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: Cocoon: One Summer of Girlhood (2026) Barbara Forever (2026) Chronovisor (2026) The Wizard of the Kremlin (2026) Donnie Darko (2001)
Welcome back to Indie Film Weekly for the week of September 4, 2026. I'm your host, Glenn Reynolds. This week in theaters, we've got an animated wartime drama about schoolgirls on a peaceful island as history closes in. We've got a documentary portrait of a pioneering queer experimental filmmaker, and we've got an academic mystery about a rumored Vatican device that can see into the past. Quick ask before we move on if you can see one of these films in a theater this weekend. Indie films need early audiences, not respectful intentions that arrive after the last showtime is gone. On demand, I've got a political thriller about the rise of modern Russian power and the men who helped turn politics into theater. And for our classic, we're celebrating a 25th anniversary cult indie about suburban dread, time loops, teenage alienation, and one very large rabbit. Want the written version of these pics each week? I also publish the indie film weekly newsletter. It's the same five films and a quick read. Sign up at newsletter.com. Let's dive in. Our first indie film in theaters this week is Cocoon One Summer of Girlhood. Directed by Yuki Mitsuina, this animated wartime drama is based on the manga by Manchiko Makyo and follows a group of girls at an all-girl school on a peaceful southern island as World War II begins to close in around them. The title sounds delicate, and that's part of the power. A cocoon suggests protection, softness, and transformation, but this story is about a world where children are not allowed to remain protected for long. The film looks at girlhood. At the moment, it is interrupted by history when uniforms, friendships, school routines, and private dreams are suddenly placed inside the machinery of war. Animation is a strong form for this kind of story because it can hold beauty and terror at the same time. Quiet landscape can feel fragile before anything terrible happens. A face can register fear without the movie needing to push too hard. Our second film in theaters this week is Barbara Forever. Directed by Bertie O'Connor, this documentary looks at the life, work, and legacy of Barbara Hammer, the pioneering lesbian experimental filmmaker whose body of work helped expand what queer cinema could be. Hammer was not waiting for permission from the mainstream. She made intimate, political, playful, formally adventurous films that put lesbian experience on screen with a kind of freedom that still feels radical. The documentary uses archival material, Hammer's own voice, and the traces she left behind to build something that is less a standard biography than an encounter with an artist who kept insisting on visibility. That matters because Hammer's work was not only about representation, it was about form. How do you make a movie that does not simply include queer life, but sees, moves, and remembers differently because of it? That question is still alive. The film premiered at Sundance, and this is exactly the kind of documentary that belongs in the Indie Film Weekly mix. Film history, personal archive, and artistic rebellion all in one place. If you know Hammer's work, this is a chance to revisit it. If you do not, this is a good doorway into an essential figure who helped make room for other filmmakers to be less polite. Our last indie film in theaters this week is Chronovisor, directed by Kevin Walker and Jack Alwan. This literary mystery follows Beatrice, a Columbia professor researching historical theories of memory, who becomes fascinated by the story of the Chronovisor, an alleged occult device said to reproduce images from any point in history on a television screen. So, yes, this is an academic thriller about archives, memory, the Vatican, and a machine that may or may not let you watch the past. Finally, a movie for everyone who has ever gone too deep into a footnote and come out different. The appeal here is the particular strangeness of the premise. It's not a time machine in the usual action movie sense. It's more unsettling than that. It's a device that suggests the past might be visible, recordable, and maybe controllable. That turns scholarship into obsession. Libraries, documents, rumors, missing evidence, and institutional secrets become the landscape of the movie. Grasshopper Film is releasing it, which is a good sign for audiences who like their mysteries a little more cerebral and their rabbit holes properly lit. Film seems built for viewers who enjoy Borgia, conspiracy, analog technology, and the dangerous thought that history may be watching back. So in theaters this week, that's Cocoon One Summer of Girlhood, Barbara Forever, and Chronoviser. Our spotlight indie film on demand this week is The Wizard of the Kremlin, directed by Olivier Lassayas. This political drama stars Paul Dano as Vadim Baranov, a fictional strategist inspired by the architects and image makers surrounding the rise of Vladimir Putin, played by Jul. The film looks at post-Soviet Russia as a place where power is not only seized, but staged. Television, myth, fear, nostalgia, and manipulation all become tools in the same kit. Assayus is a sharp fit for this material because he understands systems, media, and the way personal ambition can disappear into something much larger and colder. The hook is not only Putin as a character, it is the machinery around him, the people who translate chaos into narrative, and then sell that narrative back to a country. Dano is well cast as someone whose intelligence becomes dangerous because it finds a job. The movie is long, serious, and very much about how politics can become performance without ever becoming less violent. That is the nightmare under the polish. Is not just that power lies, is that power learns which lies people want to hear. You can stream it on Hulu. Our indie film classic this week is Donnie Darko celebrating its 25th anniversary. Directed by Richard Kelly. This 2001 cult film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Donnie, a troubled suburban teen who begins receiving messages from a monstrous rabbit named Frank after narrowly escaping a bizarre accident. From there, the film becomes a strange mix of teen drama, science fiction, psychological horror, time loop mythology, and 1980s suburban unease. It's a kind of movie that made a whole generation pause the DVD, rewind the DVD, check a message board, and then pretend they understood the timeline better than they did. But the reason it lasted is not just the puzzle, it's the mood. Donnie Darko captures a very specific adolescent feeling, being too smart, too angry, too sensitive, and too alone in a world that keeps telling you to be normal. The film premiered at Sundance, struggled in its initial release, and then found its life as a cult object, which feels perfectly right. Some movies arrive cleanly. This one crept in through the side door wearing a skeleton costume. The soundtrack, the suburban setting, the apocalyptic dread, and Gyllenhaal's performance all still work. And Frank remains one of Cinema's least comforting imaginary friends. You can watch it on Amazon Prime. And that wraps it for the September 4, 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 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 strange, keep it awake, and keep it indie.
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