38 New Movies to Watch This Fall

Summer isn’t over quite yet—but with the Venice Film Festival just around the corner, we’re already thinking ahead to the biggest and most exciting movies that will debut this fall. Our list includes a little bit of everything, from high-concept horror to 2025’s most likely best-picture contenders—including new work from Oscar favorites like Chloé Zhao, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, James Cameron, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Kathryn Bigelow. Kelly Reichardt has a new movie! So does Noah Baumbach! Richard Linklater, bless him, has two! Read on for a full preview of the best cinemas have to offer this fall, including our most anticipated movies being released from Labor Day to December 31.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Premiere Date: September 12
Director: Simon Curtis
Noteworthy Cast: Michelle Dockery, Hugh Bonneville, Paul Giamatti

Those mourning the end of The Gilded Age’s most recent season won’t have to stagger on, lost and abandoned, without Julian Fellowes’s particular brand of prim social drama for too long. He’s jumped back across the pond to write one final film, closing out the Downton Abbey saga that began with the TV series’s premiere 15 years ago. We can expect some minor scandal to ripple through the lords and ladies of upstairs society, while quainter matters occupy those toiling away in the kitchens and sculleries downstairs. There will be corny jokes (dearly departed Maggie Smith will be missed on that front) and cozy sentiment, and it will all feel good and silly. We’ll maybe even cry a bit. Y’know, Downton stuff. We can’t wait. —Richard Lawson

The Long Walk

Premiere Date: September 12
Director: Francis Lawrence
Noteworthy Cast: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill

“I was writing a kind of a brutal thing. It was hopeless, and just what you write when you’re 19 years old, man,” says Stephen King of this film’s source material, the very first novel he ever wrote. As Anthony Breznican noted in his first look at the film, King started the novel when American men were being killed in the Vietnam War at a rapid clip. Today, the story—about a group of young men who sign up for an endless marathon in hopes of winning untold riches and the fulfillment of a single wish—has a different resonance. “It’s a metaphor for any sort of hard thing you’re going through, whether it’s depression or anxiety or heartbreak or whatever,” Hoffman tells Breznican. “Sometimes in life, you want to stop walking, and that’s a really dark thought. But the second you acknowledge that and come to terms with it—and then keep going—that’s a really beautiful thing.” —Hillary Busis

The History of Sound

Premiere Date: September 12
Director: Oliver Hermanus
Noteworthy Cast: Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Chris Cooper

Mescal, O’Connor, and Hermanus had to wait years to make this swoony drama—which all three signed on for before Mescal and O’Connor became movie stars, thanks to Aftersun (which also earned Mescal an Oscar nomination) and Gladiator II in the former’s case, and Challengers in the latter’s. The movie follows Mescal’s Lionel and O’Connor’s David, a pair of music conservatory students in the 19-teens who find themselves embroiled in a passionate romance. “David is vocal, David has ideas, David is wealthy. And Lionel is kind of just being overwhelmed by this person, but in a very slow-drip way—taking a long time to quantify the impact of this moment in his life and this relationship,” Hermanus told David Canfield for VF’s first look at the film. “That’s just relatable to me, I guess. We all have people who define us, but we don’t realize they defined us until it’s too late.” —HB

Him

Premiere Date: September 19
Director: Justin Tipping
Noteworthy Cast: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker

That’s a very all-over-the-place cast list, making for a film that’s even more interest-piquing when you learn it’s produced by Jordan Peele—but not directed by him, even if the one-word title and creepy premise seems to align the film with Peele’s features Us and Nope. This horror tale is set in the world of professional sports (its original title was GOAT) and directed by TV vet Justin Tipping. Wayans plays an aging NFL quarterback; Withers is his perhaps unwitting protégé. —HB

The Lost Bus

Premiere Date: September 19
Director: Paul Greengrass
Noteworthy Cast: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera

