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‘The Crown’s Gambit’? ‘The Queen’? Whatever. Watch these 10 recent movies instead

As I’ve adjusted to this year’s release upheavals, I’ve come across plenty of good films. Here are 10.

‘Zappa’: celebrating a musical father of invention

Actor-documentarian Alex Winter presents a generously overstuffed look at the life and times of rock’s great polymath.

‘Uncle Frank,’ on Amazon, presents a different sort of American beauty

Paul Bettany has one of his strongest roles to date as a gay New Yorker returning to his rural South Carolina town for a funeral, circa 1973.

‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’: triumph and tragedy meet true greatness

August Wilson’s play has been brought to film as testimony to the ongoing vitality of Viola Davis and a memorial to the late Chadwick Boseman, both of whom give majestic performances.

MOVIE REVIEW
‘Hillbilly Elegy’: welcome to hard times
Ron Howard has taken the regionalism out of J.D. Vance’s best-seller and left behind a work of generic poverty porn.

TY BURR
‘Small Axe’: excellence any way you slice it
“Small Axe” consists of five distinct feature-length films, each focusing on an aspect of Britain’s West Indian community in the 1960s through the 1980s.

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Herzog’s heavens; a terrible wrong; playing and planting

Looking at “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds.” “Crawford: The Man the South Forgot.” and “Chuck Leavell: The Tree Man.”

‘Mank’: The forgotten genius of Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz

The "Citizen Kane" co-writer is the star of the new David Fincher-directed biopic.

MOVIES

In Focus: In ‘Crazy, Not Insane,’ on HBO, entering the minds of serial killers

Alex Gibney turns his attention to the psychopathology of serial killers

MOVIES

On Showtime, ‘Belushi’ goes beyond ‘SNL,’ Bluto Blutarsky, and the Blues Brothers

A satisfying if ultimately shallow trawl through a rich and tragic life.

In ‘Sound of Metal,’ losing your hearing and finding a new life

Riz Ahmed (“The Night Of”) gives a tour de force performance as a rock drummer who goes deaf and rebels against his new world of silence.

Hooray for Hollywood? Hooray for ‘Mank’

As in Herman Mankiewicz, the witty writer of “Citizen Kane,” here played by Gary Oldman with shabby brilliance. The David Fincher film is a lustrous, dense, and damning tale of a writer’s revenge on powerful media men and a supple metaphor for today’s faux news.

MOVIES

In ‘The Last Vermeer,’ painting a very different picture

A sweeping and serious-minded World War II-era drama about a painting stolen by the Nazis and the dissolute artist who may have brokered the deal.

MOVIES

This ‘Twentieth Century’ is clearly Canadian

Matthew Rankin’s cracked history of Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King exists somewhere on the Venn diagram between midnight movie, fever dream, Turner Classics fetish object, and Great White North prank.