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.
Barrio Triste (Stillz)
At barely two years old, Harmony Korine’s “post-cinema” company EDGLRD is already branching out. After directing AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion, Korine takes on a producer role for Barrio Triste, the feature debut of Colombian-American artist Stillz. It’s a good match of talents, given Stillz’s background as a music video director for artists like Bad Bunny and Rosalia, and while Barrio Triste takes a vibes-based approach à la Korine’s last two features it’s an entirely different beast. Exhilarating, tense, personal, and enigmatic, Barrio Triste is a compelling look at a lost generation in search of salvation, and among this year’s best first features. – C.J. P. (full review)
Bouchra (Meriem Bennani, Orian Barki)
Based on a real-life conversation shared by co-director Meriem Bennani and her own mother, Bouchra (co-directed with Orian Barki and co-written by them and Ayla Mrabet) opens with a phone call. Aicha (Yto Barrada) is checking in on her daughter from Morocco when Bouchra (Bennani) broaches a subject they’ve been avoiding for almost a decade. Stuck creatively, the latter has decided to find emotional catharsis through a script about the complex dynamic shared with her parents and seeks context from the opposite side. – Jared M. (full review)
Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg)
Certain beliefs unite all of humanity. Take, for example, the idea that the extraordinary is possible. Or, even more, that the impossible is possible. Steven Spielberg isn’t shy about believing in extraterrestrial life, and he doesn’t think you should be either. He’s so sincere about this aloof-yet-sky-high-stakes concept that he’s returning to it again with a very simple profundity in tow: “Empathy is the core of animate existence–our evolutionary advantage.” And he intends to remind us of our capacity for such. – Luke H. (full review)
Do You Love Me (Lana Daher)
In what could’ve also been called Lebanon Plays Itself, Lana Daher’s ambitious, all-archival Do You Love Me captures some 70 years of Lebanese history, curated from a search that began with more than 20,000 potential sources. Consolidated to just 76 minutes, the resulting feat of montage is an experiment as playful as it is informative, showing a country in turmoil and citizens who still find happiness in everyday life. – Jordan R.
Drunken Noodles (Lucio Castro)
The laws of time and space are met with frisky ambivalence in Drunken Noodles, Lucio Castro’s anticipated third feature and surely the hottest title in this year’s ACID lineup. Most people familiar with the New York-based, Argentinian-born director first encountered him through End of the Century, a film of similar temporal disregard: set in Barcelona, it followed two men who seemed to fall in love only to realize it wasn’t their first encounter. Upon release in 2019, critics were divided over some of the film’s more adventurous flourishes––the sense of overreach. There are a handful of moments in Noodles that do something similar, but it’s an otherwise sultry and strangely calming film, 82 minutes of late-night hookups and late-season ennui that passes like a summer breeze. – Rory O. (full review)
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (David Wain)
As the world continues fermenting its vile culture, the gang behind The State and Wet Hot American Summer is back to save you from the merciless onslaught of bad news. At least for 90 minutes. The dynamic duo of director David Wain and screenwriter Ken Marino are now in their third decade of bringing a unique brand of irreverent comedy to cinema. In the wake of their MTV sketch comedy show The State, Wain and co. premiered their cult hit Wet Hot American Summer at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. This year, they return once more with Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, a hilarious Hollywood farce in their signature absurdist voice. – Kent M. W. (full review)
The Invite (Olivia Wilde)
Small in scale, yet so much greater than the sum of its parts, Wilde conducts her quartet of players to an orchestral performance. She builds the dramatic tension of a relationship-turned-powder-keg from years of complacency and poor communication over staccato strings until it reaches its summit, only for it to drop and rise again. Employing just four principal actors, including herself, and a single apartment, it’s an impressive feat to pull off and a testament to her progression as actor-turned-director. – Kent M. W. (full review)
Jackass: Best and Last (Jeff Tremaine)
The thing with Jackass is: there’s really nothing like it. Evolving from the skate videos of the 1990s, Jackass has persisted long enough to see its public perception come full circle: from lewd, obnoxious jerks to lewd, obnoxious sweethearts. The franchise never tried to be anything it wasn’t. In making the faithful leap from television to theaters, it only upped its budget to match the larger screen. Charismatic leader Johnny Knoxville and his partner-in-pain, director Jeff Tremaine, always followed a core thesis, a timeless truth: if you film someone getting hit in the nuts, people will laugh at it. Because of their fidelity, the Jackass brand has outlasted the relevance of its once-culture-defining home, MTV, and now its middle-aged principal cast. Despite numerous threats that they had hung up their thongs and Tasers for good, the gang is back for a bittersweet coda. – Kent M. W. (full review)
