The Guide #259: What to watch this Oscars film season
In this week’s newsletter: A non-exhaustive list of the films to keep an eye out for this autumn
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The next three months or so is one of my favourite spells in the film calendar, as a load of Oscar hopefuls with big stars and auteurs attached come out of hiding. You can catch a decent movie at the cinema every week until Christmas – but you might want a guide to direct you to the right ones. This week’s Guide does exactly that.
What’s more, it’s not exhaustive: there will be films landing from the autumn festivals that haven’t yet been given a release date and a host of big awards movies due in the UK in January (Danny Boyle’s Murdoch movie Ink, Robert Eggers’s Werewulf, Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut). But, this should keep you going until the days start getting longer again.
4 Sept| The Death of Robin Hood
Granted, we begin a little slowly. This reimagining of the final days of the outlaw (played in full, crusty, Logan-style makeup by Hugh Jackman) probably isn’t for everyone, with its ultraviolence and doomy mood, but some critics have chimed with its heady vibe. For more gritty middle-ages drama (that might also be Robin Hood-tinged), Paul Greengrass’s Andrew Garfield-starring The Uprising is due on 9 Oct.
11 Sept| Just an Illusion
A summer hit in France, this coming of age drama seems well timed for the turning of the leaves here. A wistful story of a 13-year-old boy’s first tentative steps into romance, while his parents’ own one is faltering, it has some great French acting talent at its core in the form of Louis Garrel and Call My Agent’s Camille Cottin. May well be in the best international film running at the Oscars.
18 Sept| Bad Apples
This is a last chance to catch Saoirse Ronan on our screens for a while before her schedule is swamped by Sam Mendes’s Beatles quadrilogy (she plays Linda McCartney). Here Ronan is the put-upon primary school teacher who resorts to desperate measures to subdue her class’s most disruptive student in Jonatan Etzler’s twisted little thriller.
25 Sept| Sense and Sensibility
Now we are starting to get some biggies. First up Blue Jean director Georgia Oakley’s take on S&S, a high-wire move given there’s a fondly remembered movie take on the same-Jones and George MacKay star in the first of two Austin adaptations this autumn: soon on Netflix is Dolly Alderton’s Pride and Prejudice series, starring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden
2 Oct| Digger
The single most intriguing film of the year, with Tom Cruise shunning acting hero-dom to star as an oil baron trying to undo his own potentially world-ending foul-up in Alejandro Iñárritu’s climate crisis satire. Iñárritu is the master of the mixed bag, Cruise hasn’t done anything like this in decades and the trailer looks, well, pretty odd. Could be a disaster, could be fantastic – either way it will be talked about.
9 Oct| The Social Reckoning
Another maybe disaster/maybe classic: a sequel to one of the century’s most admired films, plagued by reports of reshoots and a widely disliked trailer. Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin is directing this one, rather than David Fincher – another red flag? Still, its subject is fascinating: the 2021 Facebook leak that revealed the company’s knowledge of the harmful effects its platforms were having on society. Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, as Mark Zuckerberg, star.
16 Oct| Whalefall
While this one is unlikely to trouble the prestige Oscar categories – though it might hoover up some sound/visual/technical nominations – it’s worth flagging here because, good grief what a terrifying premise: scuba diver gets swallowed by a sperm whale and has to find his way back out of it! Oh, and he only has 60 minutes of oxygen in his tank with which to do so. Claustrophobes: stay the hell away.
23 Oct| Fatherland
After the brilliant pair of Ida and Cold War, Paweł Pawlikowski delivers a third stylish, monochrome movie reflecting on postwar life east of the Berlin Wall. This one concerns the return to Berlin in 1949 of famed German author Thomas Mann (Hans Zischler), who is visiting from the US to accept literary awards in both west and east Berlin – a problem for both his CIA handlers and for his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller – who between this, Project Hail Mary and Digger, is having quite the 2026).
30 Oct | Primetime
Robert Pattinson is racking up quite the roster of ne’er-do-wells and losers in 2026: there was his snivelling, scheming suitor Antinous in the Odyssey; his brittle groom in The Drama; and his shapeshifting wannabe usurper in the forthcoming Dune 3. Joining that rogues gallery is his performance as Chris Hansen, the ethically murky host of notorious noughties TV series To Catch a Predator, in Primetime, one of the autumn’s most hotly tipped dramas.
6 Nov| Wild Horse Nine
After filming The Banshees of Inisherin, on rainswept, beautiful Inishmore, Martin McDonagh decamps to the more exotic isle of Rapa Nui – AKA Easter Island – where, in his latest, two unscrupulous CIA men are holidaying just before the 1973 coup in Chile gets under way. Chris (John Malkovich) is nearing the end of his career and fancies writing a tell all memoir; Lee (Sam Rockwell) is tasked by the agency with keeping an eye on his loose-cannon mentor. Expect all manner of Oscar buzz for Malkovich.
13 Nov| Fjord
Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) shook up Cannes with this spicy meatball of a movie about a devoutly Christian couple, who after moving from Romania to Norway, are accused of abusing their children by members of a community already suspicious of their evangelistic ways. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star in a film that sounds designed to inspire loud post-cinema debate.
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20 Nov| A Talent for Murder
A delicious-looking meta-murder mystery for late November nights. Helen Mirren plays a reclusive Patricia Highsmith, hiding away in Switzerland at the end of her career, while Alden Ehrenreich is the lad sent by her publisher to convince her to write one final Tom Ripley novel. She will, but only if he helps her devise a suitably devilish plot – which offers director Anton Corbijn the chance to make a Ripley movie by stealth.
27 Nov| The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth
Like Digger and The Social Reckoning, a big film with big questions around it: this Brad Pitt-starring Tarantino-penned (but not directed, with David Fincher instead in the chair) follow up to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had to skip the autumn film festivals in order to squeeze in extensive reshoots. Could be in dog’s breakfast territory, but given the quality of the original, we’re still excited.
4 Dec| I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
This week you have a choice of hotly anticipated movies: there’s Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy’s tale of an itinerant, relationship-phobic concert cellist, starring Pedro Pascal; or this Clio Barnard drama about skint Birmingham twentysomethings, featuring some Great British talent (Anthony Boyle, Jay Lycurgo, Lola Petticrew). See both, but if you can only catch one, home bias dictates that we should probably back the Barnard: any film with an extended rendition of The Streets’ Don’t Mug Yourself has us sold.
11 Dec| Onslaught
A lull, with most movies skipping town ahead of the impending arrival of two monster films next week (see below). One of the big festival films might drop into the schedules but for now your best bet is this genre-splicing horror thriller about an army sniper trying to protect her kid from genetically modified super soldiers. Cast looks fun: Adria Arjona, Dan Stevens, Eric Wareheim and Rebecca Hall all feature.
18 Dec| Dune Part 3
Quite why the final instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s space opus and Avengers: Doomsday are arriving in cinemas on the same weekend is beyond the ken of us non-movie execs. Neither film seems willing to budge, meaning that a showdown that has been given the Barbenheimerised moniker of “Dunesday” looks inevitable. We’re siding with Dune, likely to be gigantic, gorgeous and a little bit weird, if the source material of Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah is anything to go by. A possible best picture shout?
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