Illustration by Tiffany Chin
After a roller-coaster summer movie season that started off shaky owing to a strike-fuelled absence of titles – but eventually found its footing thanks to Deadpool, Wolverine and a few other copyrighted mainstays – this fall looks to be inching audiences back to prepandemic normalcy.
There are action blockbusters, serious-minded awards dramas, crowd-pleasing family adventures and even a few titles whose existence defies logical explanation. Here are 15 big-screen films to watch out for this season through American Thanksgiving.
Megalopolis
Adam Driver, left, and Nathalie Emmanuel in a scene from "Megalopolis."The Associated Press
Francis Ford Coppola’s long-in-the-works sci-fi epic has drained the filmmaker of his personal fortune, elicited polarizing reviews out of Cannes and delivered a deliciously chaotic marketing campaign that involved fabricating reviews of the director’s previous projects. While the movie itself – which follows an architect (Adam Driver) trying to rebuild a city in the near future – might be a masterpiece or an unmitigated disaster, the discourse surrounding it makes it the must-see event of the season. (Sept. 27)
Joker: Folie à Deux
When Todd Phillips’s first Joker movie was released in 2019, it seemed for a brief moment as if the film might set the world on fire. Or at least burn a few multiplexes to the ground. No such fury resulted, though the movie did go on to become the most surprising of comic-book success stories, and deliver the best actor Oscar for Joaquin Phoenix. Now the star and Phillips are back for this musical sequel, which adds Lady Gaga to the Gotham antics as Harley Quinn. (Oct. 4)
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Saturday Night
I sure hope that director Jason Reitman learned some lessons from Aaron Sorkin’s Saturday Night Live-esque NBC series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip before he set out to make this new comedy, which chronicles the production of SNL’s very first episode back in 1975. Both projects share stacked casts – Sorkin had Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, Reitman gets Matthew Rhys as George Carlin and Cooper Hoffman as NBC exec Dick Ebersol – and both seem to operate from a place of Lorne Michaels’s reverence. But Sorkin seemed to forget that any SNL-adjacent project should be funny. And given Reitman’s recent track record on the laugh-free Ghostbusters films, which like Saturday Night was co-written with Gil Kenan, well … hey, at least it’s not a MAD TV biopic, right? Actually: I would watch that. (Oct. 11)
Flight Risk
Michelle Dockery and Mark Wahlberg in Flight Risk.Courtesy of Lionsgate/Lionsgate
To describe this new thriller is an exercise in stacking one crazy-bananas idea on top of the other. Mark Wahlberg stars as a toupee-wearing (?) pilot flying an underworld informant played by Topher Grace (??) – but it turns out that Wahlberg’s character is actually a mob assassin (???) and now a lone FBI agent played by Michelle Dockery must stop the chaos mid-air (????). And if you need another question mark, the whole affair is directed by none other than Mel Gibson, somewhat back from semi-Hollywood exile. (Oct. 18)
Anora
Sean Baker, the do-it-all filmmaker (director, co-writer, editor, casting supervisor, producer) responsible for some of American cinema’s most thrilling films of the past decade (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket) returns this fall with Anora, his Palme d’Or-winning dramedy that might just push the fiercely independent artist into the Oscars spotlight. Following a Russian-American stripper (Mikey Madison) who embarks on a whirlwind of romance with the son of a Russian oligarch (Mark Eydelshteyn), the film seems to encapsulate all of Baker’s favoured themes – sex work, the sour reality of upward mobility – in thrilling, deeply humane fashion. (October, exact date TBD)
Venom: The Last Dance
Tom Hardy, a man of a thousand voices, gets to close out the most ludicrous superhero trilogy of this current comic-book cinema era – which is saying something – as Venom: The Last Dance swishes its way into theatres. While the Venom films have never taken themselves too seriously, they have been marked by technical incompetence that makes Hardy’s go-for-broke approach to the character(s) hard to fully appreciate. Here’s hoping that Hardy and Kelly Marcel – the latter making her directorial debut here after writing the first two Venom instalments – swing into the swan song with, if not grace then at least gusto. (Oct. 25)
Blitz
