Our Most Anticipated Movies of Fall and Winter

Try as my mother did to instill the chronology of the liturgical calendar in me, I’ve instead opted to track the passage of time by the movie release calendar. Right now, we’re in anything but Ordinary Time.

What thrills me about the fall and winter movie season is that, for the most part, the movies released in this window are the ones that will be in the conversation for the rest of the year (and even into the new year), whether it’s because they’re nominated for awards or just remain people’s personal favorites. It was around this time last year when I saw visions like Frankenstein, No Other Choice, Train Dreams, and Wake Up Dead Man. That’s not to say the movies of the summer and early months aren’t without substance or provocation (I still find myself thinking about scenes from 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Leviticus, Disclosure Day, and, of course, The Odyssey). Maybe it’s something about the liturgical motions of the season itself, the way we move from bright days to crisp nights to winter chills, that makes the films that come out during this time weightier and cozier, a cinematic hearth that burns on the fuel of new releases.

There are plenty of films absent from this list that I included in my earlier preview from this year (the existential road trip horror film It Ends remains my number one movie of the year while Godzilla: Minus Zero and Dune: Part Three loom), but here are several films that ground their thrills and stories around themes of spirituality and justice.

The Uprising (Sept. 11)

Director Paul Greengrass’ action period drama reminds us that the roots of wealth disparity run deep and wide. Loosely dramatizing the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt, Andrew Garfield stars as a plowman whose spirit is enraged by how King Richard II (Woody Norman) is treating the peasant class. The story is one of the inspirations behind the legend of Robin Hood, and there’s something undoubtedly relatable in the peasant’s cry for justice as the wealthy only grow in power. As was indicative of rulers of the time, I expect King Richard II to falsely find divine justification for their greed, unaware that God is on the side of the very people he’s persecuting.

If I Go Will They Miss Me (Sept. 11) 

As much as I enjoyed The Odyssey, my favorite movie about Greek mythology this year is Walter Thompson-Hernández’s magical ode to fatherhood, coming of age, and resilient community. If I Go Will They Miss Me focuses on Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell), who idolizes his father, Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson), equating him to the figure of Poseidon for the ways he seems larger than life. Lil Ant’s rose-colored lenses often clash with the reality of his father, who is in and out of prison as he wrestles with drug use. The film nestles its tender and heartbreaking moments between a son’s expectations and a father’s absence. The film is both an intimate, unvarnished portrait of a family relegated to society’s margins and a larger meditation on mythmaking and storytelling. As Lil Ant, his father, and mother, Lozita (Danielle Brooks), navigate life, they’re conscious of the fact that they’re making a new gospel for how to navigate the slice of Los Angeles that they call home. This is a film about knowing your story will be passed down in generations, and reclaiming some ownership of how it will be told.

As much as I enjoyed The Odyssey, my favorite movie about Greek mythology this year is Walter Thompson-Hernández’s magical ode to fatherhood, coming of age, and resilient community.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Sept. 25)

I’m of the firm belief that everyone’s faith journey, especially if it involves deconstruction, is challenging. I’m also of the belief that certain vocations uniquely complicate those questions of faith—say, if you were an assassin for hire. That’s the struggle that befalls Mahershala Ali’s Latif, a self-described “devoutly religious hitman” whose world crumbles when his wife dies, leaving him to care for his children on his own in Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. Inspired by his Islamic faith, Latif has his own moral code when doing his work, such as refusing to use a gun when carrying out his contracts, utilizing a sword instead. As he wrestles with his shattered faith in God’s goodness and the mounting pressures to provide for his kids, he finds that his past is coming back with a vengeance to haunt him. There’s a religious undergirding to Tariq’s film that makes it deeper fare than typical “assassin with a haunted past” stories, and it’s refreshing to see these questions around theodicy and justice explored in the action genre.

Primetime (Sept. 25) 

“I want something that matters. No more bottom feeders. I want a whale,” says Robert Pattinson in the trailer for director Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime. Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, the infamous television presenter and host of the segment To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004—07, and whose program focused on catching sex predators via various sting operations. The film explores the darker side of Hansen’s rise (What does it profit a man to gain ratings but lose his soul?), particularly once his show gets slotted on a coveted late-night spot. It will be fascinating to see how the film, which aims to champion the importance of stewarding stories well and not viewing tragedy as something to exploit, will toe the line between earnestness and exploitation as it dives into Hansen and the program’s messy history.

Fjord (Oct. 9) 

You’re unlikely to find a film as balanced in its critiques of extremism and polarization as Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord. The film’s protagonists are the type of conservative Christians who will be uncomfortably recognizable to many. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star as Mihai and Lisbet, a Romanian-Norwegian couple who move back to Lisbet’s hometown in Norway with their children. The town, in contrast, is much more progressive. The fault lines of the easy peace between the town and the family are tested whenever Mihai, Lisbet, or their kids are outwardly evangelistic. When Mihai and Lisbet are suspected of physically abusing their children, the interpersonal conflicts become political. Those in the town, already at odds with the family due to their beliefs, see an opportunity to save Mihai and Lisbet’s kids from religious indoctrination, while Lisbet and Mihai see the accusations as an attack on their religious freedoms. This is a dense, thoughtful exploration of the thorniness of extremity on both sides, interrogating how we have grown so tribal that condemnation is a more reflexive response than understanding. 

All of a Sudden (Nov. 25) 

I found Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden to be a tender invitation to deformation—to deconstruct both the ways we create and consume films and the ways we move through life. To paraphrase what a character in the film says, “Perhaps we’ve overadapted too much to this world’s punishing pace.” It’s not easy to unlearn, but it’s possible. What we’re treated to is a 196-minute odyssey with Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira) and Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese playwright. Marie-Lou runs a nursing home in Paris that applies an unconventional and radically compassionate level of care for its patients, which grates against her colleagues, who are used to processes that are much more clinical and fast-paced. Her conversations with Mari—as they take patient, long walks through life—are a unique invitation for us to consider the ways we’ve become so used to the world’s grammar of productivity above all. Across its vast runtime, the two discuss everything from late-stage capitalism to how to remain whole in your body even as it deteriorates. With its deliberate pace, patient camera angles, and naturalistic performances, the film reinvites us to not only fall in friendship with these two women, but also acts in and of itself as a beautifully unvarnished gift to a weary world in need of rest.

Josephine (Dec. 4)

Director Beth de Araújo’s unflinching Josephine is a tough, agonizing watch. But it is also careful and gracious to its protagonists, as it laments how ill-equipped we are as a society to care for those who have experienced the most horrific acts imaginable. Mason Reeves stars as the titular Josephine, an 8-year-old girl who witnesses a woman being sexually assaulted at Golden Gate Park. The perpetrator is captured, and Josephine’s parents try to comfort her, but Josephine begins to lash out in fear and anger, lacking the faculties to properly articulate the trauma of what she’s witnessed. It would have been easy to paint Josephine’s parents, Damien (Channing Tatum) and Claire (Gemma Chan), as being dense, obtuse, or unavailable, but the tragedy of the film is that they’re very much present for Josephine, yet are unable to properly provide a balm for the pain their daughter is feeling. That’s the great burden of parenting: You can’t control when or how your kids mature, and you can’t go through the fire for them. Being prepared doesn’t mean you won’t be scared, and not being scared anymore doesn’t mean you’re healed.

Werewulf (Dec. 25)

Another year, another Robert Eggers movie releasing during Christmas time that centers on a folkloric creature with insatiable bloodlust. A lot is still unknown about the film, but it looks to explore the same spiritually exciting questions that all of his projects have looked at prior: What are we to do with our shame? How are we to relate to communities that act as our lifeline and alienate us all the same? Does one person’s sins damn the collective? There’s much to consider about the ways our fear of “the other” might make us the true monsters.