10 Must-See Movies at FilmColumbia 2025 in Chatham’s Reopened Crandell

For 25 years, FilmColumbia has turned Chatham’s Main Street into a cinematic hotspot, and this year’s edition feels especially starry. The freshly reopened Crandell Theatre hosts the party, but the marquee names—Brian Cox and Stephen Lang—will be there in person, the kind of actors who can command a room with a raised eyebrow. Expect the usual harvest of international auteurs and indie discoveries, the kind of films you’ll be boasting about seeing here months before they open wide. Below, 10 selections to whet the appetite, enchant the senses, and maybe even change your life (thank you, Uli Edel, for Last Exit to Brooklyn)—or at least make for a good post-screening argument over cocktails at the People’s Pub.

Last Exit to Brooklyn, directed by Uli Edel

Friday, October 17 at 1pm

Before Stephen Lang was barking orders in Avatar, he was tearing up the screen as one of the raw nerves in Uli Edel’s bruising 1989 adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel. Last Exit to Brooklyn isn’t just a film—it’s a street fight, a howl of despair, and a time capsule of a city in collapse. Seeing it again on the big screen reminds you what unvarnished grit looked like before CGI took over.

The Mastermind, directed by Kelly Reichardt

Saturday, October 18 at 3pm

In a delicious genre turn, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind is a heist film—not the caper you expect, but one refracted through her quietly radical lens. Set in 1970s Massachusetts, Josh O’Connor plays JB Mooney, a suburban family man who moonlights as an amateur art thief targeting a local museum. Reichardt eschews high-gloss thrills: there are no sleek getaways or ticking timers. Instead, the film tracks how the fallout—from failed plans, suspicion, moral unraveling—reveals cracks in identity, ambition, and family. With Reichardt’s signature attention to small gestures, The Mastermind reinvents the genre from within, treating its heist as a portal into character, not cops and robbers.

Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier

Saturday, October 18 at 5:15pm

Joachim Trier reunites with Renate Reinsve, his luminous lead from The Worst Person in the World, in Sentimental Value. She plays Nora, a stage actress dragged back into a fraught relationship with her estranged filmmaker father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), after the death of her mother. Gustav has drafted a semi-autobiographical film and offered Nora the lead; when she refuses, he casts a rising Hollywood star (Elle Fanning) in her stead. The film becomes an emotional battleground: sibling rivalry, artistic ambition, guilt and memory swirl through Oslo’s winter-lit interiors. Trier lets the house—the family home—become a character itself, its walls holding grief and secrets. Sentimental Value is not melodrama; it’s a quiet reckoning, a film about what we owe one another and what we don’t say—made sharper by Trier and Reinsve’s deep creative empathy.

Drunken Noodles, directed by Lucio Castro

Monday, October 20 at 3pm

Lucio Castro returns with a simmering, elliptical romance set over two summers in New York. Adnan, a Bard College art student spending the summer house-sitting for his uncle and interning at a Manhattan gallery, drifts through encounters that blur desire, memory, and intimacy. Castro structures the film in non-linear chapters, each meeting turning familiar exchanges into charged terrain. Erotic needlepoint art, casual hookups, and poetic silences collide; time folds in on itself. Drunken Noodles is sexy without spectacle, curious without agenda—a quietly combustible ode to longing and the fallible logic of connection.

La Grazia, directed by Paolo Sorrentino

Monday, October 20 at 5pm

In La Grazia, Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) once again turns faith into grand tableau, draping Catholic guilt in velvet and neon. The story follows a priest who’s as conflicted as he is impeccably tailored, moving through Naples in a haze of incense and intrigue. Sorrentino, ever the maximalist, can’t resist surreal detours: saints wink from their pedestals, stray dogs narrate, and grace itself feels like a character just offstage. It’s operatic, decadent, and utterly Sorrentino—equal parts divine comedy and human folly. Whether you take it as satire, hymn, or visual intoxication, La Grazia makes belief look irresistible, if not entirely believable.

Peter Hujar’s Day, directed by Ira Sachs

Wednesday, October 22 at 5pm

Ira Sachs turns his tender gaze on photographer Peter Hujar (played by Ben Wishaw), crafting a film that’s less biography than communion. Peter Hujar’s Day invites us into the radical intimacy of the artist’s world, where friends, lovers, and muses blur into a single frame. Sachs isn’t interested in hagiography; he lingers instead on the ordinary—coffee cups, conversations, the way Hujar’s eye could transform the mundane into the sublime. It’s a film about mortality, yes, but also about presence: how one man captured fleeting truths before they slipped away. Expect a quiet elegy that doubles as a love letter to downtown New York.

A Private Life, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski

Wednesday, October 22 at 7pm

Zlotowski is a master of making the personal political, and A Private Life continues her excavation of women’s inner worlds under pressure. Here, Jodie Foster, speaking French, delivers a career-highlight performance as a woman whose carefully guarded secrets threaten to upend her family. Shot with Zlotowski’s trademark elegance—Parisian apartments glinting with both light and lies—the film is taut but never cold. The performances are lived-in, the stakes quietly shattering. As its title suggests, it’s about what we hide, and why hiding can sometimes feel like survival. Foster grounds it all with gravitas, making the drama as magnetic as it is unsettling.

A Poet, directed by Simón Mesa Soto

Thursday, October 23 at 2pm

Simón Mesa Soto’s debut is a reminder of why Colombian cinema is surging onto the global stage. A Poet follows a young man torn between survival in Medellín’s rough streets and his growing voice as a writer. Mesa Soto blends harsh realism with lyrical and comedic interludes, turning graffiti into scripture and spoken word into salvation. It’s a coming-of-age tale that asks whether art is a luxury or a lifeline when the world closes in. With images that flicker like half-remembered dreams, the film insists that poetry isn’t an escape but a form of resistance. Prepare to be haunted, in the best sense.

Nouvelle Vague, directed by Richard Linklater

Thursday, October 23 at 5pm

Richard Linklater goes Godardian in Nouvelle Vague, a cinephile’s fantasia set in 1959 Paris. The film follows a young, impassioned critic named Jean-Luc Godard—scribbling broadsides about what cinema should be while fretting over whether he has the chops to make a film himself. Linklater captures the jittery excitement of a movement about to catch fire: Critics trading typewriters for cameras, the smell of revolution in the projection booth. The payoff, of course, is Godard’s improbable leap into history with Breathless, a debut so audacious it rewrote the rules. Linklater uses hindsight to remind us: even legends begin in doubt.

Glenrothan, directed by Brian Cox

Friday, October 24 at 7:30pm

Brian Cox, the lion of stage and screen, makes his directorial debut with Glenrothan, and of course it’s set in whisky country. The film is a bracing family saga starring Alan Cumming—sons squabbling, fathers regretting, mothers keeping the books—with the burn of a 20-year single malt. Cox directs with surprising restraint, letting silence and scenery do as much work as his cast’s volcanic emotions. It’s a story of inheritance in every sense: land, grudges, pride. With Cox himself on hand for a post-screening Q&A, expect candor, wit, and a few choice expletives about the business. A toast to a new chapter in an already towering career.