NPR's Movie Preview: 15 New Films To Watch — And Watch Out For — This Fall
Fall is often the most intense movie season of all. Awards contenders begin to come into focus after the Toronto International Film Festival, while comedies and thrillers continue to hit screens. We got to see a lot of upcoming films at TIFF — below you'll find write-ups of 15 movies we really enjoyed and a heads-up about nearly 40 notable releases. From Mary Poppins to Aquaman to the possibility of another Oscars faceoff between directors Damien Chazelle (La La Land) and Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), we've got you covered. Keep in mind that release dates are subject to change.
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A Star Is Born (Oct. 5)
Bradley Cooper's directorial debut is a fourth take on the thrice-told story of an established artist (played by Cooper himself) who develops a troubled romance with a younger talent (played here by Lady Gaga). Cooper's desire to say something intimate about love and struggle bumps up against some of the basic story's limitations. But both stars are very good, and scenes meant to provide goosebumps come through. A crowd-pleasing weepie for sure. — Linda Holmes
The Hate U Give (Oct. 5, limited; Oct. 19, wide)
Based on Angie Thomas' hugely successful YA novel, the film stars Amandla Stenberg as Starr Carter, a young woman who witnesses the death of a friend in a police shooting and must decide what to do. While the ending seems a bit too neat, there's value in this earnest examination, directed by George Tillman Jr., about how kids learn to be activists. Regina Hall and Russell Hornsby are very good as Starr's parents. — Linda Holmes
Beautiful Boy (Oct. 12)
Based on a pair of memoirs from David Sheff and his son Nic, Beautiful Boy casts Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet as father and son, the father madly researching meth addiction as he feels his son being sucked into it. Chalamet's charismatic, maddening Nic is spectacular, and the film's stubbornly unresolved view of loving an addict — its perception of the experience as a grueling, endless walk beside someone — is brutal but feels honest. — Linda Holmes
First Man (Oct. 12)
Damien Chazelle directed Whiplash and La La Land, but this is his most mature meditation about men and emotions. Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong, whom we track from 1961 until 1969 when, as you may know, he walked on the moon. It is an astronaut movie, but it's also about the profound pain Armstrong experienced after his daughter's death and how stoicism and grief both remained part of his experience of late-1960s American masculinity. — Linda Holmes
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Oct. 19)
Lee Israel was a biography-writing has-been when she began forging letters by the likes of Fanny Brice, Noël Coward and Dorothy Parker and selling them to collectors. She got arrested, then turned her ordeal into the comeback memoir on which this film is based. As Israel, Melissa McCarthy is caustic, profane, curmudgeonly, affecting and very funny, as is Richard E. Grant as a gay alcoholic who becomes her accomplice. — Bob Mondello
Wildlife (Oct. 19)
Actor Paul Dano directs his first film, which he wrote with actress Zoe Kazan. It tells the story of a couple in the 1960s, played by Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, whose teenage son watches from behind doors and listens from other rooms as their marriage collapses. It's beautifully designed and well-acted, and Mulligan's tense work as a mother who sometimes seems to be the stronger parent and sometimes the more dangerous one is exquisite. — Linda Holmes
El Angel (Nov. 9)
This moody, stylish drama is about a real-life, baby-faced murderous criminal whose spree of robberies and killings shocked Argentina in the early 1970s. The seeds of the dictatorship that will soon assume control of the country hovers in the background, ever-present. A curly haired, pillow-lipped Lorenzo Ferro plays the young sociopath, whose beatific appearance caused the press to dub him "The Angel of Death," with a vacant remorselessness that unsettles those around him – and us, too. — Glen Weldon
Girl (Nov. 16)
