The New Movies You Can Watch at Australian Cinemas From November 25

Something delightful has been happening in cinemas in some parts of the country. After numerous periods spent empty during the pandemic, with projectors silent, theatres bare and the smell of popcorn fading, picture palaces in many Australian regions are back in business — including both big chains and smaller independent sites in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

During COVID-19 lockdowns, no one was short on things to watch, of course. In fact, you probably feel like you've streamed every movie ever made, including new releases, Studio Ghibli's animated fare and Nicolas Cage-starring flicks. But, even if you've spent all your time of late glued to your small screen, we're betting you just can't wait to sit in a darkened room and soak up the splendour of the bigger version. Thankfully, plenty of new films are hitting cinemas so that you can do just that — and we've rounded up, watched and reviewed everything on offer this week.

TITANE

Eye roll-inducingly terrible bumper stickers be damned; no one honks if they're horny in Titane. Revving when aroused is more this petrol-doused body-horror film's style, spanning characters both flesh and chrome. When she's seen writhing in fishnets atop a flame-adorned vintage Cadillac, the stony-gazed Alexia (debutant Agathe Rousselle) is working. She's titillating a Fast and Furious-style car crowd with her sexed-up display, but the car model still seems to hum with every gyration. After wrapping up, murdering a grab-happy fan with the metal chopstick keeping her hair up and then showering off the gooey, gory evidence, she's soon purring rhythmically inside that gleaming vehicle. Yes, in a plot detail that spilled the instant Titane premiered at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Palme d'Or, this is the French car sex flick.

How does someone fornicate with an automobile? Not inside or on the waxed hood, but copulating with the vehicle itself? That's one of this pumping piston of a movie's least interesting questions, although Titane does go there. In her sophomore effort after the also-phenomenal teen cannibal film Raw, writer/director Julia Ducournau isn't too interested in those specifics. She splashes the bouncy sex scene across the screen with lights flashing, human and motor pulsating as one, and pleasure seeping like exhaust fumes, but it's hardly the picture's only point of interest. Titane isn't the first feature to flirt with carnality and cars — Ridley Scott's The Counsellor had a gas-fuelled rendezvous less than a decade ago; Crash, from body-horror godfather David Cronenberg, is also steeped in automotive eroticism. But Ducournau's addition to the parking lot shrewdly links mechanophilia with agency and control, particularly over one's feelings and body.

First, before cylinders start lustily thrusting, Titane finds the initial growls of Alexia's four-wheeled fascination via a quick race through her childhood. As a seven-year-old (fellow first-timer Adèle Guigue), she enjoys audibly rumbling along with the engine. She also likes kicking the chair in front of her, exasperating her dad (French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, director of Nocturama and Zombi Child) into an accident. For her troubles, she gets a plate of the titular element inserted in her cracked skull. That steely stare matches the alloy in her head even then. From the outset, Ducournau pairs blood and metal, reshaping her central figure while laying bare her vulnerabilities. She kicks her film into a gear it'll keep shifting into again and again, too, because this is a movie about modifications: physically, emotionally and while trying to claim one's own sense of self.

Titane isn't just the French car sex film, clearly. It isn't merely a car sex movie about a woman partly forged from titanium, and with a penchant for piercing her way through those who block her road. Nor is it simply the French car pregnancy flick, with Alexia and the Caddy's tryst bearing fruit — a condition she tries to conceal, especially after more deaths lead her to Vincent (Vincent Lindon, At War), a fire chief who takes her in as his long-missing son. If Ducournau had made her script out of metal, she'd be moulding it in its molten form. She'd be letting it bubble; key to Titane's blistering appeal is its eagerness to let things boil, then brim over, because the feelings and ideas it works with are that scorching. If her feature was a car instead, it'd be that libidinous, fire-emblazoned Cadillac, which arrives with a bang, lures Alexia in and then lets loose.

Read our full review.

VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE

What's more ludicrous in Venom: Let There Be Carnage: an alien invasion of one man's body that turns into a parasite-host odd-couple show, or a prologue that thinks Woody Harrelson could've been a 90s teen? Kudos to this sequel to 2018's Venom for starting how it means to go on, at least. With its opening, set in 1996 in a home for unwanted children, the film doubles down on silliness, overblown theatrics and packaging itself as a cartoonish lark. The goofiness of the original box-office hit was among its best traits, and worked because that ridiculousness rattled against the movie's gritty superhero setup. Venom adopted all the stylistic markers that've become the serious-minded caped-crusader formula, then let Tom Hardy bounce around like he was in a comedy. But this time, everyone's gone more than a little vaudeville, as has the movie — and the outcome is right there in the title.

