The first weekend of May delivers one of the specialty market’s more politically charged lineups in recent memory, with three labor-themed films opening on May Day alongside a clutch of wider indie releases anchored by Damian McCarthy’s Hokum, the Irish folk horror that has had critics reaching for superlatives since its SXSW premiere in March.
Janus Films brings a new 4K restoration of Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning 1990 documentary American Dream to the IFC Center in New York and a dozen other screens nationwide, timed to the film’s 35th anniversary and International Workers’ Day.
The film chronicles the devastating 1985–86 strike by meatpacking workers at Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota — a yearlong walkout that split a community and ended with National Guard intervention. Kopple will appear in person at IFC Center Friday and Saturday to present both American Dream and a 4K restoration of Harlan County, USA, her 1976 coal miners documentary, which also won the Best Documentary Oscar and opens its own anniversary run at the same venues.
Lucrecia Martel’s documentary Our Land (Nuestra Tierra) launches at New York’s Film Forum, having previously won the top prize at the BFI London Film Festival and picked up awards at Locarno and from the National Society of Film Critics. The film centers on Javier Chocobar, a member of an indigenous community in Argentina’s Tucumán Province who was shot and killed in 2009 while defending his people from forced eviction. American Agitators, narrated by La Bamba playwright Luis Valdez, opens at the Quad Cinema in New York, tracing labor movements built by organizer Fred Ross Sr.
The commercial counterweight to these documentaries is Hokum, which Neon sends into 1,850 theaters. The film earned 89% on Rotten Tomatoes from 96 critics, with reviewers calling it McCarthy’s most assured work to date. Adam Scott stars as Ohm Bauman, a horror novelist who travels to a rural Irish hotel to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to find himself confronting a witch said to haunt the property’s locked honeymoon suite. McCarthy’s previous film, Oddity, grossed $1.2 million domestically after winning the SXSW Midnighter Audience Award in 2024.
RZA’s revenge thriller One Spoon of Chocolate, the first release under his 36 Cinema Distribution label, opens on 636 screens with Quentin Tarantino presenting the film, while Andy Serkis’ animated Animal Farm — with a voice cast including Seth Rogen, Glenn Close and Woody Harrelson — opens wide on 2,600 screens.
