The 5 Best Movies in Theaters Right Now

we also want to recommend the best of what’s in theaters right now. We’ve got some reviews up for movies to look forward to later this year—including Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name, which our critic didn’t enjoy as much as many others did—but until then, the following (some of which have had a comfortably long stay in theaters all summer) will keep you busy enough. If you do not have time you can buy iTunes Certificate Online to redeem it to get credit and rent all of those on iTunes Store.

Victoria and Abdul

As a treatise on a person accustomed to power and privilege who has no power whatsoever over the impending end of her life, Victoria and Abdul is stunning. Judi Dench, who earlier in her career played an earlier version of Victoria in an earlier oddball companionship situation, inhabits Madame Just Lie Back and Think of England with her typically amazing keenness, and watching the 82-year-old actress in this particular confrontation with mortality and loneliness and always having to be playing some role or other is kind of dazzling.

American Made

The men he portrays are almost always full of shit, but because it’s Cruise playing them, they’re also very fun company. There are many reasons he’s been a movie star for decades, but that might be among the most crucial: No matter how cocky or ridiculous he or his characters can be, we don’t mind being taken for a ride. The true-life drama American Made is powered by Cruise’s catch-me-if-you-can spirit, exuding a showy, impish disposition that’s sometimes grating but often enticing enough that we forgive its limitations. Aspiring to be Goodfellas but more closely aligned with American Hustle’s manic irreverence, the film has a doozy of a story to tell, and so naturally it would have been far more effective if it had simply told its story rather than endlessly marveling at its own madcap absurdity

The Big Sick

Based on the first year in the relationship of married screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, this indie rom-com has a mildly risky structure and some trenchant observations about the culture clashes that go on in immigrant families living in America. But what cuts deepest is just how profoundly lovable these people are. That’s not the same as being cutesy: Rather, The Big Sick is defiantly generous, understanding that people are horribly flawed but also capable of immeasurable graciousness when the situation requires.

Battle of the Sexes

In most sports films—whether based on true stories or not—we always know who we’re supposed to be rooting for. It’s the person or team that the movie spends most of its time chronicling, whereas the film’s villain is often seen only in passing, at a remove, sometimes presented as a distant specter or looming, unholy menace. For all its feel-good, formulaic biopic tendencies, Battle of the Sexes is notable for rethinking this narrative trope.

It

One’s fat, one’s black, one’s a nerd, one’s a sensitive mama’s boy, one’s Jewish, one’s a girl, one stutters. (The stuttering one is otherwise your traditional leading man hero character.) They do their best to survive the constant assault that is middle school, but then they discover that not only are children going missing from their quaint little town—including the too-cute-to-see-his-arm-bitten-off-by-a-clown little brother of our stuttering hero—but that they’ve in fact gone missing for generations: every 27 years, in fact.