Movies used to be seasonal — the summer months meant a steady diet of extra-buttered popcorn blockbusters, which gave way to autumn’s somber dramas and early winter’s awards hopefuls, then spring filled the gap with everything else until Memorial Day weekend restarted the cycle. Now, of course, you get I.P. tentpoles and stark-to-uplifting biopics and horror and comedy and horror-comedy all year round, and you occasionally find yourself sitting in a theater — no, really, they still exist! — wondering, wait, what month is it again? (Or, in the case of a modern crime-comedy starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt, what year is it again?)
Still, there are elements that remain eternal, like death, taxes, and the Oscars. Which means you still get something close to a traditional fall movie season, filled with literary adaptations, performance-driven chamber pieces, and history lessons filled with important reminders of Where We’ve Been and thus, Where We Might Be Going. It’s just now, you also get popular comic-book movies along with your big studio prestige projects, sometimes in the same film. It’s a gift for cinematic omnivores, so long as you can keep from getting acid reflux.
The 50 movies below are a great example of the sheer variety that awaits you, the discerning moviegoing public, from Labor Day to New Year’s Day. Biopics, bestsellers turned star vehicles, new works from brand-name auteurs and big-screen epics? Yup, you got ’em. Superhero (or rather, supervillain) adventures, sequels, and high-concept sci-fi? They’re coming your way as well. Documentaries, animated movies, revenge thrillers, and scary, Halloween-appropriate chillers? Of course! Some of them we’re salivating over seeing ASAP, others are films we’ve already caught on the festival circuit that we’re anxious to see again — seriously, wait until you get a look at The Substance, and His Three Daughters, and A Real Pain, and Anora! The one thing they have in common is that you’ll get to check them out over the next few months. Dates are, like everything else in the modern world, subject to change.
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ (September 6)
The Juice, as they say, is once again loose! Michael Keaton and director Tim Burton reunite for this belated sequel to the duo’s 1988 classic, in which the ghost with the most returns to haunt the Deetzs — Catherine O’Hara and Winona Ryder are back, too! — and cause havoc for a next-gen Burton MVP Jenna “Wednesday” Ortega. Just say his name three times (or in this case, repeat his name twice in lieu of adding a “2” on to the Beetle-end of this next Beetle-chapter …).
‘The Front Room’ (September 6)
What better way to kick off the fall moviegoing season than with a little dollop of A24 horror? A mother-to-be (Brandy Norwood) is forced to take in her elderly mother-in-law (The Tragedy of Macbeth‘s Kathryn Hunter) after the woman’s husband dies. Once the older woman moves in, however, she begins to take the house over and pit her son (Andrew Burnap) against his wife. She also has a love of that ol’ time religion, which seems to extend to thinking that the holy spirit moves directly through her — and that the baby her daughter-in-law is carrying might be even more special than anyone knows. Speaking of family: This creepfest is written and directed by Sam and Max Eggers, the latter of whom helped their brother Robert Eggers cowrite The Lighthouse. We’re digging the pedigree.
‘His Three Daughters’ (September 6)
Writer-director Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, French Exit) delivers an old-school family drama, in which three sisters — Type-A control freak Katie (Carrie Coon), numbed-out stoner Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), and resident peacekeeper Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) — as they reluctantly gather to say goodbye to their father during his final days. Trapped together in Dad’s tiny Upper West Side apartment, they begin rehashing old arguments, reopening old wounds, and revisiting lifelong grudges. This was the best thing we saw at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and it’s already staked a claim in our Top 10 list for 2024. See it ASAP.
‘Look Into My Eyes’ (September 6)
You’ll likely go into this documentary by Lana Wilson (After Tiller, Miss Americana) about NYC psychics with the idea that mockery and/or gotcha journalism is right around the corner. Guess again. Embedding herself with a half-dozen or so different psychics and recording a number of their sessions, the filmmaker neither exposes these people who claim to talk to long-gone loved ones (and in one case, pets) as exploitative con artists, nor does she proclaim them to be the real deal. Instead, she takes a compassionate look at those who seek answers from such folks, and you quickly realize that this is less about catching charlatans than looking at people who have a desire to heal by any means necessary.
