It's been a tough week. You deserve some escapist fun this weekend, particularly in the form of hiding out in a movie theater and watching one of these films recommended by our critics. Plus, find complete listings for movie times on our Things To Do calendar.

NEW RELEASES

1. Brooklyn
"It's refreshing to see this largely internal, cerebral journey of an introverted young woman play out onscreen, and Nick Hornby's screenplay, never afraid of sentimentality, keeps such a contained narrative from feeling too cold or distant. That's right: Brooklyn is good because it's so wholesome, so emotive, so free of irony, without qualifiers, and your grandma will probably like it a lot." -Megan Burbank

2. Heart of A Dog
"If you've doubted Laurie Anderson's Renaissance woman credentials, her great new autobiographical film Heart of a Dog will convince you otherwise. She directed, wrote, scored, coproduced, coshot, and did the voice-over for this elegiac tone poem about love, death, and dealing with loss." -Dave Segal

3. In Jackson Heights
"Seattle needs to sit down and watch this documentary. Wiseman's film turns out to be a document of a world entering its last days. The rich mix of cultures he meticulously and even impersonally captures will become a thing of the past. You have to wonder how bad it's going to have to get in Seattle before someone does something about it." -Charles Mudede

4. The Night Before
"The Night Before might be the only Christmas movie that offers both a whole lot of dick pics and the sad, lonely sense of desperation that defines the holidays. But then Seth Rogen throws up all over a midnight mass, and all is right with the world." -Erik Henriksen

5. Trumbo
"Award season must be around the corner, because movies like Trumbo come out only when they can be considered. This kind of movie tends to be set in some yesteryear and plays jazz, smokes heavily, and wears a long silk dress as it approaches. Not to suggest that Roach doesn't do a quality job here—as biopics go, this representation of Dalton Trumbo, a golden age screenwriter, is up there with the best." -Jacob Lichty

6. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2
"The whole thing makes a great case for not splitting up your thrilling conclusion, no matter how tempting the cash payout. Because now that we have this movie, you could skip Mockingjay 1 entirely and not miss anything but inessential pouting." -Megan Burbank
(Yes, we know this isn't a recommendation, but we also know you're probably going to be tempted to see it)

LIMITED RUN

7. Metropolitan Opera Live Broadcast: Lulu
"One of the most important—not to mention notorious—stage works of the 20th century, Lulu is the drama of a young woman who sexually and emotionally dominates a wide range of willing victims, both male and female." -Metropolitan Opera

8. The Night Porter
This 1974 cult classic art film from Italian director Liliana Cavani contains elements of "Nazisploitation" and S&M obsession.

9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
How does a new generation of fighters for trans rights inherit Dr. Frank N. Furter of Transsexual, Transylvania (played by Tim Curry), in this campy 1975 horror musical? Susan Sarandon costars, along with ripped fishnet stockings, corsets, and the dreams of science fiction.

10. The Royal Tenenbaums
"Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Owen Wilson, and Bill Murray (rocking a Professor Barnacle beard) are an extended family of neurotic geniuses whose bastard of a patriarch (Hackman) wants to bring them closer together. Too bad they hate his guts. The film is hilariously funny, dryly tender, and impeccably designed." -Sean Nelson

CONTINUING RUNS

11. Grandma
"The year 2007 saw the release of Juno, Waitress, and Knocked Up—all movies whose protagonists face unplanned pregnancies, but none seek an abortion, despite being in situations where it might be a good idea. It was as if the filmmakers didn't think a movie about an abortion could be interesting. But Paul Weitz's Grandma is evidence to the contrary." -Megan Burbank

12. The Martian
"I don’t know how high you’d have to be to not want to see a Ridley Scott film about Matt Damon getting stranded on Mars, based on Andy Weir’s startlingly sharp novel, and costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Donald Glover, and Jeff Daniels, among others." -Sean Nelson

13. Room
"Watch it as a sensitive and insightful character study, or watch it for "Daring Escape from Rape Shed!"—the action sequences are about as tense and nail-bitey as it gets. Either way, it works." -Alison Hallett

14. Sicario
"In short, Denis Villeneuve's new drug thriller is phenomenal. Its story is both personal and political, a scathing portrait of the drug war, as well as an elemental allegory in which moral dilemmas are depicted by characters crashing violently into each other." -Ned Lannamann

15. Spectre
"Spectre has all the evidence that director Sam Mendes is trying to make a movie that is simultaneously both a good movie and a good Bond movie, despite those things being mathematically and mutually exclusive phenomena." -Sean Nelson

16. Spotlight
"It's one thing for a reporter to break a story few people know about. It's another thing entirely to tear the lid off a story everyone knows something about but whose true dimensions are too horrifying to imagine. Actor-turned-filmmaker Tom McCarthy's Spotlight, which re-creates the Boston Globe's 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposure of the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal, looks at a case of the latter with riveting results." -Kathy Fennessy