A lot of people you’ve heard of are involved in the Bourne series director’s latest project: it’s also produced by Jamie Lee Curtis and Jason Blum, and written by Greengrass and Mare of Easttown scribe Brad Ingelsby. Most of them also feel a close connection to the story, which is based on Washington Post writer Lizzie Johnson’s book about the deadly 2018 Camp Fire. Greengrass told Rebecca Ford about editing the film as new fires swept through Los Angeles: “It was distressing,” he said in VF’s first look at the film. “We were looking at what we’d created, and then seeing what was going on, and they were the same images, really.” The film will stream October 3 on Apple TV+ after being released theatrically September 19. —HB

One Battle After Another

Premiere Date: September 26
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Noteworthy Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Chase Infiniti

Several of this fall’s major films are literary adaptations, including the latest from Anderson—sort of. The perennial Oscar bridesmaid took parts of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as loose inspiration for his sprawling action comedy, about an ex-revolutionary (DiCaprio), his innocent daughter (Infiniti), and the ruthless Javert-like figure who’s been hunting for them for years (Penn). Could that starry cast and pedigree get the Academy to finally give Anderson the ultimate reward—or is the master going to get left out in the cold again? —HB

Eleanor the Great

Premiere Date: September 26
Director: Scarlett Johansson
Noteworthy Cast: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jessica Hecht

June Squibb’s leading lady era continues in Johansson’s directorial debut, a sharp but heartwarming yarn about Eleanor (Squibb), a nonagenarian who moves from Florida to New York after her best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar), dies—then accidentally finds a whole new community when Eleanor stumbles into a support group for Holocaust survivors, and borrows Bessie’s backstory for herself. (Bessie was a survivor; Eleanor is not.) Growing up, Johansson was very close with her Jewish grandmother. “I could identify with that part of the story,” the first-time director told David Canfield in his recent cover profile of her. “If I didn’t, it would be more challenging, I think, and maybe not totally appropriate for me to direct it.” —HB

The Smashing Machine

Premiere Date: October 3
Director: Benny Safdie
Noteworthy Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten

Know your Safdies: This is the sports biopic directed by Benny, the brother who moonlights as an actor in buzzy projects like Licorice Pizza and Oppenheimer. It’s about Mark Kerr, a champion MMA fighter who was already the subject of a different movie called The Smashing Machine—an HBO documentary released in 2002. The fictionalized version of Kerr’s story casts Johnson as the athlete’s avatar and Blunt as Kerr’s girlfriend, Dawn. A24 is opening the film in competition in Venice this year—a strong endorsement of its potential awards power. —HB

Roofman

Premiere Date: October 10
Director: Derek Cianfrance
Noteworthy Cast: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Peter Dinklage

Catch Tatum if you can. He stars in this biopic as Jeffrey Manchester, a notorious thief known as “roofman” thanks to his signature move: drilling through the ceiling of his targets, then dropping inside and robbing them blind. The trailer promises a breezy caper focused on Manchester’s time on the lam, where he hides inside a Toys ‘R’ Us store and woos Dunst’s character with a Robin Hood–esque show of chivalry. It all seems a lot lighter than the movies that made Cianfrance’s name, including Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. —HB

After the Hunt

Premiere Date: October 10
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Noteworthy Cast: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Chloë Sevigny

Did Andrew Garfield’s character assault Ayo Edebiri’s? That’s the central question animating the very prolific Guadagnino’s new drama, which falls into a genre the kids on TikTok might call “dark academia.” Garfield is a beloved professor; Edebiri is a promising student; Roberts is the august educator caught between them after Edebiri’s Maggie makes her accusation. Think Doubt, brought into the post-#MeToo era, or David Mamet’s Oleanna, which originally premiered in 1992. The film will open wide October 17 after an initial release October 10. —HB

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Premiere Date: October 10
Director: Bill Condon
Noteworthy Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, Tonatiuh