‘Rebel Ridge’ (September 6)
A former Marine (The Underground Railroad‘s Aaron Pierre) runs afoul of some corrupt cops while biking into a small town to pay his cousin’s bail. The officers “confiscate” the cash, and when the ex-soldier files a complaint, they attempt to make his life hell. Spoiler: They have no idea who they’re f*cking with. Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, Emory Cohen, and The Office‘s David Denman costar. The fact that Jeremy Saulnier — the gent behind Blue Ruin, Green Room, and Hold the Dark — is calling the shots should tell you that this is indeed one hell of a tense, nerve-shredding revenge thriller.
‘My Old Ass’ (September 13)
An 18-year-old woman named Elliott (Maisy Stella) goes on a magic-mushroom trip and soon finds herself hanging out with an unlikely companion: her future self (Aubrey Plaza). Filmmaker Megan Park (The Fallout) has found a premise that seems destined to not only take advantage of Plaza’s slightly jaded screen persona, but also spark a conversation about what happens when youthful idealism butts up against the slings and arrows that life throws your way as you edge into your 40s. Personally, if we were to meet up with our 18-year-old self, we’d tell that ridiculous, overly righteous kid to drink more water, don’t forget the importance of moisturizing, and to seriously consider buying Apple and Oracle stocks.
‘Speak No Evil’ (September 13)
A warning to families vacationing abroad: Beware of those super-friendly fellow tourists who, after waltzing around Italy with you for a blissful week of fun, invite you to one day come stay at their country home. Should you take these seemingly lovely strangers up on their offer, you may find that they … have a secondary agenda in mind. Folks who were lucky enough to have caught the Danish horror film of the same name by director Christian Tafdrup know what happens next. And if this American remake starring James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, and The Nightingale‘s Aisling Franciosi is even 1/16th as intense and disturbing as the original, you are in for one very unnerving, unsettling evening at the moving pictures.
‘A Different Man’ (September 20)
The latest from Aaron Schimberg (Chained for Life) follows Edward (Sebastian Stan), an actor with neurofibromatosis who’s shy, socially awkward, and self-conscious about his condition. An experimental surgery essentially puts his facial disfigurement into remission and causes him to look like, well, Sebastian Stan. He changes his identity. Then his former crush (The Worst Person in the World‘s Reinate Reinsve) writes a play about the old Edward, which sparks an unhealthy obsession in the new Edward. We sense a “beauty is skin deep, true ugliness is bone deep” metaphor in here somewhere.
‘Omni Loop’ (September 20)
Have you ever wondered if you’ve just been living the same horrible week over and over week again? Zoya Lowe (Mary Louise Parker) understands what you’re going through. This quantum physicist has been stuck in a perpetual loop of the last seven days of her life for what seems to have been ages, and it’s driving her crazy. When she meets a young, up-and-coming scientist (The Bear‘s Ayo Edebiri) who’s studying the ins and out of time, however, Zoya thinks the two of them can come up with a solution to this endless rinse-repeat cycle. Writer-director Bernardo Britto’s existentialist dramedy reads like fine addition to the make-it-Groundhog’s-Day-but-different genre, and the pairing of Parker and Edebiri feels like an oddly perfect screen duo.
‘The Substance’ (September 20)
A TV star (Demi Moore, delivering what may be the performance of her career) deals with being pitilessly aged out of the industry. She then finds out that a secret subscription service would allow her to foster a younger version of herself, although the plan requires both her and her dewy twentysomething “twin” (Margaret Qualley) to abide by a strict set of rules. Let’s just say that things go awry and get very gory in Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror flick, and what starts as a satire of Hollywood hypocrisy turns into a take-no-prisoners indictment of youth fixations and impossible beauty standards.