This breathtaking debut for director Lukas Dhont centers on Lara, a transgender 15-year-old who dreams of being a ballerina even as she is waiting for the operations and hormones that will make her body line up with her vision of herself. Played by first-timer Victor Polster, Lara is angelic and magnetic. Where most queer films are about external conflicts and prejudice, Lara's primary conflict in this movie is with what she sees in the mirror. — Bob Mondello
Widows (Nov. 16)
Viola Davis kills it — literally — in this thriller about a group of wives who have to pull off a heist to clear their dead criminal husbands' debts. Directed by Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) and written by McQueen and Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), the film is taut, emotional, exciting and surprising and led by a performance from Davis so fierce and specific that you will want to see her make 20 more action movies. — Linda Holmes
Shoplifters (Nov. 23)
In Hirokazu Kore-eda's Cannes Palme d'Or-winning and hugely affecting film, a scruffy pickup "family" of Japanese grifters takes in an abused 5-year-old girl. From the Fagin-like father figure who teaches the kids to shoplift to the sweet daughter who works in a soft-porn peep show, they're all charmers. "Maybe the bond is stronger when you choose your family," says someone, and darned if the film doesn't make a good case for that notion. — Bob Mondello
If Beale Street Could Talk (Nov. 30)
Barry Jenkins follows up Moonlight with this soaring, heartfelt and visually stunning adaptation of a James Baldwin novel about a young, newly pregnant black woman struggling to free her boyfriend from jail for a crime he didn't commit. You've never seen romantic love depicted on screen with such lyrical and gorgeous intensity, or systemic injustice brought to such vivid and enraging life. Film classes will be taught about Jenkins' use of color. — Glen Weldon
Ben Is Back (Dec. 7)
Like Beautiful Boy, this is an addiction narrative about a well-off white teenager, though this time, the addiction is opiates, and the story isn't based on a real family. Julia Roberts plays a mother whose son (Lucas Hedges) turns up for Christmas when he should be in rehab, and the first half of the film is a thoughtful family drama about trust, safety and empathy. The second half becomes more of a crime drama and is far less interesting, but on balance, Roberts and Hedges make it worth seeing. — Linda Holmes
Capernaum (Dec. 14)
Had Charles Dickens written about Beirut, he would have penned this story. Zain Al Rafeea plays a diminutive, feistily resourceful 12-year-old who sues his parents for having brought him into a world where they can't (or won't) care for him. Nadine Labaki has directed a couple of lovely small films, but nothing suggested she could make a work on the epic level of Capernaum. The last shot had me choking back sobs. — Bob Mondello
Roma (Dec. 14)
Alfonso Cuarón delivers a study of a young woman named Cleo, who works as a nanny and housekeeper (first-time actress Yalitza Aparicio), and the relationship she has with her employers in Mexico City. Stunning in black and white, the film contemplates the ways in which Cleo's bond with her employers can seem almost familial and the ways in which it emphatically isn't. She is both never alone and always alone, and she is crucial to the survival of a family that isn't always present for her. Roma will come to Netflix, but also to some theaters, and it is well worth searching out on a big screen. — Linda Holmes
Destroyer (Dec. 25)
Nicole Kidman looks and seems very little like Nicole Kidman in Karyn Kusama's jangled police thriller in which a cop (Kidman) returns to ugly past events in her own life to solve a new crime that has landed on her desk — sort of. Rarely are women cast in these roles of screwed-up, hard-boiled antiheroes with a lifetime of regrets to make up for, and even if this is your basic LA noir, it's well-executed and satisfying in all the ways it should be. — Linda Holmes
Other Notable Releases
Private Life (Oct. 5): Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti star as a couple undergoing fertility treatments in this film from director Tamara Jenkins (The Savages). — Linda Holmes
Venom (Oct. 5): Tom Hardy continues his mystifying streak of denying movie audiences a chance to gaze upon his gorgeous mouth by hiding it, this time, behind the slimy black mask of Venom, the alien symbiote who has been a Spider-Man villain/antihero for decades — but don't look for Spidey to show up just yet. — Glen Weldon
