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• Film

  Special Screenings

  

  Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (1979)

  No director has ever launched on so many fool’s errands as Francis Ford Coppola. Enraging the mafia to make The Godfather? Founding indie mega shingle Zoetrope Studios? Disappearing into the Philippines for months to make an abandoned George Lucas project? Okay, so they all mostly paid off, and that last one scored him three Oscar nominations for a little flick called Apocalypse Now. But he’s also had a long history of spectacular failures: Zoetrope going bust, The Cotton Club and Tucker: The Man and His Dream flopping, the beautiful stupidity of Bram Stoker’s Dracula … you catch the drift. So, while we all wait to see whether his latest and maybe last movie, Megalopolis, is masterpiece or disaster, catch his preferred version of his wild anti-war fever dream. – Richard Whittaker

  Sept. 1-2

  Alamo Drafthouse Lakeline, Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, Alamo Drafthouse Village

• Film

  Special Screenings

  

  Ocaña: An Intermittent Portrait (1978)

  Dissidence is dangerous. That’s the message of the life and art of José Pérez Ocaña, better known simply as Ocaña, the queer painter, drag performer, and conceptual provocateur. In 1978’s Ocaña, retrat intermitent, documentarian Ventura Pons creates a portrait of a passionate and unstoppably transgressive force of nature who fled the small-town repression of rural Andalusia to take on the institutional oppression of post-Franco Barcelona. Ocaña’s paintings hang in galleries around the globe – in part due to how this film has allowed their reappraisal – but nowhere else can you drink in the glory of Ocaña’s drag walks down his adopted city’s most well-known promenade, La Rambla, events that were by turns lewd and joyful, clownish and glamorous, but always drew a captivated crowd. – Richard Whittaker

  Sun., Sept. 1

  AFS Cinema

• Film

  Special Screenings

  

  The Big Bend (2024)

  To quote that philosopher of American cinema Joe Bob Briggs, the drive-in will never die. No act of outdoor exhibition valor shows that more than the way the Blue Starlite Mini Urban Drive-In has kept the lights on after not one but two break-ins this summer. So there’s no more suitable movie to watch there than Brett Wagner’s The Big Bend, a gutsy indie road trip to far, far West Texas. – Richard Whittaker Read a full review of The Big Bend.

  Aug. 29-Sept. 12

  Blue Starlite North

• Qmmunity

  Arts & Culture

  

  The Front Festival

  Helmed by women and queer creative collective Future Front, this Labor Day weekend festival celebrates the end-of-summer holiday with this Austinite’s favorite activities: appreciating local music, film, and art, and doing a lot of swimming. The main event launches Friday, when the Contemporary Austin-Laguna Gloria hosts over a dozen independent Texan filmmakers for a movie showcase; on Saturday, Cheer Up Charlies welcomes musical acts Pam Reyes, Never, promqueen, p1nkstar, and more. Thursday and Sunday bookend the event with, respectively, night and day parties at the LINE Hotel pool, featuring DJ sets and pop-up art exhibits to boot. – Carys Anderson

  Aug. 29-Sept. 1

  Various locations