AMERICAN DOCTOR
It’s hard to make a documentary about Israel-Palestine that doesn’t feel overtly political. But Poh Si Teng’s unflinching and courageous exposé — a look at three U.S. physicians volunteering in Gaza — is a story in which medicine and moral decency take precedence over partisanship. The film smartly eschews the big picture to focus on the practical reality of surgeons trying to save lives; when kids are brought into the ER after a bombing, their suffering is unbearable to witness no matter what side of the conflict you’re on. — JORDAN MINTZER
AMERICAN PACHUCO: THE LEGEND OF LUIS VALDEZ
Edward James Olmos narrates this enlightening and entertaining archive-packed doc about groundbreaking Chicano playwright and director Luis Valdez. Charting Valdez’s rise from son of migrant farmers to director of a Hollywood hit (La Bamba), David Alvarado’s film comes at a time when the fight for equality and recognition waged by Latinos in the U.S. is making headlines. Understanding Valdez’s life and work is a way to enrich one’s understanding of what it means to be American. — J.M.
GIVE ME THE BALL!
Liz Garbus and Elizabeth Wolff celebrate tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King with infectious admiration and fondness in this nonfiction feature, which possesses the propulsive excitement of a great narrative. Weaving archival material around a captivating present-day sit-down with the candid, funny octogenarian, it’s an exhilarating sports movie and an inspiring tribute to a game-changer in women’s rights and LGBTQ visibility. — DAVID ROONEY
THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE
John Wilson (creator of HBO’s How to With John Wilson) learns about a building material, Italian wax sculptures, New York City housing initiatives and more in this typically quirky, revelatory, touching doc. It’s all a gateway for Wilson to ponder permanence and immortality, which things society preserves and which we allow to crack and crumble. I doubt any doc will make me laugh harder this year, but the film is heartbreaking in addition to being patently absurd. — DANIEL FIENBERG
I WANT YOUR SEX
Starring Olivia Wilde as a visual artist-provocateur and Cooper Hoffman as her employee/sex slave, Gregg Araki’s first feature in 11 years affectionately teases Zoomers with its playful dissection of consent and control, freedom and captivity, self-denial and exultant hedonism. And even if it threatens to run out of steam in the last section, the movie is a blast — witty and jubilant — demonstrating that at 66, the filmmaker has lost none of his youthful spark. — D.R.
THE INVITE
Wilde’s third directorial feature — a chamber piece about two couples, adapted from a 2020 Spanish film— is a smart, sophisticated entertainment that savages the institution of marriage, dangles the promise of sexual rescue and then brings the walls crashing down — until a window of hope gets cracked open. There are weak patches, but the four actors (Wilde, MVP Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz) keep it buoyant, with a crackling energy that makes the endless streams of overlapping talk play like jazz. — D.R.
JOSEPHINE
Drawn from a scarring experience in writer-director Beth de Araújo’s’s childhood, this unflinching drama puts us inside the head of the titular 8-year-old girl as she struggles to work through her feelings after witnessing a vicious attack on a woman in the park. Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan play Josephine’s parents, but it’s young Mason Reeves who holds the film’s center in a remarkably assured performance, bouncing between fragility and resilience like a rag doll one minute and a pugnacious fighter the next. — D.R.
KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE
Incorporating footage shot by the author’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Alex Gibney’s stirringly intimate doc captures the strength and resilience of its subject, who was the victim of a shocking 2022 stabbing attack at an education institution in New York. The film traces Rushdie’s life and career — starting with his childhood in India — deftly blending archival material, interviews, animation, images and film clips to reveal a prickly intellectual mellowed by time and experience. — D.R.
LEVITICUS
Two Aussie high-school boys are stalked by a sinister force that, perversely, takes the form of the person they most want in the world — each other — in Adrian Chiarella’s stylish, urgent queer horror film. There’s ample gore and jumpy moments, but the true scariness here is of the forlorn kind; leads Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen play the mounting nightmare with ache and desperation, elevating the emotional tenor of a dolefully eerie movie. — RICHARD LAWSON
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM
Shot by the late William Greaves at Duke Ellington’s Harlem brownstone in 1972 and completed by son David Greaves, this rich, gorgeously restored doc looks back on the Harlem Renaissance and key figures of the movement. Writers, artists, performers, poets and librarians all gathered for an intellectual salon to discuss their work and the contributions of deceased contemporaries. Now, in 2026, none of these great minds is still living. Isn’t it wonderful to have the opportunity to see and hear them again? — JOURDAIN SEARLES
THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK
Writer-director Noah Segan’s quiet knockout of a feature gives John Turturro his best film role in years. Unshowy but magnificent, the actor plays a nimble-fingered New York City thief who still carries himself with dignity despite a lifetime of regrets and a world gradually leaving him behind — at least until he unwittingly targets the wrong mark and has to act fast to protect the people he cares about. The movie is intoxicating not just for the depth of its character study but also for the textures of the universe it depicts. — D.R.
SHAME AND MONEY
In director Visar Morina’s keenly observed Kosovo-set drama, an act of treachery uproots a hardworking couple from their dairy farm. Trying to survive in the capital, they face a high cost of living and limited job opportunities, depending on the double-edged sword of help from relatives. As parents determined to maintain a strong front, Astrit Kabashi and Flonja Kodheli give performances of exquisite understatement in a quietly wrenching story of dwindling hope and mounting tension. — SHERI LINDEN
SOUL PATROL
Weaving together eloquent visuals with energy and deep feeling, J.M. Harper’s moving, distinctive doc delves into the memories of a half-dozen soldiers from the U.S. Army’s first all-Black special operations team in Vietnam. The tight-knit unit was tasked with some of the most dangerous missions of the conflict at a time when the “real war,” as one of the film’s subjects calls it — the movement for Black Power and against U.S. militarism — was being waged back home. — S.L.
WHEN A WITNESS RECANTS
Dawn Porter’s gripping doc takes a multipronged approach that includes new interviews and deposition videos to examine a case of wrongful conviction. The Baltimore natives known as the Harlem Park Three, sentenced as teens to life in prison for a murder they had nothing to do with and exonerated 36 years later, are compelling participants here. So is the neighbor who was pressured by police to corroborate a concocted story. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Baltimore kid at the time, provides piercing commentary. — S.L.
WICKER
Olivia Colman plays a fisherwoman in rural 1600s England who asks the local basket weaver to build her a husband made of the titular material. The resulting pile of sticks, played by Alexander Skarsgard, turns out to be both a tireless lover and handy around the house. All that whimsy and quirk might have been cloying, but the film has real things on its mind, including the mundane disappointments and insecurities of adult life. Writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer handle it all with irreverence and compassion. — R.L.
This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
