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.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta)

In 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, the Jimmy gang is back, led by Jack O’Connell in a role that oddly mirrors his Irish vampire villain in last year’s Sinners. They’ve taken Spike (Alfie Williams), the pre-teen protagonist of the previous entry, now separated from his parents, under their wing. They ended the last film saving Spike’s life from the infected, but it’s soon revealed they have nefarious means to install themselves as new leaders of a post-apocalyptic society, among them the brutal torture of any other survivors who won’t conform. The rather unpleasant violence in these sequences is a different beast than all the goofy spine-ripping (still here) of Boyle’s predecessor. – Ethan V. (full review)

All That’s Left of You (Cherien Dabis)

A sprawling, gripping drama that starts with the foundation of the state of Israel and displacement of Palestinian families in Jaffa, then ends two years shy of October 7, writer-director-star Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You considers generational trauma on both an intimate and epic scale. One of 2025’s most vital films, Dabis’ radical, heartbreaking epic serves a captivating ode to a homeland lost and a path forward—a timely call for peace and reconciliation. — John F. (full review)

A Useful Ghost (Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke)

While ghosts and spirits have long been the conduit for cinematic scares and jolts, from The Innocents to Poltergeist to The Ring, a relatively recent wave of films exploring the supernatural has been more concerned with the tangible, emotional effects these specters can have on the living. In that sense, a spiritual cousin to the likes of Uncle Boonmee, Personal Shopper, A Ghost Story, and Light from Light, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s directorial debut A Useful Ghost is a strange, tranquil, humorous exploration of the conundrums that would emerge were ghosts an accepted occurrence in everyday life, and what such phantoms could illuminate about the social and political troubles of modern Thailand and industrialization at large. – Jordan R. (full review)

The Chronology of Water (Kristen Stewart)

As a director, Kristen Stewart takes words and embodies them, carving each into the flesh of her filmmaking like scars. You can’t breathe underwater. The transfiguration of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir is a suffocating experience, keeping one under even as you think you might briefly come up for oxygen. By the halfway mark, Chronology may have induced dissociation. But you don’t look away, you don’t leave. You kick forward, stretching ahead. You reach the wall, break the surface, and breathe the air. Stewart’s staggering debut is more than catharsis—it feels and understands everything that leads to it. — Blake S.

Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)

Father Mother Sister Brother offers three movies for the price of one. The first is set on a frosty lakeside in the home of a man (Tom Waits) who’s visited by another (Adam Driver). The second pulls up in a leafy Dublin suburb where Charlotte Rampling plays mother to Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps. It’s written and directed by Jim Jarmusch, perhaps the only director in the world who could arrange that constellation of stars and have them speak in small talk over cups of tea. That he’s still interested in doing so should not be undervalued. – Rory O. (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)

The Love That Remains (Hlynur Pálmason)

Carving out a rather immaculate body of work that continues to go in different directions, Hlynur Pálmason returned last year with The Love That Remains, which premiered at Cannes and is now coming to theaters following an awards-qualifying run. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature marks a soft, Malickian left turn for the man behind the icy-bleak dramas Winter Brothers, A White, White Day, and Godland. Up against the rest of Pálmason’s oeuvre––which weighs viewers down with a grave obstinance, whether emanating from the conflict between brothers, a perceived affair, or a suicidally zealous resolve to evangelize to the least habitable (or interested) corners of the Earth––The Love That Remains is a floating catharsis of love and loss that carries its audience like a cloud carries angels.”

Magellan (Lav Diaz)

With a Western star at the center and a breezy runtime of 163 minutes, it’s easy to label Magellan Lav Diaz’s most “accessible film.” If you’re a diehard, however, it’s clearly the thing he’s worked towards his entire career. Amidst a corpus dedicated to excising the demons of a country without an identity and brutally colonized many times over, he finally turns his attention to the Philippines’ original sin. Ever the shit-stirrer, Diaz spits on the myth of Ferdinand Magellan and paints him as he was: a weak, pathetic man who stumbled his way into destabilization, all the while castigating us for wanting to see it. It’s no accident that Magellan begins with an indigenous woman being startled by an offscreen noise, staring into the camera, screaming, and running away: even the prying eyes of “compassion” are complicit, and Diaz lets you know it. –– Brandon S.

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

The opening credits of Marty Supreme features retro animation of a sperm fertilizing a giant egg; as Alphaville’s “Forever Young” blares over the soundtrack, the giant fertilized egg eventually transforms into a ping pong ball flying across the net of a table. The man hitting the ball, and the carrier of the victorious spermatozoon, is the early-twentysomething Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a self-assured table tennis player who dreams of becoming a world champion. Stuck selling shoes in his Lower East Side neighborhood, still living with his mother in an Orchard Street tenement building surrounded by obnoxious family and neighbors, Marty longs to escape an environment rife with parochial values and limited opportunities. The year is 1952: the devastation of World War II is in the rearview mirror, economic prosperity will soon be on the rise, and America has been swept up in a wave of national optimism. It’s the perfect time for a charming striver like Marty to make his mark with the tools at his disposal: a paddle and a ball, which, as the credits sequence suggests, is the source of life itself. – Vikram M. (full review)

No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)

