With only a week to go before we flip the calendar page from August to September, the month is closing out with a surprisingly packed slate of new releases. There’s nothing too massive or high-profile here, but there is plenty of variety, with theaters making room for a mix of lower- and mid-budget films across just about every genre. And on the TV side, things aren’t exactly slowing down either, with a solid mix of new and returning shows arriving this week.
Like always, we’ve compiled this week’s major releases, because keeping track of everything arriving across theaters, streaming, VOD, and television has only gotten harder. That’s why we’re here: to sort through the clutter and make it a little easier for moviegoers and TV fans to figure out what’s actually coming out this week.
🎥 In Theaters This Week
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🎥 Ghost: 2 Big To Rig
(Wed, Aug 26th and Thurs, Aug 27th — limited IMAX engagement)
Swedish arena rock band Ghost brings its Skeletour tour to the big screen in this concert film from director Amir Chamdin. Shot during two sold-out September 2025 shows at Mexico City’s Palacio de los Deportes, the film captures Tobias Forge as his stage alter ego, Papa V Perpetua, leading Ghost through the elaborate staging, masked pageantry, and arena-sized rock that have defined this chapter of the band’s touring history.
🎥 American Martyr: The Stanley Rother Story
(Wed, Aug 26th & Fri, Aug 28th — limited engagement)
Martin Sheen narrates this feature-length documentary about Father Stanley Rother, an Oklahoma-born priest who devoted his life to serving the Indigenous Tz’utujil community of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. As civil war and violence spread around him, Rother chose to remain with the people he served, despite the growing danger to his own life. The film follows a life shaped by faith, courage, sacrifice, and a deep sense of responsibility to others.
🎥 The Dog Stars
(Fri, Aug 28th — wide release)
Jacob Elordi follows his Oscar-nominated turn as Frankenstein’s Monster by facing the end of the world in Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic survival drama. Here, Elordi plays Hig, a young pilot living alongside Josh Brolin’s hardened survivalist, Bangley. When a mysterious radio transmission suggests there may be life beyond their isolated homestead, Hig ventures into a ruined world filled with dangerous scavengers. With Margaret Qualley, Allison Janney, Benedict Wong, and Guy Pearce, this adaptation of Peter Heller’s novel asks what makes survival worth fighting for.
🎥 Coyote vs. ACME
(Fri, Aug 28th — wide release)
After a lifetime of defective rockets, collapsing traps, and one Road Runner he still can’t catch, Wile E. Coyote finally takes ACME to court. Will Forte stars as the struggling attorney who takes his case, only to face John Cena as the lawyer defending the corporation behind all those malfunctioning gadgets. Built around decades of classic Looney Tunes destruction, Dave Green directs this live-action/animated legal comedy that was once scrapped by Warner Bros. but has now been given a second life.
🎥 Buddy
(Fri, Aug 28th — wide release)
From Casper Kelly, creator of the warped ’80s sitcom spoof / viral short Too Many Cooks, comes a new twisted comedy about a children’s show where happiness is mandatory and refusing to smile has deadly consequences. In the relentlessly cheerful world of It’s Buddy!, young performers sing, dance, and follow the rules until one child refuses to play along with the show’s bright orange unicorn host, Buddy. Delaney Quinn leads a cast including Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Keegan-Michael Key, Michael Shannon, and Patton Oswalt in this darkly satirical take on 1990s children’s television.
🎥 Idiots
(Fri, Aug 28th — wide release)
Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr. play two guys who barely have their own lives together but somehow get hired to transport a wealthy teenager (Mason Thames) to rehab. What should be a straightforward drive quickly goes off the rails when their passenger pulls them into drugs, crime, and increasingly dangerous trouble with a cast of oddball characters (Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Braun, Kiernan Shipka). Actor-filmmaker Macon Blair (The Toxic Avenger) writes and directs this chaotic road comedy about three people spectacularly unqualified to make good decisions.
🎥 Finding Emily
(Fri, Aug 28th — wide release)
Love can be maddening... especially when you’re texting the wrong person. Musician Owen (Spike Fearn) teams up with psychology student Sami (Angourie Rice) to track down the girl he believes is his soulmate after a phone-number mix-up. Their campus-wide search soon becomes a viral story of unrequited love, while unexpected feelings begin growing between Owen and Sami, proving the heart rarely follows a straight line in this British rom-com.
🎥 It Ends
(Fri, Aug 21st — expands)
One wrong turn can sometimes last forever. In this existential horror thriller, Phinehas Yoon, Akira Jackson, Noah Toth, and Mitchell Cole play four recent college graduates whose late-night food run lands them on an endless two-lane road, where the surrounding woods hide otherworldly threats. They soon realize they’re trapped on a road to nowhere... one that may never end.
🎥 Colony
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release)
From Train to Busan filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho comes another relentless outbreak thriller, this time set inside a sealed conference facility where a mutating virus is turning people into something faster, smarter, and harder to escape. Gianna Jun stars as a biotechnology professor trapped inside as quarantine collapses and survival becomes increasingly desperate. This new zombie horror asks one terrifying question: what happens when the infected start learning faster than the living can survive?
🎥 Just Play Dead
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited releases; in select theaters)
Samuel L. Jackson and Eva Green play a married couple whose insurance scam turns into a battle over who gets to survive it. Jack (Jackson) plans to fake his murder, collect $30 million, and frame his wife’s lover. Nora (Green) has another idea: kill Jack for real and keep the money herself. Casino Royale director Martin Campbell turns their competing schemes into a twisty crime caper fueled by betrayal, deception, and one very dangerous marriage.
