Best Movies of Fall 2025

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson reprise their roles as IRL paranormal investigators Lorraine and Ed Warren in the final entry (for now!) in this surprisingly durable horror franchise. They still ain’t ‘fraid of no ghosts — but the couple are frankly terrified of encountering a demon in a small Pennsylvania town in 1986. Especially because it’s the same malevolent denizen of the netherworld that they met when they first started taking up cases all those years ago, and apparently this hellspawn has some unfinished business. Yikes.

One of the buzzier titles to come of this year’s Sundance, writer-director-star James Sweeney’s bittersweet comedy follows a young man (Dylan O’Brien) mourning the recent loss of his identical twin brother. He bonds with a fellow member (Sweeney) of a support group for grieving twins — and let’s just say that this new friend of his may have more than a passing connection to the guy’s sibling. It’s a great introduction to a new voice in edgy, indie cringe-comedy.

Say one last goodbye to the Crawley family and their small army of servants, as creator and screenwriter Julian Fellowes gives the characters of his TV show and film series a big ol’ victory lap. It seems that, as the upper-crust British family enter into the 1930s, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is set to take over the reins of Downton Abbey until a scandal centered around her divorce [dramatic gasp!] threatens to get the whole brood kicked out of high society. The usual suspects are back: Hugh Bonneville, Elisabeth Perkins, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Brendan Coyle, Joanne Froggatt. So are some of the franchise’s familiar faces — Paul Giamatti, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton — and a couple of newbies, in the form of Alessandro Nivola, Joely Richardson and Simon Russell Beale. Cherrio, Downton-ers!

Finally, the one sequel we’ve been dying to see for decades. The founders of “England’s loudest band” haven’t played together in decades — David St. Hubbins holds it down in a mariachi group, Nigel Tufnel works at a cheese shop, Derek Smalls pitches crypto — but when some hotshot management types suggest a reunion tour might be lucrative, the Tap comes back together. And thankfully, Marty “Enough of My Yappin’” DiBergi is there to capture the trio in all their glory once more. God bless you for this, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Rob Reiner. Our anticipation level is at 11 right now.

Fellow fans of the video artist/filmmaker Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang), take heed: His latest work stars Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell as two strangers who, thanks to a magical GPS system, embark together on a [checks notes] big, bold, beautiful journey. Frankly, you had us at “Koganada’s new movie.” Dig this supporting cast: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater, Jacqueline Novak, Billy Magnusson, Sarah Gadon.

All the aspiring football player Cameron Cade (I Know What You Did Last Summer‘s Tyriq Withers) wants is to be the starting quarterback of his favorite NFL team, the San Antonio Saviors. So when he gets an invitation to come train with the Saviors’ longtime QB Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) at the legend’s personal compound, Cade jumps at the chance — this is the moment he’s been dreaming about. Once the young player starts a rather unusual regiment, however, he gets the feeling that something else is happening behind the scenes. Justin Tipping directs the latest horror flick to come out of Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw production company, and you can feel the Get Out creator’s vibe all over the trailer.

Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera star in this drama centered around the 2018 Camp Fire in the rural woods of Northern California, which ended up turning close to 154,000 acres of land into scorched earth and remains the single deadliest fire in the state’s history. McConaughey is a school bus driver who helps shepherd dozens of kids caught in the danger zone to safety; Ferrera is the teacher who helps out. On paper, it sounds like just another true-story disaster movie, but the fact that filmmaker Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) is calling the shots suggests a hyper-intense, you-are-there approach to this real-life blaze.

Scarlett Johansson adds “director” to her resumé with this tale of a cross-generational friendship between an elderly woman (June Squibb), mourning the recent death of an old pal, and a 19-year-old college student (Erin Kellyman) in New York City. Then the older lady tells a bit of a fib to her younger companion, which soon turns into a media story and, well, you can imagine the pickle our hero finds herself in. It’s the sort of modest, character-driven drama that Johansson specialized in when she was starting out as an actor. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Jessica Hecht costar.

