Find more of KQED’s picks for the best fall 2023 events here.
This guide contains an update.
The fall movie schedule is rife with behemoths that, Hollywood hopes, will continue the theatergoing boom driven by Barbie, Oppenheimer and a few aging action franchises. A shadow darkens the landscape, however: the ongoing Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strikes for a fair contract from the streamers and studios. One immediate though small consequence is that a few releases were bumped to next year, after agreements are signed and the talent is available to hawk the merchandise.
You won’t miss ’em, though — in part because Hollywood isn’t the whole picture.
‘26.2 to Life’
Sept. 22
Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Run, don’t walk, to Christine Yoo’s locally produced documentary shot on location at San Quentin. Blending intimate character study with big-picture social issue, Yoo profiles some of the marathon runners (and their volunteer coaches) in the state prison’s 1000 Mile Club. This is where the rubber(-soled shoes) meet the road, on a “track” of unforgiving gravel surrounded by high walls, under the gaze of guards. Winner of the Audience Award at SF DocFest, 26.2 to Life takes us into a circle of runners determinedly and hopefully sprinting toward a way out.
‘Carlos’
Bay Area screenings Sept. 23, 24 and 27; wider release Sept. 29
AMC Metreon and Balboa Theater in S.F.; other theaters around the Bay Area
The San Francisco sound wasn’t birthed entirely in the Haight by the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. Carlos Santana exploded out of the Mission (after learning his chops in his native Mexico) in August 1969, his eponymous band’s debut album hitting stores the week after their electrifying performance at Woodstock. Rudy Valdez’s documentary depicts a seeker and an experimenter, an artist whose ’70s forays into jazz fusion and beyond flummoxed record company execs wanting the guitarist to repeat his Latin rock (star) riffs.
Pre-opening screenings are slated for theaters all over the Bay Area Sept. 23, 24 and 27, with onscreen appearances by Santana and Valdez. There won’t be a big S.F. premiere, regrettably — not even in conjunction with the S.F. Latino Film Festival (Sept. 28–Oct. 14), marking a missed opportunity for former Rolling Stone journalist and interviewer par excellence Ben Fong Torres to play master of ceremonies.
46th Annual Mill Valley Film Festival
Oct. 5–15
Theaters throughout Marin County, additional screenings at the Roxie in San Francisco and BAMPFA, Berkeley
For the last 20 or so autumns, the stars have come out to Marin County to launch their dramas on the path to (they hope) Academy Awards. But actors aren’t promoting their films during the strikes, so MVFF director Mark Fishkin gets up every day nervously rooting for a resolution. It may turn out that Bay Area documentary filmmakers — another pillar of the festival program — soak up more of the spotlight this year. Cue East Bay director and editor extraordinaire Maureen Gosling, whose brand new The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane pays tribute to the Oakland nonagenarian singer-activist who (among her many, many accomplishments) opened a blues club in North Beach in 1961. Lynn Hershman Leeson, the visionary local artist and filmmaker (Conceiving Ada, Teknolust, Strange Culture) and early explorer of the effects of new technology on our perceptions, privacy and humanity, takes the stage for a tribute. Errol Morris returns to the Bay Area (his pivotal encounter with Werner Herzog in the ’70s in Berkeley is the stuff of legend) with The Pigeon Tunnel (Oct. 20 in theaters and Apple TV+), a deep dive into British spy-cum-novelist John Le Carré that confirms truth is slipperier than fiction.
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Oct. 20
Theaters around the Bay Area, subsequently streaming on Apple TV+
Martin Scorsese drops another self-important, three-and-a-half-hour true-crime saga that his devotees will devour in theaters and the rest of us will watch over a couple nights on our couches. Adapted from David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and The Birth of The FBI, the movie depicts a 20th century smash-and-grab of Native American property by white people. In the 1920s, after the Osage people were awarded rights to the oil found on their Oklahoma land, they were bedeviled by swindlers, extortionists and murderers. (Are you shocked that there will be blood in a Scorsese film?) Here’s hoping the quintessential New Yorker’s neo-Western piques an interest in hearing contemporary Indigenous voices — like those centered every year in the American Indian Film Festival (Nov. 3–11 at the SFPL and other venues).
‘Priscilla’
Oct. 27
Theaters everywhere
Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette) revisits and revises the legendary life(style) of another King from the female perspective. Priscilla Presley’s best-selling 1985 memoir Elvis and Me provides the perfect vehicle for the filmmaker’s fascination with the interior lives of famous (and famously underrated) women with spare-no-expense interior decorators. Priscilla (played here by Cailee Spaeny) was only 14 when she met the star (he was 24), so expect plenty of psychosexual melodrama and heartbreak hotel before Priscilla establishes her own identity and prevails despite the tabloid press. Jacob Elordi as Elvis does double duty as troubled villain and eye candy.
