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.

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)

If a James Bond or Mission: Impossible film excised all its action scenes––save a stray explosion or gunshot––while employing a script with a pop John le Carré sensibility, it might resemble something like Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. A hyper-slick, suave spy thriller, it’s mainly relegated to dinner tables and office rooms as stages for rapid-fire, gleefully barbed verbal sparring scripted by David Koepp, returning to the genre after Ethan Hunt’s first outing. Primarily focusing on a trio of couples working in British intelligence, Koepp’s script poses the question: it is possible to have a healthy relationship when there’s no such thing as separating work from life, particularly when your job description is one of a professional liar? – Jordan R. (full review)

Eephus (Carson Lund)

If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game. – Jordan R. (full review)

The Encampments (Michael T. Workman, Kei Pritsker)

A document of a moment in time for a story very much still unfolding, The Encampments is a thorough, engrossing portrait of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, created by Columbia University students last year, calling for their university to divest from U.S. and Israeli weapons companies. With insights from those most directly involved in the protests––including many fearing for their safety and future as America’s newly-instated fascist regime continues to strip away rights––the documentary becomes a sobering, infuriating look at the dismantling of free speech and the nefarious ways those in power will go to any lengths to silence those that are of opposing interests. If there’s any positivity to be gleaned, The Encampments is a powerful portrait of collective action and, as other universities and organizations drew inspiration, how acts of courage can cause ripple effects across the world. – Jordan R. (full review)

Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)

Miguel Gomes, the Portuguese filmmaker behind The Tsugua Diaries, Arabian Nights, and Tabu, made his long-awaited return at last year’s Cannes with the mesmerizing odyssey Grand Tour. Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “If Chris Marker and Preston Sturges ever made a film together, it might have looked something like Grand Tour, a sweeping tale that moves from Rangoon to Manila, via Bangkok, Saigon and Osaka, as it weaves the stories of two disparate lovers towards a fateful reunion. The stowaways could scarcely be more Sturgian: he the urbane man on the run, she the intrepid woman trying to track him down. Their scenes are set in 1917 and shot in a classical studio style, yet they’re delivered within a contemporary travelogue––as if we are not only following their epic romance but a director’s own wanderings.”

Henry Fonda for President (Alexander Horwath)

One of the most thought-provoking, densely assembled documentaries of the year is now playing at Anthology Film Archives. Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President, which premiered at Berlinale last year, is a three-hour journey through the career of the legendary actor. But rather than telling a standard cradle-to-grave story, performances and life events are used to chart a course of the history of America itself. Also featuring audio from Fonda’s final interview, it’s a truly fascinating approach to rethinking the biographical documentary. – Jordan R.

Invention (Courtney Stephens)

Grieving comes in many guises. In Courtney Stephens’ Invention, speculative fiction blends with personal history to explore the ways we process death. The subject is Callie Hernandez, an actress and filmmaker whose father died of a COVID-related illness in 2021. There’s much archival footage of the man, mostly television recordings from his times as a kind of telemarketer for new-age healing methods, but Stephens and Hernandez go one further, suggesting an alternative timeline. In this ersatz world, a patent for an electromagnetic healing device is left to her in her father’s will. No categorization does the film justice: it’s about death and mourning, of course, but it’s just as interested in people’s susceptibility to conspiracy. – Rory O. (full review)

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)

“In a career spanning four decades and eight features, Alain Guiraudie has cemented himself as one of our most astute chroniclers of desire. If there’s any leitmotif to his libidinous body of work, that’s not homosexuality (prevalent as same-sex encounters might be across his films) but a force that transcends all manner of labels and categories. His is a cinema of liberty: of vast, enchanted spaces and solitary wanderers who wrestle with their passions, and in acting them out, change the way they carry themselves into the world. Desire becomes an exercise in self-sovereignty, a way of reasserting one’s independence––a rebirth. It is often said that cinema is an inescapably scopophilic realm, where the act of looking is itself a source of pleasure, but Guiraudie has a way of making that dynamic feel egalitarian, as thrilling for those watching as it is for those being watched.” – Leonardo G. (full review)

No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor)

Despite the horrors shown throughout No Other Land (all prior to October 7), it’s the Israeli bulldozers calmly retreating post-demolitions that I cannot shake. Beyond the secret document proving that “converting” Palestinian villages like Masafer Yatta into army training grounds was to drive inhabitants out, or an Israeli courtroom––devoid of jurisdiction as illegal settlers––ruling to reject Arab permit requests while evicting families with roots going back almost two centuries, all that’s necessary to understand the terrorism at play are those trucks blindly destroying private property before rolling away. Because it’s not about these occupiers “needing the land” or “enforcing the law.” It’s about control. About laughing at Israeli Yuval Abraham and Palestinian Basel Adra, knowing their only recourse is creating devastatingly crucial documents like this. So prove it’s enough by watching, absorbing, and refusing to remain silent––once a distributor finds the courage to let you. – Jared M.

