Looking for what to see in theaters? Our feature, updated weekly, highlights our top recommendations for films currently in theaters, from new releases to restorations receiving a proper theatrical run.
While we already provide extensive monthly new-release recommendations and weekly streaming recommendations, as distributors’ roll-outs can vary, this is a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you.
The Blue Trail (Gabriel Mascaro)
The Blue Trail, the lively new film from Gabriel Mascaro, takes its name from the secretions of a mythical snail. Azure and oozing, the substance, when dropped on the iris, is rumored to grant a vision of things to come. This news is welcomed with admirable disinterest by Tereza (Denise Weinberg), a woman of a certain age who has, due to recent state insistences, decided there’s no longer much use in looking ahead. The film is set in a near-future Brazil where the lives of the elderly are overseen by some cruel combination of governmental interventions and half-interested offspring. In Tereza’s world, leaving one’s locale now requires a permission slip, and those without are rounded up in so-called “Wrinkle Wagons.” Anyone lucky enough to reach their 80th birthday, as Tereza soon will, are rewarded with a move to The Colonies: a place no one seems to know much about, aside from the fact that anyone who goes there doesn’t return. – Rory O. (full review)
Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Relegated to a mystifying worldwide NFT release, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s first of three films last year is now available to see exclusively in theaters alongside a restoration of his earlier feature Serpent’s Path. As Rory O’Connor said in his review, “How do you even start to write about Chime, a film that keeps secrets guarded and lives off the shocks of its knife-edge turns? It’s safe to say the director is Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It’s also safe to say Chime is 45 minutes long, making it feel more like the pilot for a TV series we’ll never see––only adding to the intrigue. Like much of the director’s work, it’s the kind of thing you could have seen late night on television when you were much too young. It would have also left a mark.”
The Drama (Kristoffer Borgli)
Some critics are going to say The Drama is not about race, or that if it is, this is simply an accident born of colorblind casting. There is a reveal—the reveal the entire premise hinges on—early in the film that would perhaps make more sense to people if it had come from a white person. It’s definitely something that, historically, is more associated with troubled white American men. But this is a film, not real life, and The Drama presents us with a character viewers have never seen on the big screen before. – Jourdain S. (full review)
Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze)
Languorous without becoming laborious, meditative without becoming meandering, abstract without becoming abstruse, Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf is a road movie unlike any other. It follows Irakli (David Koberidze), a father in search of his daughter, a sports photographer whose sudden disappearance is less of an enigma to solve than a vehicle for Koberidze’s imagination to serenely drift. Featuring Giorgi Koberidze’s charming, addictive score and shot on a Sony Ericsson, the fuzzy look of which transforms mundane landscapes into foreign-seeming textural images and hypnotic sequences, Dry Leaf, at 186 minutes, actively heightens our perception to its bucolic territory, its singular wavelength. It’s the kind of film where the destination is less important than the journey, where submission to its logic is more meaningful than a resistance, and where, like a vivid dream, its numinous sensations linger long after viewing. No matter the resolution, Koberidze has established himself as a modern enchanter. – Nirris N.
Faces of Death (Daniel Goldhaber)
Director Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer Isa Mazzei are intimately familiar with the darker side of the Internet. Their 2018 debut, Cam, remains among the quintessential horror films of the Internet age, and with their reboot / remake / reimagining of Faces of Death, they bring the past into startling view of the present. It’s a film that recognizes there’s a little bit of a sicko in all of us, and there may be nothing we can do about it. – Devan S. (full review)
Fiume o morte! (Igor Bezinović)
Learning about Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 16-month occupation of Fiume, a tale vividly retold in Igor Bezinović’s new, Tiger Award-winning documentary Fiume o Morte!, I spared a thought for Yukio Mishima. D’Annunzio’s life didn’t end so theatrically, but the two men––celebrated writers and hyper-nationalists with hubristic military dreams and similarly contested legacies––certainly shared a taste for the quixotic and chaotic. Was D’Annunzio a fascist colonizer, as those who still remember him in Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) claim, or was he the admirable dreamer as romantic as his poems? A century later, the jury’s still out. – Rory O. (full review)
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens)
Written by Almereyda and Stephens, with voiceover from Chloë Sevigny, Earth Coincidence paints Lilly as a 20th-century polymath, a one-of-a-kind maverick hellbent on “getting his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness.” Yet a hagiography this is not. Fascinated as it may be with its subject––a man bestowed with a “panoramic thinking” that led him to operate at the interstice between science and sci-fi––Earth Coincidence is as keen to praise Lilly for his contributions to things like the Save the Whales movement as it is to expose some of his most barbaric theories, not least that a steady diet of LSD would prove as eye-opening to his aquatic tenants as it did to him. (Whether or not that’s true we’ll never know, though it’s safe to say the acid injections Lilly routinely administered to his dolphins didn’t make their captivity any smoother.) Where others might have played the most salacious aspects of Lilly’s saga and astonishing drug intake for shock value, Almereyda and Stephens are after something different––namely, the processes through which ideas can be absorbed into the mainstream and meaningfully shape it. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Kontinental ‘25 (Radu Jude)
