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.

Amrum (Fatih Akin)

There’s a reason behind the odd credit at the start of Amrum: “A Hark Bohm film by Fatih Akin.” While the two collaborated before on the latter’s In the Fade, this project had a different beginning. Bohm wrote the script to direct himself before realizing he wouldn’t have the strength to do so. Raised on the island of Amrum (and a teen during the film’s 1945 setting), it was surely a very personal project that Akin initially refused to take over. – Jared M. (full review)

Blue Film (Elliot Tuttle)

“Provocation” has become watered-down in recent times. All it takes to provoke someone is tossing off a bunch of half-assed offensive statements or aiming your cannon at every divisive mainstream issue on a quest to push people’s buttons. Getting a reaction out of people is easy; actually making them consider things is another matter entirely. Blue Film, by that token, is provocative in the truest sense of the term. Elliott Tuttle’s film seeks to unsettle, question, and, yes, provoke you. But his masterful two-hander wants, more than anything, to extend understanding to both men at the center, asking you to see them as flawed humans with depth and complexity, even if we’d rather not. – Devan S. (full review)

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari)

Blue Heron, Romvari’s feature debut, once again mines the director’s own history, following a Hungarian family of six as it settles in a nondescript stretch of suburbia outside Vancouver. The opening line, “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood,” belongs to the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven), the film to her older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a sullen, taciturn adolescent with a history of self-destructive behavior no one has learned how to deal with, much less address. Yet Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child. Yes, the kid is most certainly not all right, but he traverses Blue Heron as its most mysterious, elusive character, and that impenetrability is a measure of Romvari’s empathy. Rather than pathologizing his pain––a tendency his own parents succumb to––she invites us to sit with it and bask in his drawn-out silences, in the gaps between the words and imperfect memories that grown-up Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the film’s second half, will try piecing together. – Leonardo G. (full review)

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)

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)

The Last One for the Road (Francesco Sossai)

It doesn’t take long to work out where you are in The Last One for the Road––for the backroads of Veneto, Italy, Francesco Sossai’s delightful new movie has the unmistakable specificity of a life spent there. What you instead start to wonder is the when of it all. The protagonists are a pair of rogues in their 50s––one of whom, Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla), wears a shirt the color of a tobacco stain, the other, Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano), a style of bushy mustache I’ve rarely seen onscreen since Bruno Ganz sported a similar one in The American Friend. Only after stumbling into a group of Gen Z students––the most visible dressed in the headgear of an Egyptian goddess––late at night along a Venice canal do we realize that our heroes exist in the here and now. If it wasn’t for their innate knack for catching last orders, regardless of the watering hole, you’d almost call them men out of time. – 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)

Our Land (Nuestria Tierra) (Lucrecia Martel)

Before Our Land (Nuestra Tierra), there is a solemn parade of quiet production logos. This is often the case with films of political and historical importance. The stories that are the most vital are often the most difficult to tell and almost always arrive at a delay. In 2018, a local landowner named Dario Amin and two retired police officers, Luis Gomez and Eduardo Sassi, were finally tried for the murder of Javier Chocobar, an elder member of the indigenous Chuchagasta community in northwest Argentina’s Tucumán Province. The events leading up to the murder, which occurred in October 2009, were caught on video. Yet it took 9 years for the Argentinian government to recognize the Chuchagasta community’s pleas for justice. – Jourdain S. (full review)

Silent Friend (Ildikó Enyedi)

Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi is best known for her 2017 Golden Bear-winning film On Body and Soul, where an unlikely pair of characters met in a dream and, as deer, fell in love. This remarkably tender Berlinale winner is, in many ways, the precursor to Enyedi’s newest film, notwithstanding the fact that in-between came The Story of My Wife (2021), a period drama of an obsessive love affair starring Léa Seydoux. Not to say the latter is irrelevant: the English-language debut allowed Enyedi to expand the details of her singular worlds beyond language and cement herself as a European auteur to whom actors flock. While Silent Friend stars the indomitable Tony Leung (and also Seydoux in a small role), the real star of this film is a ginkgo tree. If On Body and Soul was fauna, Silent Friend is flora. – Savina P. (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 Pianos (Arnaud Desplechin)

The past rears its not-so-ugly head in Two Pianos, Arnaud Desplechin’s latest film exploring the ways gorgeous people make an even bigger mess out of the messiness of life. Set amidst the world of classical music in Lyon, this tale of a tortured pianist’s reunion with his also-tortured first love contains the literary and melodramatic elements one normally expects from Desplechin, who––having not received a theatrical release since 2017’s Ismael’s Ghosts––has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the U.S. That’s not the case in his home country, where he’s maintained a prolific output that continues attracting some of France’s top actors. With Two Pianos he’s put together a rich, thoughtful look at how we can shape our lives around our biggest regrets. – C.J. P. (full review)

Two Seasons, Two Strangers (Sho Miyake)

Two Seasons is the third in a wonderful recent run by Miyake, joining Small, Slow But Steady (2022) and All The Long Nights (2024). With each he has shown a remarkable ability for mixing porcelain-like levels of craft and detail with stories of comparatively messy human compassion––a cinematic mix that never fails to delight. Despite racking up some awards for those films, his work plays at the kind of modest register that often keeps filmmakers of his ilk relatively below-the-radar or, at the very least, just shy of name recognition. Winning the Leopard might be the push that elevates him to auteur status and perhaps (with respect to Locarno) the biggest of the big competitions, where I feel he belongs. – Rory O. (full review)

Two Women (Chloé Robichaud)

If, by and large, American cinema has taken a puritanical view on sex, leave it to our neighbors up north to craft a refreshingly frank, hilarious comedy of manners about seeking erotic pleasure when life has hit a dead end. Scripted by Catherine Léger from her own stage play Home Deliveries, itself inspired by Claude Fournier’s 1970 feature Two Women in Gold, Canadian director Chloé Robichaud’s Two Women is playful, raucous, and wholly heartfelt, a film not afraid to explore the dark corners of life when it comes to depression, infidelity, and the dullness that can set in during new motherhood. Its comedy-first approach comes with a comforting sense of tenderness and fleetness, shot on 35mm with a lively warmth by cinematographer Sara Mishara. – Jordan R. (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.

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