Late summer is when Hollywood clears the cupboards, dumping its cans and mystery jars into theaters before awards season arrives with the good china. This year, however, the cinematic pantry is well stocked: Everybody’s favorite CIA grad (and Vassar dropout!) gets the origin-story treatment in Tony; Wile E. Coyote escapes a tax-write-off scheme worthy of Acme itself; and mumblecore monarch Joe Swanberg returns after seven years to make attractive people in Alaska uncertain about their relationships.
Elsewhere, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet turns 40, Boris Karloff’s monster acquires a live score, and the Butthole Surfers receive the documentary treatment civilization has demanded. There are samurai mysteries, forgotten poets, liberated owls, mountain-bike daredevils, and Amy Goodman refusing to stop asking inconvenient questions.
Tony
Before Kitchen Confidential, the world travels, and the televised meals in far-flung places, Anthony Bourdain was a 19-year-old Vassar dropout trying to become a writer. Matt Johnson’s Tony narrows its focus to one formative summer in Provincetown, where Bourdain takes a job in a restaurant kitchen and discovers the swaggering, profane, communal world that will redirect his life. Dominic Sessa, the breakout star of The Holdovers, plays the chef and icon, with Emilia Jones as Nancy Putkoski and Antonio Banderas as the restaurateur who becomes his mentor. Loosely inspired by the chapters of Kitchen Confidential, the film favors the salt air and controlled chaos of a coming-of-age comedy over cradle-to-grave biography—though everything carries the bittersweet knowledge of who Bourdain became, and how his story ended.
Tony is currently screening at multiple theaters across the region.
Coyote vs. Acme
After decades of being flattened, incinerated, and dropped from cliffs by catastrophically defective mail-order gadgets, Wile E. Coyote finally does the sensible thing: He lawyers up. In Dave Green’s live-action/animation hybrid, the persistent predator hires a down-on-his-luck personal-injury attorney, played by Will Forte, to sue the Acme Corporation. John Cena plays the company’s slick counsel, with Lana Condor, Tone Bell, and Looney Tunes favorites joining the mayhem. The movie’s escape from oblivion is nearly as improbable as its premise. Completed in 2022, Coyote vs. Acme was shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery for a tax write-off before outrage prompted a reversal. Rescued by Ketchup Entertainment, this corporate satire now gets what its hero has chased for 75 years: another chance to catch its audience.
Coyote vs. Acme opens on August 27 and will screen at multiple theaters across the region.
The Samurai and the Prisoner
Best known for the psychological horror classics Cure and Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa—no relation to Akira—ventures into samurai cinema with this cerebral historical mystery. Set in 1578, the film follows warlord Araki Murashige, who rebels against the powerful Oda Nobunaga and finds himself besieged inside Arioka Castle. Murashige’s imprisoned enemy, the brilliant strategist Kuroda Kanbei, becomes his unlikely confidant as a series of murders threatens to fracture the stronghold from within. Adapted from Honobu Yonezawa’s novel, The Samurai and the Prisoner has fewer flashing swords and charging armies than its title might suggest. Kurosawa instead builds a claustrophobic puzzle around loyalty, power, honor, and betrayal, creating something like an Agatha Christie mystery staged inside a feudal pressure cooker—with the fate of a castle hanging in the balance.
The Samurai and the Prisoner opens on August 28 and will screen at multiple theaters across the region.
Frankenstein with New Live Score
James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein gave cinema one of its most enduring monsters—and made Boris Karloff, unrecognizable beneath Jack Pierce’s makeup, an icon. At the Stissing Center, the horror classic receives a new musical life with the world premiere of composer Michael Shapiro’s chamber score, performed by the Argus String Quartet and pianist Steven Beck. Shapiro, whose orchestral score has been performed by more than 80 orchestras, treats creator and creation as doubles: Dark, driving themes accompany Henry Frankenstein, while the monster receives gentler, more sympathetic music that underscores the soulfulness of Karloff’s performance. Before the screening, Karloff’s daughter Sara will discuss the English actor behind the flat-headed creature—an elegant man forever associated with his lumbering, misunderstood monster. August 29 at Stissing Center in Pine Plains.