Having successfully translated Inherent Vice to the screen, Paul Thomas Anderson takes on another Thomas Pynchon novel: Vineland, which follows a former Sixties revolutionary trying to navigate the treacherous waters of Reagan’s America. His loose adaptation moves everything up from the mid-1980s to the present day, but the overall story appears to be the same, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the ex-hippie running around Northern California in search of his possibly-in-danger kid (newcomer Chase Infiniti). Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, Alana Haim, Regina Hall, and The Wire‘s Wood Harris round out the cast. This is the movie we’re looking forward to seeing this season.

Writer-director Ronan Day-Lewis makes his feature debut with this familial drama about pious man (Sean Bean) trekking deep into the woods to find his brother, a former British soldier who abandoned his wife and child years ago. This recluse still suffers from PTSD and prefers solitude to society; still, his sibling’s mission is to bring him back into the fold and hopefully heal old wounds. The fact that this hermit-like figure is played Ronan’s cowriter and father Daniel Day-Lewis — and that the role signals his return to the screen after an eight-year absence — is cause for celebration, to say the least. The always great Samantha Morton and Samuel Bottomsley (How to Have Sex) costar.

Current title-holder for the hardest working man in horror filmmaking, Osgood Perkins drops yet another cryptic, spooky-looking movie a mere six months after releasing his Stephen King adaptation The Monkey. Details regarding what this new film is about are being guarded like they’re state secrets (actually, given how state secrets are treated these days, the security around them is likely a lot better). But we do know, per Perkins himself, that it can be classified as “grown-ups horror in a house.” And that it takes place in a single location, and Rossif Sutherland and Orphan Black‘s Tatiana Maslany play said grown-ups. This teaser actually leaves us with way more questions than answers.

Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) looks at George Orwell’s transformation from a cog in Britiain’s colonialist machinery (he served on the police force in Burma in the 1920s) to political critic, essayist and world-renowned author of Animal Farm and 1984. Then the documentarian connects the dots between those two dystopian novels, the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes, and the ways in which history tends to repeat itself. Like, say, in contemporary America. You would not call the outlook “good.”

If you’re a convict who’s just escaped from prison and on the lam from the law, there are probably worse places to hide out than a makeshift hole in a wall inside a Toys ‘R Us. (We guess?) Desperate times call for desperate measures, and after Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum), a military veteran reduced to ripping off fast-food joints to make ends meet, breaks out of the joint, the franchised toy store offers him a safe place to lay low. Derek Cianfrance (The Place Beyond the Pines) directs this truly wackadoo true-crime story; Kirsten Dunst plays an employee who falls in love with Manchester; and LaKeith Stanfield, Peter Dinklage, Uzo Aduba, and Ben Mendelsohn round out the cast.

In the early days of the UFC, there was no one tougher than Mark Kerr, the former wrestler-turned-MMA fighter was one of the first big names of the sport. But a host of injuries and personal demons threw a lot of roadblocks into his career, as well as his relationship with then-wife Dawn Staples. Anyone who caught the 2002 doc The Smashing Machine knows the ups and downs of his life story — and now writer-director Benny Safdie, a.k.a. one half of the team that brought you Good Time and Uncut Gems, has given Kerr his own Raging Bull-style biopic. And who else could portray the champ but Dwayne Johnson, a star who knows a thing or two about the agony and the ecstasy of life inside the ropes? (Yes, that is indeed him under those impressive prosthetics.) Emily Blunt plays Dawn, and real-life UFC stalwart Ryan Bader plays Kerr’s fellow fighter and best friend, Mark Coleman.

The remarkably prolific Luca Guadagnino — he had both Challengers and Queer in theaters last year — returns with a torn-from-the-headlines drama about a Yale professor (Julia Roberts) who finds herself defending a friend and fellow academic (Andrew Garfield) from charges of sexual assault. The fact that the j’accuse is coming from her protégé (Ayo Edebiri) makes things extra-complicated; the extra wrinkle of Roberts’ character having a few skeletons in the closet as well makes the situation damn near untenable. Bring on the cancel-culture handwringing!