Carnage isn't just an apt term to describe the film, which has actor-turned-director Andy Serkis (Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle) behind the lens; it's also the name of its second symbiote, aka a flesh-munching extra-terrestrial who inhabits a bag of bones, then brings out its basest urges. Mercifully, Let There Be Carnage isn't big on rehashing the mechanics established in the initial flick, but Venom fits the bill, too, after the creature took up residence inside San Francisco journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy, Capone), then unleashed the franchise's one-body, two-personality double act. Carnage, the red-hued parasite, is the spawn of Venom, albeit bursting forth from condemned serial killer Cletus Kasady (Harrelson, Zombieland: Double Tap) after a scuffle with Brock. And yes, this is the kind of feature that has the scenery-chewing Harrelson proclaim its subtitle with glee. He bellows "let there be carnage!" with winking jokiness, but resembles a ringmaster announcing the next act in a big top.

Scripted by returning scribe Kelly Marcel, who also mined Fifty Shades of Grey for all the humour she could — and using a story co-credited to Hardy, who clearly has an attachment to his Marvel-but-not-Marvel Cinematic Universe character — Let There Be Carnage isn't burdened with much plot. After getting murderous following his separation from girlfriend Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris, No Time to Die) in their youth, Kasady will only tell his tale to Brock before he's executed. The latter goes awry due to Carnage's arrival, and a deal. The new symbiote will reunite Kasady with Barrison, whose ability to manipulate sound has seen her locked in an asylum, if the sadistic criminal assists his havoc-wreaking passenger to dispense with Brock and Venom. Cue the obvious — yes, carnage — and an inevitable showdown.

Harrelson wasn't an adolescent in the 90s, but his performance nods to that decade, back when his resume spanned White Men Can't Jump, Natural Born Killers, The People vs Larry Flynt, EDtv and the like. That isn't a compliment; he's simply summoning-slash-parodying that heyday, and he's in a film that wishes it released then. Indeed, Let There Be Carnage could've been the hit of 1993, 1999 or any other year before Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy reshaped the genre, the MCU turned it into one of the predominant forms of big-screen entertainment (and now small screen, too), and superhero flicks began arriving every few weeks. Really, Harrelson's work here feels like a chaotic distraction rather than a throwback nudge, because there's only one great thing about Let There Be Carnage: Tom Hardy arguing with himself

Read our full review.

BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN

Banging is the certainly word for it; when Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn begins, it's with high school teacher Emi (Katia Pascariu, Beyond the Hills) and her camera-wielding husband Eugen (first-timer Stefan Steel) having loud, enthusiastic, pink wig-wearing sex — and filming it. Romanian writer/ director Radu Jude (I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians) shows the explicit three-minute snippet of footage as others will see it, because others will indeed see it: the students at Emi's school, their parents and her fellow teachers among them. All genitalia and thrusting and lustful talk (and shouted queries through the door from whoever is looking after the couple's child), this graphic opening also makes a bold and firm statement. So many people within the film's frames will take issue with it as vocally as Emi and her partner are enjoying themselves — and they're unmistakably enjoying themselves — but Jude definitely isn't one of them.

2021's Berlinale Golden Bear-winner, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn also starts with a gleeful provocation — not just to those seeing Emi and Eugen's home video within the movie, but to Jude's viewers. It's a jolting opening that's exactingly orchestrated to make audiences react, then unpack their own instant reflexes in tandem with the rude on-screen posse that may as well be waving pitchforks. The underlying question: to those who object, what makes this raunchy romp between two consenting adults so shocking? Worse exists on the internet en masse all the time, so is it its unexpected arrival? Within the picture, is it the fact that Emi is a teacher, a woman or that she's unapologetic, too? Both queries speak to ideas long internalised about what we see where, who we allow to do what, and the power that comes from enforcing arbitrary and hypocritical judgements about supposed immorality and obscenity.