‘Wolfs’ (September 20)
Brad Pitt and George Clooney are two professional “fixers” who find that they’ve both been hired to do the same job, leading many moviegoers to wonder: Are we still living in the 1990s? Thank god these two stars remain dedicated to still making these kinds of movies. And as much as we do love writer-director Jon Watts’ recent Spider-Man trilogy, we’re pretty sure a filmmaker can’t keep creatively sustaining themselves on superhero blockbusters alone. Plus the always remarkable Amy Ryan is in this too. We’re honestly psyched about this.
‘Lee’ (September 27)
Living in Paris in the 1930s, Lee Miller worked as a model — until war comes once again to Europe, at which point she decides she wants to be the one behind the camera. By the time she entered the concentrated camps after the Nazis are defeated, she will have changed the way we view warfare. Kate Winslet steps into the photographer’s battered, scuffed boots to portray someone determined to capture truth one frame at a time. Andy Samberg — not a typo! — plays her longtime collaborator David Scherman. Alexander Skarsgard, Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, and Noémie Merlant round out the cast, while Ellen Kuras — no stranger to the power of imagery, given her status as one of the greatest working cinematographers today — calls the shots from the director’s seat.
‘Megalopolis’ (September 27)
Francis Ford Coppola returns with another huge swing for the fences, detailing a crumbling fictional empire that looks a lot like contemporary America. A visionary named Caesar (Adam Driver) dreams of a utopian city for all; his rival, Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), is determined to keep the powerful in power by any means necessary. Naturally, his party-girl daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with Caesar. And we haven’t even got to Shia LeBeouf in drag, Jon Voight’s conspicuously Trump-like billionaire or the fact that Aubrey Plaza plays a character named Wow Platinum. Coppola has embedded a lifetime’s worth of literature, philosophy, cinephilia, and fretting for the human race into this massive epic, and having chased this white-whale project in one form or another for decades, he’s finally caught it.
‘Will & Harper’ (September 27)
Will Ferrell first met Harper Steele when the two of them were hired for Saturday Night Live within the same week, and they have been close friends and creative collaborators for almost three decades. When the latter came out as a trans woman in 2022, the two decided to go on a cross-country road trip — something Steele had done many times over the years. It would be the first she’d encounter the nooks and crannies of Middle America as a woman, however, and the result ended up being a barometer of the country’s attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community, human rights, celebrity, tolerance, and a lot more. Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Start Go to Del Mar) tags along and documents their coast-to-coast trek.
‘It’s What’s Inside’ (October 4)
Beware the uninvited guest who shows up at your unisex bachelor party, bearing a mysterious game that he claims will change everyone’s lives. (Notice how we didn’t add “for the better” to the end of that sentence.) Having bought writer-director Greg Jardin’s debut feature out of Sundance for a hefty price, Netflix has high hopes for this twisty, turn-y tale of old college friends suddenly dropped into a wedding-slash-reunion weekend from hell. So while we won’t reveal the many, many secrets in this gonzo-millennials mystery, we will say that it is indeed a wild ride.
‘Joker: Folie a Deux’ (October 4)
Yes, director Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix return for another round of D.C. I.P.-tweaking featuring God’s lonely clown — but what has us jazzed is Lady Gaga (!) joining these gents to play the Joker’s girlfriend, fellow sociopath and literal partner in crime, Harley Quinn (!!!). Also, apparently it’s a musical. Rejoice, Batfans and Little Monsters. You now have at least on thing in common.
‘The Outrun’ (October 4)
Writer Amy Liptrot’s memoir about being an addict and hitting rock bottom benefits from having the great Saoirse Ronan going through the stations of the self-destructive character-study cross here: drinking and drugging, bottoming out, leaving London for her hometown in the Scottish Isles, enduring rehab, putting her life back together one shattered piece at a time. German filmmaker Nora Fingscheidt (The Unforgivable) directs.
