Hollywood has largely assumed that still-traumatized audiences would prefer to keep the annus horribilis of 2020 in their memories and off their screens. Director Ari Aster (“Midsommar”) therefore took a huge risk by zeroing in on one New Mexico town during the summer of 2020, during which Covid guidance-following Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) faces off with Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who believes that masks and social distancing violate personal liberty.

Not content just to litigate still-simmering pandemic debates, Aster also tosses the George Floyd protests into the maelstrom when Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) joins the Black Lives Matter movement and offers a searing indictment of social media-driven polarization. “Eddington” is the “first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed,” said Jason Gorber at Paste. (HBO Max)

Most people are largely unaware that we live in a world in which any nuclear-armed country can trigger the total destruction of human civilization in less than an hour. In director Kathryn Bigelow’s unsettling “A House of Dynamite,” an unattributed ballistic missile launch from the Pacific heads toward Chicago, and the film looks at the crucial 20-minute period between detection and impact from several different perspectives.

They include that of Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) a duty officer in the White House Situation Room, and the president (Idris Elba), who is well-intentioned but unprepared for a crisis of such magnitude. Despite an ambiguous ending that may frustrate some viewers, “A House of Dynamite” is a “movie of our time, worth watching, mulling, debating and asking officials why they are doing so little about everything,” said Fred Kaplan at Slate. (Netflix)

Rose Byrne, one of the most gifted comedic actresses of our era, breaks out her dramatic chops as Linda, a therapist confronting an absent husband, a collapsed ceiling in her Montauk apartment and a very sick daughter (Delaney Quinn). The film taps into an “enigmatic, fraught lineage interested in interrogating feminine emotional collapse with a surrealist bent” that should nevertheless resonate with anyone “struggling to balance selfhood and sanity in the face of substantial responsibility,” said Melanie Robinson at Flood Magazine.

The film is part of a growing library of art about parents overwhelmed by the demands of caring for children, including the TV series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” and the 2024 film “Nightbitch,” about a mother whose struggles literally turn her into a werewolf. (Prime)

It may be no accident that several of 2025’s standout films tackle themes of autocracy, especially given the ongoing global retreat of democracy. In 1971, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) seeks answers from Brazil’s military junta when the government disappears her journalist husband, Rubens (Selton Mello).

Eunice refuses to allow the regime make her husband vanish without a fight, engaging in a years-long battle to find out what happened. By “depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life,” director Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning film “conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety” in a story that really belongs to Eunice and her “display of “unglamorous strength,” said John Powers at NPR. (Netflix)

Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is traveling with his family when their car breaks down outside a factory after they strike and kill a dog. Inside the factory, one of the employees, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), believes the driver of the car is his torturer from a years-ago stint in one of the Iranian regime’s notorious prisons. Vahid follows him and kidnaps him.

But soon, doubt sets in Vahid’s mind about whether he has the right guy. Director Jafar Panahi is a leading figure in the Iranian New Wave cinema movement that is shaped by — and exists in opposition to — the country’s sclerotic autocracy. In a film that is “actually surprisingly funny,” Panahi explores questions “about prisons, the ones time and memory make for us, and the hard-to-find psychological keys that’ll release us,” said Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert. (in theaters now)

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s thriller is set in an alternate version of the United States where a left-wing revolutionary movement, French 75, was brutally put down in the early 2000s and an autocratic police state now rules. More than a decade later, aging guerrilla Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) lives in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), when they are pursued by Col Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), Willa’s biological father, who needs to eliminate her to join a white nationalist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club.

From the cold open, when French 75 militants jailbreak an immigrant detention facility, it is clear that the themes “resonate agonizingly closely with the current mood.” It is an action movie that “brims with strategic ingenuity and daring, cinematic and political,” said Richard Brody at The New Yorker. (Prime)

Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s first film since 2021’s superb “The Worst Person in the World” stars Stellan Skarsgard as Gustav Borg, an aging film director who is estranged from his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Elle Fanning is Rachel Kemp, an American actress that Gustav has cast in an autobiographical comeback movie after failing to convince Nora to take the part.

But that plot is almost secondary to the moving exploration of the family’s past and present, including Gustav’s abandonment of the family during Agnes and Nora’s childhood. Strong performances from the cast highlight Trier’s “gorgeous, generous and gut-wrenching meditation about inherited familial suffering,” said Sophie Monks Kaufman at Sight and Sound. (in theaters now)

Released amid an ongoing national backlash to the “Me Too” movement, director Eva Victor’s intimate drama looks at the long aftermath of sexual violence through the eyes of one sardonic survivor. Victor herself stars as Agnes, a literature professor whose life and career was derailed after she was assaulted as a graduate student by her advisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi).

Cutting back and forth between a present-day visit from her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), and the assault and its immediate aftermath, the film explores the lingering impact of trauma and the ways that it can return, suddenly and unbidden, even years later. Centered around the “sort of multifaceted, beautifully drawn-out protagonist you rarely see in movies,” Victor’s film is a “truly astounding work of art, from start to finish,” said David Fear at Rolling Stone. (HBO Max)