The 10 Best Movies in Theaters Right Now

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:

10. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Release Date: September 6, 2024
Director: Tim Burton
Stars: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 104 minutes

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice takes Burton back to what he does best: silly-scary horror-comedy that at once feels lovingly homespun and vibrantly realized. It’s a trifling diversion, but it’s also Burton’s most comfortable, freewheeling and satisfying movie in years. Years after her encounter with Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) and the Maitlands, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), still decked out in her goth attire, is now the host of a tacky haunted house reality show called Ghost House, produced by her overzealous boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia receives word from her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) that her father Charles has died in a morbidly comic manner that allows him to be portrayed as headless once he’s revealed in the afterlife (a necessary choice to eschew the presence of disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones). Lydia, Delia and Rory pick up Lydia’s semi-estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), whose disbelief in all this ghost crap only makes her further resent her mom following the death of her father. They return to the town of Winter River for the funeral—and to sell off the old house that the Deetz family once shared with the spirits of the Maitlands who, according to Lydia, have since figured out how to “move on.” Meanwhile, Betelgeuse is on his daily grind as a working stiff in the afterlife, now a manager in a paper-pusher office staffed by a bunch of those great shrunken-head guys from the first movie. Luckily, the laxity that Burton brings to Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s busy screenplay helps make the frivolous stakes more feature than bug, as do the commitment of the stacked cast and the return to wonderfully realized practical sight gags and spooky, neon-laden sets. The world of Beetlejuice is an exceedingly strange one, and the performers, new and old, ride the right tonal wavelength that intersects between the absurd grotesquery and the earnest character drama the script attempts to ground them in as we ping-pong between the living world and the kitschy, uncanny world of the dead.—Trace Sauveur

9. Never Let Go

Release Date: September 20, 2024
Director: Alexandre Aja
Stars: Halle Berry, Percy Daggs IV, Anthony B. Jenkins
Rating: R
Runtime: 102 minutes

“We’re the world now.” That’s what a mother (Halle Berry) tells her twin sons Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) in Never Let Go, and maybe it’s not as grandiose as it sounds. Though the movie is not explicitly or maybe even implicitly about the pandemic, the events of the last five years do provide a plausible reason to not immediately doubt the mom’s claim. Plenty may well identify with the scary simplicity of forcibly shoving the rest of the world out of mind in order to survive in one of our own (attempted) making. That, and Halle Berry has played some fiercely protective moms in her time; who are we to doubt her sincerity? Sincerity isn’t really the issue in Never Let Go anyway – though the movie does nevertheless sow seeds of doubt about the state of the world early on, which helpfully mitigates the initial, sinking feeling that it’s teeing up an obvious twist. Nolan, Samuel and their mom live in an isolated cabin, and are only permitted to enter the surrounding woods when tied to a lengthy series of ropes, tethering them to their home at all times and distances. Supposedly, this protects everyone by literally tying them to a blessed home. The tension of Never Let Go doesn’t derive wholly from whether a mother is deceiving her children, or even from how “real” the monsters in the woods are. Quiet, menacing contemplation is not always a strength of horror director Alexandre Aja, but versatility is; his previous movie was a single-location sci-fi thriller called Oxygen, preceded by the creature feature Crawl; he’s also done supernatural and comedic variations on the genre. Some of his movies have truly gnarly gore, and one of the finer touches in Never Let Go is actually its strategic gratuity – how some small but appreciably nasty bits of business squirm their way into a story that doesn’t strictly require them. The movie’s lack of a clearly defined villain might alienate some genre fans; so might the lack of an easily trackable metaphor. Others will find it a relief. Never Let Go is a horror movie more interested in what it can evoke than what it can state or even imply.–Jesse Hassenger

8. Eureka 

Release Date: September 20, 2024
Director: Lisandro Alonso
Stars: Viggo Mortensen, Chiara Mastroianni, Alaina Clifford, Sadie Lapointe
Rating: NR
Runtime: 147 minutes

