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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