A new Kathryn Bigelow thriller is always an event, and the Hurt Locker director’s latest sound like a true nail-biter: Someone, somewhere, has launched a missile aimed at the United States. No one knows where it’s come from or, more importantly, where it’s headed — which means a team of White House staff, military brass, and other high-level security types must figure out how to stop potential mass casualties with little info and next-to-no time to take down the rogue weapon. The title seems pretty apt, given the description. In the hot seat: Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Greta Lee, Anthony Ramos, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke and Tracy Letts.

A magnum opus of maternal anxiety that polarized Sundance, Mary Bronstein’s unsettling drama follows a woman — played by Rose Byrne, making the most of a juicy, jittery role — on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Her daughter is suffering from an unnamed ailment, her kid’s doctor (played by Bronstein herself) keeps threatening to withhold treatment, her husband is M.I.A., her therapist is hostile, and to make matters worse, a large, highly symbolic hole just opened up in her ceiling. Someone called this “Uncut Gems for Moms,” given how it feels like a rolling panic attack, and we second that description.

Bill Condon has directed everything from the James Whale biopic Gods and Monsters to the Oscar-winning Dreamgirls — which could very well make him the ideal filmmaker to tackle this adaptation of the Broadway musical, based on Hector Babenco’s 1985 movie of the same name, in which a political prisoner (Y Tu Mama Tabien/Andor star Diego Luna) and his cellmate (Tonatiuh) fall in love after bonding over their fandom for an actress. Cast in the part of the star they both admire — previously played by Sônia Braga onscreen and Chita Rivera onstage — is no less than Ms. Jennifer Lopez.

It seems that some sort of artificial-intelligence–generated bad guys have made their way into the “real” world — putting that adjective in scare quotes for you simulation-theory fans, you’re welcome — and humanity’s only hope ironically lies in a software program named Ares, who leaves the digital realm on a life-or-death mission. The latest entry in Disney’s Tron franchise has something old (Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Kevin Flynn), something new (cast members like Jodie Turner-Smith, Greta Lee, Gillian Anderson, and Evan Peters), something borrowed (that torn-from-the-headlines A.I. paranoia premise!) and something regrettably blue.

Remember “the Grabber,” that 1970s child-abducting serial killer from The Black Phone who was like every stranger-danger nightmare from the era, rolled into one? Well, the creepy guy in the white devil mask is back in Scott Derrickson’s sequel to his 2021 hit — or at least some version of him, ready to defy conventional social morality and death itself, is back. Ethan Hawke, who played the original Grabber, is listed among the returning cast, so… who knows? Mason Thames, who took on the killer in the original, is also present for more scares. Demían Bechir and Jeremy Davies costar.

The first of two Richard Linklater movies hitting screens this fall — see also: Nouvelle Vague — follows composer Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) as he endures one long, very drunk and very, very dark night of the soul after the Broadway premiere of Oklahoma! That groundbreaking musical was the brainchild of Hart’s former writing partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott)… and let’s just say that Hart’s not handling his friend’s success without him in the most charitable of manners. Bobby Cannavale is the Sardi’s bartender who doubles as Hart’s therapist; Patrick Kennedy is his drinking buddy, New Yorker editor and future Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White; Margaret Qualley is Elizabeth Weiland, who Hart may or may not have had romantic longings toward.