Lushly lensed and intensely cerebral, Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka is on par with the experimental Argentine director’s previous output. Granted, it’s now been exactly a decade since his last feature, Jauja, screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, these two films feel inextricably linked: they both feature animal spirit guides, colonized landscapes and Viggo Mortensen as a frontiersman searching for a lost daughter. What sets Eureka apart, however, is its concerted focus on a broad Indigenous perspective. Instead of being relegated to the fringes, the film’s Native characters are consciously centered. As viewers exhaustively follow their daily routines, the lingering effects of imperialist violence across the Americas are deeply felt. Though each narrative is carefully blended from one to the next, Eureka is best internalized as an immersive exploration of Indigenous identity in response to white supremacist subjugation. These sinister forces have manifested throughout the Americas since European colonizers first set foot on these shores, and they continue to target Native Americans as the far-right rises to power in the region.–Natalia Keogan

7. Girls Will Be Girls

Release Date: September 13, 2024
Director: Shuchi Talati
Stars: Preeti Panigrahi, Kani Kusruti, Kesav Binoy Kiron
Rating: R
Runtime: 119 minutes

A tangible takedown of patriarchal hypocrisy, and how these larger social forces impact women in specific ways, Girls Will Be Girls is a bold and thoughtfully shot debut from writer/director Shuchi Talati. Complicating the story of Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) and Sri’s (Kesav Binoy Kiron) boarding-school romance with erotic thriller psychology and cultural observation, Girls Will Be Girls documents coming-of-age moments with refreshing spirit and explicitness. Adding in the complex role of Mira’s wannabe cool-mom Anila (Kani Kusruti) can make the movie seem like it’s juggling quite a bit, but within Talati’s confident, cramped, physically intimate frames, the latent energy is enough to carry us forward through the movie’s sometimes-warring interests. With beautiful colors, lived-in performances and a searing perspective on Indian society, Girls Will Be Girls is a heightened, beautiful, painful return to high school—with enough uncomfortable twists to make you squirm in your seat.–Jacob Oller

6. Inside Out 2

Release Date: June 14, 2024
Director: Kelsey Mann
Stars: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Kensington Tallman, Liza Lapira, Tony Hale, Lewis Black, Phyllis Smith, Ayo Edebiri, Lilimar, Grace Lu, Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan, Paul Walter Hauser, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ron Funches
Rating: PG
Runtime: 96 minutes

Inside Out 2, the sequel to the Oscar-winning film, revisits Riley (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) in the full-blown throes of adolescence. Thirteen-year-old Riley is about to graduate from eighth grade. In the first movie, Riley was adapting to life in California. Now Riley is adapting to leaving middle school behind for high school. Parents of teens will be charmed (and definitely feel validated) by how accurately the movie captures this period of time.“Family island” is blocked by “friendship island” in Riley’s brain. A construction crew comes through her mind and posts a “Pardon Our Dust. Puberty is Messy.” sign. That’s when all the new emotions descend on Riley. There’s Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my personal favorite, Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). With her head constantly bent over, Ennui, who is obviously French, is too exhausted to even get up off the couch and controls Riley’s console from her phone. Exarchopoulos’ droll delivery is one of the film’s many highlights. The script by Meg LeFauve (who also wrote Inside Out) and Dave Holstein perfectly captures our complex minds. Nostalgia (June Squibb) humorously keeps trying to make an appearance. Suppressed emotions, brainstorms, dark secrets and streams of consciousness are all brought to life. As in the first movie, Inside Out 2 is vibrant and full of color with fun, tongue-in-cheek visuals. (Sarcasm literally causes a chasm). And these new emotions have a darker spin: Anxiety is bright orange, a pulsating bundle of nerves; Envy is green, naturally; and Embarrassment gets more pink with each passing humiliation. Director Kelsey Mann keeps the action zipping along, while Amy Poehler brings that same determined effervescence to Joy. And Hawke, as the increasingly frantic emotion who thinks she’s helping until she realizes too late that she’s not, plays Anxiety just right. I took my very own Riley to the screening. After the movie, which she enjoyed, she told me she felt “called out” by much of what she had seen. “Is that okay?” I asked. “Yes,” she responded. “At least now you know what’s going on in my head.”—Amy Amatangelo

5. Sing Sing

Release Date: July 12, 2024
Director: Greg Kwedar
Stars: Colman Domingo, Clarence Maclin, Sean San José, Paul Raci
Rating: R
Runtime: 107 minutes

