It me.
As this newsletter hits your inbox, I’ll be knee-deep in banging out my review for the opening night film of this year’s Venice Film Festival: Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. (If you want more details on how I approach film festival coverage, I unlocked a vintage subscriber-only post to give you some insight!)
But one need not be on the ground in Venice, Toronto, or Telluride to get a taste of what’s coming to theaters this fall (or perhaps early 2025). Most of these filmmakers’ prior work provides a fascinating insight into what they’re premiering now, and I always relish this time of year as an opportunity to use the past as a skeleton key for the present. If you want to try this for yourself, I’ve rounded up 10 films from directors who have new work on the verge of a fall festival bow — watch these at home and have a leg up on upcoming releases!
Brady Corbet, The Brutalist (Venice/Toronto/New York)
Venice director Alberto Barbera is already dropping hints that Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist — a 215-minute drama shot on 70mm complete with an intermission — is going to be the surprise smash of the festival. This time around, I’ll be trying my best to give Corbet my full attention. I did his last work, Vox Lux, dirty by watching it with one foot mentally out the door because I squeezed it in before First Man on my final day at TIFF. I finally revisited last year for, of all things, a piece about M3GAN and was blown away by how much this had to say about pop music and American trauma.
Vox Lux is available on Tubi.
David Gordon Green, Nutcrackers (Toronto)
I’d be hard-pressed to name any working filmmaker with a more eclectic résumé than David Gordon Green. In a quarter-century, he’s directed everything from prestige biopics like Stronger to uproarious studio comedies like Pineapple Express and even franchise-revitalizing horror legacyquels like 2018’s Halloween. It’s not entirely clear what register he’ll be working in with his TIFF-opening Nutcrackers, which stars Ben Stiller as a workaholic uncle who will assume care for his recently orphaned nephews. But maybe it’ll have a hint of the independent spirit that birthed his career. If you aren’t familiar with his 2000 debut George Washington, which could easily have landed a mention in my poetic social realism canon. This slice of life in rural North Carolina is among the best from an otherwise navel-gazing cohort of filmmakers who give off the vibes of “watches Terrence Malick once.”
George Washington is available on the Criterion Channel.
Marielle Heller, Nightbitch (Toronto)
Fans of this newsletter and friends of me know: I am extremely in the tank for Amy Adams and feel like this is the year she’s finally going to take the Oscar. (She simply did not appear in the movie Hillbilly Elegy, why do you ask?) This dark comedy about a stay-at-home mom who transforms into a dog seems like exactly the meaty thing that could finally get her over the line on nomination #7. But beyond the concept, she will also be directed by Marielle Heller, the inaugural member of my exclusive two-time interviewees club. (It just hit #13!) I’m pretty sure we both cried whenever we discussed Mr. Rogers in regards to her extraordinary A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but I think the movie that will prove most pertinent to Nightbitch is the caustic comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me? This true tale of a literary forger gave me one of my all-time favorite exchanges with an interview subject when I got to ask Melissa McCarthy the following:
There’s something a little perverse about the way that, in embracing these fabrications, Lee does her best work. Do you feel any connection to her as an actor, in the sense that you have to play pretend in order to provide something truthful and authentic about reality?
I feel like we were on very, very similar paths in terms of what we do. I don’t want to play someone like myself. I would be very uncomfortable. I don’t know what to do as myself. I don’t know where to put my hands in a picture! As a character, strangely, I have no hesitation on how and when I do something. It gives me a lot more courage than I do in my normal life. I thought, I don’t know how far into it, but Lee and I do the exact same thing, which is why she didn’t want to write about herself and was so difficult about it. She lived through other people. She was a great writer when she could write through someone else’s voice. Turns out, she was a great writer either way, but the safety net of standing behind someone. I really relate to that. We picked different ways to do it, but we did a very similar thing.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is available to rent from various digital platforms.
Dea Kulumbegashvili, April (Venice/Toronto/New York)
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice … look, it really says something when any filmmaker manages to secure the fall festival holy trinity of Venice, Toronto, and New York twice. It’s even more impressive when that filmmaker is making their second feature period and comes from a country without a particularly established presence on the global stage like Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili. (That’s the eastern European country, mind you, not the state where everything shoots now for tax reasons.) If her sophomore effort April, which follows an obstetrician who finds herself on the outs in a small town following a failed delivery, is anything like her gripping religious drama Beginning, then we could be in for something extraordinary. Like many a great film that I’ll only ever watch once, I remember little about what happens in Beginning — but I’ll never forget the way it made me feel. This tale of a Jehovah’s Witness who watches her world slowly unravel has several stomach-churning scenes that made me realize I’m not as desensitized to extremities on film as I might have thought.
Beginning is available on MUBI.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cloud (Venice/Toronto)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, I owe you an apology. I wasn’t really familiar with your game. This Japanese director has gotten somewhat of a reappraisal in recent years thanks to constant feting by his protege, Oscar-winner Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The student might have become the master, but the master is also still a master. He’s back in genre mode this fall with the psychological thriller Cloud, though if you’ve heard of Kiyoshia (not Akira) Kurosawa, it’d probably be for his deeply unsettling horror work. I was lucky enough to see Cure on the big screen this month, and I was worried I’d be lulled to sleep reading subtitles during a late-night showtime. The exact opposite happened as myself and a packed auditorium found ourselves rapt with this detective story. It’s less the crimes themselves that matter in this film, though I found myself squirming at his depictions of ordinary people mutilated with a slashed “X” on their corpses. Rather, the investigator is trying to figure out why the perpetrators do it given that they all remember their deeds … just not the motivation for them. If you’re tired of the monster always just being trauma, here’s a horror movie for you.