‘Piece by Piece’ (October 11)
A documentary on Pharrell Williams? Cool. A documentary on Pharrell Williams but his life story is re-created with Legos? Now you have our undivided attention! Filmmaker Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom, Roadrunner, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) pieces together a portrait — literally — of the super-producer, singer, and songwriter behind “Happy,” “Get Lucky,” and a million other hits, with a little help from everyone’s favorite free-play building blocks. Williams has never done anything by the book, so why should a music doc about his rise to stardom be any different?
‘Saturday Night’ (October 11)
So in the mid-1970s, this TV producer from Canada had a wild and crazy idea, which involved mounting a live, late-night sketch show to fill a gap in NBC’s weekend programming, he gathered together a bunch of veterans of improv groups and the National Lampoon, and, well, the rest is history. Director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air, Juno, those recent Ghostbusters movies) revisits the origin story of Saturday Night Live as Lorne Michaels (Gabrielle LaBelle) tries to wrangle a bunch of countercultural misfits-slash-comic geniuses into shape to mount the series’ first episode. Willem Dafoe, Dylan O’Brien, Cooper Hoffman, Finn Wolfhard, Lamorne Morris, J.K. Simmons (as Milton Berle!), and Succession‘s Nicholas Braun (as both Jim Henson and Andy Kaufman!!!) costar.
‘We Live in Time’ (October 11)
Oh, you know: Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, they become parents, one of them gets sick, they stay together through thick and thin, time marches on. Why should you care, you ask? Because Andrew Garfield is the boy, Florence Pugh is the girl, director John Crowley did the amazing drama Brooklyn a number of years ago — so you know he’s good with actors — and you probably need a good emotional cry over watching a couple experiencing the highs and the lows of a live lived together over decades, yet conveniently compacted down to two hours.
‘Anora’ (October 18)
Just your typical boy-meets-girl romp, if the boy was a Russian oligarch’s filthy rich son and the girl was an exotic dancer/escort from Brooklyn who accepts his impromptu marriage proposal. The latest from Sean Baker (The Florida Project) plays like a mashup of Pretty Woman and Uncut Gems, with Mikey Madison’s working-class sex worker getting swept off her feet by Mark Edelshteyn hedonistic rich kid and settling in to a life of mansions and Vegas getaways. Then a trio of guys who work for the young man’s parents shows up to inform them the party is over, and the film slams its foot down on the gas pedal.
‘A Real Pain’ (October 18)
Actor-writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s buddy dramedy follows two cousins — one a gregarious and boundary-ignoring hippie type (Kieran Culkin) and the other an uptight neurotic (Eisenberg) — who travel to Poland to pay tribute to their late grandmother. Hooking up with a tour group led by The White Lotus’ Will Sharpe, the two formerly close relatives try to reconnect and reconcile with both their personal history and their heritage. The closest thing to a consensus hit at this year’s Sundance, Eisenberg’s sophom*ore turn behind the camera proves that he’s just as talented a filmmaker as he is an actor, and knows exactly where the middle ground between hilarious and poignant lies.
‘Rumours’ (October 18)
From the moment that the first still from Guy Maddin’s new movie hit the internet — featuring two folks crouching next to a giant brain in some hallucinogenic forest — you could tell that this was going to be severely cracked even by the Canadian cult filmmaker’s standards. The logline of this dreamlike fable (co-directed by Maddin’s longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, and produced by Ari Aster) is that a group of world leaders has gathered for the annual G7 summit. Then the night before a presentation, they all get lost in the woods and before you can Lord of the Flies, things take an absurd survivalist turn. Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Denis Ménochet, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Charles Dance are among those stuck in this waking nightmare; if it’s even half as wonderful as My Winnipeg, we’re in for a treat.
