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.

BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (Kahlil Joseph)

Celebrating and condensing centuries of Black history that would take more than a few lifetimes for any scholar to thoroughly ascertain in totality, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions eschews dryly academy ethnographic study to deliver a kaleidoscopic, vigorous, engrossing journey. Utilizing Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah’s W. E. B. Du Bois-inspired “Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience”––the latest edition of which is nearly 4,000 pages––as its foundation, with page numbers presented throughout its plethora of references, the viewing experience is less daunting than one imagines the filmmaking process surely must have proved. Converging and clashing seemingly thousands of pieces of media to thought-provoking effect, this is a directorial debut that’s overwhelming in its rapid pace while also acting as a generous invitation to further examine any one of its sprawling tendrils of past, present, and future Black history. – Jordan R. (full review)

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)

Blue Moon, which world-premiered at the Berlinale, is another beautifully personal work from Linklater, full of authorial idiosyncrasies and tics, but distinguishing the film from his corpus is it being the kind you can only make at a mature career stage. It’s not so much that Linklater has nothing to prove––screenplays like Robert Kaplow’s and its rarified, remote milieu of mid-WWII New York theaterland can typically send financiers balking. With a “legacy” career, little favors and gives come your way; for Linklater, maybe his next will be a legitimate awards contender, and new relationships with acting talent can be brought to bear. And different or lower expectations for the end product allow him to really express who he is as an artist at this point in his life. – David K. (full review)

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

After dabbling in dystopian fantasy (The Lobster) and period comedy (The Favourite), shocking us along the way with original creations (Dogtooth) and fanciful adaptations (Poor Things) alike, Yorgos Lanthimos has proven time and again that there’s not a single uncreative bone in his body. Remaking the criminally underseen Korean sci-fi comedic thriller Save the Green Planet!, he succeeds in honoring the original while putting his unique stamp on it. The result is a sleeker (if slightly paler) version of a truly bonkers film. – Zhuo Ning Su (review)

The Chronology of Water (Kristen Stewart)

Book adaptations yield two kinds of films: those that transliterate and those that translate. While the former insist on keeping the source material’s spirit at the cost of a rendition so faithful it comes to stage things rigidly, like a direct transplant from page to screen, the latter trust both mediums so completely, allowing for some poetic gap between book and film as if translating an idiom from one language to another. Adaptation can be a risky venture for seasoned filmmakers, let alone a newcomer. Even more so if you’re an A-list actress, whose directorial debut likely faces a great deal of scrutiny. In light of this, Kristen Stewart’s decision to adapt the 2011 memoir The Chronology of Water by American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch––who is probably better-known for her second book (and first published with a major press) The Small Backs of Children––suggests that the match between artist and material was anything but forced or accidental. – Savina P. (full review)

Cutting Through Rocks (Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni)

The documentary Cutting Through Rocks is proof positive of the idiom, “two steps forward, one step back.” Directed by Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, this film tells the story of Sara Shahverdi, the first elected councilwoman in her northwestern Iranian village. We follow her from her campaigning for votes, to her surprising victory, and then her struggle to affect change in her community. A long-lived culture of male-dominated norms stands in her way and leads to deep tensions and conflict. Members of Shahverdi’s own family become enemies, questioning the stubbornness of her resolve and willingness to fight back. – Dan M. (full review)

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)

Hamnet is a great work of empathy and the best film Chloé Zhao has made by quite a wide margin. Adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who returns here as co-writer, the film serves as a lovely reminder of why art is important, how watching something can make you feel, make you understand, make you consider. – Dan M. (full review)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

Many films, from the classic melodrama Mildred Pierce to last year’s playful dramedy Nightbitch, have tried to depict the unique struggles of motherhood with a focus on the special intimacy of child-rearing. Mothers have long borne the brunt and most of the blame for how their children behave in the world. Fatherhood is considered more optional, and the bar to clear for being good at it is much lower. These may seem like obvious statements, but they bear repeating in an American society that villainizes birth control and abortion. America wants women to bear children and then provide them with none of the emotional or monetary support for them to thrive and have their own personal lives. In recent years, filmmakers have tried to illustrate the darker side of motherhood, with films like Tully getting at the exhaustion and loss of self that can happen therein. In the aforementioned Nightbitch, Amy Adams plays a woman who realizes how lost and hopeless she feels as a stay-at-home mother, having given up her career to spend more time with her son. No matter how often they cry out for help, our patriarchal society pressures them to push themselves all the way to the edge. – Jourdain S. (full review)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

If you were handed over the man who destroyed your life and those of countless others––a psychopath who tortured, raped, and murdered in the name of a tyrannical system––what would you do? Would you exact revenge or do the impossible––forgive and set him free? It Was Just an Accident, Jafar Panahi’s first film since his release from prison in Iran, hinges on that excruciating dilemma. The story is easy enough to summarize; its emotional wallop defies facile description. In an unexpected stroke of luck, four Iranians who did time for protesting the regime manage to abduct the guard responsible for the unspeakable atrocities they suffered behind bars. Having knocked him unconscious, they shove him in a van and travel around, wondering what to do. The whole journey spans less than a day. By the time it wraps, Accident feels like content under pressure. Panahi welds scorching social critique to a masterful command of form: a devastating cry for justice, his latest also serves as a superb thriller. It is a towering achievement. – Leonardo G. (full review)