After dissecting the Second World War history of Amsterdam in painstaking detail with last year’s mammoth documentary Occupied City, British phenomenon Steve McQueen turns his eyes toward bombed-out London with this drama starring Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson and Stephen Graham. Details are scarce on the actual story, but given that it’s McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Widows and the criminally overlooked Prime Video anthology Small Axe), expect something original and epic. (Nov. 1)
Here
When Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis work together, the results can define a generation (Forrest Gump, Cast Away) or be so ruinous that it takes several generations to wipe the memory of their existence from the popular imagination (Pinocchio, The Polar Express). Perhaps their latest collaboration, Here, will be a case of the former, though an awful lot hinges on the highest-of-high concepts: The film covers the events of a single spot of land – from prehistoric patch of mud to modern-day living room – with the “camera,” such as it is, remaining completely static. (Nov. 1)
Conclave
Sergio Castellitto as Cardinal Tedesco in director Edward Berger's Conclave.Courtesy of Focus Features. © 2024 Focus Features, LLC. All Rights Reserved./Focus Features
Pope movies can go either way (see: The Two Popes; don’t see: The Pope’s Exorcist). But with Conclave, the awards race gets what looks to be a holy-hell ripper. Based on Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, director Edward Berger’s film stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini in a tale of backstabbing papal intrigue. Because when you’re playing with God, you either Vatican or Vatican’t. Feel free to use that tagline in your marketing, Conclave producers. (November, exact date TBD)
A Real Pain
Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain.Searchlight Pictures
Kieran Culkin brings a sliver of that Roman Roy energy from HBO’s Succession in his performance here as an antsy ne’er-do-well who reunites with his cousin (Jesse Eisenberg) for a tour of Poland to honour their late grandmother. Written and directed by Eisenberg, who graciously gives his co-star the juiciest lines and scenes, A Real Pain was a standout from this past January’s Sundance Film Festival and should go far with adult audiences looking for something, well, real to hold onto this fall. (November, exact date TBD)
Heretic
After going full-on villain with the underrated HBO series Undoing, Hugh Grant gets to play unhinged psycho again in this provocative new horror movie from Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, writers of the Quiet Place franchise. After two Mormon missionaries arrive on his doorstep, Grant’s villain begins to play a game of cat and mouse that could convert the most skeptical of genre fans. (November, exact date TBD)
Red One & Moana 2
It’ll be a double dose of Dwayne Johnson this fall, as the Rock headlines two projects that the star surely hopes will get him back on the right track after a series of muscular misfires. Not to be confused with the woeful 2021 action-comedy Red Notice, Red One casts Johnson as the personal security for Santa himself, who must rescue St. Nick after he’s kidnapped. (I’ve heard of worse high-concept pitches.) And Moana 2 finds the star reprising his role as Maui, the singing, dancing demigod who is responsible for at least two of your children’s most favourite songs of all time. Godspeed, Rock. (Red One opens Nov. 15, Moana 2 opens Nov. 27)
Gladiator II
Director Ridley Scott once again asks audiences if they are not entertained with this sequel to his quarter-century-old epic. While Russell Crowe is sitting things out, Scott has rounded up a killer cast of new Romans to participate in his circus for some hard-earned bread. Paul Mescal leads, joined by Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal and Joseph Quinn. Plus deadly monkeys, rhinos and sharks, oh my! (Nov. 22)
Wicked
Speaking of killer-animal lineups: Universal Pictures is placing a big, fat, yellow-brick bet on director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Wicked, the Wizard of Oz prequel that has been a consistent Broadway smash. Curiously, though, the studio’s marketing is hiding two big elements: that this film is in fact a musical (there’s barely any singing in the trailer featuring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo) and that it’s actually part one of two, with the second instalment slated to open next fall. Take a cue from the Lion, Universal, and grab some courage. (Nov. 22)