Awards Season Heats Up With ‘The Only Living Pickpocket In New York,’ ‘Fatherland’ & More — Specialty Preview
Several independent films are opening this weekend, with awards attention surrounding John Turturro’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland. The releases span limited cinema runs and broader openings, while A24’s You Can See Everything goes wide and Netflix expands the release of La Bola Negra.
Pickpocket opens on six screens in New York and Los Angeles, with Turturro playing an ageing thief in a changed city; it has a 97% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score. Fatherland, which won Pawlikowski the Cannes Best Director award, opens at four cinemas and follows Thomas Mann and his daughter across post-war Germany. Wider releases include A Talent for Murder on 876 screens and Wicker on 1,471; Wicker, starring Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage and Alexander Skarsgård, has a 92% critics’ score and 93% audience score.
In short
- Several independent films open amid awards-season attention.
- Pickpocket begins on six screens and has a 97% critics’ score.
- Wicker opens in 1,471 cinemas with strong critics’ and audience scores.
Explained simply
Independent films are released on fewer cinema screens than mainstream studio films, often starting in a handful of cities before expanding if audiences respond. Awards attention can help these films attract viewers and distributors, though reviews and early scores are only snapshots of critics’ and audiences’ opinions.
John Turturro is an American actor known for film and television roles, while Paweł Pawlikowski is a Polish-British filmmaker whose films have received international awards. Their new films draw on different settings: a changing New York seen through the life of an ageing thief, and post-war Germany through the story of writer Thomas Mann and his daughter.
This weekend’s releases also include films opening on hundreds or more than a thousand screens, alongside titles widening their distribution. The range shows how specialist releases compete for attention while some films reach much larger cinema audiences from the outset.