You might say that Guillermo del Toro — award-winning writer-director, horror aficionado, maestro of the macabre — has been chasing after Mary Shelley’s Gothic interpretation of the Prometheus myth in one form or another throughout his prolific career. Now, the gentleman has finally made his own spin on this classic tale of daring to tread where no man should, i.e. making them monsters outta dead-people parts. Oscar Isaac is the good doctor know for his reanimation experiments; Jacob Elordi is the creature given both life and a sense of existential crises; Mia Goth, Ralph Ineson, and Christoph Waltz lend their talents as well. The fact that del Toro has cited artist Bernie Wrightson’s sketches of the monster as a big inspiration gives us high expectations; that he also wanted to blend elements of both the original story and The Bride of Frankenstein makes us positively giddy. See it in a theater with a giant screen if you can, starting in October; it hits Netflix on November 7th.

Writer, director and star Aziz Ansari dreams up an It’s a Wonderful Life for the 2020s, in which an angel (Keanu Reeves, in the role he was born to play — an angel!) lets a gig-economy worker (Ansari) switch places with his employer, a ridiculously rich Angeleno (Seth Rogen). Things don’t go exactly as planned, of course. It turns out that things are economically rough out there, people! And happiness is elusive whether you’re a prince or a pauper!

The overall premise of Jafar Panahi’s new movie — a much-deserved winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes — is simple: A man (Ebrahim Azizi) finds his family trip interrupted when his car breaks down. A mechanic (Vahid Mobasseri) thinks he recognizes him as the person who tortured him for years in prison. He abducts the traveler, and then proceeds to round up several other former inmates to confirm that he is indeed the culprit. It plays at times like a nailbiting thriller, an elliptical road movie, and a sort of backstage farce revolving around a payback killing instead a theatrical production. Simply amazing.

Heist flicks? We dig ’em. Thrillers set in the 1970s? We like ’em a lot. Films directed by Kelly Reichardt, the Pacific Northwestern director whose character studies of bohos, outcasts, social misfits, and margin dwellers has made her one of the most significant American moviemakers working today? We love ’em. A heist flick directed by Reichardt, starring Josh O’Connor, Alana “One Third of HAIM” Haim, John Magaro, Bill Camp, Hope Davis and Gaby Hoffmann? It’s like we’ve been granted three wishes, and they’re all coming true at once.

Yorgos Lanthimos reunites with Emma Stone and her Kinds of Kindness costar Jesse Plemons for this English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean sci-fi/comedy/thriller Save the Green Planet! The gist: Plemons and Aidan Delbis are two disturbed young men who kidnap Stone’s high-powered CEO because they’re convinced she’s an alien. If you’ve seen the original, you know that things get weird. Given the previous collaborations between the Greek filmmaker and the Oscar-winning actor, we’re betting that things get even weirder in this new version. (We just pray they keep the ending.)

In September 1981, Bruce Springsteen finished the final show of his biggest tour to date and retreated to a small house in Colt Neck, New Jersey. Having purchased a four-track recorder, the Boss began noodling on some rough ideas for potential songs. He’d end up insisting that those demos would become his next LP: the stark, bleak, and stripped-down Nebraska. Based on Warren Zanes’ book about the making of that classic album, this mini-biopic from Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace) looks back at extremely pivotal point in the rock star’s career, with The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White as a scruffy, searching Springsteen and Jeremy Strong as his manager-slash-guardian angel Jon Landau.

Tessa Thompson takes on one of the theater roles that’s a milestone for virtually every female actor: Hedda Gabler, the destructive newlywed hero of Henrik Ibsen’s greatest play. (Come at me, fans of A Doll’s House!) Director Nia DaCosta, who directed Thompson in her 2018 indie debut Little Woods, has promised not just an adaptation of a tragedy involving lies, dysfunctional marriages, suicide, envy and any number of other deadly sins but a “reimagining” of the classic work. Personally, you had us at “Tess Does Hedda.” Costarring Imogen Poots, Nina Hoss, Kathryn Hunter and Tom Bateman.

