latest effort Nope opens with Nahum 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” It’s that last clause which perfuses Nope, a shrewd, tactile yarn about a brother-sister rancher duo in pursuit of video evidence of a UFO circling their home.
1. A Love Song
Release Date: July 29, 2022
Director: Max Walker-Silverman
Stars: Dale Dickey, Wes Studi, Michelle Wilson, Benja K. Thomas, John Way, Marty Grace Dennis
Rating: PG
Runtime: 81 minutes
One of my grandpas died right before the pandemic. My grandma met someone in the middle of it. Her new relationship wasn’t well-liked in my family, but it made her giddy as a schoolgirl—finding another cowboy to look at livestock with, play cards with, to make dinner with. When I was little, she used to live in a trailer, driven out into the woods and bricked into the earth. I see a lot of her in writer/director Max Walker-Silverman’s sublime debut, A Love Song, where a widow and widower find a teenage verve for each other—weathered but not beaten in the sun of the American west. Faye (Dale Dickey) lingers at one of several campsites surrounding a crawfish-filled lake, waiting for Lito (Wes Studi).
Author and suggestions made by : Paste Movies Staff
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