5 Indie Movies This Week: Horsegirls, The Kidnapping of Arabella, Ms 45 & More

This week on Indie Film Weekly, Glen Reynolds highlights five indie films worth knowing about: three in theaters, one on demand, and one classic.

🎥 Indie Film Reviews:
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez (2026)
Horsegirls (2026)
The Kidnapping of Arabella (2026)
The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023)
Ms 45 (1981)

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Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for the week of July 17, 2026. I'm your host, Glenn Reynolds. This week in theaters, we've got a documentary portrait of a Chicano theater and film pioneer who changed American culture. We've got a character drama about a young autistic woman and the oddly beautiful world of competitive hobby horse dancing. And we've got an offbeat road movie about a troubled young woman and a seven-year-old who accidentally turns herself into a kidnapping case. Quick ask before we move on if you can see one of these in the theater this weekend. Indie films do not survive on good intentions. They survive on people buying tickets while the showtimes still exist. On demand, I've got a desert crime thriller where a diner full of strangers learns that waiting for a fuel truck can be a very bad life choice. And for our classic, we're going back to a raw 1981 New York revenge film that still hits like a brick through a window. Want the written version of these picks each week? I also publish the Indie Film Weekly Newsletter. It's the same five films in a quick read. Sign up at newsletter.circusroadfilms.com. Let's dive in. Our first film in theaters this week is American Pachuco, The Legend of Luis Valdez. Directed by David Alvarado, this documentary tells the story of Luis Valdez, the writer, director, and activist who helped define Chicano theater and later brought Chicano stories to a much wider film audience. The film tracks his path from farm worker communities to the creation of El Teatro Campesino, the theater troop born out of the United Farm Workers Movement. That origin matters, because Valdez was not treating art as decoration. He was using performance as organizing, education, history, and survival. The documentary also follows the path to Zutsuit and La Bamba, showing how one artist kept pushing Latino stories into spaces that were not exactly holding the door open. What makes this work is that it's not just a career recap. It's about cultural authorship. Who gets to tell the story, who gets centered, who gets reduced to a stereotype, and who gets to become mythic. Valdez comes across as funny, stubborn, generous, and very aware of the battles behind the applause. It won the Audience Award at Sundance, which makes sense. This is the kind of documentary that sends you out wanting to watch the work, read the history, and maybe call your most dramatic friend. Our second indie film in theaters this week is Horse Girls, directed by Lauren Maring. It follows Margarita, a 22-year-old autistic woman trying to step into adulthood while her home life becomes more fragile. Her mother's health is uncertain, and Margarita is caught between wanting independence and knowing that the person who has anchored her may not always be able to. She takes a first job at a Halloween store, which is already a perfect indie film workplace because every aisle looks like someone's inner life had a clearance sale. Then she discovers competitive hobby horse dance, a real sport built around choreographed routines performed with stick horses. On paper, that sounds like an easy joke. The movie knows better. For Margarita, this world offers structure, expression, community, and a place where intensity is not a problem to hide. The film's strongest move is treating hobby horse dance with sincerity without making it precious. It's funny because life is funny, but the stakes are real. Margarita is trying to build a self that can survive change. The routines become a way to practice confidence before she knows if she has it. Maring keeps the focus intimate, and the result is a coming-of-age story that does not feel pre-packaged. It is specific, warm, and odd in the best way. Our last indie film in theaters this week is The Kidnapping of Arabella, directed by Carolina Cavalli. This Italian road comedy follows Holly, a restless young woman who feels like she's missed the instructions for normal life. Then she meets Arabella, a seven-year-old girl with enough confidence for the both of them. Through a chain of bad timing and worse assumptions, Arabella accidentally fakes her own kidnapping, and Holly winds up on the road with a child who's not nearly as helpless as the situation suggests. The plot sounds like chaos, and it is. But the film's engine is the odd couple relationship. Holly is supposed to be the adult. Arabella, inconveniently, often seems like the one with a clear plan. The trip becomes a strange escape for both of them, away from families, expectations and the adults who think they understand what is happening. Cavalli has a feel for deadpan absurdity, the kind where people make one small bad decision and then have to spend the next hour pretending it's still manageable. Chris Pine appears in the cast, which adds another little spark of curiosity, but the real pleasure is watching Holly and Arabella bounce off each other. It's a road movie about confusion, loneliness, and the dangerous appeal of being needed by someone, even if that someone is seven and technically missing. So in theaters this week, that's American Pachuco, The Legend of Luis Valdez, Horse Girls, and The Kidnapping of Arabella. Our spotlight indie film on demand this week is The Last Stop in Yuma County, directed by Francis Galapi. This is a lean crime thriller set mostly inside a remote Arizona diner where everyone's waiting for the fuel truck to arrive. A traveling knife salesman pulls in low on gas. Then two bank robbers show up after a job, and the room's temperature drops without anyone touching the thermostat. Soon the diner fills with unlucky locals and passers by, all stuck together because the pumps are dry. That's the setup, and it's a beauty. One place, too many people, too many secrets, not enough exits. Jim Cummings plays the salesman, and he's very good at men trying to stay polite while mentally calculating how doomed they are. The film has a great sense of escalation. Every new arrival changes the balance in the room, and every attempt to keep things calm somehow makes things worse. It's funny in a dry, nervous way, then suddenly not funny at all. If you like compact thrillers where geography, timing, and bad judgment do most of the work, this is a very satisfying rental. You can rent it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, or Fandango at home. Our indie film classic this week is Ms. 45, directed by Abel Ferrara. This 1981 New York Revenge film is grim, stylish, and absolutely not polite. It follows Thana, a mute garment worker in the city's fashion district, who is attacked twice in one day. After surviving, she begins moving through New York with a gun and a new relationship to fear. The film is tough material, and it is not something that I would call casual viewing. But as low budget urban cinema, it has real force. Ferrara shoots the city as a place of constant threat, crowded streets, small apartments, parties, stairwells, corners where danger seems to be waiting because no one bothered to remove it. Zoe Lund plays Thana with a haunted stillness that becomes more disturbing as the film goes on. The performance is mostly physical because Thana does not speak, but you understand the shift in posture, gaze, and movement. The film is revenge thriller, exploitation movie, feminist provocation, and punk artifact all at once. It is messy by design and still hard to shake. If you want to see what early 80s New York Indie filmmaking looked like when it had no interest in smoothing the edges, this is the one. You can watch it on Peacock or rent it on Apple TV or Amazon Video And that wraps it for the July 17, 2026 edition of Indie Film Weekly. If you want to support the show, do the simple stuff. Subscribe so you don't miss next week. Share it with one friend who likes being early. Rate it because it helps the apps take the show seriously. Then leave a quick review, even one sentence helps. Until next week, keep it bold, keep it specific, and keep it indie.