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

For the second time in three years, Cannes’ competition ends with a film in which Josh O’Connor plays a scruffy, late-20th-century man with some knack for pinching masterpieces. Following (spiritually or otherwise) Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, an experiment in form so thorough and self-assured that even Robert Bresson might have appreciated it. Nobody expected the versatile director’s first heist movie to resemble Ocean’s 11, but The Mastermind is still remarkably low on flash. There is a jazzy score by Rob Mazurek and some even-jazzier opening credits, but this is very much a Reichardt joint: from its gorgeous, sylvan landscapes and autumnal color palette to the patient, observational tone, it suggests what robbing art in the early part of the 1970s might have truly felt like. – Rory O. (full review)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Viva la revolución! As bellowed by the ex-radical and current schlub Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), we have One Battle After Another’s most immediately memorable line, and arguably its thesis statement. But in this compelling, propulsive new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s still worth scrutinizing the nuances, undertows, and implications of that command. With the Spanish maintained, and the line’s ties to the Cuban Revolution, it embodies the film’s debt to the western United States’ hispanic culture. But whose revolución are we actually talking about, and is the ailing Bob sincere or endearingly delusional?  – David K. (full review)

Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs)

When I look at Peter Hujar’s portrait of poet Allen Ginsburg, taken on December 18, 1974, it’s strikingly nonchalant. Ginsberg is standing on the sidewalk, one hand in pocket and the other looped through the straps of a bag draped on his shoulder. He’s looking right down the barrel of the lens with an “okay, you’re taking my picture” expression on his face. Ginsberg is perhaps the most recognizable name to come out of the beat generation of poets but he looks like he could be anybody––he could be your buddy Carl. It was taken for the New York Times but certainly doesn’t have the gloss and sophistication of celebrity portraits we see in major publications today. The austere street beside him is on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood now flooded with tourists, boutiques, and banality. Just as Hujar’s photo is indicative of an era of artistic renaissance in New York City, so is Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day. – Kent M. W. (full review)

Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk (Sepideh Farsi)

On October 7, 2024, Israel’s occupation of Gaza took new shape as a publicly declared war. At the time, Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi was traveling around the world presenting a film about the conflict she experienced firsthand as a child in Iran. Meanwhile, in Gaza, 24-year-old Palestinian journalist Fatma Hassona watched in horror as the night sky lit up with electric-white streaks of incoming missiles like lightning. As Farsi followed the genocide in Gaza, she felt drawn to cover it somehow, but couldn’t find a way into the occupied zone. Through Palestinian refugees, she finds Fatma, and a beautiful virtual relationship begins to blossom. – Luke H. (full review)

Rebuilding (Max Walker-Silverman) 

We can all feel lonely. Even if we’re constantly surrounded by people, we can find ourselves detached or isolated––lost in our own minds. For some, that feeling is brought on by devastation. The kind that arrives out of nowhere, takes everything, and leaves rubble. Many of us see it in the news, think “how awful,” maybe donate some money, but chalk it up to the indifference of fate and move on. In Rebuilding, Max Walker-Silverman considers if loss and destruction are part of life, then healing and rebirth must be, too. – Kent M. W. (full review)

The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)

When Armando (Wagner Moura) finally resolves to seek a fake passport and one-way ticket out of Brazil for himself and his young son, he asks his father-in-law to suggest a spot where he could meet a fixer. The old man recommends a room inside his place of work: a cinema. This choice (a movie theatre standing as the only safe refuge from death) is both hopelessly romantic and in keeping with the infectious cinephilia of Kleber Mendonça Filho, director of The Secret Agent, an unsettling and rousing thriller into which Armando staggers as a tragic hero. Anyone familiar with the Brazilian’s filmography will recognize these tributes as a recurring motif, but even neophytes will appreciate the affection he reserves for the movies––those who make them and the places that house them. A critic-turned-filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is the rare cineaste who can make his love palpable and contagious. When they don’t explicitly graft their touchstones onto present-day Brazil (as the rural siege western Bacurau did with the works of John Carpenter or Sam Peckinpah) his films often double as heartfelt paeans to theatres themselves. In his recent documentary Pictures of Ghosts, the Recife-born director trained his camera on venues scattered across his native turf (or what remained), asking us to contemplate the evangelical churches and rubble that replaced them. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Over a delicately structured, Mike Mills-ian montage of Nora Berg’s (Renate Reinsve) personal heritage––30-odd years of an Oslo native’s existence relayed in a sparse collection of seminal moments, feelings, and thoughts, then layered into the lives and characteristics of those that preceded her––the wizened voice of a grandmother ushers us into Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier’s intergenerational drama about processing (if not healing) family trauma through art. – Luke H. (full review)

WTO/99 (Ian Bell)

One of the more fascinating elements of the documentary WTO/99, directed by Ian Bell, is that while it visually suggests a relic, the political observations feel as predictive as they are reflexive. The film compiles a clear chronology of the events that took place throughout the Seattle WTO protests outside of the WTO Ministerial Conference on November 30th, 1999. What began as a peaceful demonstration primarily concerning labor and environmental issues devolved rather quickly into chaos on the first day, with law enforcement unleashing tear gas and rubber bullets on thousands of citizens. And while property damage is documented in video clips, Bell paints a fairly distinct picture of a large majority of non-violent demonstrators injured thanks to escalation by police. – Dan M. (full review)

Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackleton)

What would a feature-length director commentary look like when the film was never made? This is the slippery, fascinating conceit of Charlie Shackleton’s rather brilliant Zodiac Killer Project, which finds the director walking through his failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge into the first major documentary on the unsolved case. What emerges, one could argue, is even more intellectually stimulating than the original intentions: a sui generis, often humorous stream-of-consciousness journey highlighting the ever-mounting mass of repeated cliches of various true-crime documentaries and series. Instead of a simple hit piece, however, Shackleton investigates why such familiarity often works on the viewer while ensuring you’ll never watch such a program the same way again. – 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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