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Your Fall Movie Guide: Epic Visions, Personal Sagas and Gladiators Galore

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Fall isn’t what it used to be, and I don’t mean the higher temps. Back in the day, the studios started rolling out Academy Award-oriented adult dramas the minute kids were back in school. September and October still offer a ton of serious, dark movies — horror galore! — but Hollywood isn’t sending us its best until Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The Oscar race is wide open compared to last year, when the summer movies Oppenheimer and Barbie set the pace, so an unheralded contender could jump out of the pack. The other storyline is the resurgent box office; Joker: Folie á Deux (Oct. 4) has a leg up with Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix laying on the eyeliner and the shtick. Finally, don’t expect many election-related titles; it turns out Flight Risk (now opening Jan. 24, 2025) is not a reference to a convicted felon awaiting sentencing but a Mark Wahlberg genre thriller directed by Mel Gibson.

A man peers through a looking glass, a woman stands behind him, city in background
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis.’ (Lionsgate)

‘Megalopolis’

Opens Sept. 27, 2024

Francis Ford Coppola’s lavishly ambitious passion project unfolds in New Rome, i.e. New York City, in a near-future littered with cultural echoes of the past. The perennial dance between Art, Politics and Commerce plays out by way of a metaphorical melodrama rife with Shakespearean references and deep philosophical meaning. “In Coppola’s worldview,” Jessica Kiang wrote in Sight and Sound after the Cannes premiere, “there is no good or bad, there is only great or piffling, and Megalopolis may not be great, but it certainly isn’t piffling.” If you’re even a teeny bit interested in the maestro’s late-career magnum opus — possibly because of or despite the multiple controversies surrounding its making and promotion — you must see it on the big screen.

black-and-white photograph of a woman posing a nude model with a painting beside her
A (touched-up) photograph of artist Tamara de Lempicka at work, the subject of a new documentary by Julie Rubio. (Tamara de Lempicka Estate LLC. All Rights Reserved)

‘Saturday Night’

Opens Sept. 27 (exclusive), Oct. 4 (limited), 2024

Everything is television, even the once-rarified movies. But how interested are you in a movie about television, specifically a rendering of the 90 minutes building up to the debut of Saturday Night Live on Oct. 11, 1975? Writer-director Jason Reitman marries the creative/hormonal snap-crackle of a summer-camp flick to the ticking tension of a clock movie, leavened with a dash of door-slamming backstage farce. The viewer passes the time judging Matt Wood’s portrayal of John Belushi and Dylan O’Brien’s rendition of Dan Aykroyd. Saturday Night ultimately will find its biggest audience via streaming, that is, on the small screen where it all began.

Mill Valley Film Festival

Oct 3–13, 2024
Smith Rafael Film Center, Sequoia Cinema, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Perfectly situated on both the calendar and the map, MVFF is a magnet for star-driven awards hopefuls and locally produced social-issue documentaries. Without an official program announcement yet, we must speculate: This year’s honorees include Jude Law, and the local premiere of The Order (in which he plays an FBI agent tracking right-wing terrorists in the Northwest in 1983) could be in the cards. We can likewise anticipate Marin’s own Marielle Heller returning with MVFF alum Amy Adams and Nightbitch. R.J. Cutler’s Martha Stewart profile for Netflix would certainly seem a logical fit. What we do know is that local documentary filmmaker Julie Rubio’s The True Story of Tamara De Lempicka & the Art of Survival, about the great Art Deco painter, will have its world premiere.

Woman sits behind typewriter at desk
Elisa Zulueta as Mercedes in ‘In Her Place.’ (Diego Araya Corvalán/Netflix)

‘In Her Place’

Premieres Oct. 11, 2024
Netflix

The gifted Chilean documentary maker Maite Alberdi (The Mole Agent, The Eternal Memory) makes her narrative fiction debut with a true (crime) story. In 1955, the novelist María Carolina Geel shoots and kills her boyfriend in a hotel restaurant. Her self-assured demeanor in court kindles something in the judge’s diffident secretary, who surreptitiously visits the writer’s apartment. Bit by bit, Mercedes assumes María’s style and attitude. Alberdi wittily explores the roles and behavior that women were and are limited to in patriarchal societies, hence the title’s other meaning.

Looking for even more South American, Latin American and/or Mexican cinema? The 16th San Francisco Latino Film Festival, coincidentally, also launches on Oct. 11, at the Roxie and other locations.