Leviticus (Adrian Chiarella)
Being queer—especially in this rapidly regressive age—means becoming acquainted with a base level of fear for most of your life. It is something you learn early on: not only when you must discover who can be trusted with your survival, but whether they might betray that trust later. Violence takes so many forms that it can lead to a sort of paranoia that folds in on itself. Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus understands this intimately. By blending the mechanics of It Follows with the trauma of conversion therapy, he crafts a tense, thematically potent feature debut that is more than just a clear metaphor—this is a creepy horror picture in its own right. – Devan S. (full review)
Maddie’s Secret (John Early)
You can’t accuse John Early of not committing. Through the majority of his acting career, the comedian has become a reliable avatar for a palpable, toxic, hilarious narcissism, playing characters oblivious to the world outside the bubbles they’ve so thoroughly cultivated. That was particularly evident over four seasons of Search Party, as well as last year’s Stress Positions, a Sundance favorite that exposed the absurdity of living in quarantine over a masked summer. As an agoraphobic tenant in a Brooklyn brownstone, Early took the situation’s disaster and approached it through his very specific kind of self-assured, righteous mania to such an extent that his freak-outs are still rattling around in my brain. – Jake K-S. (full review)
Night Nurse (Georgia Bernstein)
The best narrative film I saw at Sundance earlier this year, Night Nurse is a movie that very much walks to the beat of its strange drum. With shades of early Atom Egoyan, Georgia Bernstein’s directorial debut is a psychosexual drama following a nurse’s peculiar journey becoming connected to a strange patient’s perverse idea of fun. John Fink said in his review, “The perverse Night Nurse doesn’t quite qualify as a psychosexual thriller, despite underlying erotic tension; there is something more seductive and sinister under the surface.” – Jordan R.
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan)
After a clunky opening setting the table for his time-hopping reworking of Homer’s epic, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey settles into a rhythm of melding awe-worthy spectacle with the emotional toll of a seemingly never-ending journey of despair and sacrifice. What I was most struck by, even for all its fantastical elements, is how much Nolan mines from the rather spare natural settings to instill a grounded sense of vastness when it comes to Odysseus’ journey. While one wishes for a bit more patience to take it all in, the trademark propulsiveness of the director works wonders as we discover the ingenuity of each setpiece. For another perspective, read Nick Newman’s eloquent review, which details why the technical feat of shooting entirely in IMAX has its drawbacks. – Jordan R.
Remake (Ross McElwee)
“I used to call myself a filmmaker. I used to call myself your father.” These two sentences are repeated like a mantra through Ross McElwee’s latest searingly personal documentary, Remake, focused primarily on the devastating loss of his 27-year-old son Adrian to a fentanyl overdose in 2016. It’s the director’s first film in fifteen years—the last, Photographic Memory, also utilized his relationship with Adrian to tackle self-reflective themes around parenthood, perspective, and the passage of time. McElwee has, for decades, been a pioneer of the type of tangential documentary storytelling popularized of late by artists like Nathan Fielder and John Wilson; work that on the surface appears as though the person behind the lens is making it up on the fly and finding a destination in real time, yet is far more methodically researched and developed over painstaking hours in the editing room. (Unlike the majority of his earlier work, which he edited solely, McElwee pulled in the aid of master editor Joe Bini, whose oeuvre includes Grizzly Man and American Honey). – Mitchell B. (full review)
Romería (Carla Simón)
Continuing in the low-key register of her Golden Bear winner Alcarràs, Carla Simón returns with Romería, another tale of intergenerational dissonance. A film about the stories families choose to tell and the ones they bury deep inside, it unfurls on Spain’s Atlantic coast, where 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia) hopes to reunite with her paternal family. It’s also a story about displacement and yearning for lost roots, themes that cut close to the bone for a director whose parents died of AIDS when she was still a child, and who reunited with her father’s family in the town of Vigo, Galicia, where the film is set, at the same age. Simón has always been an autobiographical filmmaker; Romería might be her most personal work yet. – Rory O. (full review)
Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)
The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts and visions collide in stupefying dioramas. The director is a spinner of wandering tales, never fueled by linear plots so much as ambient forces: a ticking clock, gusts of wind, the distant roaring of waves. His dramas tend to pull your gaze from people and toward the inanimate objects that litter their surroundings. It’s here––in the interstice between the fictional foreground and non-fictional background––that the actual story often lies. – Leonardo G. (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.