Unsurprisingly, this pre-Halloween weekend is bursting with thrilling suspense in films like The Lighthouse and Parasite, plus many classic scary movies, including in Cinerama’s Horrorama fest. But that’s certainly not all that’s playing—there’s also Guy Maddin’s Séances, a beguiling experiment in interactive film; NFFTY, the National Film Festival for Talented Youth; and the gorgeous, ever-beloved Miyazaki film Spirited Away. See all of our film critics’ picks for this weekend below, and, if you’ve got a special taste for the macabre, click here to find all the spooky movies you can watch until Halloween. If you’re looking for even more options, check out our film events calendar and complete movie times listings (which are now location-aware!).
Note: Movies play Thursday–Sunday unless otherwise noted
Ad Astra
Writer/director James Grey’s follow-up to 2016’s excellent, underrated The Lost City of Z is a clunkier affair, with sad-sack Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) embarking on an almost-certainly doomed voyage through the solar system to track down his MIA astronaut father (Tommy Lee Jones). Along the way, he fights battles both external (space pirates!) and internal (daddy issues!), and he also spends a whole lot of time monologuing, thanks to an unnecessary, on-the-nose voiceover. But it’s when the movie shuts up—when Gray’s camera skims the plains of the Moon, when an antenna towering into Earth’s atmosphere begins to shudder, when the screen is filled by the shadow-blue rings of Neptune or the churning storms of Jupiter—that Ad Astra hits the profundity and scope that all McBride’s monologuing fails to get at. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations
