Our critics selected their favorite films this week, from wide releases to one-time showings, and we have the details on when and where to see all of them. If the 23 options below aren't enough, you could also check out The Nordic Heritage Museum's Nordic Lights Film Festival, the "basically unintelligible warfare and death and brightly colored explosions" in Michael Bay's 13 Hours, or the other films on our movie times listings.

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NEW RELEASES
1. The 5th Wave
"In the science fiction movie The 5th Wave, the aliens are not nice but very destructive. They want all humans to be dead. They mean business. Earth has real value to them, and they do not want to share any of it with the "third chimpanzee" (let alone the second or the first). That's the whole story. And the people who bankrolled The 5th Wave, which stars Chloë Grace Moretz, hope that it "will do for aliens what Twilight did for vampires." - Charles Mudede

2. Ride Along 2
"What's particularly effective here is the staging: both action and slapstick exist in solid, comprehensibly established spaces. That may seem like faint praise, but even prestige blockbusters these days get sloppy with that stuff, and it's nice to see good fundamentals in what could easily have been a cash-in sequel." - Ben Coleman

LIMITED RUNS
3. Anomalisa
"One part of Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa is really great, and the other part is really predictable. The greatness has everything to do with its look (animated puppets and their world), and the not-so-greatness with its story. The good news is that the latter does not get in the way of the former." - Charles Mudede

4. 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. That it also contains perhaps the best footage of a dog playing piano and painting that you will ever see may be a bonus to some. You don't have to be a canine-lover to appreciate Heart of a Dog, but it obviously helps." - Dave Segal

5. Learning to Drive
"Clarkson, the ultimate WASP (with skin so pale, it’s practically translucent) and Kingsley, born Krishna Pandit Bhanji, are very good together. Naturally, he teaches her about patience and she teaches him about poetry, but some predictability is a small price to pay for a film about ordinary Americans trying to get through the day without having to battle aliens, dinosaurs, or other forms of computer-generated conflict." - Kathy Fennessy

6. The Lost Boys
A 1987 flick about comic book nerds turned vampire gang leaders. Plus, it stars our favorite Coreys (Haim & Feldman).

7. Mustang
"By turns lyrical and wrenching, Mustang depicts the process by which five orphaned sisters relinquish freedom for a form of cultural bondage. Until then, they flirt with boys and play on the beach, but what looks like innocent fun to Western eyes earns reprobation from their insular Turkish community." - Kathy Fennessy

8. Noma, My Perfect Storm
"Noma is a restaurant in the city of Copenhagen. It focuses on foods that are specific to Scandinavia. The restaurant has won numerous awards, and it is praised by journalists from around the world. Noma’s co-owner and head chef René Redzepi is very passionate about food and the nature of the human body and its senses. He has a culinary philosophy that’s at once simple and profound: We do not just eat food, but we also eat the seasons. But the best part of this documentary is its cinematography. The images of Noma’s dishes are so stunning, it’s hard to believe they are objects you put in your mouth but you preserve forever with your eyes." - Charles Mudede

9. Saturday Night Fever
"The music and dancing in the nightclub are not what make SNF an important work, but its mundane details and attention to class differences. The star of the film, John Travolta, is working-class, and the woman he desires, Karen Lynn Gorney, is lower-middle-class—though Gorney’s character behaves as if she is from a much higher station in society than Travolta’s. Also, there are few scenes from that period that are more brilliant and funny than the SNF diner scene. I will never get enough of Travolta talking with a mouth full of hamburger." - Charles Mudede

10. Shampoo
"Ashby, who directed his first film when he was 40 and died before he was 60, seems to have had no impulse to interpose himself between the stories and the audience. In a period that wasn't called the "me decade" for nothing, he preferred to stay out of the way (aside from the odd Hitchcock cameo), allowing a tone, not a style, to emerge as the grand unifying element of his body of work." - Sean Nelson

11. The Sprocket Society presents Saturday Secret Matinees
Watch the entirety of the highly regarded serial Spy Smasher over the course of twelve weekly installments. Each screening will feature one episode, plus a secret feature film that follows a monthly theme: classic comedies in January, serial heroes & heroines in February, and fantasy & adventure movies in March.

12. Theeb
"Themes of betrayal, revenge, brotherhood, and independence will grip you, and the high-stakes plotline imbues even the serene moments with a murmuring nervousness and momentum. With the suspenseful story, breathtakingly authentic acting, and cinematic shots of Jordan, it will appeal to both snobs and people who whine about subtitled movies being boring." - Julia Raban

CONTINUING RUNS
13. The Big Short
"While The Big Short has all the nuance of a sledgehammer, it's a passionate, provoking film—and a very, very funny one. Gosling, in maybe his best performance ever, is scathing and hilarious, and the supporting cast is fantastic across the board. Sure, the movie almost unflinchingly fails the Bechdel Test, and many of its main characters never actually share screen time. But McKay's mixture of comedy and outrage is entertaining and infuriating—you'll find yourself laughing at the tackiness of Wall Street's avarice, before you're sickeningly reminded of what they got away with." - Ned Lannamann

14. 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

15. Carol
"It's kind of strange that Todd Haynes—the director of Velvet Goldmine—has become a master of cinematic restraint, but Carol is perfectly attuned to the culture of mid-century repression it documents, and equally adept at showcasing the passions and prejudices that simmer below the surface." - Alison Hallett

16. Creed
"If you loved the original Rocky—and its heart, and the sometimes unbearable tension it provided—Creed is a fun and worthy film-going experience. And an exception to the rule that lightning never strikes in the same place twice." - Wm. Steven Humphrey

17. The Good Dinosaur
"A boy-and-his-dog story where the boy is a talking dinosaur and the dog is a little grunting caveman, The Good Dinosaur is one of Pixar's best." - Erik Henriksen

18. 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

19. The Revenant
"Judged on a scene-by-scene basis, The Revenant often feels like one of the most amazing movies ever made, with Emmanuel Lubezki's breathtaking cinematography capturing every vivid facet of nature's teeth and claws. Taken as a whole, however, the lack of tonal variance and unrelenting bleakness end up serving the director's monumental ambition more than the relatively sparse narrative. Still, even when it verges on self-parody—this is a movie where a character is listed in the end credits as Dave Stomach Wound—the sheer mad bravura on display makes it impossible to dismiss." - Andrew Wright

20. Sisters
"In Sisters, Poehler and Fey play against type: Fey's the irresponsible manicurist to Poehler's type-A nurse. They've traveled different paths in life, but when they host one final party slash awkward high school reunion in their parents' just-sold house, they find they aren't really so different after all. Spoiler alert: That house gets wrecked. Type A Lady finds the courage she needs (in a joint) to make bad choices. Loose Cannon learns that being responsible SUCKS. And if you're wondering, why yes, that IS basically the plot of Sam Shepard's classic True West. Except I liked Sisters better, because it's funny." - Megan Burbank

21. 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

22. 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

23. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
"The Force Awakens does not offer much of a new story but simply and brilliantly retells much of the old one. It's also very faithful to the images, the technologies, the economy, and the wardrobe of the founding films in the Star Wars series. Indeed, the more you know about the first three films, the more pleasure you will get out of The Force Awakens." - Charles Mudede