Weekend! Party time! Excellent! And what kind of party might you be looking for, readers? Well, if it’s one that involves new movies, theater, and music, you’re in luck, because Washington City Paper’s critics have a slew of recommendations for you. 

In theatre, Kriston Capps reviews Animal, Studio Theatre’s latest production, written by British playwright Clare Lizzimore and directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch. The mesmerizing play is “haunting, humanizing, and satisfying, building up to a climactic twist that will resolve a central question that audience members may not have realized they had—while opening up other questions that more of us should be asking.”

Unlike last week, the cinema actually has some new films worth checking out! Director Cary Fukunaga (read our interview with him here!) has a new film that’s simultaneously premiering in theaters and on Netflix. However, as Noah Gittell says, “Beasts of No Nation deserves attention simply for showing us a world we don’t often see—in the movies or elsewhere,” which means you should see it “[on] the big screen, or don’t see it at all.”

And third time’s a charm for Steve Jobs biopics with Danny Boyle‘s bluntly titled Steve Jobs, which Tricia Olszewski says is “the Jobs biopic you’ve been waiting for, even if you sometimes forget that it’s about Jobs.” Olszewski also reviewed the second directorial effort from actress Mélanie Laurent, which is a “portrait of what can happen when mean girls go too far,” that finds Laurent “delicately [balancing] portraying a sense of menace and hurt feelings while not trafficking in the melodramatic.”

Finally, if you’re looking for some new tunes to feast your ears on this weekend, local synth-pop band Br’er has a new album out that Keith Mathias says is the group’s “strongest effort yet.”