🎥 The Sun Never Sets
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited releases)
There comes a point in adulthood when the future we imagined starts to feel less certain. Joe Swanberg’s latest relationship drama explores that uncertainty, with Dakota Fanning as a woman reconsidering the life she thought she wanted. When her long-term boyfriend (Jake Johnson) asks for space, she returns home and reconnects with a former flame (Cory Michael Smith), creating a complicated love triangle between the future she was building and the past she thought she had left behind.
🎥 Beyond Belief
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release)
Carson Lueders stars as Andy, a teenage rocker chasing dreams of music stardom while still dealing with the loss of his father. Set in the 1980s, this faith-driven coming-of-age drama follows Andy after a mysterious voice tells him to run, sending his life in an unexpected direction. As his ambitions give way to bigger questions about faith and purpose, he must decide whether the future he wants is really the one he’s meant to follow.
🎥 The Salt Path
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release)
Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs star as a husband and wife who lose their home and make the impulsive decision to walk 630 miles along England’s rugged South West Coast. Directed by acclaimed theater director Marianne Elliott (War Horse), this husband-and-wife road drama follows the couple through exhaustion, storms, and uncertainty as their journey becomes a search for dignity, endurance, and a new understanding of what home means after nearly everything has been taken away.
🎥 Legend of the White Dragon
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release)
The late actor and mixed martial artist Jason David Frank, best known for Power Rangers, stars in this action-fantasy adventure as a fugitive warrior trying to clear his name and find his way back to his family. Mark Dacascos, Jason Faunt, Rachele Brooke Smith, Andrew Bachelor, David Ramsey, and the late Michael Madsen join him for one final dragon-sized battle, where redemption may be the hardest fight of all. When the city needs a hero, hiding is no longer an option.
🎥 Filipiñana
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release)
Paradise looks a little different when you’re the one keeping it pristine while everyone else gets to enjoy it. Rafael Manuel’s Sundance-winning debut follows Isabel, a 17-year-old from rural Philippines who takes a job at an exclusive country club outside Manila, where every chore reveals a rigid social order. Executive produced by acclaimed filmmaker Jia Zhangke (A Touch of Sin) and shot by cinematographer Xenia Patricia (100 Nights of Hero), this quietly unsettling drama turns a manicured resort into a sharp study of class, control, and privilege.
🎥 Hanging by a Wire
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release)
A routine school commute turns into a fight for survival when a cable car carrying eight passengers, including six schoolboys, is left dangling above a ravine in northern Pakistan. Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s documentary reconstructs the 2023 Battagram rescue through firsthand accounts, news footage, drone imagery, and reenactments as local rescuers and authorities race to bring everyone to safety before the remaining cable gives way.
🎥 Boorman and the Devil
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited release; in NY)
Some films fail so loudly they become legends. David Kittredge’s documentary revisits John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, the critically savaged sequel that nearly derailed his career. Boorman joins Linda Blair, Joe Dante, Mike Flanagan, Karyn Kusama, and others to unpack the production, backlash, and cult reputation that followed. More than a defense of a notorious misfire, the film asks whether some movies simply need decades before audiences are ready to look again and reconsider what they once dismissed.
🎥 Dead Janitors Club
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited theaters)
Crime doesn’t clean itself. Felix Merback stars as Jeff, a broke porn shop worker who takes a better-paying job with a shady crime-scene cleanup crew operating outside the law. What starts as easy money quickly gets messier as Jeff and his coworkers are pulled deeper into the crimes they’re supposed to erase. Directed by Kenny Gage and Devon Downs, with Jake Busey and Gary Busey co-starring, this horror-crime comedy turns cleanup work into a dangerous side hustle.
🎥 Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth And Nothing Butt
(Fri, Aug 28th — limited theaters)
Few bands wore their freak flag louder than the Butthole Surfers. Their name alone gives you a pretty good idea of just how unorthodox they’ve always been. Tom Stern’s documentary follows the San Antonio art-punk legends from their 1980s underground beginnings through cult fame and mainstream recognition with the ’90s hit “Pepper.” Using archival footage, interviews, animation, and surreal reenactments, the film captures the reckless creativity of a band that pushed artistic boundaries and influenced generations.
🎥 Gandahar: 4K restoration
(Fri, Aug 28th — re-release)
Legendary French animator René Laloux’s (Fantastic Planet) final feature follows Sylvain, a young warrior investigating an army of automata turning Gandahar’s people to stone. His search leads to abandoned mutants called the Deformed and a massive living brain tied to the invasion across centuries. With Philippe Caza’s surreal designs and Gabriel Yared’s score, this newly 4K-restored animated science-fantasy blends time travel, ecological collapse, and political guilt into a cosmic warning about the future that feels strangely relevant today.
🎥 Terminator 2: Judgment Day — 35th Anniversary
(Fri, Aug 28th thru Wed, Sept 2nd — re-release)
Thirty-five years later, it remains one of those rare sequels that didn’t just go bigger... it made everything matter more. James Cameron expanded the mythology while transforming Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor into a hardened survivor and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 into an unlikely father figure for Edward Furlong’s John Connor. Beneath the killer cyborgs and blockbuster spectacle is a surprisingly human story about compassion, sacrifice, and choosing a better future. Now back in theaters this weekend, T2 remains proof that great sequels don’t have to repeat the original... they can redefine it into something even more memorable.
