40 ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ (Sept. 25)
Jaclyn Martinez/Amazon Studios
That long-awaited Blade movie starring Mahershala Ali may have had a permanent stake put through its heart — sorry! — but the Oscar-winning star and director Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli) still managed to team up for what sounds like a far more interesting project. A devoutly religious father is forced to raise three kids on his own when his wife unexpectedly dies, and he’ll do anything to fulfill both sides of the parenting equation in her absence. Did we happen to mention that he’s a hit man, and must navigate the Houston’s criminal underworld in order to survive? Do we have your attention now? Also starring John Cho (rocking a seriously flashy grill), Giancarlo Esposito, Tramell Tillman, and Ramy‘s Laith Nakli.
39 ‘Digger’ (Oct. 2)
Warner Bros. Pictures
Alejandro González Iñárritu truly loves immersive, intense moviemaking — if you’ve seen Birdman and The Revenant, you know what we mean — so the thought of him collaborating on a movie with the totally chill Tom Cruise (joke alert!) was always going to get tongues wagging. The star plays Digger Rockwell, “the most powerful man in the world.” The logline: Essentially, Rockwell causes some sort of catastrophe and has to try to make things right again with his signature shovel (see title) before something akin to Armageddon occurs. Dropping by for the end of the world as well: Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Emma D’Arcy, and Michael Stuhlbarg.
38 ‘The Social Reckoning’ (Oct. 2)
Leah Gallo/Columbia Pictures
Don’t call it a sequel — Aaron Sorkin’s revisit to the world of Facebook corporate shenanigans is being billed as a “companion piece” to The Social Network, the Oscar-winning film he penned, not a Part II. This time, Sorkin is doing double duty as writer and director, and he’s training his focus on Frances Haugen, the product manager turned whistleblower who passed along internal documents detailing all types of dodgy decisions at Zuckerberg Inc. involving misinformation peddling, election misinformation, and worse. Mikey Madison plays Haugen; Jeremy Strong brings his characteristic Method madness to Mark Zuckerberg; Jeremy Allen White is Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz.
37 ‘Verity’ (Oct. 2)
Alisha Wetherill/Amazon
The cinéma du Colleen Hoover continues, with the novelist’s 2018 psychological thriller getting the A-list treatment. A young woman (Dakota Johnson) is hired to finish the bestselling series of a popular author (Anne Hathaway) after the latter is waylaid by an accident. The more this ghostwriter dives into her employer’s history, however, the more it seems like the writer’s condition was not due to an “accident.” Let’s hope this one doesn’t end in lawsuits.
36 ‘Fjord’ (Oct. 9)
Tudor Panduru/Neon
A couple (Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve) move with their family to her small hometown in Norway. Soon, rumors begin to swirl around the village regarding the way these new residents behave with their kids; the fact that he’s Romanian only seems to fuel the locals’ mistrust. The combination of these actors, filmmaker Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), and a scenario brimming with mistrust, paranoia, and good old-fashioned fear of the other — not to mention the fact that it won the top prize at this year’s Cannes — makes this film prime awards bait.
35 ‘Misty Green’ (Oct. 9)
Merrick Morton/A24
Once upon a time, Misty Green was an Emmy-winning star with a hell of a singing voice. Then her career took a bit of a nosedive — something about bad behavior on sets and personal demons getting the best of her. A potential role in an upcoming project may mean that a second chance at stardom, however, is right around the corner, if she can just keep the old habits from coming back. Chris Rock does triple duty as writer, director, and actor in this character-driven drama from A24, and he’s packed the cast: Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick, Topher Grace. But the film really looks like a major showcase for Rosalind Eleazar, a British actor who’s been a big presence on TV in the U.K. (Harlots, Slow Horses) and, if this trailer is any indication, will likely generate a lot of awards-season chatter with her performance as the title character.
34 ‘La Bola Negra’ (Oct. 16)
Carla Oset/Netflix
Netflix has extremely high hopes for this Spanish epic from the duo known colloquially as “Los Javis” — Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo — that pinballs among three different timelines (1932, 1937, and 2017) and three slightly interconnected stories of gay desire among three different men. If you’ve seen the Javis’ stellar HBO series Veneno (or even better, their multigenerational genre mash-up show La Mesías), you know they have a way of mixing the outrageous, the emotionally devastating, and the sort of grand storytelling that requires a large canvas. This may be their most ambitious project yet, and given the rapturous reception out of Cannes, has breakout potential written all over it.
33 ‘Musk’ (Oct. 16)
Ken Cedeno/Alamy Live News/Bleecker Street
Alex Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversial subjects (Scientology, Enron, scandals within the Catholic church) or notorious public figures (Eliot Spitzer, Jack Abramoff, Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky). Here, the documentarian gives us a two-in-one combo with this four-hour portrait of Elon Musk, a person who — and we feel pretty safe saying this — has a few dollars in the bank and inspires no shortage of opinions among the general populace. Expect a few surprises, a greatest-hits reel or two of Musk’s morally questionable decisions over the past decade, and that sense of dread you get recalling what happens when a certain type of intelligent innovator acquires too much money, too much power, and not enough accountability.
32 ‘Once Upon a Time in Harlem’ (Oct. 16)
NEON
In 1972, the late, great filmmaker William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One) sent out an invite to the last living creators and emissaries of the Harlem Renaissance: Come to Duke Ellington’s apartment on the corner of West 157th and St. Nicholas Avenue for a night of cocktails and conversation. He proceeded to document a who’s who of songwriters, authors, poets, theater bigwigs, journalists, movers, and shakers sitting around and reminiscing. The footage remained virtually unseen — until now. Thanks to David Greaves, William’s son (who was also operating one of the cameras on that fateful night), we get to be a fly on the wall as a host of legends detail how they made history and changed American art forever. It’s a victory-lap testament to an absolutely vital American cultural movement.
31 ‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’ (Oct. 16)
Jon Pack
The great John Turturro plays a career thief who’s been plying his sticky-fingers trade for decades, lifting just enough wallets and perusing enough purses on the sly to take care of his infirm wife. Then our old-school thief ends up stealing the wrong thing, which puts him in the crosshairs of a brash kid (Will Price) with Mob connections. A sleeper out of this year’s Sundance, writer-director Noah Segan’s crime-inflected character study is a throwback to the NYC indies of yesteryear, complete with Steve Buscemi playing a pawn shop owner and Giancarlo Esposito as a cop who’s busted Turturro’s pickpocket more than once over the years. Also on board: Jamie Lee Curtis and Tatiana Maslany.
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