Indeed, loving, animated, costumed and sex toy-aided intercourse between a married couple in the privacy of their own home is the nicest thing that graces Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — until the feature's glorious climax, that is. What follows the intimate clip is a razor-sharp satire of a world that's so indifferent to so much ghastliness and so often, yet remains so unaccepting of carnality and so quick to use it as a reason to unbridle our worst sniping impulses. The film wields that notion as a weapon, all as Emi and Bucharest's other residents also navigate the pandemic. Jude could've set his scorching feature at any time, but overtly drawing attention to the daily behaviour that's been accepted while the globe battles a decimating virus — and the fact that some here would rather fixate on a different and trivial kind of viral spread — makes a blunt but perceptive point.

Accordingly, in the cinema verite-style first section, Emi rushes around the city on foot, going about an ordinary day that morphs into anything but. Actually, given that she learns of the sex tape backlash while surrounded by everyday hostilities and vulgarities, this chapter reinforces an ugly truth: that the performatively horrified responses from the parents of Emi's students are all too routine. Then, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn's second act unleashes scathing and playful cine-essay snippets about the country's past, the planet's present, human behaviour — often at its most atrocious — and how porn is used as both a scapegoat and an anaesthetic. Lastly, a mask-wearing Emi is interrogated and publicly humiliated by parents and teachers, their punitive savagery and blatant sanctimoniousness on full display.

Read our full review.

THE UNFORGIVABLE

There's a sense of symmetry to the fact that Netflix drama The Unforgivable marks Sandra Bullock's first movie in three years — since she last graced the big screen in Ocean's 8 and also starred in the streaming platform's hit Bird Box, both in 2018. After winning her Best Actress Oscar back in 2009 for The Blind Side, Bullock has appeared on-screen sparingly, featuring in just seven films over that period; however, when she puts in a phenomenal performance, she's as excellent as ever. In The Unforgivable, she does haunted, dead-eyed and determined like it's second nature, playing against-type as a woman just released from prison after a 20-year stint for murder. That said, she's also one of the best things about a movie that's almost everything else enough — serviceable-enough, watchable-enough, engaging-enough, compelling-enough — as it tracks an overstuffed redemption quest. 

Bullock's Ruth Slater has had two decades to stew on the incident that sent her to prison: the killing of a sheriff (W Earl Brown, No Man of God) who was trying to evict her and her then five-year-old sister Katie (Neli Kastrinos, Yellowjackets) from their family's farmhouse following their father's suicide. Upon getting out, she's warned by her parole officer (Rob Morgan, The United States vs Billie Holiday) about the difficulties of reintegrating back into normality, but finding her sibling (Aisling Franciosi, The Nightingale) is the sole thing on her mind. That's complicated by Katherine's lack of memory of anything before her adoption, and her protective new parents (Succession's Linda Emond and The Comey Rule's Richard Thomas). And, while there's enough meat in that family reunion saga for the film's plot, that's only one of its threads.

Screenwriters Peter Craig (Bad Boys for Life), Hillary Seitz (Eagle Eye) and Courtenay Miles (Mindhunter) have adapted The Unforgivable from three-part 2009 UK TV series Unforgiven; hence the jam-packed storyline that feels as if it's unwilling to trust that just one or two of its subplots could garner an emotional response. Also included: the stigma of life as a convicted cop-killer, a label that follows Ruth's every move; the sheriff's now-grown sons (Wonder Wheel's Tom Guiry and Dickinson's Will Pullen) and their revenge plans; a tentative connection with a colleague (Jon Bernthal, The Many Saints of Newark) at the fish factory where she works nights; the couple of well-off lawyers (The Suicide Squad's Viola Davis and Godfather of Harlem's Vincent D'Onofrio) who now live in the Snohomish County home that started all her trouble; and a secret that Ruth's been carrying for years.

Davis is sorely underused, but also exceptional in her few scenes, carving out as much space as she can in a film that always seems hurried. There should be urgency to The Unforgivable, of course, given Ruth's desperate focus on reconnecting with her sister, but there's a sensation of rushing rather than immediacy. Still, thanks to her two biggest female names — with one yearning yet closed off, and the other segueing from affronted to understanding, Bullock and Davis' scenes together are repeated highlights — filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher) ensures that neither tension nor intensity is lacking in her English-language debut. With cinematographer Guillermo Navarro (Dolittle), she also smartly mines the parallels between Seattle's grey climes and the many shades in Ruth's restarted life, but The Unforgivable still never manages to quite match its best elements.

