The Best Movies Now Playing in Theaters

We’re thrilled to launch a new feature on The Film Stage highlighting 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, we thought it would be helpful to provide a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you. We’ll be updating this page weekly, so be sure to bookmark.

About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan made a triumphant return to Cannes last year with About Dry Grasses, for which Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes, and now Turkey’s Oscar entry arrives this month. In his review, Leonardo Goi said, “The pastures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s luminous new film are only dry at the very end. Save for that brief summery coda, the landscape in About Dry Grasses remains a snowcapped immensity where prairies are ringed by belittling peaks, people stand out as calligraphic silhouettes, and snow falls so heavy as to blot out everything. It’s as if it fell ‘to make oblivion possible,’ observes art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), and in a film populated with wanderers trying to start anew, those words echo like a prayer. Geographically and thematically close to the rest of Ceylan’s oeuvre, the film finds him working once again in a remote corner of Eastern Anatolia and revisiting leitmotifs in his preferred mode: long, talky symposiums that pit characters against each other in games of verbal fencing. But none of it feels like a retreading. If anything, About Dry Grasses is both a distillation of Ceylan’s recurrent tropes and a purification of his style, a film made of conversations that remain explosive even at their most forbidding, shivering with a sense of fluid emotions constantly at play.”

The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki)

Whereas that 2013 film saw Miyazaki––a man with distinct sensitivity to children’s perspectives––deciding to close on the very adult tale of a man bearing blood on his hands from World War II, he returns to the well, somewhat, in The Boy and the Heron (I much prefer its Japanese title How Do You Live?). Beginning in the middle of a Toyko fire during the war, young man Mahito’s life is thrown into quick disarray. Quickly check Miyazaki’s Wikipedia page to find a quotation about him noting that one of his first memories was the “bombed-out cities” of his home country during that period––though Mahito faces a tragedy Hayao didn’t, his mother perishing in the flames. Soon relocating to the countryside with his strict father Shoichi––who is long past Mahito’s mother, having remarried her younger sister Natsuko––the boy faces growing pains beyond belief. His face smacked with a rock and shooting a burst of blood was enough of a shocking image from an anime film to make the press-screening audience gasp. – Ethan V. (full review)

La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)

While Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny perhaps garnered more press out of Cannes, another selection involving archaeologists and tomb raiders will have a longer shelf life. Alice Rohrwacher’s latest feature La Chimera (starring Josh O’Connor, Isabella Rossellini, and Alba Rohrwacher) ranked quite highly on our top 50 films of 2023 list for good reason. It’s a dreamy, magical odyssey in which the Italian director whisks viewers away with the kind of transportive vision she’s exuded in all her features thus far.

Club Zero (Jessica Hausner)

Across her five previous features, Austrian director Jessica Hausner (Amour Fou, Lourdes, Little Joe) has developed a distinctly unique tone––one which carries through her sixth outing Club Zero. Led by Mia Wasikowska, the dark satire follows a nutrition teacher at an elite school whose relationship with five students takes a dangerous turn. While Hausner is perhaps intentionally poking the bear as it relates to eating disorders, one could swap out the subject of her new film to another topic du jour and still retain a cogent, one-of-a-kind look at cult mentality. Read my interview for more. – Jordan R.

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude)

Long before the formal somersaulting of his 2021 Berlinale winner Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, the Romanian director’s films have hopscotched across genres and tones, weaving together the vernaculars of essay films, documentaries, and archives into projects that unfurl like mosaics. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World follows in their footsteps. A collage perched between road movie and black comedy, Jude’s latest is another effervescent study of life in the 21st century, a work that’s engineered to both sponge something of our screens-infested zeitgeist and interrogate its textures. Few filmmakers are so reliably able to conjure snapshots of modern capitalism and its neuroses; fewer still can douse those documents with so much playfulness and wonder as Jude. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Free Time (Ryan Martin Brown)

Few films capture the trials and tribulations of twenty-something waywardness rooted in economic realities of today so eloquently and humorously as Ryan Martin Brown’s feature debut Free Time. Led by Colin Burgess in a beautifully articulated performance of neurotic self-sabotage, this portrait of “the Great Resignation” more than makes up for its small scale with keen observations on what it means to have a creatively satisfying life. Accompanied by the strong supporting cast of Rajat Suresh, Holmes, James Webb, Eric Yates, Jessie Pinnick, and Rebecca Bulnes, Free Time feels the promising beginnings of a new era in NYC indie filmmaking.

Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)

This is a Rose Glass movie, which means it packs a killer, multi-faceted punch and resists easy classification. Her second feature after St. Maud is a stylized neo-noir love story, a drama about addiction, an athletic underdog tale, and a bloody thriller compounding genres and narratives that overlap and blend into each other without any wrinkles. It takes place in rural New Mexico circa 1989, where Lou (Kristen Stewart) helps manage a warehouse gym, plunging toilets and defending the advances of a co-worker named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov). Lou has a bad smoking habit, a chopped-up mullet, and some dark secrets from her past. But her life changes when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) rolls into town from Oklahoma and starts maxing-out on weights. She’s looking to get to Las Vegas to compete in a bodybuilding competition and needs some money and a place to bulk before the big day. Jackie has a certain look and quiet demeanor that attracts Lou, who quickly gifts her new friend a bottle of steroids to gain a little edge. It’s not long before the pair start up a feverish romance that Glass portrays sensitively and seductively, then ferociously. – Jake K.S. (full review)