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Doc Stories

Oct. 17–20, 2024
Vogue Theatre, San Francisco

SFFILM’s annual weekend immersion in nonfiction ranges from artist profiles to dispatches from the front lines of the world’s hot spots. The Q&As tend to be unusually pithy and candid due to the numerous local filmmakers (voting members of the Academy’s doc branch) in the crowd. I’m hoping the program, which hasn’t been announced as of this writing, includes the Palestinian-Israeli collaboration No Other Land, which received the jury and audience awards at Berlin for its blistering exposé of the Israeli military’s destruction of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.

two people look to the right
A still from ‘Black Box Diaries.’ (Courtesy SFFILM and Paramount/MTV Films.)

‘Black Box Diaries’

Opening Nov. 1, 2024

Japanese journalist Shiori Ito’s 2021 memoir Black Box chronicled her sexual assault by a well-known television personality and the resistance she encountered from all directions in pursuing justice. Displaying both courage and creativity, Ito has translated her nightmarish experience to film, successfully balancing the roles of director and subject, journalist and survivor. She weaves secret recordings, verité footage and harrowing personal testimony into a work of indelible power that screened earlier this year at SFFILM following its Sundance premiere.

‘Here’

Opening Nov. 1, 2024

The curiously superficial movies of Robert Zemeckis (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Cast Away) have an uncanny knack for finding the commercial and cultural zeitgeist while reveling in special-effects breakthroughs. (The latter is what sticks with us, generally.) The director re-teams with Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and screenwriter Eric Roth for an eon-spanning epic about home, family and other Great American Ideals that unfolds in one location with a fixed camera. The trailer lays on the treacle so thick that it plays like a PSA for voting early — lest you find yourself still immobilized in a sentimental coma on Election Day.

woman stands in front of crowd with a gun raised to sky in right hand
A still from Jia Zhangke’s ‘Ash Is Purest White,’ 2018. (Courtesy BAMPFA)

Jia Zhangze: Filmmaker in Residence

Nov. 7–30, 2024
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Jia Zhangze’s career, now in its 30th year, parallels and reflects China’s transition to capitalism and the myriad accompanying ambitions and anxieties. His extended visit to BAMPFA is a major occasion, for he is not only China’s greatest living director but one of the most important filmmakers on the planet. Most of the public screenings with Jia in attendance are already sold out, but a few tickets remain for Ash Is Purest White (Nov. 13), his bravura 2018 saga of a gangster’s wife (Zhao Tao) making her way in the world.

Two men look up
Kieran Culkan and Jesse Eisenberg star in ‘A Real Pain.’ (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)

‘A Real Pain’

Opening Nov. 15, 2024

Jesse Eisenberg won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance for his post-post-post-Holocaust road movie. Eisenberg (who also directed) and Kieran Culkan play neurotic, estranged cousins compelled by a provision in their grandmother’s will to visit Poland, where she was born and survived the death camps. Manic, funny, poignant and yes, painful, the film manages to connect individual trauma with the unfathomable suffering of millions while incorporating reality into fiction.

Man in baroque clothing and wig gesture broadly in concert hall
Tom Hulce as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the 1984 film ‘Amadeus.’ (© The Saul Zaentz Company)

Saul Zaentz Film Celebration

Nov. 15–17, 2024
Smith Rafael Film Center, San Rafael

Saul Zaentz (1921–2014) was a pillar and patron of Bay Area independent filmmaking for some four decades. The public, however, knew him for the beautifully made, Oscar-winning movies that he produced and supported. The Berkeley FILM Foundation and California Film Institute commemorate the 10th anniversary of Zaentz’s death, and the legacy of an iconoclast of unshakable principles, with screenings of Amadeus (a 4K restoration), The English Patient, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Guest speakers include Academy Award-winning sound designer Mark Berger, editor Vivien Hillgrove and associate producer Paul Zaentz.

Man crouches in gladiator outfit and rubs sand between hands
Paul Mescal in the role of Lucius in ‘Gladiator II.’ (Aidan Monaghan/Paramount Pictures)

‘Wicked’ and ‘Gladiator II’

Both opening Nov. 22, 2024

Oscar season arrives in force with Broadway belters and Roman brawlers. You know right now if you want to see these extravaganzas, even before the barrage of TV ads, billboards, social media campaigns and talk show appearances. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande bring the star and vocal power to Wicked, while Ridley Scott gives Irish arthouse phenom Paul Mescal (Aftersun, All of Us Strangers) the keys to the chariot and worldwide superstardom. The antidote to all this ego-tripping is Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. (which also opens Nov. 22), Todd Komarnicki’s biopic of the pacifist Lutheran theologian who joined the plot to assassinate Hitler. A person of principle is always in season.

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