While not exactly a smash-hit at the Sundance Film Festival in January, costar Jennifer Lopez did at least make a forceful impression in director Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Broadway musical. Lopez plays a sort of dream figure who comforts and haunts two inmates—one a political dissident, the other essentially jailed for being gay—in an Argentinian prison during the junta rule of the 1970s. They’re played by Diego Luna and Vida star Tonatiuh, with Lopez’s fantasy musical numbers acting as bright, loud bits of punctuation to interrupt the horror of prison life. A movie like this might once have been the stuff of Oscar bait, but Academy tastes have changed (a little) in recent years. Still, it would be nice to see Lopez get some campaign traction for her fully committed performance—and, yes, she sings like a dream. —RL

Urchin

Premiere Date: October 10
Director: Harris Dickinson
Noteworthy Cast: Frank Dillane, Harris Dickinson

Fledgling movie star Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl) made his feature directorial debut at Cannes this year with this thoughtful, artfully constructed film. Frank Dillane, of Fear the Walking Dead fame, plays a man struggling with addiction as he tries to secure shelter and find a sense of stability. Dickinson, who also appears in a supporting role, directs with a sure hand and a sturdy moral compass—Urchin neither panders nor otherwise condescends to its main character, or to the plight of the real-life people who inspired the film. Sad but humane, Urchin is one of the better actor-turned-director efforts we’ve seen in recent years. It’s well worth seeking out at the art-house this fall. —RL

Tron: Ares

Premiere Date: October 10
Director: Joachim Rønning
Noteworthy Cast: Jared Leto, Evan Peters, Greta Lee, and Jodie Turner-Smith

Jared Leto stars in this stand-alone sequel within the Tron universe, which turns the original premise of Tron on its head by bringing characters from the video game realm into the real world. Director Rønning also told Deadline that “this film will be more emotional” than its predecessors. Jeff Bridges is expected to make an appearance, and Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails are composing the score to the film. —John Ross

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Premiere Date: October 10
Director: Mary Bronstein
Noteworthy Cast: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Christian Slater, A$AP Rocky

From its spiky title on down, the relentless If I Had Legs is not interested in winning anyone’s sympathy—even as its warts-and-all portrayal of motherhood is bound to resonate with parents, whether they want to admit it or not. Richard Lawson raved about Byrne’s performance in his review of the film out of Sundance. “I bolted out of the theater when the end credits rolled in dire need of fresh air and quietness of mind. At first, I thought I didn’t like the movie,” he wrote. “But then, of course, I quickly realized that the film had simply done its job; the whole point is for the audience to desperately want out, just as [Byrne’s] Linda does.” —HB

Ballad of a Small Player

Premiere Date: October 15
Director: Edward Berger
Noteworthy Cast: Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton

Conclave director Edward Berger has a similarly starry follow-up film coming: this adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel, focused on a British gambler (Farrell) who comes across an intriguing stranger (Swinton, who may as well have those words tattooed on her forehead) in Macau. The film will debut on Netflix, previously home to Berger’s Oscar-winning 2022 take on All Quiet on the Western Front, on October 29, after a theatrical release October 15. —HB

Good Fortune

Premiere Date: October 17
Director: Aziz Ansari
Noteworthy Cast: Aziz Ansari, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen, and Sandra Oh

It’s been a rocky road for Aziz Ansari as a film director. His first film, Being Mortal, was shut down due to alleged behavioral issues on set with one of its stars. Ansari then pivoted to Good Fortune, which he has described as a flat-out comedy. It follows the Parks and Rec alum as a down-on-his-luck gig worker who, through a guardian angel played by Keanu Reeves, gets to swap lives with his rich friend, played by Seth Rogen. —JR

Blue Moon

Premiere Date: October 17
Director: Richard Linklater
Noteworthy Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott

Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater? Collaborating on a biopic of Richard Rodgers’s former creative partner, the depressive alcoholic Lorenz Hart, lyricist behind “My Funny Valentine” and “The Lady Is a Tramp”? Set on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!? This film’s very description is built to turn a certain type of person into that ubiquitous Vince McMahon meme. Linklater spent 10 years noodling on the movie, he told Rebecca Ford last year: “I’m not afraid to sit with something and just wait until the time is right.” It’ll open wide October 24.—HB