‘Smile 2’ (October 18)
The surprise 2022 horror hit — about a supernatural entity that feeds on trauma and causes people to maniacally grin — gets a sequel, and this time the “final girl” isn’t a therapist but a Gaga-like pop star (Naomi Scott). She’s about to embark on a massive tour when she happens to witness a suicide, and wouldn’t you know it, the guy (Lukas Gage) was inexplicably smiling before he shuffled off this mortal coil. Which means she’s now been targeted as the vengeful spirit’s next victim, and suddenly she’s seeing grotesquely smiling people everywhere, and … you get the picture. Paramount clearly hopes they’ve got a new scary-movie franchise on their hands, and if director Parker Finn’s follow-up to his first film is even half as scary as the original, they should be able to start counting those stacks of money ASAP.
‘Woman of the Hour’ (October 18)
Say hello to Anna Kendrick, genre auteur! The Pitch Perfect actor makes her directorial debut with the stranger-than-fiction story of Rodney Alcala, a prolific serial killer who’d been targeting young women for almost a decade before he was finally apprehended in 1979. The year before that, however, Alcala was one of three bachelors vying for the hand of contestant Cheryl Bradshaw on The Dating Game (!), and had ended up winning the grand prize on the game show. In the hands of most filmmakers, this would either be a nail-biting thriller or a comedy filled with Me Decade kitsch. Kendrick decides to roll the dice by trying to do both at once while adding in a lot of social commentary on a culture of rampant sexism, then and now — and her gamble pays off.
‘Memoir of a Snail’ (October 25)
Australia, the early 1970s: Two thick-as-thieves twins (voiced by Succession‘s Sarah Snook and Power of the Dog‘s Kodi Smit-McPhee) are separated after their father passes away. Given respective foster families, they each grow up wondering what happened to the other. Did we mention that all of this plays out in stop-motion animation? The new film from Adam Elliot (Mary and Max, Harvie Krumpet) looks exactly like the kind of funny, melancholic, moving story he specializes in. Plus the supporting voice cast is nothing to sneeze at: Eric Bana, Nick Cave, Jacki Weaver, Delicastessen‘s Dominique Pinon.
‘Dahomey’ (October 25)
The big winner at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, this new doc from Mati Diop (Atlantics) centers on roughly two dozen artifacts that were taken from what’s now the Republic of Benin by French colonialists. For decades, these items sat in a French museum. Now, they’ve been returned to the West African country, and Diop gathers testimonials from students, curators, and even the objects themselves (!) about what it means for a nation’s cultural heritage when its treasures are plundered and passed off as the spoils of occupation.
‘The Nickel Boys’ (October 25)
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — about a fictional 1960s reform school known as the Nickel Academy, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious, real-life institution the Dozier School — gets the prestigious awards-season treatment, thanks to writer-director RaMell Ross. If you were lucky enough to catch his incredible 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, then you know he’s the perfect person to adapt Whitehead’s story of a young man named Elwood Curtis (Ethan Harisse) who tries to navigate the brutal world of the school along with a fellow classmate (Brandon Wilson). Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, and Fred Hechinger costar.
‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ (October 25)
To his parents, Mats Steen was just a young man who bravely endured life with duch*enne muscular dystrophy and loved playing video games. To his fellow World of Warcraft players, however, Mats was better known as Ibelin Redmoore, a hero who was dashing, funny, and always ready to lend an ear when others were troubled. After he passed away at the age of 25, his parents received a massive data dump of their son’s interactions within WoW — and it’s these dialogues, commands, and re-created gameplay that form the backbone of The Painter and the Thief director Benjamin Ree’s documentary about the power of community, online or otherwise. Have tissues handy.
‘Venom: The Last Dance’ (October 25)
Tom Hardy’s Spider-Man antihero returns for his third (and, if the title is to be believed, final) round, still biting heads and taking names. Which he’ll need to do, since a bunch of nasty creatures from Venom’s home planet have somehow made their way to Earth. So long as there’s more of the wonderful growling banter between hapless man and malicious symbiote that characterized the first two movies, we’re all good. Plus Juno Temple shows up as a scientist who wants to keep information on all these alien life forms runnin’ amuck a secret, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is a military man who aims to help her achieve that goal by any means necessary.
