Barbie / Baumbach, Noah

To live in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis. Or you're a Ken.

The Book of Clarence.

Fast Charlie.

The Iron Claw.

Night Swim.

Blast of silence / Baron, Allen

Professional killer Frankie Bono returns after an apparent absence to Manhattan during the Christmas season to assassinate the gangster Troiano.

The learning tree / Criterion Collection (Firm)

Based on Parks' semi-autobiographical novel, the film follows the journey of Newt Winger, a teenage descendant of Exodusters growing up in rural Kansas in the 1920s, as he experiences the bittersweet flowering of first love, finds his relationship with a close friend tested, and navigates the injustices embedded within a racist legal and educational system. Exquisitely capturing the bucolic splendor of its heartland setting, this landmark film tempers nostalgia with an incisive understanding of the harsh realities, hard-won lessons, and often wrenching moral choices that shape the road to self-determination of the young Black man at its center.

Lone star / Borrego, Jesse

A keen observer of America's social fabric, writer-director John Sayles uncovers the haunted past buried beneath a small Texas border town in this sprawling neo-western mystery. When a skeleton is discovered in the desert, lawman Sam Deeds, son of a legendary local sheriff, begins an investigation that will have profound implications both for him personally and for all of Rio County, a place still reckoning with its history of racial violence. Sayles's masterful film is novelistic in its intricacy.

Nanny / Amazon Studios

Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant, takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy white family in New York City. Separated from her son and casually exploited by her employers, Aisha finds herself consumed by unsettling visions and a growing rage, one that could either destroy or empower her.

The others / Amenábar, Alejandro

A remote manor; hushed, candlelit atmosphere; and shivery, supernatural menace. With his first English-language feature, Chilean Spanish writer-director-composer Alejandro Ameǹbar resurrected the classic gothic chiller to create a ghost story of uncommon emotional resonance. Nicole Kidman stars as a World War II-era mother whose imperiousness masks a terrifying pain, as she keeps her light-sensitive children enshrouded in darkness on her country estate. The arrival of three new servants punctures her insular world and seems to disturb the balance between the living and the dead. With each stunning twist and turn, Ameǹbar immerses us more deeply in a realm haunted not only by spirits but also by guilt, trauma, and repression.