22 July (Oct. 10): Paul Greengrass, director of United 93, dramatizes the 2011 terrorist attacks in which a right-wing extremist killed 77 people with a car bomb and at a Norwegian youth camp. — Bob Mondello
The Happy Prince (Oct. 10): Rupert Everett says Hollywood stopped hiring him as a leading man after he came out, so he wrote, directed, produced and cast himself as the title character in this story of Oscar Wilde. — Bob Mondello
The Kindergarten Teacher (Oct. 12): Sara Colangelo's film is about a teacher who becomes obsessed with a student who she is convinced is a genius. Word of mouth at TIFF was mixed, but audiences were buzzing about Maggie Gyllenhaal's performance. — Glen Weldon
Halloween (Oct. 19): Jamie Lee Curtis is back again as Laurie Strode to tangle with, and hopefully stop, the unstoppable masked murderer Michael Myers. — Glen Weldon
Mid90s (Oct. 19): Jonah Hill's directing debut is a loosely plotted skater-boy flick centering on a 13-year-old eager to hang with the cool kids at the local skateboard shop. They nickname him "Sunburn" and introduce him to cigarettes, pills, drinking, girls and sex. The cast is mostly skaters, not actors, but they're persuasive as pals, and Hill is clearly having fun. — Bob Mondello
Suspiria (Oct. 26 limited; Nov. 2 wide): Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me by Your Name, remakes Dario Argento's Italian horror flick about a dance academy that's a front for a supernatural conspiracy. — Bob Mondello
Bohemian Rhapsody (Nov. 2): Rami Malek (yay!) stars in this Freddie Mercury (woo!) biopic directed by Bryan Singer (...). — Glen Weldon
Boy Erased (Nov. 2): The year's second drama about gay conversion therapy (following the wry, pugnacious The Miseducation of Cameron Post) plays it, as it were, straight. Performances from Lucas Hedges and Nicole Kidman are outstanding, which should surprise no one — look for both on Oscar lists — but the film is hampered by an ending that aims for catharsis, yet ends up feeling too narratively tidy and overdetermined. — Glen Weldon
The Front Runner (Nov. 6 limited; Nov. 21 wide): If you buy the film's oft-stated thesis that Gary Hart's campaign was the moment in American politics that CHANGED EVERYTHING™, with respect to demanding access to politicians' private lives, you'll have a great time. If your brain keeps offering up caveats and counterexamples, as mine did, you can still have a ball with its overlapping dialogue, behind-the-scenes look at the campaigning process, and, of course, Hugh Jackman's hugely distracting Gary Hart wig. — Glen Weldon
Nobody's Fool (Nov. 2): Tyler Perry's latest comedy features Tiffany Haddish as a woman who is released from prison and immediately makes herself busy sniffing out a con artist who may be victimizing her sister. — Linda Holmes
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (Nov. 2): In Disney's digitized extravaganza, it's not safe for young Clara to traipse through the land of the Sugar Plum Fairies. — Bob Mondello
They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (Nov. 2): Morgan Neville's documentary is about the making of Orson Welles' satire The Other Side of the Wind, which will itself be released for the first time on that day. — Bob Mondello
The Girl in the Spider's Web (Nov. 9): Claire Foy takes over the role of Lisbeth Salander in this adaptation of the first of the books in the Millennium series that was written by another author after the death of Stieg Larsson. — Linda Holmes
Peterloo (Nov. 9): Director Mike Leigh looks at the tragic 19th-century massacre of nonviolent protesters in Manchester. — Linda Holmes
At Eternity's Gate (Nov. 16): Willem Dafoe is a tormented Vincent Van Gogh, painting landscapes in Arles, France. — Bob Mondello
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Nov. 16): The Coen brothers head to Netflix and bring some of their favorite actors (Tim Blake Nelson! Stephen Root!) for this stylish fable of the Old West as it never was. — Glen Weldon
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (Nov. 16): The first Fantastic Beasts film was set in America, decades before Harry Potter got that lightning scar; this one promises a return to Ol' Blighty – and Hogwarts itself. — Glen Weldon