BEST SELLERS

Best Sellers is the latest case of casting-by-internet, or so it seems, at least: pairing up Aubrey Plaza and Michael Caine smacks of a feverish film Twitter dream. They both turn in fine performances, too, with the former coming off career-best work in Black Bear to play independent publishing house editorial director Lucy Stanbridge, and the latter getting a meatier role than his last Christopher Nolan-directed bit-part (that'd be Tenet) as cantankerous writer Harris Shaw. Lucy needs a big bestseller to save the business, which she took over from her father. Harris has been typing out manuscripts for the five decades since his sole success, which made the elder Stanbridge, but hasn't submitted the one he's under contract for to the company. Enter Lucy's solution to her pressing problem, and one that the reclusive Harris only goes along with because he's short on cash.

Knowing how Best Sellers will turn out is as easy as knowing which marks the always-likeable Plaza and Caine usually hit. Indeed, it's knowing why their team-up instantly sounds like a winner on paper — she's acerbic, albeit in a slightly lighter mode than seen in her breakthrough Parks and Recreation role, while he relishes being a curmudgeonly, outdated drunk who yells "bullshite!" so much that it's soon a viral catchphrase. There's plenty to like about their scenes together, especially when sweetness seeps into the surrogate grandfather-granddaughter bond that develops while Lucy and Harris are on tour spruiking his new book anywhere and everywhere they can. In their solo moments, they both find rich notes of yearning and melancholy in their unlikely duo, too, cementing the film's tender but comic look at odd-couple kindred spirits.

Nevertheless, while boasting its own shelf of charms, Best Sellers is more standard than stellar. Mostly, actor-turned-directing first-timer Lina Roessler and screenwriter Anthony Grieco, a fellow thespian-turned-debutant, remain happy doing the minimum — which is understandable when you have Plaza and Caine leading the show, but keeps the film from cutting as deeply as it could. There's hints of savvy savageness in Harris' rallying against the literary world, the commerce of publishing and everything that comes with being a celebrity, although it always sticks to the expected. The same applies in Lucy's willingness to rethink the usual relationship between art and money in order to get the new book, The Future Is X-Rated, to strike a chord with readers as the pair make dive bars their offices on their cross-country road trip.

A movie can be nice and neat at once, and for one to be a pro while the other proves a con — and this is one of those movies. Even though it could've been so much more, Roessler's feature is an easy, undemanding and cosy watch, and its soft hues ensure that feeling remains as plain as an all-caps book cover. Best Sellers is also far too eager to stick to cliches, including that aforementioned gentle visual approach, which feels bluntly tailored to the weekday matinee crowd. Time might be against them — he's 88 now, and made it sound as if he might be done with acting while doing real-life promotional duties for Best Sellers, although he then walked that back — but here's hoping that Plaza and Caine get a second on-screen chance. Their first collaboration definitely whets the appetite for more; in fact, that's the firmest imprint it leaves.

STRAY

In gorgeous and glorious 2016 documentary Kedi, Istanbul's stray cats received their moment in the cinematic spotlight, and also expressed much about the Turkish city and its human inhabitants in the process. The result was perfect — purrfect, even — regardless of whether you're normally a feline fan. Indeed, it's the defining movie about mousers, and also about their relationship with both places and people (even trying to put the likes of Garfield, Cats, A Street Cat Named Bob and its sequel A Christmas Gift from Bob, some of cinema's other go-to kitties, in the same company is thoroughly pointless). With Stray, it's now their canine counterparts' time to shine, so animal-adoring film lovers can spread their love between cats and dogs equally. Where Kedi elicited purrs of elation, this dog-centric delight is a piece of tail-waggingly tender and thoughtful cinema, too.

Istanbul isn't just an arbitrary choice of setting for this compassionate film; it has a 'no kill, no capture' law when it comes to the dogs roaming its streets, which is why there's more than 100,000 of them scampering around. That leaves documentarian Elizabeth Lo spoiled for choice, but she only spends time with a few of those woofers. They span street veterans Zeytin and Nazar, both of whom prowl the pavement as comfortably as they would someone's home, as well as puppy Kartal. As they sniff and scurry their way through their days, Lo stitches together a perceptive and textured portrait of their lives, of the city around them, and of the people who help and are helped by them — and, just like in Kedi (which she wasn't affiliated with at all), there's plenty of two-legged Istanbulites who prove forever changed by these canines' presence. Here, there's a group of young street-dwelling Syrian refugees that are especially touched by Zeytin, Nazar and Kartal as well.

