10 movies you can watch right now, including Conclave

This story has been updated.

There are a lot of movies out right now in the ether that you can choose from, but sometimes, it’s just so hard to pick which ones are worth your time.

Luckily, we’ve watched a lot of movies lately. And we’ve picked out eight films that you can check out right now that are absolutely worth spending time with and two you might want to skip.

As the summer gets hotter and hotter, why not beat the heat with an afternoon at the movies?

Let’s check out 10 of these films, which range from the latest from Clint Eastwood to some clear-cut Oscar contenders.

Juror No. 2

Even at 94 years old, Clint Eastwood is still operating in such an electric space as a filmmaker. This grueling morality tale of a man caught in an absolutely impossible position is one of his best films in ages. Eastwood is just marvelous at examining American structures and those who are tasked to uphold them, the ones that govern us and the ones we upkeep with each other. Nicholas Hoult casts such a conflicted pall of guilt and compromise, a perfect conduit for Eastwood's investigation. What he finds is all too human. We want to see ourselves in the best light, but we should be haunted in how relatable the shadows are. May this not be Eastwood's last film; we need him and his perspective.

Blitz

Steve McQueen is one of the unquestioned greats working in film right now, and the vision alone is worth the watch. He has such a way of finding horror in our history, in pulling the chair out from under your expectations of what’s coming to slap you back into reality the second to get comfortable. I haven’t felt quite as suffocated by a film’s surroundings in quite some time. It’s as visceral as Dunkirk and 1917, not just in the terror and mayhem of combat but also in the kindness and depravity of people in times of war and oppression.

The film’s general narrative doesn’t quite match the bouncing survey of its setting, but once Benjamin Clementine shows up in one of the year’s breakout turns, the film really finds its footing. It’s a little rough in assembly, sure, but McQueen’s craft is volcanic and unforgettable. The Steven Spielberg/Charles Dickens comparisons are very apt, but some of this is just unmistakably McQueen. It's an imperfect marvel.

Conclave

Ralph Fiennes playing a morally tormented Poirot of sorts in a papacy election whodunnit is what movies were made for. Conclave is the exact kind of thorny, breathless chamber piece that breaks through, anchored by rigorous craft and a real sense of place and time.

Edward Berger strips down the self-seriousness and allows this to be exactly what it must be, searing melodrama with twists, turns and tricks up its sleeve. It's lack of pretension is rewarded with real captivation. This is closer to The Da Vinci Code than First Reformed, but it's a real gem all the same.

Anora

Sean Baker is one of my favorite filmmakers working, and this feels like his post-COVID “we’re all just so tired, man” gut punch. This is an excellent film, boundless in its energy and pragmatically grounded it is to the reality of its characters. Mikey Madison is a movie star and owns the screen, but the entire cast is without flaw. Red Rocket is Baker’s masterpiece, but Anora is as great of a pivot as any director has made recently. We really are the sum of how we survive and how we help each other get by along the way.

Venom: The Last Dance

For all about this movie that just does not work, the generic scientist-military B-plot, the ridiculously unconvincing bad guy with heavy metal white hair from another realm and his Geonosis battle arena goo monsters, the wasting Stephen Graham’s time…Tom Hardy is just so magnetizing, his relationship with Venom so oddly charming…makes this worth it, even if it’s a whimper of a finale in so many respects. It’s a great dynamic trapped in flimsy storytelling. It's emotional in a way the film couldn’t be without Hardy caring.

However forgettable the non-Venom scenes are, you also get Venom singing along to David Bowie in a van with alien hippies and him kicking a slot machine because he doesn’t understand the rigors of gambling probability. There isn’t a Venom movie you can outright dismiss, even though only one of them (the second) is genuinely good. Hardy’s endearingly oblong central performance and the way he vibes with his alien pal make all of these compulsively watchable when they’re on screen.

His Three Daughters

Three absolutely dynamite performances cast against a very believable story about the grueling, awkward crawl to death where all the beans spill out when your emotions are shot and you have zero cares to give. Azazel Jacobs is so smart to just get out of the way and let these three do their thing. The ending is a wallop. The whole operation is a major success.

Piece By Piece

Piece By Piece rules. A Pharrell LEGO documentary is as cool as it sounds. All the needle drops made my face hurt from grinning; the whole thing is dopamine. A big hoorah for creativity.

The scene where Pharrell gets Pusha T on the "Grindin’" beat when his career is starting to taper out…and then you hear the song start…that's cinema, baby!

The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot is DreamWorks doing Wall-e, Finding Nemo and Bambi all at once, and it's a stunner. Some of the most jaw-dropping animation this decade, and the emotional beats claw in deep. Not to be hyperbolic, but this might be DreamWorks Animation's best since Shrek.

DWA got awfully close with the How to Train Your Dragon movies and Kung Fu Panda 2, but The Wild Robot feels like the studio's first elite Disney/Pixar counterpunch post-ogres. It's a big dang deal.

Saturday Night

I adore Jim Henson with my entire heart, and Jason Reitman does him a great service in Saturday Night by making him the most relatable person in the cast, someone so deeply exhausted by the sardonic atmosphere while he’s just trying to do his job.

Reitman’s film is pretty remarkable, expectedly extolling Lorne Michaels and company’s genius of giving such chaos shape and iconography but also subtly recognizing the explicit danger of giving this much power to such a happy accident. Gabriel LaBelle is somehow better here than Fabelmans?!

SNL is such an exhaustive part of our culture, and I get not really wanting to embrace a movie that’s half hero worship. I just find Reitman too clever and emotionally plugged into his themes. He gets the human toll, of Michaels' stellar achievement and the cost to make it work.

It’s a smart approach. SNL is such a complicated beast, half eternally beloved and half very uncomfortable to reckon with in hindsight…much like most things in American pop culture. Reitman’s movie is a rollicking testament to the first that cracks the door open for the second.

It’s a great American movie, one that really strikes at the heart of what makes something like SNL so lasting and so corrosive. You’ll always root for them to make it to 11:30, always love the sketches and the stars, always respect the man behind the madness. But, like most things, pulling open the curtain shows you the truth — the good, the bad, the ugly, what’s really going on when you go live.

Screened at the Nashville Film Festival

A Different Man

This rocked. "Homer’s Enemy" from the perspective of Frank Grimes.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: 10 movies you can watch right now, including Conclave