The 10 best movies on Showtime to watch right now

Telling the story of a young girl and her mother as they try to survive in the shadow of Disney World, The Florida Project is a thoughtful, grounded meditation on what it means to live in severe poverty. The film features a pair of genuinely revelatory performances from a pair of non-actors who play the mother and daughter, as well as a truly stellar supporting turn from Willem Defoe. Few movies better grapple with what it means to be poor in America, or reckon with the way that poverty and America’s obsession with things like Disney World are inherently linked.

The movie that cemented Mia Goth’s status as a generationally great scream queen, X feels like a Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff in the best possible way. The film follows a group of film students who rent a cabin on a farm in order to film a horror movie, only to be slowly picked off by the owners of that farm. Goth is doing double duty here as the young target of the couple’s attacks and the elderly woman taking them down, and she’s outstanding in both roles. X is not a particularly subtle film, but it’s incredibly effective because of its great ensemble and a few genuinely great movie moments from director Ti West.

This unlikely Oscars juggernaut has more than earned its reputation as one of the best movies of the 2020s. In addition to feeling like a pretty definitive take on the multiverse, the film’s sprawling ambitions are equaled by its constant focus on the story of a single family. Following an overworked Chinese immigrant who is starting to regret every decision that got her to where she is now, the movie is really a reflection on the nature of regret and the constant need for kindness, especially in a world that can be lovely, scary, and bewildering, all at the same time.

One of Adam Sandler’s best dramatic performances comes in Uncut Gems, in which he plays a gambler who can’t stop himself from placing his next big bet. Few movies in the history of cinema are more stress-inducing than Uncut Gems, in part because Sandler’s Howie is constantly working himself both into and out of binds. Through two features, the Safdie brothers have proven themselves to be masters of this kind of cinematic distress, and Sandler proves himself more than up to delivering in a movie in which he rarely spends more than a second offscreen.

Alex Garland’s second directorial effort may be his best, in part because it’s so willing to be indulgently strange. Annihilation tells the story of a woman who joins a team of explorers tasked with investigating a singular ecological phenomenon known as “The Shimmer.” Once the crew enters this region, which has been utterly transformed, they discover that their understanding of reality has to change. Where the movie goes from there is almost impossible to explain, but Annihilation is mind-bending in the best way. It’s also a thoughtful rumination on guilt and love, and the way those two are sometimes inextricably linked.

A story of grief and death that is both mournful and hopeful, A Ghost Story is metaphysical in the best possible way. The film follows a couple in the aftermath of the sudden death of the husband. Following his death, the husband spends the rest of the movie under a sheet, a ghost who is largely unable to interact with his surroundings. As he watches life flash through the house that was once his, we see a genuinely magnificent cross-section of what humanity is and what it can be. A Ghost Story is a tough film to literalize, but David Lowery’s fierce direction makes it a totally riveting experience from beginning to end.