There’s no telling whether Park Chan-wook is a fan of the Sex Pistols. But during his latest film, No Other Choice, I found myself pondering the line John Lydon memorably uttered during the band’s disastrous final performance in 1978: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” No Other Choice is 139 minutes centered on such a feeling––what it means to be cheated by employers, competitors, and artificial intelligence. It is also about what it takes to fight back––really fight back. – Christopher S. (full review)

Pillion (Harry Lighton)

It wouldn’t be Cannes without a good scandal film. For 2025, British director Harry Lighton’s feature debut Pillion may be the one that sends the most people clutching their pearls. Centered on a dom-sub relationship within the gay biker milieu, it features depictions of fetishistic sex acts that could trigger a few sensitive souls. It would be a shame, however, if all attention is directed at the kinks and shocks––Lighton has made a truly provocative anti-romance that’s funny, honest, strangely touching. It’s an exceptional balance act that makes Pillion the unlikeliest crowd-pleaser. – Zhuo-Ning Su (full review)

A Poet (Simón Mesa Soto)

One of the great character studies of the year, Simón Mesa Soto’s Cannes Un Certain Regard winner A Poet follows a down-and-out writer trying to find his way through a complicated situation attempting to mentor a young student. I said in my Cannes review, “Far removed from the mournful yearnings of A Quiet Passion––much less the quotidian, calming rhythms of Paterson––Simón Mesa Soto’s Medellín-set second feature finds unexpected poetry in the jagged, pained misery of dashed dreams and misinterpreted, career-ending good intentions. A Poet’s Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios), though 2,000 miles south of the down-on-their-luck, desperate characters often captured by Sean Price Williams’ camera, would find some recognition in the shared Sisyphean struggle of striking out at every opportunity life offers up. This Un Certain Regard jury prize winner is a darkly humorous, cautionary character study in letting one’s long-lost creative dreams drive every decision––one in which Soto, more often than not, finds empathy as his protagonist circles the drain.”

The President’s Cake (Hasan Hadi)

Among the best things in The President’s Cake are the colors. There’s the deep red of a rooster’s comb as it peeks out from a young girl’s carrying pouch; there’s the white decorations that adorn her uncle’s blue car; and then there is the opening vista, in which a deep evening sky is disturbed by the roar of two American fighter jets. We’re somewhere in the ’90s, the country is Iraq, and the decorations are for its president, Saddam Hussein. Soon the camera will peel away to reveal a group of villagers lining up for water. If this is the length people are going for basic requirements, you soon begin to wonder: what chance does anyone have of finding baking soda? – Rory O. (full review)

Resurrection (Bi Gan)

Few filmmakers with just two features under their belt can amass the passionate, cinephilic following of Bi Gan. His blend of surrealist storytelling, ultra-realist aesthetics, and a trippy play with time transforms rural China into a place of hypnotic beauty. Seven years after Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the wait for his third feature is finally over. Premiering in competition at Cannes, Resurrection sees the writer-director venture onto new ground while also serving what fans have desired. Narratively and stylistically chameleonic, it’s a sci-fi-flavored, century-spanning cinematic collage and profound invitation to dream. Bi Hive, rejoice: this is Palme material. – Zhuo-Ning Su (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)

Sirat (Oliver Laxe)

For the French-Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, a competition berth in Cannes has been a long time coming. Laxe was here in 2010 (You All Are Captains), 2016 (Mimosas), and 2019 (Fire Will Come) without once going home empty-handed, and he now rises to the occasion with Sirat, his grandest, most adventurous work yet: the kind of bold, auteurist arrival that seems to happen more here than any other festival. The story takes place in Morocco, which provided the backdrop of Laxe’s first two films, and follows a father searching for his daughter amidst the dust and drugs of an illegal rave scene in and around the Atlas Mountains. There’s a delicious touch of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore to that setup, but Sirat is more in the lineage of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, even Mad Max: a story about a ragtag group attempting to move some monstrous vehicles over a landscape so unforgiving it might actually be hell. If I see a better film in Cannes, it will have been a very good year. – Rory O. (full review)

Sound of Falling (Mascha Schilinski)

German writer-director Mascha Schilinski’s sophomore feature Sound of Falling is the first competition title to screen at Cannes this year. If it’s anything to go by, we might be headed for a vintage edition of the festival. Set around a farm in northern Germany over the course of a century, this highly experimental, deeply unsettling tale about the fates of women and their echoes down history plays like a psychosexual fever dream of epic scope. While it will confound and upset plenty, hardcore cinephiles can mark this down as their next film to obsess over. It’s quite a feast. – Zhuo-Ning Su (review)

The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold)

In The Testament of Ann Lee, Amanda Seyfried gives the finest performance of her career. The actress shakes, rattles, and moans through a selection of 18th-century hymns that have been updated by Daniel Blumberg, the composer who shouted out London’s Cafe Oto (another church of peculiar noises) after winning an unlikely and richly deserved Oscar for The Brutalist earlier this year. Directed by Mona Fastvold and co-written by her partner Brady Corbet, Testament feels so symbiotic to their previous movie that it’s not hard to picture Seyfried’s Lee––the real-life founder of the Shaker movement and a woman who believed herself to be the second coming––and Adrien Brody’s László Tóth existing in the same grainy, textured, 70mm frame (if a century or so apart). – Rory O. (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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