Making her first full-length film after a background in doco shorts, the director/cinematographer/editor lets her four-legged subjects be the stars, even though humans are an inescapable part of their existence. Lo is also happy to let her audience observe her furry heroes. More than that, she frequently places the camera at canine height so that viewers feel as if they're seeing the world through a dog's eyes, or getting as close as they can (far closer than simply watching your own pet on a home video, for instance). Forget saccharine Hollywood flicks that use that idea as a gimmick (see: A Dog's Purpose and A Dog's Journey — or, better yet, don't see them because they're terrible). In Stray, immersion and insight are the key aims. And, they're feats that the soulful and contemplative movie repeatedly, patiently and ruminatively delivers.

The result is a doggie treat of a crisply lensed doco, and one of the biggest joys of both Kedi and Stray alike is the sensory experience that comes with their on-the-ground approach. Neither movie merely wants to just show audiences how their chosen animals live, but to convey as much detail as possible — which is where that canny camerawork, and also the feature's naturalistic soundscape, barks loudest. Some elements of Stray do strive a little too hard to resonate, though, such as its philosophical quotes about dogs and composer Ali Helnwein's score. But just as it's impossible to begrudge a pooch for being too energetic, it's difficult to fault a film this shrewd, earnest and heartfelt about the crucial role that canines inhabit in human civilisation, the many ways we benefit, and the sheer magic of a pure pupper-people connection.

CRY MACHO

Clint Eastwood has already had his animal phase, thanks to 1978's Every Which Way but Loose and 1980's Any Which Way You Can. At the age of 91, he's already had almost every phase in his career he's going to both in front of and behind the lens. Still, with Cry Macho, he takes the road already well-travelled by seemingly every other on-screen action star and tough guy. Eastwood has been far more than that across his filmography, but he's now buddying up with a child as everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vin Diesel to Dwayne Johnson and Liam Neeson have before him. Indeed, Cry Macho overtly resembles one of the latter's most recent movies, The Marksman, which only hit cinemas earlier in 2021. It stemmed from a former Eastwood collaborator, in fact, and felt like it should've starred him — which leaves his latest following in its footsteps.

They aren't impressive footsteps to retread, although Eastwood and screenwriter Nick Schenk (a veteran of the actor/director's Gran Torino and The Mule) help imbue their feature with more depth than its predecessor. Their approach is straightforward and easy, yet it works, in no small part because seeing Eastwood stride across the frame always brings his wealth of prior roles to mind. Cry Macho leans into and toys with that past. That's an apt move in another way, given that this film could've been made with this star/helmer in the 80s, but he passed on it. Schwarzenegger also cycled in and out of the project a decade ago, but it seems this movie needed to wait for Eastwood. The throwback vibe it sports — that comes as much from it being penned by N Richard Nash in the 70s, rejected as a screenplay, then turned into a novel, as from being set in 1979 and 1980.

A rodeo star whose life changed via injury (his own) and tragedy (losing his wife and son), Mike Milo (Eastwood) is content enough with his quiet twilight years. Alas, his old boss Howard (country singer Dwight Yoakam) now says that the cowboy owes him a favour. The rancher's teenage son Rafo (Eduardo Minett, La rosa de Guadalupe) apparently needs rescuing from his mother (Fernanda Urrejola, Party of Five), and Mike is the man reluctantly tasked with travelling to Mexico City to carry out the job. Unsurprisingly, the situation isn't as clearcut as Howard contends, with corrupt Federales, car thieves and other unhappy strangers on their path all muddying the road home even further. But a forced stopover in a small town, where cantina owner Marta (Natalia Traven, Soulmates) becomes the new female influence in their lives, helps forge a rapport.

There's also a rooster called Macho, which is Rafo's best friend and his source of income via cockfighting — and the reason that Eastwood growls out the line "if a guy wants to name his cock Macho, that's fine with me". Mike doesn't take to the fowl at first but, of course, his way with animals is one of his defining traits. Cry Macho's chief struggle — its balance of what gleams and what's trite — shines through in this rooster relationship. There's something moving in the bond that obviously forms between Mike and Macho, as it does between Mike and Rafo, but it's also happy to be overly mawkish. The film looks the sun-drenched western part, and Eastwood plays his own part with grizzled grace; however, those uneasy balancing acts just keep popping up. Here, reflecting on what it really means to be macho and a hero goes hand in hand with writing off sexually confident women and having the movie's two primary female characters basically throw themselves at Eastwood, for instance.