Creed II (Nov. 21): With the direction turned over from Ryan Coogler to Steven Caple Jr., it's hard to know what to expect from the Creed sequel. But if Michael B. Jordan is punching, many of us will be there. — Linda Holmes
Green Book (Nov. 21): Starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen, Green Book looks a lot like Driving Miss Daisy for a new generation, but it won the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival, so get ready to hear more. — Linda Holmes
Ralph Breaks the Internet (Nov. 21): The sequel to Wreck-It Ralph sends Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) into the world of social media via Wi-Fi router, but forget that — everyone's talking about the scene with the Disney princesses. — Glen Weldon
The Favourite (Nov. 23): Yorgos Lanthimos follows up The Killing of a Sacred Deer with this period piece about Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) and two members of her retinue (Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone) squabbling to win her ... um, favour. — Glen Weldon
Anna and the Apocalypse (Nov. 30): It's a British Christmas zombie musical – say it soft and it's almost like praying. — Glen Weldon
Mary Queen of Scots (Dec. 7): Saoirse Ronan's Mary Stuart foolishly tries to overthrow Margot Robbie's Elizabeth I (didn't she see I, Tonya?) and gets sent to the tower for her trouble. — Bob Mondello
Under the Silver Lake (Dec. 7): Andrew Garfield stars in a shaggy-dog, LA noir mystery from the director of It Follows. — Bob Mondello
Mortal Engines (Dec. 14): Peter Jackson adapts Philip Reeve's steampunk novel about a post-apocalyptic world where the few surviving cities are housed in giant machines that roam the Earth and fight one another. — Glen Weldon
Second Act (Dec. 14): If you've been wondering why fate hasn't brought you a movie where Jennifer Lopez accidentally defrauds a company into hiring her — a movie where the trailer actually uses The Cranberries' "Dreams" — then this comedy is here for you. — Linda Holmes
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Dec. 14): The animation looks ... well, amazing, and the all-star voice cast spectacular. The story, in which Spider-Man (Jake Johnson) visits parallel universes, with their parallel Spider-Men (including Miles Morales, voiced by Shameik Moore), promises to feature many of the comic's deep bench Spidey-adjacent characters.— Glen Weldon
Vice (Dec. 14 limited; Dec. 21 wide): Christian Bale gained a lot of weight to play Dick Cheney in this biographical dramedy from Adam McKay that also stars Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell and Tyler Perry. — Bob Mondello
Mary Poppins Returns (Dec. 19): Not a remake but a sequel, this film from director Rob Marshall casts Emily Blunt as perhaps the most famous nanny ever, Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer as the grown-up Banks children, and some guy named Lin-Manuel Miranda as her friend Jack. Apparently, he's got a resume. — Linda Holmes
Bird Box (Dec. 21): Sandra Bullock and Sarah Paulson star in this post-apocalyptic story with a screenplay written by Eric Heisserer, who wrote the adapted screenplay of Arrival. — Linda Holmes
Welcome to Marwen (Dec. 21): Steve Carell plays the lead in a drama inspired by the 2010 documentary Marwencol, about a man who recovers from trauma by building and maintaining a miniature town .— Linda Holmes
Cold War (Dec. 21): Shot in black and white (like director Pawel Pawlikowski's Oscar-winner Ida), this romance between a singer and a pianist is really about the dark heart of Poland itself. — Bob Mondello
Holmes & Watson (Dec. 21): Will Ferrell is Sherlock Holmes, John C. Reilly is Dr. Watson, and Arthur Conan Doyle is doubtless rolling over in his grave. — Bob Mondello
Aquaman (Dec. 21): Jason Momoa's waterlogged fratboy hero must embrace his destiny, contend with his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson) — and contend with Orm's VERY goofy-looking outfit, in the process — in DC/Warner's latest superhero tale. — Glen Weldon
On the Basis of Sex (Dec. 25): Felicity Jones plays Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in this biopic about Ginsburg's battles against sex discrimination long before she made it to the nation's highest court. — Linda Holmes
Jessica Reedy and Alex McCall produced and edited this story for the Web.
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