It Was Just an Accident

Premiere Date: October 17
Director: Jafar Panahi
Noteworthy Cast: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten

If an international film draws enough attention, it can become a powerful force in the Oscar race; for proof from recent years, look back at Anatomy of a Fall or, yes, Emilia Perez. Dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi scored a surprising Palme d’Or win at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival with this drama, made in defiance of authorities from his native Iran. Panahi has been arrested and imprisoned due to his films and his politics on more than one occasion—most recently in 2022. That background informs his latest work, about a former political prisoner (Mobasseri) who unexpectedly encounters an officer who tortured him in prison (Azizi). —HB

The Mastermind

Premiere Date: October 17
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Noteworthy Cast: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, Bill Camp

Beloved indie filmmaker Reichardt could be poised to break out for a new audience with this one, which at least sounds commercial: It stars O’Connor as a 1970s family man who moonlights, badly, as an art thief. (The paintings he steals aren’t even terribly valuable.) Haim plays his wife; Davis and Camp are his upstanding parents. Reviews out of Cannes indicate that O’Connor is perfectly on Reichardt’s wavelength; maybe, if we’re lucky, the two of them will collaborate on a new project with Michelle Williams next. —HB

Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost

Premiere Date: October 17
Director: Ben Stiller
Noteworthy Cast: Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara

This documentary project is personal for the younger Stiller, who wanted for years to make a movie about his parents—both great comic actors in their own right. “It really did take about four and a half years to really figure out what it was,” he recently told VF’s David Canfield. “Talk about not having perspective on anything. It’s my family, and I’ve never made a movie where I’m talking personally about stuff or in it as myself—where I’m also editing the movie. You think, ‘I want to be honest here, but where do you draw the line with that?’” —HB

Hedda

Premiere Date: October 22
Director: Nia DaCosta
Noteworthy Cast: Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, Nicholas Pinnock

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, meet Nia DaCosta’s Hedda Gabler. Henrik Ibsen’s ageless play about the titular desperate housewife has been transformed into what Amazon MGM calls “a provocative, modern reimagining,” an intriguing logline for a film by a director who has a penchant for making old IP (Candyman, The Marvels) feel fresh. The movie’s making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, before debuting in select theaters on October 22 and streaming on Prime Video on October 29. —HB

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Premiere Date: October 24
Director: Scott Cooper
Noteworthy Cast: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser

Based on Warren Zanes’s 2023 book of the same name, this drama explores the making of Bruce Springsteen’s landmark 1982 album, Nebraska. A fusion of roots and rock, pared down to the barest essentials of both forms, the album helped solidify Springsteen as a blue-collar troubadour. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White plays the singer-songwriter as he holes up in a farmhouse to craft that legendary collection of songs, while Jeremy Strong plays his manager Jon Landau, and Paul Walter Hauser plays the guitar tech Mike Batlan, who helped him record the sessions. —Anthony Breznican

A House of Dynamite

Premiere Date: October 24
Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Noteworthy Cast: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts

Nobody does a taut thriller like Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win an Oscar for best director—and her presence has been sorely missed at multiplexes in the nearly 10 years since she followed 2012’s searing Zero Dark Thirty with 2017’s less well received Detroit. Netflix is keeping details close to the vest, with revealing only a simple logline for the film: “When a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.” —HB

Bugonia

Premiere Date: October 24
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Noteworthy Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Alicia Silverstone

Did Emma Stone shave her head for this movie? What won’t she do for director Yorgos Lanthimos? Other than that, little is still known about this film, an adaptation of the South Korean Jang Joon-hwan film Save the Green Planet! The plot is apparently centered on two men who kidnap a high-powered CEO whom they think might be an alien sent to destroy planet Earth. This time around, Lanthimos has paired himself with former Succession writer Will Tracy—so expect the film to be darkly comedic, but maybe less esoteric than last summer’s Kinds of Kindness. It’ll expand to wide release October 31. —JR

