A diverse group of new releases join an indie weekend teetering on awards season kickoff at the close of a pretty momentous week for the industry.
New in theaters, Sony Pictures Classics Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! and Mahershala Ali’s TIFF-premiering Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, along with stories about a New York location scout and a stuntman. A Long Day’s Journey Into Night starring Jessica Lange starts an Academy run. Isaac Mizrahi doc Unzipped is back.
Big picture, the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act was just introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress who hope it will pass by year end. The bill calls for a federal tax credit of up to 30% for U.S. productions, stackable with state incentives. It would be transformative.
The Consent Decree laying out Paramount’s settlement with attorneys general led by California’s Rob Bonta also landed, with an rather odd definition of independent film. The judge in the case hasn’t approved the settlement.
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Moderate releases: SPC’s Josef Kubota Wladyka’s Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! arrives on 500+ screens nationwide. The Tokyo-set comedy-drama premiered at Sundance, see Deadline review. Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) and her husband Luis love competing in Tokyo’s ballroom dance scene, but after tragedy strikes, Haru withdraws into isolation. When friends coax her back to the studio, she develops an infatuation with the new instructor. Rotten Tomatoes Certified Fresh at 89%.
Independent Film Company opens TIFF-premiering 1970s-set comedic biopic The Stunt Driver by Michael Dowse on 670 screens. Stars Jay Baruchel as daredevil Ken Carter, a world champion stunt driver on a bold quest to execute a mile-long jump in a rocket car across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the U.S., facing absurd challenges along the way. With Ed Helms and Ben Foster.
Limited: Long Day’s Journey Into Night from Quiver Distribution, starring Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Ben Foster and Colin Morgan, opens at the Lumiere Cinema in LA for an Academy run. David Lyndsey-Abaire wrote the screenplay for the feature directorial debut of celebrated British theater and opera director Jonathan Kent, who also directed Lange in her 2016 Tony-winning Broadway role in the classic play by Eugene O’Neill.
Set on a single day in August 1912 at the Tyrone family’s Connecticut seaside home. The pic has Lange playing the emotionally troubled and addiction-plagued matriarch Mary Tyrone. Harris is husband James, a self-made man, renowned actor and failed property magnate; Foster the charming but wayward and hard-drinking elder son, Jamie; and Morgan is the poetic, bleakly optimistic and consumptive younger son, Edmund (a portrait of O’Neill himself). Rolls out to additional markets this fall.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother from Amazon Drama MGM Studios opens in limited release at six theaters in New York and Los Angeles, coming off its TIFF world premiere. At 98% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes (48 reviews), see Deadline’s here. Written, directed, and produced by Bassam Tariq, it stars Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali as Latif, a devoutly religious hitman navigating fatherhood, faith, and sacrifice in Houston. With John Cho, Abubakr Ali Adia, and Giancarlo Esposito. Will continue to roll out in coming weeks.
Greenwich Entertainments’s The Scout, written and directed by Paula González-Nasser in her feature debut, opens at Film Forum. Stars Mimi Davila as Sofia, a young location scout for a TV pilot filming in New York City. She scours the city’s varied neighborhoods, entering the private spaces of strangers while trying to satisfy the demands of her erratic employers. González-Nasser draws from her own experience as a location scout in the film, which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Adds Alamo Drafthouse L.A. next week.
Supernatural horror Never After Dark from Magnolia Pictures, written and directed by Dave Boyle, opens in limited release in L.A. at the Nuart and Laemmle Noho (with filmmaker Q&As) and AMC Burbank Town Center and in NYC at the Angelika Film Center and AMC Empire. Expands next week, moving to more than 100 runs by October 9. The Japanese ghost story premiered at the SXSW Midnighter section in March. It follows Airi (Moeka Hoshi of Shōgun) a wandering medium who spends her life guiding restless spirits out of the world of the living. Summoned to an isolated country house, she encounters a grotesque apparition with powers that defy her experience. At RT 100% off 34 reviews.
Take Me Home from Willa opened at the IFC Center this week and will move to L.A. next. Written and directed by Liz Sargent, the film won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, where it premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition Sundance Film. Expanded from Liz’s acclaimed 2023 Sundance short, the feature stars her real-life sister, Anna Sargent, alongside Ali Ahn (The Diplomat) and Victor Slezak (Blue Bloods).
Anna, a 38-year-old Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability, lives in a delicate balance in suburban Florida, serving as a caregiver for her aging parents while navigating her own need for support. When a severe heatwave shatters her family’s fragile routine and exposes her father’s dementia, Anna’s world is thrown into uncertainty. Forced to confront the systemic failures of the American healthcare infrastructure, she must fight to carve out her own path toward autonomy, independence and chosen community.
British comedy The Incomer from Sumerian Pictures, written and directed by Louis Paxton, opens in NYC and L.A., expanding to 200 theaters nationwide next weekend. In this modern folk fairy tale set on a remote Scottish island, two siblings (Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) survive by hunting seabirds, retelling the stories of their ancestors and defending the isle from dreaded Incomers. Their world is upended when an awkward city worker (Domhnall Gleeson) comes to uproot them. Also stars Emun Elliott, Michelle Gomez and John Hannah. Winner of the NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance.
Janus Films presents the l4K re-release of Douglas Keeve’s Unzipped, chronicling the launch of Isaac Mizrahi’s legendary Fall 1994 collection, at Film Forum in NYC. Mizrahi, Keeve and producer Nina Santisi host sold-out Q&As moderated by Lena Dunham, Evan Ross Katz and more. The doc will expand nationwide in October.