Who better than Richard Linklater — prolific moviemaker, maverick, super-duper film nerd — to chronicle the making of the French New Wave classic Breathless? The Dazed and Confused director pays homage to Jean Luc-Godard’s gamechanging 1960 debut, i.e. the movie that rewrote the rules of cinema, inspired a generation of film nerds to pick up cameras, and forever made self-conscious crime flicks cooler than cool. Newcomer Guillaume Marbeck gets the privilege of donning those iconic dark shades and spreading the word of God(ard); Aubry Dullin is Jean-Paul Belmondo; Zoey Deutch rocks a blond pixie cut as Jean Seberg.

The great Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, You Were Never Really Here) takes a crack at Ariana Harwicz’s novel, about a recent mother (Jennifer Lawrence) slowly losing her sanity after she and her husband (Robert Pattinson) move to the countryside. It was one of the more divisive films to play at Cannes this year, to say the least — but everything you’ve heard about Lawrence’s go-for-broke performance is indeed true. Unhinged doesn’t begin to cover it.

The year is 1974. The place is downtown New York City. The interviewer is the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, and the interviewee is photographer Peter Hujar, who’s agreed to tell his close friend all about his day as part of a book project she’s working on. Filmmaker and Sundance’s favorite son Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue, Keep the Lights On, Passages) turns their conversations into a two-hander for Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw, all in an attempt to conjure up a long-lost Bohemia filled with cigarette smoke, intellectual banter, gossip and mash notes from the underground.

We were ready to give up on the Predator franchise until Dan Trachtenberg dropped Prey in 2022, and suddenly, it felt like there was a world of potential in a series devoted to interstellar hunters with dreadlocks and mandibles. So we’re jazzed that Trachtenberg is also behind this follow-up, which pairs one of the alien killers with an android (Elle Fanning) fighting for their lives on a distant planet. Apparently, Fanning’s bot is one of Weyland-Yutani’s models, which means that whole Alien vs. Predator thing is now canon and more than just a cheap cross-franchise lark.

Once again working with his longtime cowriter Eskil Vogt and his The Worst Person in the Week star Renate Reinsve, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier carefully constructs a morality tale around a once-prominent movie director (Stellan Skarsgård) hoping to make a comeback with a new project. He offers the role based on his daughter to his actual daughter, an anxiety-prone stage actor (Reinsve) with a grudge against dad. Then he decides to cast an American movie star (Elle Fanning) instead, and film the whole thing in their actual family house. There’s a reason this won the Grand Prix award at Cannes this year — it’s the sort of blend of irony, comedy, and well-earned pathos that made a lot of us fall in love with Trier’s work in the first place.

George Clooney plays a world-famous movie star on a press tour, who alternates charming the media with reflecting on the life he’s led and the world around him. Yes, we agree that it is a stretch. The fact that writer-director Noah Baumbach is the one crafting this portrait of a screen artist as an older, contemplative man gives us hope. And there’s already a lot of industry chatter about Adam Sandler, who plays the star’s manager, finally getting an Oscar nomination thanks to this — which doesn’t make up for him being robbed of one for Uncut Gems but hey, we’ll take what we can get. Laura Dern, Greta Gerwig, Emily Mortimer, Patrick Wilson, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent and Bad Sisters‘ Eve Hewson all join in on the fun.

Taiwanese-American filmmaker — and longtime collaborator/producer for Oscar-winner Sean Baker, who returns the favor here — Shih-Ching Tsou makes her solo directorial debut with this story about a Chinese woman (Janet Tsai) emigrating to Taipei with her two daughters to open a market stall. The family has a hard time adjusting to their new life, to say the least. Netflix picked this modest little movie shot on a 4K iPhone out of Cannes, and clearly have high hopes for it in the Best International Film category. Awards potential or not, you should seek this out by any means necessary.

