Mae, the mother of 10-year-old Angela and 6-year-old Ellie, is gradually losing her grip on reality. Her caring husband, Andrew, wants his children to have a stable home life, but he has to spend most of his time working to support the family. When Mae is institutionalized, the young girls are left to their own devices, and Angela begins to live in a dark fantasy world where she combats Satan and speaks with God. Q&A with Rebecca Miller following screening.

The Film Stage presents: A Miami hotel owner finds danger when he becomes romantically involved with the wife of a deposed general from the Dominican Republic where he fought many years back. Introduced by Nick Newman. Courtesy of Abel Ferrara and Anthology Film Archives.

The film follows Grace (Lawrence) and her partner Jackson (Pattinson), who have recently moved into an old house deep in the country. With ambitions to write The Great American Novel, Grace settles into her new environment, and the couple welcome a baby soon after. However, with Jackson frequently – and suspiciously – absent, and the pressures of domestic life starting to weigh on her, Grace begins to unravel, leaving a path of destruction in her wake.

Three sisters find their lives spinning out of control in the wake of their parents' sudden, unexpected divorce.

A dedicated schoolteacher spends her nights cruising bars, looking for abusive men with whom she can engage in progressively extreme sexual encounters.

Directed by Ion Borș  Moldova, Romania, 2022, 103 min One of the rare features recently emerging from Romania’s neighboring country, Carbon is a black comedy and powerful political indictment born entirely out of a picaresque road trip. A young Moldovan man, lured by the cynical promise of a free flat, and his Afghan war veteran sidekick set off for the Transnistrian front in the 90s, only to stumble upon an anonymous, charred corpse. Their simple, noble quest—to identify the body and grant it a proper burial—collides with sheer bureaucratic failure: every authority figure they encounter—military commanders, the mayor, the local doctor and priest—proves more incompetent and 'burnt-out' than the deceased. Hauling their macabre cargo on a tractor-powered odyssey, the two protagonists become the improbable moral center of a morally bankrupt world. Ion Borș has crafted a bitter yet profoundly humane farce, a savagely ironic look at a society in freefall where rules evaporated faster than Soviet promises.

Directed by Horia Cucută and George ve Gänæaard Romania, 2024, 100 min Weaponizing the faux-documentary format with surgical precision, Dismissed is a low-key yet deeply unsettling conspiracy thriller built entirely on talking heads—a cold, calculated parade of faces offering carefully manicured lies. The micro budget constraints transform into style: the drama is in the writing and the constant drip-feed of revelations. A freelance journalist investigates a fatal server room fire at tech giant Futura AI after the case is quickly and suspiciously shut down. Dispensing with costly reconstructions, the film relies solely on the methodical accumulation of testimony to expose the rot. The relentless structure—the journalist's skeptical face juxtaposed against utterly unreliable sources—slowly turns the dead victim from "exemplary employee" to an inconvenient religious outlier. A timely, chilling study in corporate erasure, this indie debut makes themes of workplace toxicity and AI ethics feel immediate, plausible, and terrifyingly real.

Directed by Dmytro Moiseiev Ukraine, 2024, 102 min Adapted from Andrey Kurkov’s novel, published in the US in 2002, the action unfolds weeks before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, yet this is far from being a predictable, black-and-white depiction of an enduring conflict. Moiseiev's film is a laconic and quietly daring affair, stripping existence to its basics in the Donbas's desolate 'grey zone' and focusing on the last two human remnants—a solitary beekeeper and his cynical, former schoolmate—in a village cut off from the world. Their views, like their lives, face opposite directions: one East, one West. Their dynamic, though, is the film's beating heart—a desperate, droll co-existence where past enmity is subsumed by common hardship, bound by sheer proximity and necessity. With every distant blast and shared gesture of humanity, this tender, understated drama is a testament to connection as the final act of resistance, while also exploring the painful realization that living in limbo is no longer tenable.

Directed by Danis Tanović Croatia, Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, 2024, 98 min Better known for the Oscar-winning brilliance of his debut No Man’s Land, Bosnian director Danis Tanović delivers a refreshingly escapist counterpoint here. Swapping the gritty landscape of war that tinges his previous work for a luminous Adriatic refuge, this entertaining light-toned rom-com centers on a feisty woman (Anja Matković, also co-writer) arriving on Prvić, a tiny, car-less Croatian island of fewer than 500 people, to claim a familial inheritance. Forced to linger, she takes a barmaid job, navigating the eccentric local bunch and a quirky romance with a visiting novelist. The gorgeous setting functions as a palpable character, lending a sun-drenched nostalgia to this nuanced blend of breezy humor and deeper themes of generational debt. Subtle and sensual, and filled with highly effective running jokes (stoned cows are a highlight), Tanović’s film elegantly charts the heroine’s delayed coming-of-age while hinting at the fragile beauty of second chances.

Directed by Bogdan Mureșanu Romania, 2024, 138 min The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with actor Iulian Postelnicu Last year’s top awarded Romanian film proved equally successful with local audiences, clearly eager to revisit the country’s recent, most resounding event. The New Year That Never Came is a symphonic project, leveraging a solid six-strand choral structure to map the fall of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Set on the incendiary day of December 20, 1989, the film's power lies in a calibrated mix of absorbing drama and crushing, often dark humor. Mureșanu ambitiously intertwines disparate lives, following—among others—the escalating paranoia of a factory worker after his son's forbidden wish; the moral agony of an actress forced to laud the regime on TV for the never-broadcast New Year’s special; and the dangerous cat-and-mouse game between a student trying to flee and the ubiquitous Secret Police. It is a tightly woven narrative tapestry, building to a cinematic rupture that mirrors the emotional catharsis felt when history shattered the Communist lie.