PALAZZO DI COZZO

If Franco Cozzo was to spruik Palazzo Di Cozzo the same way he's promoted his baroque furniture business over the decades, he'd likely repeat one phrase: "grand documentary, grand documentary, grand documentary." He'd do so because that's what he's known for, and because his ads peppered with "grand sale, grand sale, grand sale" are a part of Melbourne's history, even inspiring a single that hit the charts. On the city's TV screens, Cozzo has been the face of his eponymous homewares store, so much so that he's a local celebrity. His lively exclamations fill much of this doco, too, through archival clips, observational footage of him at work and a to-camera interview.

In the latter chat, he sits on one of the ornate chairs he's made a fortune selling, and answers interview questions like he's holding court — and for Melburnians familiar with his name and citywide fame, and for the uninitiated elsewhere, Palazzo Di Cozzo explains both the reason he's regarded as such a prominent personality. Written and directed by feature-length first-timer Madeleine Martiniello (The Unmissables), the result is a film about the hardworking jump its subject took from arriving in Australia from Sicily in 1956 to becoming part of the cultural fabric of his new home. Speaking about the mural painted of Cozzo in Footscray, graffiti artist Heesco notes that his tale is "the migrant dream"; however, while this affectionate film happily stresses that point, it also blissfully takes the easiest route.

As a straightforward chronicle that covers the basics — who Cozzo is, what he's done, and also where, when, why and how — Palazzo Di Cozzo ticks the expected boxes in an informative and engaging-enough fashion. It tracks his story from making the move to Melbourne by boat and starting out as a door-to-door salesman, through to his 70s and 80s heyday, his frequent media presence, and his standing today. It lets his personality lead the way, too. And, the film also spends some of its early moments chatting to people who've decked out their houses with his wares, or watched their parents to do the same, to underscore what the rococo aesthetic has meant to Italian expats as an opulent slice of home.

But even when one interviewee is in tears recounting how hard her mum and dad must've worked to spend $17,000 on Cozzo furniture in the 70s, there's always a sense that Palazzo Di Cozzo isn't scratching as deep as it should. The documentary doesn't avoid moments that Cozzo would rather forget, and even shows him getting irate when questioning heads in a direction he doesn't like; however, it also indulges rather than interrogates the persona that's leapt up around him over the years. Cue too many instances of people parroting his style of English back to him, and indulging a cartoonish stereotype — and very little effort to understand why that's the image Cozzo chose, what his popularity for playing that part says about Australia and its attitudes towards migrants, and also what the nostalgia afforded his way now says as well.

Palazzo Di Cozzo is now screening in Sydney and Melbourne after opening in Brisbane earlier in the year when New South Wales and Victoria were in lockdown.

If you're wondering what else is currently screening in Australian cinemas — or has been lately — check out our rundown of new films released in Australia on July 1, July 8, July 15, July 22 and July 29; August 5, August 12, August 19 and August 26; September 2, September 9, September 16, September 23 and September 30; October 7, October 14, October 21 and October 28; and November 4, November 11 and November 18.

For Sydney specifically, you can take a look at out our rundown of new films that released in Sydney cinemas when they reopened on October 11, and what opened on October 14, October 21 and October 28 as well.

And for Melbourne, you can check out our top picks from when outdoor cinemas reopened on October 22 — and from when indoor cinemas did the same on October 29.

You can also read our full reviews of a heap of recent movies, such as Herself, Little Joe, Black Widow, The Sparks Brothers, Nine Days, Gunpowder Milkshake, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Old, Jungle Cruise, The Suicide Squad, Free Guy, Respect, The Night House, Candyman, Annette, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Streamline, Coming Home in the Dark, Pig, Big Deal, The Killing of Two Lovers, Nitram, Riders of Justice, The Alpinist, A Fire Inside, Lamb, The Last Duel, Malignant, The Harder They Fall, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Halloween Kills, Passing, Eternals, The Many Saints of Newark, Julia, No Time to Die, The Power of the Dog, Tick, Tick... Boom!, Zola, Last Night in Soho, Blue Bayou and The Rescue.