Frankenstein screens on August 29 at 7:30pm at the Stissing Center in Pine Plains. in Chatham.
All the President’s Men
Released in the nation’s bicentennial year, Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men remains the gold standard for newspaper procedurals—and a bracing reminder of what dogged reporting can accomplish. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose investigation of the Watergate break-in helped topple the Nixon presidency. The Crandell Theatre screening will be followed by a discussion on journalism and investigative reporting moderated by WAMC’s Joe Donohue. Panelists include former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron; Anne Alvergue, the Oscar-nominated codirector of The Martha Mitchell Effect; Berkshire Eagle publisher Fred Rutberg; and Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg. A meet-and-greet begins at 5pm, followed by the film at 5:30pm.
All the President’s Men screens on August 29 at the Crandell Theater in Chatham.
Ethan Bloom
What happens when a 13-year-old Jewish boy decides he should be Catholic? Ethan Bloom turns that conversion crisis into a warmhearted coming-of-age comedy about first love, family, grief, faith, and the suspicion—common among adolescents—that everyone else has already figured out life’s rules. Made outside the studio and streaming systems through crowdfunding and investment, the film embodies producer Ted Hope’s concept of “NonDē,” or non-dependent, filmmaking: Artists retain creative control, then build an audience themselves, screening by screening. That approach has taken Ethan Bloom through 44 festivals, earned it Best Comedy Feature at the Sedona International Film Festival, and led to a 20-week run in Florida. The September 3 screening at the Crandell Theatre in Chatham will be followed by a Q&A with writer-producer Maylen Dominguez.
Ethan Bloom screens September 3 at 7pm the Crandell Theatre in Chatham, followed by a Q&A with writer-producer Maylen Dominguez.
Late Fame
Willem Dafoe finds a tender register in Late Fame as Ed Saxberger, a postal worker who published a little-noticed poetry collection decades ago and abandoned his ambitions. When a young admirer appears at his door, Ed is welcomed into a circle of twentysomething artists who proclaim him a forgotten genius. The attention revives his hopes—and draws him toward Gloria, the group’s alluring, self-dramatizing “tragic heroine,” played by Past Lives star Greta Lee. But Ed gradually begins to question whether his acolytes understand his work or merely enjoy the performance of rediscovering him. Directed by Kent Jones and adapted by May December screenwriter Samy Burch from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, this wistful comedy considers artistic integrity, generational vanity, and the intoxicating danger of finally being recognized.
Late Fame opens on September 3 and screens at multiple theaters across the region.
The Sun Never Sets (with dir. Joe Swanberg)
Mumblecore maestro Joe Swanberg returns to filmmaking after seven years with The Sun Never Sets, an Alaska-set romantic drama built around the uncertainty he has made his specialty. Dakota Fanning stars as Wendy, whose divorced boyfriend Jack (frequent Swanberg collaborator Jake Johnson) suggests they take a break so she can decide whether she is willing to forgo marriage and children. Bad idea, Jack. Wendy promptly reconnects with her ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), creating a triangle in which stability, adventure, and desire refuse to line up. Shot on 35mm and shaped through improvisation, the film turns familiar rom-com machinery into something looser and raw.
The Sun Never sets screens on September 7 at 7pm at the Community Theater in Catskill. Director Joe Swanberg will appear for a post-screening Q&A moderated by filmmaker Alex Ross Perry.