“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), and her former student, Fred (Adonis Tanța), sit by an anti-communist resistance monument in Cluj and watch a horrific video of a drone attack on a Russian soldier. Having found the dead body of a man she evicted earlier that day, Orsolya, who now works as a bailiff, is looking to blow off some steam. They move uphill and Fred––whose delivery bag is plastered with Romanian flags, so as not to be confused with immigrant gig workers––serenades her. Next, they have sex in the bushes. The film up to this point has been awash with ideas and vaguely apocalyptic images: Roman ruins, a robot dog, a dinosaur park, zoomed-in footage of the Hindenburg disaster, a scene from Robert Aldrich’s atomic-era nightmare Kiss Me Deadly. This should all be a lot, but somehow Jude keeps it together. – Rory O. (full review)
Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
Christian Petzold’s fifteenth feature Miroirs No. 3 marks his fourth with Paula Beer, the actor-muse he first directed in 2018’s Transit, a film that shares significant themes with his newest––chiefly that of total strangers inexplicably recognizing each other and immediately feeling a deep, soulful bond with nary a word. Needless to say Miroirs No. 3 is, like the others, an enigma. – Luke H. (full review)
Palestine 36 (Annemarie Jacir)
You almost believe Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine) wants the village perspective when asking his chauffeur Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya) to explain the Palestinian experience outside the city to a collection of landowners at his table. He’s barely able to get the preamble out before one of the guests reminds him of his place: it’s them who pay British taxes while the farmers never pay off their debts. There’s no clearer picture of just how powerful a role greed plays in our world’s tone-deaf political discord. They ignore their kin’s real issues while wondering if “Zionism could be a good thing,” since their property matters most. – Jared M. (full review)
Revelations of Divine Love (Caroline Golum)
Medieval life happened so long ago that our natural inclination is to view it from an alien remove and marvel at how someone actually lived like that. This is silly, of course: human nature stays fairly consistent throughout history, as do plagues, unrest, or the preparations needed for a holiday. Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love brings this dichotomy to the forefront, not just in recounting the historical events written down by Julian of Norwich, but by pointedly setting anachronistic characters and dialogue against such plainly artificial, Brechtian sets. Accuracy is not exactly what it’s going for. Rather, it’s charmingly evocative, sure to resonate with anyone mildly familiar with the era. – Devan S. (full review)
The Stranger (François Ozon)
Nobel laureate Albert Camus is one of the most consequential thinkers and writers in the French language, having created absurdist characters and worlds that reflect a view on human existence which remains hauntingly unique. His debut novel The Stranger has seen two notable cinematic adaptations since its publication in 1942: once by Italian maestro Luchino Visconti (1967), most recently by Turkish director Zeki Demirkubuz (2001, under the title Fate). A fellow Frenchman has finally stepped up to revive Camus’ words for the big screen as they had originally sounded; perhaps not coincidentally, it proves the most faithful, hypnotically evocative version. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)
Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa)
When Donbass arrived in 2018, sandwiched between the start of the 2014 Russian-backed conflict in the titular eastern Ukrainian region and full-scale invasion of the country four years since its release, the world Sergei Loznitsa trained his camera on was a surreal, decaying wasteland. It’s not that the film was necessarily prophetic about the atrocities that would later spread across Ukraine. But it spoke to concerns that now feel especially of-the-moment, the same that have long served as a cornerstone of the Belarus-born, Kiev-raised director’s oeuvre. While Donbass was a work of fiction, its preoccupations with the way truth can be manipulated also haunt the archive-based documentaries for which Loznitsa is arguably best known. From Blockade (2006) to The Kiev Trial (2022), the director hasn’t exhumed USSR-era footage as a sort of time machine, but a means to reappropriate history from the regime’s official narratives. Which is why to salute Two Prosecutors as the filmmaker’s “return to fiction,” as the Cannes Film Festival did upon welcoming Loznitsa’s latest to its Official Competition, is both technically accurate and somehow misleading. – Leonardo G. (full review)
Yes (Nadav Lapid)
Tel Aviv native, defector, and auteur Nadav Lapid opens his fifth feature in a catastrophic state of carouse. A filmmaker known for his employment of trademark dance sequences, Lapid is back with an equally visceral but uncharacteristically clubby groove in Yes, a work whose sarcastically enthusiastic title points to the relentless ridicule and hometown mockery that defines it. – Luke H. (full review)
More Films Now Playing in Theaters
Read all reviews here. For our NYC-specific repertory round-ups, including many films that will tour the country, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.