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‘Demons’ with live score by Goblin
Oct. 27
The Castro Theatre, San Francisco
It may be a tad early to start making your adult Halloween plans. Unless, that is, horror is your home, your haven, your happy place. It certainly is for composer and keyboard player Claudio Simonetti, who got his start working with giallo master Dario Argento back in the day as part of the Italian prog-rock band Goblin. The group has evolved over the years while Simonetti established himself as a prolific composer for scary movies and TV shows. The band’s back together and primed to perform Simonetti’s score to the gory, nonsensical and fun Demons (1985). Co-written and produced by Argento and starring the immortal Urbano Barberini, Natasha Hovey and Karl Zinny as horror moviegoers trapped in a demon-infested theater, it’s a meta experience nicely suited to the Castro. Goblin returns to the stage after the film and intermission to play their hits and passages from other movie scores.
Doc Stories
Nov. 2–9
Vogue Theatre, San Francisco
Noting the Mill Valley Film Festival’s emergence as an important stop for prestige narratives, SFFILM is positioning Doc Stories to be a magnet for nonfiction films with awards ambitions. (How come we’re so fortunate? The Bay Area boasts the most Academy and guild voters after Los Angeles, New York and London.) Titles of particular local interest premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival that could make their way here include Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour feast for gastronomes, and Summer Qamp, Jen Markowitz’s portrait of a rural Canadian outpost for queer, nonbinary and trans kids. Karim Amer’s (The Square) latest urgent verité missive from a global hotspot, Defiant, puts us in the room with Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
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‘Rustin’
Nov. 3 in theaters, Nov. 17 on Netflix
East Bay filmmaker Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer’s 2003 documentary, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin (streaming for free on Kanopy), remains a revelatory portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s confidant and the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin never received his due — he largely had to remain behind the scenes — because depraved G-man J. Edgar Hoover would have used Rustin’s homosexuality to undermine public support for the Civil Rights Movement (which he deemed a domestic threat). Brother Outsider debuted at Sundance and aired on PBS, yet history suggests George C. Wolfe’s biopic (produced by Netflix, starring Colman Domingo and co-written by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, who wrote Milk and, ahem, Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar) will reach even wider audiences.
Infinite Horizons: The Films of Werner Herzog
Nov. 9 through Feb. 28
BAMPFA, Berkeley
Who would have predicted that the oddest oddball of the New German Cinema would become the most beloved filmmaker on the planet, the great demolisher of “objective” documentary and a patron saint of American independent film? Indefatigable, endlessly curious and larger than life, Herzog made the arthouse masterpieces Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, and the nonfiction classics Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World (among the many, many films included in this retrospective). An iconoclast’s iconoclast, Herzog crashed the barricades between narrative and documentary and changed the movies forever. His appearances at the Nov. 9–12 screenings are essentially sold out.
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‘The Holdovers’
Nov. 10
Theaters everywhere
Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti pop a cork some two decades after Sideways with a period film that aims to ace the holiday heart-warmer sweepstakes. Giamatti plays a cynical East Coast prep school teacher (Scrooge Lite?) given the less-than-cheerful Christmas assignment of tending those students with nowhere to go on break. The tried-and-true tropes of bonding, mutual respect and transformation are on the menu, though Payne and Giamatti’s talents for tiptoeing through schmaltz should keep the sentimentality at bay. The trailer, interestingly, gives off serious ‘70s vibes, from the Traffic and Badfinger songs to the typeface of the title. If Payne was visited by the spirits of Robert Altman, Alan J. Pakula and Hal Ashby, I’ll welcome a little grit in the fruitcake.
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‘Napoleon’
Nov. 22
Theaters everywhere
Oscar season invades for real with the thunderous arrival of another Ridley Scott horse opera about a Great Man. Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong and we’re not in for the spectacle of a Method actor (Joaquin Phoenix) in a tri-corner hat stomping through Russian mud in a maelstrom of bluster and angst. The logline, you see, suggests that Napoleon’s relationship with Empress Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) is the focus of the movie, but no biographical study would be complete without the volcano of ambition, success and failure. It seems unlikely, though, that Scott is going to reinvent Josephine as history’s first career coach, not when he’s choreographing CGI-enhanced battle scenes to “rival” Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece Napoleon.
Aug. 28: This guide was updated to replace the listing for ‘Dune: Part Two,’ which will now be released March 15, with a recommendation for ‘Rustin.’