Nouvelle Vague

Premiere Date: October 31
Director: Richard Linklater
Noteworthy Cast: Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch, Aubry Dullin

If you like stripes and cigarettes, you’re in luck: Linklater’s love letter to the French New Wave has both in spades. The film focuses on young Jean-Luc Godard (Marbeck) as he makes the leap from film critic to filmmaker with Breathless, his era-defining crime drama. The film got a warm reception in Cannes this year, perhaps because it was debuting on Godard’s home turf; we’ll see if international audiences agree that it has a certain je ne sais quoi. It’ll debut on Netflix November 14. —HB

The Running Man

Premiere Date: November 7
Director: Edgar Wright
Noteworthy Cast: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin

The 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick was a campy, neon-hued take on one of Stephen King’s earliest novels (originally published under the pen name Richard Bachman). Edgar Wright’s new adaptation promises to stick closer to King’s dystopian roots, although the filmmaker is known for adding his own subversive sense of humor to his work. While the earlier film costarred Family Feud host Richard Dawson as the unctuous host of a live-TV broadcast in which desperate people fight for their lives (and prizes!) in fatal gladiatorial combat, the new version has brought Josh Brolin aboard as the ringleader of this bloody show. In our era of humiliation-rich reality TV, The Running Man is still ahead of its time. —AB

Die My Love

Premiere Date: November 7
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Noteworthy Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek

Ramsay’s movie caused a frenzy at Cannes this spring, as David Canfield reported from the festival, due largely to its marquee performance from Jennifer Lawrence—who seems like a shoo-in for this year’s best-actress race. Richard Lawson agrees that she’s sensational in the film as a mother dealing with postpartum depression: “She cannily balances mordant humor with existential unease and fury, a bolt of energy coursing through the film…It’s quite something to behold: a comedic performance that manages convincing notes of devastation, or a dramatic turn that is also screamingly funny. What a thrill to see Lawrence expanding her artistry like this, a movie star reclaiming the talent that her celebrity once nearly obscured.” What more do you need to hear, really? —HB

Nuremberg

Premiere Date: November 7
Director: James Vanderbilt
Noteworthy Cast: Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Leo Woodall

Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring? Sure, why not! The Oscar winner takes on Hitler’s notorious confidant in this film based on Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. (Malek plays the psychiatrist.) The story’s a bit more focused than that of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg, though it will surely invite comparisons to that film after making its world premiere at TIFF in September. —HB

Train Dreams

Premiere Date: November 7
Director: Clint Bentley
Noteworthy Cast: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Kerry Condon

One of the bigger sales at this year’s Sundance, Train Dreams is a lushly filmed but otherwise modest epic about one man drifting through the early decades of the 20th century. Joel Edgerton affectingly plays a man of the woods watching as an old way of life slowly gives way to modernity. He’s also attending to personal sorrows, some of which are alleviated by a character played with wit and warmth by Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin). If director Clint Bentley’s deliberately paced film doesn’t exactly inspire awe minute-to-minute, there are at least a heap of stirring visuals, Bryce Dessner’s lovely score, and a lyrical knockout of an ending to make the whole thing feel pretty significant indeed. —RL

Eternity

Premiere Date: November 14
Director: David Freyne
Noteworthy Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, John Early

The high-concept afterlife of The Good Place meets the high-concept romance of The Lobster in A24’s metaphysical rom-com, set among a group of the recently deceased who must decide where—and with whom—they’re going to spend the titular amount of time. Olsen plays Joan, who was married first to Luke (Turner), who died young, then Larry (Teller), with whom she grew old. Which man will win her everlasting affection? Audiences at TIFF will be the first to find out. —HB

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

Premiere Date: November 14
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Noteworthy Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Isla Fisher.