Who better to give us a Running Man for the 21st century than Edgar Wright, a filmmaker with a wonderfully sick sense of humor and a knack for goosing well-worn genre material? The real question is whether this story by Stephen King — sorry, “Richard Bachman” — written in the 1980s, about a game show where contestants are hunted for sport, will seem even mildly satirical in this day and age. (The source material does take place in the “futuristic” year of 2025, so….) Glen Powell is the man on the run, hoping to win cash prizes and avoid the hunters trying to kill him. Josh Brolin is the host who’s making sure the broadcasting of this life-or-death spectacle is a ratings hit. Michael Cera, William H. Macy, Katy O’Brian, Sean Hayes and Lee Pace are either offering their support, competing against Powell or trying to murder him. You’ll find out whether our man is a millionaire or toast after a word from our sponsor.

Spanish-French filmmaker Oliver Laxe’s woozy, epic thriller plops a concerned father (Sergi López) into the middle of the Moroccan desert, as he tries to find his missing daughter amidst the nomadic hipsters frequenting underground trance-music concerts. It sounds like a riff on The Searchers, redone for the 21st-century rave-scene set, right? Then things take an extremely lysergic, extra-dark turn, and suddenly everything plunges into pure nightmare territory. You’ll want to see this one in a theater with a state-of-the-art sound system.

Clint Bentley (Jockey) adapts Denis Johnson’s novella about the life and times of a logger named Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton) practicing his trade in the early part of the 20th century. One of the consensus best-of picks out of this year’s Sundance, this meditative character study will remind you of early Terrence Malick, with its languorous shots of nature and philosophical narration as Granier witnesses the best and worst of this nation’s growing pains, falls in love with resourceful woman named Gladys (Felicity Jones), and experiences great tragedy. (Bonus: You also get William H. Macy going full Walter Brennan as a crazy old coot!) But the movie truly hinges on Edgerton, who gives the best performance of his career playing the kind of stoic, callous-handed man who helped build modern America from the ground up.

And now for the conclusion of Jon M. Chu’s two-part adaptation of the Broadway musical juggernaut, which rewinds back to show us how The Wizard of Oz‘s resident good witch Glinda (Ariana Grande) and wicked witch Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) became the best of frenemies. Fans of the play knows how it ends, but for the rest of you new to this tragic and tuneful tale, hold on to your fucking broomsticks! Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Bowen Yang, Jonathan Bailey, Peter Dinklage and rest of the gang from Part 1 are all present and accounted for.

The wedding vows said “Til death do us part” — but that doesn’t stop Larry (Miles Teller) and Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) from meeting up in the afterlife after both of them die within weeks of each other. Given that they’d been happily betrothed for decades in the corporeal world, the assumption is that they will now spend eternity — see title! — together in the hereafter too. Except, well, funny story: Before Joan was married to Larry, she was the wife of a soldier named Luke (Callum Turner) who was killed in the Korean War. And now that she’s dead as well, shouldn’t they be posthumously joined as one for all time instead? Hot damn, we got ourselves a good old-fashioned existential A24 fantasy rom-com! The always Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early costar.

Set in Brazil circa 1977 — “a time of great mischief” — Kleber Mendonça Filho’s portrait of a fugitive (Narcos‘ Wagner Moura, who won the Best Actor prize at Cannes) feels like its setting you up for a paranoid political thriller. It soon adopts a kitchen-sink approach that incorporates everything from outré horror-movie sketches to odes to old movie theaters. You can tell this is the same filmmaker who made the pointed, character-driven drama Aquarius (2016), and co-directed the modern exploitation-cinema nugget Bacurau (2019), as well as the person who penned the elegiac love letter to Brazilian cinema, Pictures of Ghosts (2023). Yet the scope and ambitiousness of this extended period piece feels new for him.

There was never any doubt as to whether Disney would make a sequel to the super-popular 2016 animated hit, about two cops — a bunny and a fox — solving crimes in a world of anthropomorphic animals. The only question we have is: what took them so long? Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman once again voice Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde, Zootopia P.D.’s finest, as they try to catch a wily reptile named Gary DeSnake (played by Ke Huy Quan). Idris Elba, Shakira, Quinta Brunson, Jenny Slate, Tommy Chong, Jean Reno and Fortune Feimster also lend their pipes to the shenanigans.

