6 Films to Catch in February at Local Indie Theaters

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie star in the latest adaptation of "Wuthering Heights," out just in time for Valentine's Day.

I’m super excited about Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Father, Mother, Sister Brother. There are certain creative partnerships that feel like old friends showing up right on time, and Jarmusch and Tom Waits belong firmly in that category. Their earlier collaborations—Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes—helped define a strain of American indie cinema that prized rhythm, deadpan humor, and the poetry of misfits talking past one another. Seeing them reunite in Father Mother Sister Brother feels like a small cultural gift, a reminder that some artistic conversations never really end.

Waits, now 76, looks better than you’d expect, weathered in the way good leather is weathered, his presence still carrying that gravel-road authority. Jarmusch gives him space, patience, and silence, all tools they’ve trusted before. For longtime fans, this reunion lands with a particular charge. It brings history with it. It brings memory. And it brings the pleasure of watching two artists who still know exactly how to listen to each other.

No Other Choice

Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice is a sly, meticulous scalpel slicing through the myth of capitalism with the gleeful precision of a surgeon who also happens to be a stand-up comic. At its center is You Man-su, a seasoned paper-mill lifer who gets shown the door in today’s ruthless job market and decides that if the system won’t give him a shot, he’ll take one himself—of a very literal sort.

Chan-wook adapts Donald Westlake’s The Ax with a tonal balance that slips from deadpan absurdity to stark social satire, asking us to laugh even as we feel the cold, hollow crunch of economic anxiety underfoot. Lee Byung-hun’s wryly expressive turn anchors the madness with tragicomic heart. More than a thriller, it’s a dark mirror held up to a world where the hunt for dignity sometimes breaks bad in unforgettable ways.

No Other Choice opens at the Crandell Theater in Chatham on February 25.

The Voice of Hind Rajab

The Voice of Hind Rajab unfolds around a single phone call, and it never lets the audience forget that what they are hearing actually happened. The film centers on the recorded emergency call of six-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped in a car during an Israeli military assault in Gaza, her voice growing smaller as hope narrows. Director Kaouther Ben Hania builds the film with restraint and precision, combining the original audio with carefully staged reenactments that refuse spectacle. The camera stays close. Silence carries as much force as dialogue.

The result is devastating in its clarity. There are no editorial shortcuts, no emotional cues added for effect. The film trusts the material, and it trusts the audience to sit with it. This is not an easy watch, nor should it be. The voice at its center lingers long after the screen goes dark, a reminder of how history is sometimes reduced to a recording, and how much responsibility lives in listening.

The Voice of Hind Rajab screens through February 5 at the Moviehouse in Millerton.

Wuthering Heights

Just in time for Valentine’s Day! Emerald Fennell’s newest Wuthering Heights is a film that feels like a storm sweeping across the Yorkshire moors long before the first note of Charli XCX’s music begins. The story of Heathcliff and Catherine is familiar, but this version leans into pulse-quickening passion and a visceral chemistry that takes no prisoners. Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw moves with a fierce intensity, and Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff broods and burns with a hunger that tests every vow and silence between them. Fennell’s direction embraces heat over restraint and embraces the raw edges of obsession, social friction, and self-destruction.

Wuthering Heights opens on February 13 at the Beacon Movie Theater, the Moviehouse in Millerton, and the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington.

Father, Mother, Sister Brother

Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother moves at the unhurried pace of a long conversation you’re glad to overhear. The film is built in three chapters that track adult children circling back to the people who shaped them, all set in very different places and moods. Tom Waits sits in a snowy New Jersey house as a dad whose quiet oddness defines a lifetime of understatement, while Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik try to bridge distance with small talk and bigger questions. In Dublin, a novelist mother played by cinematic treasure Charlotte Rampling greets Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps for tea that feels as revealing as confession. In Paris, twins played by Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat look at family photos and find surprising tenderness amid loss. Jarmusch lets silences stretch, lets everyday gestures carry more weight than loud emotions, and rewards patience with moments that are quietly rich, warm and unexpected. Long live quirky indie cinema!

Father, Mother Sister Brother opens on February 12 at the Moviehouse in Millerton.

The President’s Cake

Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake tracks a day that should break a child but instead shows how much resilience can live in small bodies and big worlds. Set in the 1990s, Nine-year-old Lamia is picked at school to bring a birthday cake for Saddam Hussein’s celebration, a task that sounds absurd when pantry shelves are empty and ingredients are rarer than good news. She lives with her grandmother in the Mesopotamian marshes and sets out with her best friend Saeed, a loyal rooster named Hindi in tow, to find flour, sugar, eggs and baking powder in a city under sanction and strain.

Hadi filmed on location with mostly untrained actors, and that urgency and authenticity show in every glance, bartered bargain and moment of joy amid the hardship. The result feels both tender and sharp, a portrait of childhood ingenuity and the strange absurdities of life under dictatorship that stays with you long after the credits roll.

The President’s Cake opens on February 13 at Upstate Films’s Starr Cinema in Rhinebeck.

Midwinter Break

Midwinter Break takes its shape from Bernard MacLaverty’s novel of the same name, a book that understands how a long marriage reveals itself sideways, in glances, habits, and what people choose not to say. Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds star as Stella and Gerry, a couple in their late sixties who travel from Ireland to Amsterdam for a winter break that quietly becomes a reckoning. The trip unfolds through museums, canal walks, shared meals, and hotel rooms, with the present continually interrupted by memory. Years of love, faith, compromise, and unresolved grief surface in fragments.

Gerry carries the weight of a moral decision made decades earlier, one that shaped the course of their life together. Stella has lived alongside that silence, alert to its cost and its consequences. The story moves with restraint and patience, allowing meaning to accumulate through small gestures and pauses. It is a film about endurance, responsibility, and the uneasy intimacy of knowing another person for most of a lifetime.

Midwinter Break opens on February 20 at the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington and the Moviehouse in Millerton.