‘Blitz’ (November 1)
Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) takes viewers into the streets of a metropolis under siege, as Nazi bombs pummel London and WWII rages throughout Europe. In the middle of this is Rita (Saoirse Ronan), a single mother who’s trying to protect her young son George (Elliott Heffernan) by sending him away to the countryside. Then the boy decides to return home, at the very moment that a particularly hairy attack threatens to leave the city in rubble — and the family members must find each other amidst the blitzkrieg. Stephen Graham, Harris Dickinson, Hayley Squires, Kathy Burke, and The Jam/Style Council icon Paul Weller costar.
‘Conclave’ (November 1)
The Pope is dead — long live whoever the new Pope will be! Part of that monumental decision will be determined by Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who will aid in assembling a conclave, i.e. the group of his fellow cardinals tasked with voting for the next pontiff. While a number of different candidates jockey for a shot at the Vatican’s top spot, Lawrence comes across a big secret that the powers that be want to stay hidden, lest it tear the foundation of the Catholic church asunder. Woo boy. Edward Berger, the man behind the recent All Quiet on the Western Front remake, directs a starry ensemble cast: John Lithgow, Isabella Rosselini, Stanley Tucci, Sergio Castellitto and Brian F. O’Byrne.
‘Here’ (November 1)
Yes, Robert Zemeckis does love a good high-concept idea filled with technical challenges — and this new film, which reunites him with his Forrest Gump leads Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, is a doozy. The Back to the Future goes back to the past and focuses his camera on one patch of prehistoric terra firma. He then traces that same bit of square footage, keeping the same single camera shot, over thousand and thousands of years, as ancient civilizations fall and rise, and it eventually becomes a plot of land where a suburban house is built. We then watch as the young Hanks and Wright — oh, there will be digital de-aging! — buy the place, raise a family, and grow old together. It’s a full-frontal assault on your tear ducts, in other words.
‘Bird’ (November 8)
If you’ve seen British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s work, then you know she has a knack for finding poignancy in hardscrabble lives, and moments of tenderness within the toughest of coming-of-age circ*mstances. Her latest sounds falls within her Fish Tank-type sweet spot: A 12-year-old girl (Nykia Adams) lives in Kent with her ne’er-do-well father (Barry Keoghan), and pines to be part of a group of local teen criminals-in-training. A mysterious stranger (Passages‘ Franz Rogowski) soon enters the picture, in search of his own father. There’s something… different about him that fascinates this youngster, and it turns out he might be the one protector she has in what can be a very cold, cruel world.
‘Emilia Pérez’ (November 13)
Have you heard the one about the musical featuring a morally conflicted lawyer (Zoe Saldana), a cartel drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón) who fakes their own death in order to transition to becoming a woman, and Selena Gomez? A big hit out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone) pulls out all of the stops for this mash-up of old MGM-style song-and-dance numbers, telenovela drama and crime thriller. It’s a trip.
‘All We Imagine as Light’ (November 15)
Part ode to female friendships and part city symphony — Mumbai after hours has rarely looked so enticing onscreen — Payal Kapadia’s tale of two nurses struggling to reconcile respective romantic issues and feeling of loneliness was the first Indian film to play in competition at Cannes in 30 years. But it would be a landmark work even if it had not broken that particular M.I.A. streak, with Kapadia building off the docu-hybrid style of her previous movie A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and imbuing her portrait of life in the big city with a genuine sense of lived-in lyricism.
‘Heretic’ (November 15)
Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are two Mormon missionaries on a two-year proselytizing trip, who just happen to cross the path of a nice older man (Hugh Grant). He invites them into his household — don’t worry, he says, my wife is in the other room — and settles in to hear why he should consider Jesus Christ as his lord and savior. It soon becomes apparent that he may actually want to test their faith as opposed to developing his own — and that these two pious young woman have knocked on the wrong door. Uh-oh. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are the writer-directors behind this A24 horror movie, so you can thank them for your nightmares.