Blue Velvet
Forty years after David Lynch peered beneath the manicured lawns of Lumberton, Blue Velvet has lost none of its power to unsettle. Kyle MacLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont, a student whose discovery of a severed ear draws him into the orbit of singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) and the gas-huffing psychopath holding her captive, Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, committed). What begins as boy-detective adventure curdles into a fever dream of voyeurism, violence, sexual obsession, and all-American rot, with Laura Dern providing the film’s counterweight of innocence. Lynch’s feature established the template he would revisit in “Twin Peaks”: an idyllic surface concealing an underworld. Simultaneously beautiful, funny, and nightmarish, Blue Velvet remains one of cinema’s definitive warnings against looking too closely at what crawls beneath the roses.
Blue Velvet screens on September 9 at 7:30pm at The Rosendale Theater.
Wild Inside (with dir. Penny Lane)
When a vandal cut through his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo in 2023, Flaco—a Eurasian eagle-owl raised in captivity—escaped into Manhattan and became a New York celebrity. Director Penny Lane (Hail Satan?) follows the owl’s adventures as he learns to hunt, perches on fire escapes and sidewalks, evades recapture, and inspires a community of watchers. But Wild Inside refuses to turn Flaco’s story into a fable of liberation. Alongside the wonder of an animal discovering life beyond his cage, Lane examines the realities of urban wildlife and the human-made dangers that ended his journey. Clear-eyed, the documentary asks what wildness means in a city built to contain it.
Wild Inside screens at the Crandell Theater in Chatham on September 10 at 7pm, followed by a Q&A with director Penny Lane.
The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (with dir. Tom Stern)
Long before “Pepper” carried them onto alternative-rock radio, the Butthole Surfers were Texas-bred psychedelic terrorists whose concerts involved nudity, strobe lights, flaming cymbals, disturbing films, and enough noise to rearrange the audience’s internal organs. Tom Stern’s documentary The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt traces the band’s rise from the post-punk underground, where Gibby Haynes, Paul Leary, and turned provocation into a lifestyle and chaos into an aesthetic. Appropriately, Stern avoids the talking-head treatment, mixing footage with animation, puppetry, and testimony from Ice-T, Dave Grohl, Flea, Henry Rollins, and Richard Linklater. The result promises to be hilarious, disreputable, moving, and considerably safer than attending an actual Butthole Surfers show circa 1986.
The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt screens at Upstate Film’s Orpheum Theater in Saugerties on September 14 at 8pm, followed by a Q&A with director Tom Stern.
Ritual Mountain Bike Film Tour
The switchbacks are steeper, the gaps wider, and the consequences of a missed landing considerably more dramatic when mountain biking moves onto the big screen. The 2026 Ritual Mountain Bike Film Tour collects short films celebrating the landscapes and communities that propel the sport. Expect white-knuckle descents, aerial footage, improbable lines through rock and forest, and the reminder that gravity is undefeated. The nationwide tour pairs elite riding with stories of exploration, perseverance, trail stewardship, and the peculiar fellowship formed by people who regard mud, bruises, and expensive mechanical failures as the ingredients of a good weekend. Designed for singletrack obsessives and armchair riders alike, Ritual offers the exhilaration without the emergency-room deductible.
The Ritual Mountain Bike Film Tour screens at Denizen Theater on September 16-19 at 7:30pm.
Steal This Story, Please! (with dir. Tia Lessin)
The switchbacks are steeper, the gaps wider, and the consequences of a missed landing considerably more dramatic when mountain biking moves onto the big screen. The 2026 Ritual Mountain Bike Film Tour collects short films celebrating the landscapes and communities that propel the sport. Expect white-knuckle descents, aerial footage, improbable lines through rock and forest, and the reminder that gravity is undefeated. The nationwide tour pairs elite riding with stories of exploration, perseverance, trail stewardship, and the peculiar fellowship formed by people who regard mud, bruises, and expensive mechanical failures as the ingredients of a good weekend. Designed for singletrack obsessives and armchair riders alike, Ritual offers the exhilaration without the emergency-room deductible.
Steal This Story screens at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon on Septmber 18 at 7pm followed by a Q&A with director Tia Lessin and producer Karen Ranucci.