Cure is available on the Criterion Channel.
Justin Kurzel, The Order (Venice/Toronto)
“In the past, I have brought a level of violence to the screen, and it’s been explicit in a way to tell the story,” Australian director Justin Kurzel told me in the context of his most recent release, Nitram. “Then, in this, it was sort of watching the lead-up to that violence, and the suggestion of it.” I can’t necessarily endorse Nitram because it’s just so unpleasant to watch the making of a mass shooter, but a part of me wonders if some of that approach will carry over to his upcoming premiere The Order, which follows an FBI agent (played by Jude Law) busting up a string of bank robberies led by a charismatic white nationalist (played by Nicholas Hoult). Kurzel’s already done great work with Hoult as a scuzzy but incredibly compelling screen presence in The True History of the Kelly Gang, which deconstructs and demolishes the mythic Australian figure. Hoult’s but a minor part — the movie really belongs to a fearless George MacKay — in a sprawling canvas that takes masculinity and nationality as its subject. It’s a muscular movie worth your time and consideration.
The True History of the Kelly Gang is available to rent from various digital platforms.
Pablo Larraín, Maria (Venice/Telluride/New York)
Expect Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas film starring Angelina Jolie to serve as “the conclusion to his trilogy of biopics about iconic historical women” following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer. This fascination with history isn’t new for the Chilean director, however, who’s been constantly probing the long shadow of dictator Augusto Pinochet over the country’s psyche. That took on perhaps its most literal form to date in last year’s El Conde, which operates from the wild premise “What if Pinochet was a vampire?” Part allegorical drama, part science-fiction, and wholly Larraín, the film also opened up a new collaboration with cinematographer Ed Lachman (most famous for his work on Todd Haynes’ films) that yielded a somewhat surprising Oscar nomination last year.
El Conde is available on Netflix.
Mike Leigh, Hard Truths (Toronto/New York)
It’s a testament to how much I can separate art from the artist that I can still recommend a Mike Leigh movie after he was so rude to me in our interview. A less charitable friend points out that such grouchiness in dealing with others does taint his work for her because he’s such an astute listener to his characters and doesn’t extend the same sympathy to other people in reality. Either way, I await anything that the octogenarian chronicler of quotidian British working-class lives wants to put out. I’m excited to see him return to the present day with Hard Truths and reteam with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, with whom he collaborated on 1996’s Palme d’Or-winning Secrets & Lies. Jean-Baptiste’s Hortense is the emotional anchor of this masterfully observed domestic drama who sets events in motion when she tries to locate her birth mother. She stumbles into a flimsily-held-together family led by Brenda Blethyn’s messy but well-meaning Cynthia. Hortense simply making her presence known is enough to exhume long-buried resentments, tensions, and intimacies.
Secrets and Lies is available on Max and the Criterion Channel.
David Mackenzie, Relay (Toronto)
It’s arriving on the fall festival scene with minimal buzz, but maybe that’s the way Relay director David Mackenzie likes it. After all, his Best Picture-nominated triumph Hell or High Water was a similar sleeper hit at Cannes in 2016. Anything starring Riz Ahmed has my attention automatically, but this concept is fascinating as well given that it features him as a mysterious middleman between whistleblowers and corporations. Mackenzie knows how to work with charismatic talents as shown by 2014’s Starred Up, featuring a then-relative newcomer Jack O’Connell as prison inmate Eric Love. He’s the spiritual progeny of anarchic Randall P. McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and James Dean’s renegade Jim Stark from Rebel Without a Cause. Already hardened by years in a juvenile facility, Eric arrives to play with the big boys and establish his position at the top of the pre-ordained social structure. The film neither entirely humanizes nor animalizes Eric, yet he’s still a staggering force to witness. Even as O’Connell and Mackenzie erect barriers preventing us from really sympathizing with Eric, he becomes all the more enticing of a character.
Starred Up is available on Peacock and Tubi TV.
Steve McQueen, Blitz (London/New York)
I’m ready to call it: Steve McQueen’s Blitz, a chronicle of the bombing of London featuring Saoirse Ronan, is the movie we’ll all be watching with our families over Thanksgiving when it drops on Apple TV+. In the meantime, there’s an entire limited series of films by Steve McQueen on Amazon Prime Video under the Small Axe banner that chronicle the triumphs and travails of Britons of West Indian descent in the second half of the twentieth century. While the short and sweet Lovers Rock is my personal favorite, Mangrove is the fullest movie of the bunch. This courtroom drama follows the resistance of the Mangrove 9, a group of Black activists who stand up to police harassment of their community. It’s in the classical Sorkin-esque mode but with an impeccable eye toward institutional pressures rather than individual heroism.
Mangrove is available on Amazon Prime Video.
It’s always great when an interview reads less like an interrogation and more like a true conversation, which was the case for this chat with the team behind Between the Temples. I somehow ended up explaining “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” to the legendary actress Carol Kane (and maybe convinced her to see Spring Breakers, too?) — while her director Nathan Silver and co-star Jason Schwartzman were also a hoot. Read it all on Slant Magazine and look for it in theaters now.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
I found this a fascinating glimpse into how filming locations are chosen!
I’ve been bumping this since Blink Twice — a film that, if nothing else proves Zoe Kravitz got some of the musical taste genes from her dad.
Two great reads on recently departed screen legends: Bilge Ebiri on Alain Delon at Vulture and
on Gena Rowlands at The Atlantic.One last post for summer movies, though, coming this weekend!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall