Movie Madness: The best films of 2023 so far to watch this summer

As the summer may bring a little extra time to catch up on movies, our critics have selected a handful of options worth your time. All are available in theaters or on demand.

Asteroid City

The story: Wes Anderson’s latest follows the staging of a play about the goings-on in a small desert town in the 1950s. But that play is actually shown as if it were a movie, one featuring Scarlett Johansson, Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Tom Hanks and many more.

Manohla Dargis’s take: “Written by Anderson, the film is about desire and death, small mysteries and cosmic unknowns and the stories that we make of all the stuff called life. Part of what makes his work memorable and often unexpectedly touching is that his filmmaking — the stylized way he orders the world with his richly populated cast of collaborators — expresses how he navigates the world’s confusions.”

Showing Up

The story: In this film from Kelly Reichardt, Michelle Williams plays Lizzy, a sculptor in Portland, Ore., who navigates the pitfalls of her day-to-day while preparing for an art exhibition.

Manohla Dargis’s take: “Showing Up is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie.”

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

The story: Based on the popular Judy Blume novel and set in 1970, the movie, directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, follows the travails of Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) as she fumbles her way through the transitions of adolescence.

Lisa Kennedy’s take: Fortson “carries the day, or rather the school year. In her face, Margaret’s glimmers of dawning self-awareness and hurt ring true. From the moment the soon-to-be sixth grader utters the movie’s first prayer — which ends with the entreaty, ‘Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible’ — Fortson’s Margaret proves to be a protagonist who is as incidentally funny as she is authentic.”

Polite Society

The story: Two sisters, Lena (Ritu Arya) and Ria (Priya Kansara) share a bond. But when Lena falls for a wealthy physician, something shifts in her. With marriage on the horizon, Ria, through a series of action spectacles, sets out to stop her sister’s wedding.

Amy Nicholson’s take: It’s “a rollicking genre mash-up” that is “set in an enclave of well-to-do Muslim Londoners who play along with the comedy’s title until they get cranky. Then come the punches and neck chops, the bruises and broken glass, the ludicrous wire-fu that allows a matron in a brocade lehenga to fly through the air. It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.”

Full Time

The story: In Éric Gravel’s film, Julie (Laure Calamy), a single mother and the lead chambermaid of a five-star hotel in Paris, must navigate the overwhelming demands of her routine.

Beatrice Loayza’s take: “The film is a portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations, which threaten to break her when a nationwide strike throws her tenuous act off balance.”

Sanctuary

The story: Hal (Christopher Abbott), a wealthy heir, and Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), a longtime employee, vie for control over their uncommon relationship in this twisty duet directed by Zachary Wigon.

Jeannette Catsoulis’s take: “Both actors are excellent, but Qualley is chameleonic in a role that requires her to slide seamlessly from playful to stern, cunning to confrontational, penitent to downright scary. At times, as when Hal erupts with unexpected violence, her face freezes and we can almost see her contriving ways to regain control of a suddenly dangerous situation. If she’s to succeed, she’ll need more than a talent for debasement and humiliation. Sexual but not sexy, Sanctuary is fantastically dynamic and emphatically theatrical.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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