One to One: John & Yoko (Sam Rice-Edwards, Kevin Macdonald)

If there’s one thing you absolutely cannot miss in Kevin Macdonald’s electrifying ’70s-set New York City music documentary One to One: John & Yoko, it is, unsurprisingly, the music. Thanks to son Sean Ono Lennon’s supervision, the remastering of the iconic couple’s only full concert––and what would be John’s final performance, eight years before his assassination––sounds like an avalanche of near-mythical music history. And, as if hearing it anew isn’t enough, for the first time we can see it. What could only be partially heard on Lennon’s posthumous 1986 album Live in New York City can now be seen and heard in crisp, clear beauty across one giant, riveting, unforgettable cinematic experience. – Luke H. (full review)

Queens of Drama (Alexis Langlois)

The relationship the queer community has with an ever-expanding and rotating lineup of pop divas goes back decades, even if the current iteration of that relationship in the social media age––via the wars between unhinged stan accounts and, of course, endless posts about flop stars doomed to the “Khia asylum”––feels like an entirely new evolution in parasocial fandom. The decades-spanning pop industry satire Queens of Drama might skip over the present day altogether, spending more time reflecting on the mid-2000s dominance of stars manufactured by the Simon Cowell machine than anything more contemporary, but it feels completely of-the-moment for how it establishes the ways in which cultural backlash has transformed for the digital age. It’s reductive to view this as solely a product of the pearl-clutching right when this toxicity can often originate within the queer community––particularly for openly queer artists, who tend to receive just as much vitriolic scrutiny within the LGBTQ community as they do those wanting to erase them from existence. – Alistair R. (full review)

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)

If any single thing distinguishes directors from auteurs, the capacity to put oneself into the film might be a strong dividing line. Few living directors have defined themselves so strongly as David Cronenberg, and while this sets expectations that can very well engender confused responses, it’s all the more opportunity to surprise––such as a sold-out New York Film Festival crowd being hushed into stunned silence when they realized his new film, The Shrouds, was less of the Videodrome or Scanners variety than an unsparing film about grief and loss, albeit a study spring-loaded with doppelgängers, vaguely futuristic tech, and dense conspiracy plotting. When all is said and done, The Shrouds might very well emerge one of Cronenberg’s best films. – Nick N. (full interview)

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Yet Sinners mainly feels so refreshing when this richness of text can easily be overlooked for enjoyment of an unholy hybrid of period drama and horror freakout, Coogler showing as much reverence for the genre as he does the centuries of music which guide this story (and Ludwig Göransson’s excellent score). Most importantly, he remembers that the archetypal vampire tale is an inherently horny one, and he pulls some tricks from Luca Guadagnino’s book for making sexually explicit stories which play even more erotically from what they withhold. Every sex scene features fully clothed actors, but all contain dialogue, or specific kinky details, which serve to remind us that, Dracula onwards, the best vampire stories are carnal ones where characters’ lust is baked into the premise. – Alistair R. (full review)

Viet and Nam (Trương Minh Quý)

A beautiful, haunting romantic drama, Trương Minh Quý’s second feature Việt and Nam was a stand-out at last year’s Cannes and now it’s finally arriving stateside. Luke Hicks said in his NYFF review, “The opening shot of Việt and Nam, writer-director Trương Minh Quý’s sophomore film, is a feat of cinematic restraint. Nearly imperceivable white specs of dust begin to appear, few and far between, drifting from the top of a pitch-black screen to the bottom, where the faintest trace of something can be made out in the swallowing darkness. The sound design is cavernous and close, heaving with breath and trickling with the noise of running water. A boy incrementally appears, walking gradually from one corner of the screen to the other. He has another boy on his back. A dream is gently relayed in voiceover. Then, without the frame ever having truly revealed itself, it’s gone.”

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

The Best New Restorations Now Playing in Theaters

The below list features newly restored films receiving a theatrical release run. For NYC-specific repertory round-ups, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.

  • High Art
  • Killer of Sheep
  • Love Hotel
  • Pink Narcissus
  • A Man and a Woman

Read all reviews here.

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