“Game of Thrones” stars Pedro Pascal (“The Mandalorian”) and Bella Ramsey (“Catherine Called Birdy”) lead the series as Joel and Ellie, the main player characters of the original 2013 video game. Set in a post-apocalyptic United States where the world has been ravaged by an outbreak of zombie-like hosts mutated by a bizarre fungus, the story follows Joel, a smuggler working in Boston, as he is tasked with protecting 14-year-old Ellie on a trip across the country....

While “The Life Ahead” draws from the same Romain Gary novel that inspired the 1977 Oscar-winner “Madame Rosa,” Ponti and co-writer Ugo Chiti have transplanted the setting from France to inner-city Italy and set the drama in the present day. That means cinematic grand dame Loren, returning to the screen for the first time in a decade, can play a role that fits her 86-year-old visage, and she brings a sturdy, domineering quality to the part....

Netflix’s synopsis for “The Life Ahead” reads: “In the colorful Italian port city of Bari, the streetwise 12-year-old Senegalese orphan Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) has ambitions to make his fortune in the underworld of the town’s shady alleyways. One day, he steals a bag of items from the elderly Madame Rosa (Loren), a Holocaust survivor who makes a meagre living raising the children of prostitutes with whom she once shared the streets....

One is a safe plastic monument to the solipsism of today’s studio cinema; an orgiastic celebration of how studio filmmaking has created a feedback loop so powerful that it’s programmed audiences to reject anything that threatens its perfection (and to clap like seals for anything that reaffirms it, even if that means cheering for the “unexpected” return of heroes and villains they were once eager to leave behind). The other is a jagged little red pill of a blockbuster that exhumes its intellectual property with such a pronounced sense of déjà vu that the comforts of its memory start to feel like the bars of a cage, and the perfect circle of its feedback loop blurs into a particle accelerator spinning faster and faster in order to create something new and romantic....

Time has a tendency to flatten history’s darkest chapters, reducing panic and persecution to footnotes and caricature. So it goes with Adolf Hitler, whose outsized image as a cartoon villain often obscures the horrifying endurance of Nazi ideology today. “The Meaning of Hitler” sets the record straight. A bracing blend of historical inquiry and cinematic soul-searching, directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s eerie and insightful essay film burrows into the nexus of Hitler’s mythology in a remarkable attempt to determine whether it makes more sense to understand its resilience or tune it out....

By the time Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), the beguiling central figure of “The Queen’s Gambit,” has sex for the first time, she has already survived the death of her mother, a harrowing orphanage stint, developed multiple addictions, and wiped the floor with chess masters twice her age. She reaches coolly across the nightstand to light a cigarette, strawberry curls framing a placid expression, as if she’s performed this time-honored post-coital ritual a million times before....

Here are 13 recent disturbing highlights. Don’t watch them alone. “Antebellum” Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s feature debut may lack subtlety, but often makes up for it with a bone-chilling terror that suggests everything onscreen is very real. The Janelle Monae-starring film is built on a relatively simple story, one partially obscured by chopped-up storytelling (once you’ve seen “Antebellum,” it’s relatively easy to rearrange the pieces into one coherent timeline, though the film itself does no such favors) and a handful of unnerving sequences that serve to throw both the audience and Monae’s character for big loops....