‘Gladiator 2’ (November 22)
Paul Mescal straps on the leather tunic and sandals for Ridley Scott’s long-in-the-works sequel to his 2000 Oscar-winner, playing the now-grown Lucius Verus. (You remember the kid from the first movie, right? The nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus? Who Russell Crowe’s warrior saves?) Connie Nielsen is his mom, Lucilla. Plus Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal are in this, swinging swords and taking names as well. And should you want some lovely sense of genre continuity: No less than the star of I, Claudius himself, Sir Derek Jacobi, portrays a Roman senator. Are we not be entertained?! Chances are the answer will be a resounding yes.
‘The Piano Lesson’ (November 22)
Denzel Washington’s ongoing project to adapt all 10 of August Wilson’s “Century Cycle” plays for the screen continues, with this take on the playwright’s 1987 drama — about a feud over a piano that’s played an important part in one family’s history — being the latest. The Fences director-star is merely executive-producing this entry, however, with sons Malcolm Washington stepping behind the camera and John David Washington taking on the role of Willie, the young man who wants to sell the heirloom so they can claim their land. His sister, Berniece (Till‘s Danielle Deadwyler), feels like it’s too precious to let go of. Samuel L. Jackson, Ray Fisher, Corey Hawkins, Stephan James and Erykah Badu round out one hell of a cast.
‘Wicked’ (November 22)
Broadway’s record-breaking, Wizard-of-Oz-revising musical comes to the big screen, with Cynthia Erivo as the woman destined be the Wicked Witch of the West, Ariana Grande as the future Glinda the Good and Jeff Goldblum as the man behind the curtain; Bowen Yang, Michelle Yeoh and Jonathan Bailey follow them down the yellow brick road. (And yes, it’s still being broken up into two separate films: Part 2 drops in late 2025.) Start revving up your broomsticks!
‘Moana 2’ (November 27)
She’s back! The hero of Disney’s 2016 animated hit and her mystical deity friend Maui (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson, respectively) return for another adventure in the South Seas — this time, it involves another curse, a mysterious island and Moana taking up the challenge of uniting “all the people of the entire ocean.” Bring the kids! Rachel House, Temuera Morrison, Alan Tudyk and Nicole Scherzinger lend their talents as well.
‘Nightbitch’ (December 6)
A writer (Amy Adams) decides to put her professional ambitions on hold to focus on parenting — and the fact that the character is literally listed simply as “Mother” in the credits hints that this adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel is telling the story from her rather frustrated perspective. Her one outlet is a nightly run around the neighborhood to blow off steam, which is soon accompanied by a rather majorly transformative change. IFYKYK, and if you don’t know, let’s just say the title contains a major hint. The always great writer-director Marielle Heller (The Diary of a Teenage Girl) has the sort of sensibility that suggests she’ll lean in to both the satirical and more personal aspects of this story with gusto. Scoot McNairy, Zoe Chao, Mary Holland, and Suspiria‘s Jessica Harper join in on the fun.
‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ (December 6)
No less than Barry Jenkins is calling the shots on this prequel to 2019’s remake of The Lion King, which puts the focus on Simba’s dad and how he become the true king of the jungle. The Moonlight filmmaker has namechecked Hamlet when talking about the movie; he’s also promised laughs, tears and some wonderful music numbers. Hakuna matata indeed.
‘Kraven the Hunter’ (December 13)
Each Spider-Man fan has their own personal favorite archvillain in the Webhead’s universe, and we’ve always been partial to Kraven, one of the original bad guys in Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s early run. Now, we finally get a (much-delayed) screen version of the big-game hunter, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson donning the character’s dope animal-print outfit and getting his own solo outing before his inevitable meet-up with Spidey. Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott and The White Lotus’ Fred Hechinger have supporting roles. The good news: there’s no way in hell that this is worse than Madame Web.