On the Adamant (Nicolas Philibert)

For the second in a row, the Berlinale jury has awarded the top prize of Golden Bear to a documentary. Before Mati Diop’s Dahomey this year, Nicolas Philibert’s On the Adamant picked up the prize and now Kino Lorber has released it in theaters. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “A lot of what’s good about On the Adamant can be found in that opening sequence: how François seems to channel his frustration through a creative outlet; how expression seems to focus him, if only for a minute. In another scene, a man with more apparent disabilities than François presents a drawing to the other members of his class, explaining that the two girls pictured are his daughters. When asked why he isn’t included in the scene, he charms the crowd by flipping it over to reveal another sketch of them together at the zoo. Those kinds of moments are what’s on offer in Philibert’s compassionate, calmly observed, at times intermittent film: an invitation to board the Adamant and meet its crew, enjoy their company, get some idea of their vantage, and appreciate the Art Brut energies of their craft.”

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

Watch an exclusive clip above.

Wim Wenders’ serene, Oscar-nominated character study gives Kōji Yakusho one of his best roles, portraying the everyday routine of a toilet cleaner in Japan. (Don’t worry, it’s slightly more exciting than that sounds.) Luke Hicks said in his review, “With Perfect Days, a passion project he’s wanted to make for decades, Wenders has constructed a daydream of minimalist living (which I don’t mean fashionably) and humanist perspective that has more legs than his past five fiction films combined.”

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (Neo Sora)

In a heartbreaking work that feels like a private home movie with which the world is being graced, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s son, filmmaker Neo Sora, captured his father’s final performance. Shot in beautifully austere black-and-white, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus focuses solely on the music, capturing a man contending with his physical limitations during the last gasp of astounding talent. It’s a treasure. – Jordan R.

The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu)

One of the most-acclaimed films on the festival circuit last year, premiering at Berlinale and stopping by Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and New York, Zhang Lu’s meditative drama The Shadowless Tower is now in theaters. Leonardo Goi said in his Berlinale review, “Watching over Beijing’s Xicheng district is an enormous white pagoda, a relic of the Kublai Khan rule, so majestic and otherworldly in looks and stature it might as well have been dropped on Earth from a far-flung planet. Legend has it the monument casts no shadow––not in its immediate vicinity, at least––though its silhouette is said to stretch as far as Tibet. No other corner of the megalopolis features as prominently as this one in Zhang Lu’s The Shadowless Tower, a film to which the 13th-century wonder lends its title as well as a metaphor for the kind of permanence its drifters fumble after. And no one among them is as drawn to it as Gu Wentong (Xin Baiqing).”

Snack Shack (Adam Rehmeier)

Evolving the zippy, punk aesthetic in his previous feature Dinner in America, director Adam Rehmeier’s Snack Shack is an entertaining Dazed and Confused-esque summer comedy, bolstered by the spirited performances of its leads, Conor Sherry and The Fabelmans‘ Gabriel LaBelle. Following the always-scheming best friends’ journey as they attempt to strike rich when they take over the snack shack of the local pool, the narrative ends up hitting some expected beats, but there’s a comfort in its familiar nature––conveying a throwback nostalgia that doesn’t overshadow its characters. – Jordan R.

The Taste of Things (Trần Anh Hùng)

One of the most purely pleasurable films of last year, Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things brings Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel together one of the best culinary cinematic experiences since Babette’s Feast. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Last time Benoît Magimel appeared in the Cannes competition, a vision in Albert Serra’s Pacifiction, he played a foreign diplomat who stalked an island of French Polynesia like a trashy king. If Serra’s otherworldy film told a cautionary tale about feckless Euro-decadence, Magimel’s latest is more like a revelry. Adapted from Marcel Rouf’s 1924 novel The Passionate Epicure, The Taste of Things is a film about the pleasures of preparing food and consuming it, the idea of cooking as an act of giving and even of love––if a leitmotif exists in this film’s script, it is the sigh of ecstasy.”

The Tuba Thieves (Alison O’Daniel)

A singular viewing (and listening) experience, the documentary The Tuba Thieves explores what it means to listen and how sound––particularly its absence––figures into everyday life. A fascinating counterpart to a fellow recent Sundance premiere, 32 Sounds, Alison O’Daniel’s film opens up the world of the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing community to invite audiences to see and hear the experience. With a rather radical use of captions and subtitles, it’s among the essential documentaries of 2024 thus far. John Fink said in his Sundance review, “A film that rewards patience, The Tuba Thieves, despite its title, is not a quirky heist picture but rather a meditation on the presence and absence of sound framed by both recent and further-removed history.”

The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

In The Zone of Interest a commander, his wife, and their four children live a life of bucolic bliss. They picnic by the lake. They doddle by the pool. When he sets off to work, she tends to the lilacs. Sat around the dinner table over würst and kohl, the girls’ hair plaited back like golden brezeln, they seem as if plucked from German romanticism. So why, you begin to wonder, is the light so dim? Why do these people not seem to mind when the dogs bark at night? And why do those barks sometimes sound like screams? – Rory O. (full review)

More Recommended Films Now Playing in Theaters

Limbo

With Love and a Major Organ

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.