Greg Kwedar’s sensitive, joyous Sing Sing does more than simply dramatize the workings of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program, it incorporates participants into the very fabric of the film’s DNA. Most of the cast is composed of former New York prisoners who had gotten involved in RTA during their incarceration, turning the film’s depiction of a prison theater production into a reflection of honest, shared experiences by the performers. But, while much of Sing Sing’s success is owed to the moving nature of these men’s reality, they are not used as props. Sing Sing is an emotional prison drama that doesn’t beg for your tears amid all of the typical heartstring-tugging signifiers that come with the genre’s territory. It represents these lives sincerely and avoids grandiose histrionics, melding the real experiences of these men within the fantasy of filmmaking to find graceful emotional truths. The element of unreality comes in the form of Sing Sing’s lead performer: Colman Domingo portrays an interpretation of the real-life John “Divine G” Whitfield, a long-time participant in RTA who now helps lead the program, alongside being a hobbyist playwright when he’s not working on how he’ll convince the review board that he deserves parole for the crime that he was wrongly imprisoned for. The heart of Sing Sing lives and breathes in the world of theater, but more broadly acts as a statement regarding the importance and universality of artistic creation. Cinematographer Pat Scola captures events on 16mm film, and the final product is wonderfully textured and vibrant. Flashy camera theatrics are abandoned for a concentration on the performers, and every first-time film actor populating the screen effortlessly fills out the frame. But, more than anything, Sing Sing’s most productive quality is how it builds out cathartic character development through the process of creating art, and in doing so carves out a space for men to express a level of emotional honesty that’s typically discouraged. In Sing Sing, healing is forever an ongoing process, but one you’re never alone in accomplishing. –Trace Sauveur

4. A Different Man

Year: 2024
Directors: Aaron Schimberg
Stars: Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson
Rating: R
Runtime: 112 minutes

You can change your hair, you can change your clothes, you can surgically change your face to that of Hollywood hunk Sebastian Stan, and you’ll still be the same awkward, unlikeable weirdo on the inside. Or at least, that’s what writer/director Aaron Schimberg asserts in A Different Man, an exhilarating blend of body horror, dark comedy, sci-fi and romance. Even with all the power of the 21st century’s most scientifically advanced beautifying technology, the human race has still not figured out a medical surgery to make us better people, perhaps because this wouldn’t be a particularly profitable industry. It’s not that Edward (Sebastian Stan), an unsuccessful actor afflicted with neurofibromatosis, is a particularly vain individual. It’s once Edward abandons his own name for a fake sounding one and forsakes his former nice guy identity for a new debaucherous life as a wealthy real estate asshole that we realize, hey, maybe this wasn’t such a great guy to begin with. On top of that, maybe I, the viewer, am also an asshole for assuming Edward was a decent guy just because his face was deformed. And then the charismatic Oswald (Schimberg’s previous collaborator Adam Pearson) enters their lives stage right, and suddenly, he’s everywhere. Pearson is so compelling here that I hope it becomes his new calling card after long being known as “the guy from Under the Skin.” A Different Man is a major work—even as it shapeshifts from Cronenberg to Kaurismäki, developing into new territory at every turn, Schimberg never loses sight of his central questions: What makes us who we are? What does it mean to be a good person in this weird but beautiful world, surrounded by other people? Without providing precise answers, or resorting to the tired old cliché of “beauty is not skin deep,” Schimberg throws us in a new direction.—Katarina Docalovich

3. Shaun of the Dead

Year: 2004
Director: Edgar Wright
Stars: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton
Rating: R
Runtime: 97 minutes

Together, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead established precedents for the “modern” zombie film that have more or less continued to this day. The former made “zombies” scary again, and the latter showed that the cultural zeitgeist of zombiedom (which was picking up around this point) could be mined for huge laughs as well. Most importantly, the two types of films could exist side by side. Shaun of the Dead makes a wry, totally valid criticism of modern, digital, white-collar life through its wonderful build-up and tracking shots, which show slacker Shaun wandering his neighborhood failing to even realize that a zombie apocalypse has happened. Once he and his oaf of a friend finally realize what’s happening and take up arms to protect their friends and loved ones, the film becomes a fast-paced, funny and surprisingly emotional action-comedy. Few horror comedies have actually combined the elements of humor and serious horror the way this one does in certain scenes–just go back and watch the part where David is dragged through the window of The Winchester by zombies and literally torn to pieces. It’s a film that works on so many levels, and manages to be uproariously funny while still being quite faithful to the fidelity of Romero-style zombies. Much in the same way as Zombieland (a definite spiritual successor), it shows that whether the zombies are “scary” is ultimately a matter of how everyone reacts to them. Shaun of the Dead was so momentous that it’s next to impossible to make a zombie comedy at this point without being accused of ripping it off–take Fido, a film that seems based entirely on the “domesticated zombie” gag at the end of this film. —Jim Vorel