Folks are already going nuts over this screen version of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, which focuses on the death of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, and the way that his untimely passing sent his parents into a dizzying spiral of grief. Specifically, they’ve singled out Jessie Buckley’s portrayal of the boy’s mom and the Bard’s wife, Agnes Shakespeare; expect to hear a lot about this performance as the Awards-Season Industrial Complex kicks into gear. But Paul Mescal’s take on a grieving William Shakespeare and the direction from Chloé Zhao (The Rider, Nomadland) will likely get tongues wagging as well, and in terms of dramas that are apt to leave you tearful and emotionally shattered, this may be the one to beat. Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn and David Wilmot are also strutting and fretting across the soundstage as well.

Rian Johnson’s gloriously goofy detective series goes for Round 3, as Daniel Craig’s sleuth Benoit Blanc finds himself embroiled in another case with loads of suspects and a suspiciously high body count. The plot itself is a mystery, but we do know that Johnson has once again assembled a who’s-who for his whodunnit: Andrew Scott, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Josh Brolin, Jeremy Renner, Cailee Spaeny, Josh O’Connor, Mila Kunis and Thomas Haden Church, among others.

Writer/director/producer/modern-dramedy-godhead James L. Brooks (Broadcast News, The Simpsons, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Terms of Endearment — do we need to go on?) returns with this story about a lawyer named Ella McCay (Sex Education‘s Emma Mackey) who’s been elected governor of her home state. But hey, just because you’re on a professional high doesn’t mean that everything’s kosher when it comes to dealing with your family, amirite? Especially once your deadbeat dad (Woody Harrelson) re-enters your life. The cast is crazy stacked: Jamie Lee Curtis, Ayo Edebiri, Slow Horses‘ Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Albert Brooks, Rebecca Hall, Julie “I Voice Marge” Kavner.

James Cameron shot this third Avatar movie simultaneously with the second one, 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water — and the title to this new one sounds way, way more menacing and apocalyptic than its predecessor. The usual suspects (Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, Stephen Lang) are back for more as well, continuing the saga of the Na’vi. Expect this film to make a hundred thousand gajillion dollars as well.

Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried star in an adaptation of Frieda McFadden’s 2022 novel about a troubled young woman who, desperate for a steady paycheck, takes a job working as a maid for a wealthy woman and her family in Westchester, New York. Everything seems peachy, until the newest addition to the household begins to suspect that every happy smile hides a number of rather dark secrets. Paul Feig directs this thriller — and we’re assuming we’re getting more of the Feig who made A Simple Favor rather than the Feig who gave us, say, Spy and Bridesmaids.

How many actor-directors does it take to make a movie involving failed marriages, a midlife crisis and the New York stand-up comedy scene? (I don’t know, how many actor-directors DOES it take to make a movie involving failed marriages, a midlife crisis and the New York stand-up comedy scene?!) The punchline: just one, if that person is Bradley Cooper. The multi-hyphenate maestro behind Maestro sets his sights on the story of a fiftysomething gentleman (Will Arnett, who co-wrote the film with Cooper and Mark Chappell) who finds salvation from his so-called life by making strangers laugh at his pain. Laura Dern plays his wife, who’s navigating some rocky waters of her own. Also on the bill: Sean Hayes, Amy Sedaris, Andra Day, Ciarán Hinds, and Peyton Manning, whom we are told was once a big deal in the world of sports?

Lotta folks were wondering what the deal was with Timothée Chalamet’s slim, trim mustache he was sporting during the press tours for A Complete Unknown, and no, he’s not following that Bob Dylan film with a biopic on John Waters. He grew it for this period drama from Josh Safdie (Uncut Gems, Good Time), about a ping-pong champion loosely based on real-life table-tennis whiz Marty Reisman. It’s both a sports drama and the answer to the future trivia question, “Which movie stars Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Penn Jillette, Tyler the Creator and Abel Ferrara?” Merry Christmas!