‘On Becoming a Guinea Fowl’ (December 13)
Director Rungano Nyoni’s follow-up to 2017’s I Am Not a Witch starts with a woman named Shula (Susan Chardy) coming across a dead body in the road. The fact that she’s dressed exactly like Missy Elliott from “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” video, down to the silver helmet and puffy black jumpsuit, shows you that Nyoni has a wicked sense of humor; the revelation that the corpse is “Uncle Fred,” a well-known pedophile who chronically abused the village’s young women for years without consequences, demonstrates that the movie is also not f*cking around. A pointed take on the social protections afforded to predators to avoid “awkwardness,” the unnecessary shame shared by survivors and the need to call out complicity and speak out regardless of such stigmas.
‘The Six Triple Eight’ (December 20)
“No mail, low morale” — that was the motto of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-female army unit (and the only one completely made up of women of color) stationed overseas during World War II, and colloquially known as the “Six Triple Eight.” Their mission: sort through 17 million pieces of mail and deliver it to the Allied troops in desperate need of good news from back home. Tyler Perry gives this somewhat forgotten chapter of WWII history the big-screen treatment, with Kerry Washington as the unit’s commanding officer, Major Charity Adams; Oprah Winfrey, Susan Sarandon, Sam Waterston, Ebony Obsidian and Dean Norris costar.
‘Babygirl’ (December 25)
Remember how everyone’s been saying that there’s no sex in movies any more? It sounds as if this drama from Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) is about to singlehandedly reverse that trend. A sexually frustrated CEO (Nicole Kidman) begins a torrid affair with a young intern (Harris Dickinson) at her company. To say that it upends her life — and taps into a whole other side of this woman in terms of power dynamics, desire and the middle ground between the two — would probably be putting it lightly. Kidman herself has said that “I’ve made some pretty exposing films, but not like this,” and given that the statement is coming from the person who made Eyes Wide Shut with her husband, we’re curious to see how far this May-December romance goes. Antonio Banderas and Talk to Me‘s Sophie Wilde costar.
‘A Complete Unknown’ (December 25)
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Young man with great hair comes to New York, writes a song or three, becomes hailed as the Next Big Thing. He completely upends his reputation as Folkie Messiah by plugging in his guitar into an amp and “play[ing] it f*cking loud!” Then he does nothing but revolutionize pop music and reinvent himself another eight or nine times over the decades. Forget about interstellar messiahs and iconic chocolate-makers — Timothée Chalamet takes on the biggest, ballsiest role of his career by playing the young Bob Dylan in this do-look-back portrait of the artist from Walk the Line‘s James Mangold. (Judging from the trailer, his Dylanesque singing voice is not bad at all.) Dig this casting: Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Elle Fanning as a character not-so-loosely based on Suze Rotolo, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Scoot McNairy as Woody Guthrie, and Broadway great Norbert Leo Butz as Alan Lomax.
‘The Fire Inside’ (December 25)
Cinematographer Rachel Morrison (Mudbound, Black Panther) makes her feature directorial debut with this based-on-a-true-story drama about Clarissa “T-Rex” Shields, the American boxer who won her first of two gold medals for the sport at the 2012 Olympics. This biopic follows the athlete as she trains for the international competition, hitting the heavy bag and battling more than her share of personal demons — as well as the fights she fought after her victory in London, in terms of getting equal pay and proper recognition for professional female pugilists. Ryan Destiny (TV’s Star) plays Shields; Brian Tyree Henry is on board as her coach Jason Crutchfield. Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) wrote the screenplay.
‘Nosferatu’ (December 25)
Before he was a well-respected director of horror movies like The Witch and The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers directed a stage production of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent about a vampire wreaking havoc in London. (Any similarities between this German film and a Universal monster movie involving an Eastern European bloodsucking his way through Old Blighty was not, shall we say, coincidental.) Now Eggers comes full circle with his own screen remake of the landmark film, with Bill Skarsgard as the plasma-craving Count Orlok and Lily-Rose Depp as the object of his “affection” Ellen Hutter. Nicolas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Simon McBurney costar.