2. Between the Temples

Release Date: August 23, 2024
Director: Nathan Silver
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Carol Kane, Dolly De Leon, Caroline Aaron, Robert Smigel, Madeline Weinstein
Rating: R
Runtime: 111 minutes

“A widower and his old music teacher prepare for a late-in-life bat mitzvah” sounds a bit like the set-up for a joke. A bartender in Between the Temples deadpans about as much, undercutting the hilarious, vigorous, emotionally rich movie with exactly the right amount of wry self-awareness. Filmmaker Nathan Silver re-teams with his Thirst Street co-writer C. Mason Wells (not to mention cinematographer Sean Price Williams and editor John Magary; this thing is an indie talent smorgasbord) for an endlessly energetic look at two lost souls’ desperate search for something to hold onto. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) isn’t looking for love, or even purpose, really. He just needs to get through the day. Carla (Carol Kane) isn’t here to help him, but to knock herself out of a rut. Their spark, never cloying and always quippy, matches all the heat radiating from Between the Temples‘ grainy ’70s aesthetic into its snowy setting. Its quick and clever script, enhanced by plenty of improvisation, is matched by a movie that never quits reaching into its bag of invigorating tricks. The movie looks fantastic, and it never stops looking fantastic in new ways, with fun flourishes of style juicing up every sequence: We zero in on these two lives through iris shots and reflections, zipping around alongside them like Benny Hill, getting more in their heads with intense zooms, jump cuts, split diopters and split screens—Between the Temples has it all. And all this flash piles up underneath the two engrossing central performances to build a light-hearted foundation from which yearning can naturally blossom. As Ben teaches Carla for her upcoming coming-of-age, we’re swept away by genuine connection, convincingly sung from the bimah.–Jacob Oller

1. Longlegs

Release Date: July 12, 2024
Director: Oz Perkins
Stars: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood, Kiernan Shipka
Rating: R
Runtime: 101 minutes

The first thing I wanted to do after seeing Longlegs is take a shower. Some horror movies have you looking over your shoulder on the way out of the theater, jumping at shadows in the parking lot. These are the horror movies that follow you. Longlegs doesn’t follow you. You’re drenched in Longlegs. It’s all over you—in your hair, on your clothes—by the time the credits roll. Its fear is less tangible than a slasher or a monster, even less than a demon. It’s just something in the air, in the back of your mind, like the buzz of a fluorescent lamp. Oz Perkins’ Satanic serial killer hunt is his most accessible movie yet, putting the filmmaker’s lingering, atmospheric power towards a logline The Silence of the Lambs made conventional. Precisely crafted and just odd enough to disarm you, allowing its evil to fully seep in, Longlegs is a riveting tale of influence and immersion. After FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) successfully, and mysteriously, locates a killer on little more than a hunch, her charming boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), assigns the quiet savant to a long-dormant investigation into a suspect known only by how he signs the coded letters found at the crime scenes: Longlegs (Nicolas Cage). Only, the mystery to be solved isn’t Clue. You’re not filling in weapon, location, suspect. The question crawling under Longlegs’ skin is how grounded this case actually is, whether it’s a truly by-the-book procedural or whether that book is bound in skin and filled with spells. Lee is tight-lipped and uneasy in her own skin, a child’s soft voice wrapped in a blue FBI windbreaker. But she doesn’t balk at corpses, or head for the hills once she realizes she’s on Longlegs’ radar. Longlegs could also feel like familiar territory for Cage, at first glance. And that’s all we get at first, glances. Like any good monster movie, we’re denied a close look at Longlegs for a decent chunk of the movie’s three segments, but once we see him, that’s all you can think about. You see how a demonic seed has been planted and left to its own devices, down in some forgotten cellar, festering in the dark. As Perkins’ story progresses, you wonder where else those seeds have spread. It’s rotten Americana, every god-fearing Bible-thumper’s fears proven right. Longlegs contains a handful of impressively controlled performances, a dilapidated aesthetic rich with negative space, a queasy score, a methodical but always gripping pace, and one of the most original and upsetting horror villains in a long while. Perkins’ haunted vision is so convincing, you also might feel like scrubbing it off of you after you’ve hustled back to the safety of your home.–Jacob Oller

Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.

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