That wacky gang of magicians is at it again for the third installment of this heist-centric franchise that consistently does well at the box office. This time, the film is being helmed by Venom and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, and a new group of illusionists has been added to the already expansive cast—with Rosamund Pike and Ariana Greenblatt suiting up. —JR

Jay Kelly

Premiere Date: November 14
Director: Noah Baumbach
Noteworthy Cast: George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Patrick Wilson, Greta Gerwig

Phew! Baumbach’s giving Rian Johnson a run for his money in terms of starry ensembles, for another highly anticipated Netflix project—one the Marriage Story filmmaker and scribe cowrote with the very funny writer-actress Emily Mortimer. Really, though, the movie’s about one person: George Clooney’s Jay, an actor in his 60s who’s a lot like, well, George Clooney. “When you’re an actor in my position, at my age, finding roles like this aren’t all that common,” Clooney recently told David Canfield for VF’s first look at the film. “If you can’t make peace with aging, then you’ve got to get out of the business and just disappear. I’m now the guy that, when I go running after a bad guy, it’s funny—it’s not suspenseful. That’s okay. I embrace all of that.” The movie debuts on Netflix December 5. —HB

Wicked: For Good

Premiere Date: November 21
Director: Jon M. Chu
Noteworthy Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum

No one mourns the wicked, and they won’t have to gnash their teeth awaiting the second half of this blockbuster musical either. While Broadway patrons only had to make it through an intermission to find out how Elphaba and Glinda’s story dovetails into The Wizard of Oz, the big-screen version gave itself an extra year to complete the tale. While the back half of the Stephen Schwartz fantasy musical is regarded as having fewer sing-along numbers than Act I, the lyricist-composer has crafted two new songs for the second film that will put to rest any singing-in-the-theater controversy (at least for the first few viewings). —A.B.

Hamnet

Premiere Date: November 27
Director: Chloé Zhao
Noteworthy Cast: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn

On paper, it’s hard to think of a more old-school Oscar bait film than this one: Buckley stars as Agnes, wife of William Shakespeare, as she loses, then mourns, her titular son (Jacobi Jupe)—while her husband works to immortalize their lost child in Hamlet. But such categorization doesn’t seem fair to Zhao’s film, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel. The movie is Oscar winner Zhao’s return to serious filmmaking after her brief, ignominious detour in the Marvel trenches; cinemaphiles hope it will be a return to form as well. The movie expands nationwide on December 12. —HB

Frankenstein

Premiere Date: November TBD
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Noteworthy Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz

This is the movie Guillermo del Toro has wanted to make for most of his life. It’s an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel but delivers many twists from the Pan’s Labyrinth and Shape of Water filmmaker’s own sprawling imagination. Oscar Isaac stars as the doctor who longs to play God, while Jacob Elordi is the creature he revives from the remains of the dead. Mia Goth plays the woman who captivates them both, while Waltz is the moneyman who funds this unholy research. The story is a mediation on fatherhood and legacy, and the darkest downturns that both can take. —AB

Ella McCay

Premiere Date: December 12
Director: James L. Brooks
Noteworthy Cast: Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kumail Nanjiani

It’s been 15 years since Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment writer-director James L. Brooks made a film. His last feature was the dismal How Do You Know, an erratic, misguided, and mind-bogglingly expensive romantic comedy-drama that made poor use of stars Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, and Jack Nicholson. Here’s hoping Brooks does a bit better by his Ella McCay cast, which includes Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, and more. Mackey plays a young woman working in politics who suddenly finds herself installed as her state’s new governor. Curtis plays her wacky aunt, while—judging from the trailers, at least—Nanjiani is a love interest who also works on Ella’s security detail. When done right, Brooks’s brand of wordy bluster can be a wonder of humor and heart. But it’s been a while since his trick really worked. Here’s hoping Ella McCay breaks a bad streak. —RL

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Premiere Date: December 12
Director: Rian Johnson
Noteworthy Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington