52 Must-See Movies to Watch This Fall Season
Fall doesn’t technically start in our hemisphere until September 22, but north of the film industry equator, autumn truly kicks off at the end of August. New releases unseen until now, past festival films finally getting their due, and fall festival premieres with distribution abound. Who said the fall movie season was dead this year because of last year’s strikes?
Well, whoever did was dead wrong, because there’s a firehose of sparkling new movies coming to theaters through the rest of the year. We’ve got Ridley Scott and Paul Mescal, Denzel Washington and his sons Malcolm and John David, Pedro Almodóvar with high priestesses of cinema Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Saoirse Ronan in not one but two Oscar contenders, Amy Adams back on the big screen, real pains, different men, and complete unknowns. Plus, horror readies for spooky season (and after a great horror summer) with a gluttony of gross-outs, hauntings, and possessions stalking the big screen.
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Pundits feared studio output could be hampered by the strikes, and while we’re certainly not without a handful of major tentpoles this season, there are more than enough buzzy indies to fill that void. A24 makes a splash this season with an ambitious lineup from Kyle Mooney’s “Y2K” to a Nicole Kidman-led psychosexual thriller “Babygirl,” “We Live in Time” with Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, Paolo Sorrentino’s Cannes premiere “Parthenope,” and “The Front Room” from Max and Sam Eggers, the brothers of one Robert Eggers. He’s got a new movie out, too, this year with the Christmas Day premiere of “Nosferatu” from Focus Features, a gothic horror that looks to be skipping the fall fests to instead head for all eyeballs (or all vulnerable necks) everywhere.
In the world of sequels, along with Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II,” there’s “Terrifier 3,” “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Moana 2,” and more. And the big studios could have another Barbenheimer on their hands with the same-day release of both “Gladiator II” and the screen musical adaptation of “Wicked.” These movies couldn’t be further apart in spirit — but then again, were “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” any closer? The inevitable thinkpieces (and the box office numbers) will tell us more in November.
Below, IndieWire rounds up the many movies we hope you won’t sleep on this fall season. And we’ve dipped just a little bit into winter as well to include films coming out at the very end of December.
Samantha Bergeson, Christian Blauvelt, Wilson Chapman, Kate Erbland, Alison Foreman, Jim Hemphill, Tony Maglio, Mark Peikert, Harrison Richlin, Sarah Shachat, Brian Welk, and Christian Zilko also contributed to this story.
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