A raw, fly-on-the-wall documentary about Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-long journey in creating his self-financed passion project, Megalopolis. The bold and unrelenting epic returns in Mike Figgis’ portrait of Coppola’s creative process – weaving together archival material, unfiltered cast interviews, and a close-up view of how the legendary filmmaker drew from Roman history, political allegory, and his own singular vision to shape the world of Megalopolis. This isn’t a record of a production on the brink, it’s a personal memoir unfolding in real time.

Megalopolis is a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina, a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero, who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero, the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.

Lee Umstetter (Academy Award® nominee* Nick Nolte, 48 Hrs., Warrior) is serving 'life without possibility' at San Quentin - a life sentence, with no possibility of parole. While other men might give up hope, Lee puts pen to paper and writes a play about living behind bars. Performed with his fellow inmates it causes a sensation, winning him the heart of a local drama critic (Rita Taggart, Mulholland Drive) - and a pardon. Now a free man, Lee reunites his prison buddies to perform the story of their lives across America. With the harsh and brutal reality of a criminal's life behind them, Umstetter and his troupe get a new chance to experience a world they never dreamed possible. Nolte and a remarkable ensemble cast including Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters), Joe Mantegna (The Godfather Part III), William Forsythe (Raising Arizona), Anne Ramsey (The Goonies) and Mark Rolston (The Shawshank Redemption) along with Academy Award® nominated** co-writer and director John Hancock (Bang The Drum Slowly) make Weeds a compelling, stark and emotionally charged film. Q&A with John D. Hancock and Staurt Shapiro (Night Flight) following sceening.

After writing for Cahiers du cinéma, young Godard decides making films is the best film criticism. He gets Beauregard to fund a low-budget feature, creating a treatment with Truffaut about a gangster couple.

When their evil enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunites to rescue one of their own's daughter.

In the midst of her whole life falling apart, Kennedy attempts to somehow reconnect with her dead father, searching for permission to live her own life within a wild pool-hopping escape through the elaborate estates of her college town. Q&A with director Sam Hayes following screening.

Set against the barren sprawl of the California desert, Room Temperature follows a family’s annual tradition of transforming their home into a DIY haunted house—an increasingly unhinged ritual now hijacked by the father’s obsessive vision. Rejecting the tropes of traditional horror while steeped in its atmosphere, Room Temperature builds its haunted house from plywood, grief, and quiet despair. The cast, comprised of artists, non-actors, and one possibly spectral French teen known only as “Extra,” wanders through the film like costumed ghosts in a stage set they didn’t design. Shot in muted tones and marked by deadpan performances and disorienting emotional shifts, the film lingers in the liminal space between artifice and collapse. Hilarious, uncomfortable, and deeply strange, this is haunted-house cinema as poetic autopsy, a slow, disquieting meditation on control, longing, and the fantasies we force onto others. Q&A's with Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley following both screenings.

Together with American photographer Mike Brodie (b. 1985), Cyrill Lachauer travels in freight trains across the United States in search of lost fathers, the limits of image-making, and an unattainable romance celebrated by pop culture but simultaneously rejected by society. The ashes of Slack, Mike Brodie’s girlfriend who died of an overdose, become synonymous with a generation scarred by the fentanyl crisis, raised in a climate of post-punk, TikTok and an unconditional will to be free.

 Slack (WT) oscillates between artistic documentary and essay film, between feature and experimental film. It describes the life and travels of Mike Brodie and his friends – drifters, hobos and crust punks. They live in illegality. They live the ultimate inversion of the much-vaunted American dream, the promise of social advancement accessible to all. Cyrill Lachauer’s works are the result of long journeys that take him on freight trains through the outback of the USA. He immerses himself in his surroundings and their landscapes and reproduces his experiences as fragmentary stories in photography, film and text. Following the premiere will be a Q&A with Mike Brodie and Cyrill Lachauer.

In a sedate Massachusetts suburb circa 1970, unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B Mooney sets out on his first heist. With the museum cased and accomplices recruited, he has an airtight plan. Or so he thinks.

1982. As an unknown disease begins to spread in a small mining town in the Chilean desert, gay men are accused of transmitting it through their eyes. Twelve-year-old Lidia, the only girl in the community, sets out in search of the truth. Q&A's with Diego Céspedes following all screenings.

A retired farmer and widower in his 70s, Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. Then he hits on the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual journey.

On the streets of London, Mike is hustling to get by. Roadside evangelizers won’t let him sleep in peace, his slippery friend won’t pay up the money he stole, and before long, he finds himself in trouble with the law. As he struggles to reintegrate into society, shuffling between gigs as a line cook and a trash collector, he must balance a newfound sense of community with his own itch for self-destruction.

A young poet rebels against the creative stagnation of cinema and decides to make a film where all conventions will be swept aside Introduced by Lex Walton.

Rachel doesn't realize she has grown up in captivity working for an advertising agency where her job is to assess Mommy 6.0, her favorite pop star in the whole entire world. Q&A with Peter Vack 5/16. Moderated by William Banks.