The good news is that the fall film season is a superhero-free zone, unless you count the government agents who rescued a small group of American hostages in Iran or the operatives who tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden. Autumn films will still be packed with action, but you will not have to check your brain at the door.
In fact, your brain will get quite a workout with ambitious new releases like Cloud Atlas, which interweaves six plot lines in six different time periods, or even a sci-fi item like Looper, which poses a dilemma for a hit man, assigned to kill his time-traveling future self.
The fall is the season when award bait arrives in theaters, and this fall will see releases by such Oscar-winning directors as Ang Lee, Tom Hooper, Sam Mendes, Kathryn Bigelow and Steven Spielberg. There will be literary items ranging from Anna Karenina to Les Miserables, biographies of presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt and, oh yeah, a movie about a guy named James Bond.
Here is a highly subjective look at 15 films scheduled to be released between now and the end of the year, but as always their release dates or arrivals in the area are subject to change based on studio or distributor whims.
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Looper (Opened Sept. 28) ― High on the list of loopy movie concepts for this fall is this science fiction notion from director Rian Johnson (Brick) about assassins who kill targets sent back from the future. It’s not the time travel idea that’s so strange, but that hit man Joseph Gordon-Levitt becomes Bruce Willis 30 years from now. The fact that he is assigned to off Willis is easy to buy. Gordon-Levitt has gradually become a must-see performer (Inception, Dark Knight Rises) and Looper sounds promising, even if it probably should be a summer release.
Frankenweenie (Oct. 5) ― Fans of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride should be lining up for the latest perverse stop-action animated feature from the twisted, talented Tim Burton. Fancying himself a mad scientist, a little boy attempts to bring his deceased pet dog back to life, and succeeds beyond his wildest expectations. The film is an expansion of a short that Burton made in the mid-’80s, a passion project that he renders in retro black-and-white. Further demonstrating he is a softie for actors from his past projects, he casts that little kleptomaniac Winona Ryder (Beetlejuice) as one of the movie’s voices.
Argo (Oct. 12) ― Ben Affleck’s journey from tabloid punch line to accomplished film director (Gone Baby Gone, The Town) is likely to continue its upward trajectory with this suspenseful so-far-fetched-it-has-to-be-true rescue of American hostages in Iran by CIA operatives posing as a science-fiction film crew. Affleck casts himself as the key “exfiltration” expert, and then surrounds himself with wily veteran talent like Alan Arkin and John Goodman.
Seven Psychopaths (Oct. 12) ― The transition from the theater to the movies has tripped up many a writer-director, but darkly comic yarn-spinner Martin McDonagh made it look easy with the droll In Bruges. Now, he is out to prove that was no fluke with this shaggy dog story of a shih tzu stolen from a mob boss who becomes crazed with the need for revenge. Irishman McDonagh sets the murky yarn in sunny Los Angeles, reportedly doing for the City of Angels what he did for the quaint Belgian town of Bruges. He brings back In Bruges star Colin Farrell, as well as Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell from the Broadway cast of his A Behanding in Spokane.
The Sessions (Oct. 26) ― John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) plays a real-life journalist-poet who has spent most of his 38 years in an iron lung fighting polio. No wonder he never got around to having sex. Now, intent on losing his virginity, he enlists the help of a therapeutic surrogate ― sort of a clinical hooker ― played by Oscar winner Helen Hunt. The emotional film copped the Audience Award at Sundance earlier this year, and Hunt and Hawkes are naked for most of the film. Apparently priest William H. Macy is not.
Cloud Atlas (Oct. 26) ― The potential mind-blower of the year, this harnessing of David Mitchell’s sprawling novel took three directors ― Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix Trilogy) and Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) ― to capture this story of six interwoven tales that take place in six separate time periods. In all, it is a parable of courage and loyalty, with a stellar cast that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent, who appear as different characters in the various eras. Got that?
Flight (Nov. 2) ― Denzel Washington’s specialty is playing noble, but flawed men, like his latest role as a pilot who makes an emergency landing and gains sudden media attention, bringing exposure to his long-hidden drinking problem. Sounds like an action picture grafted onto a character study. Robert Zemeckis directs, returning to live-action and away from the motion-capture stuff that saw limited success. Coming off her Oscar win, Melissa Leo is enjoying more visibility, here playing a federal investigator, in a cast that includes Don Cheadle and the busy John Goodman.
Skyfall (Nov. 9) ― Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) hardly seems a logical choice to helm the 23rd installment in the long-running, mega-lucrative British spy series, but it seems he has re-invented himself into an action filmmaker, rather than bend the series to his more low-key instincts. The main thing is that Daniel Craig is back as 007, pitted against wily Javier Bardem as a blond-coiffed baddie, intent on taking down James Bond and his boss, M (Judi Dench), with him. Locations include China and Turkey, which ups the visual ante, but otherwise expect the usual doses of tasteful sex and violence.
Lincoln (Nov. 9) ― What makes this biography of the final months of our 16th president such an anticipated awards magnet? Director Stephen Spielberg. Screenwriter Tony Kushner. Actor Daniel Day-Lewis. It probably never occurred to you how much the chameleon-like Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood) looks like ol’ Honest Abe, but after seeing still photos from this film, the resemblance is unmistakable. Arriving just days after our current national election, this saga of a man wracked by the difficulties of governing a divided country should put our contemporary woes in perspective. Sally Field plays Lincoln’s unhinged wife Mary and the ubiquitous Joseph Gordon-Levitt is his son, Robert Todd.
Anna Karenina (Nov. 16) ― The prestige literary release of the fall is likely to be this adaptation of the great Tolstoy romantic classic (especially since the latest remake of The Great Gatsby has become a no-show this Oscar season). The film reunites director Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) with his star, Keira Knightley, as the aristocrat’s wife who is drawn to have an affair with a cavalry officer. The story, of course, has been told many times on screen with such actresses as Greta Garbo and Vivien Leigh in the title role, but what seems likely to set this one apart is the screenplay by the verbally nimble Tom Stoppard.
Life of Pi (Nov. 21) ― Remember The Old Man and the Sea? Well, picture a young man and a tiger, together in a lifeboat, adrift at sea, desperate to survive. Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) tries to render Yann Martel’s symbol-laden novel about teenager Piscine Patel ― nicknamed “Pi” ― traveling from India on a freighter carrying zoo animals, when a storm hits and sends him overboard with some hungry critters. Improbable, but go with it. The advance word is Lee has another Oscar contender on his hands.
Hyde Park on Hudson (Dec. 7) ― Bill Murray is notorious for turning down roles, so when he reluctantly agrees to play Franklin Roosevelt, it earns our attention. The film pinpoints a pivotal moment in history in 1939 when England’s King George VI visits FDR at his upstate New York retreat to persuade him to lend support for the war effort in Europe. Based on a BBC radio play from three years ago, the weekend meeting is recalled by a distant cousin of the president’s (Laura Linney). Can’t you see the Best Actor Oscar coming down to a match-up between Lincoln and Roosevelt?
Zero Dark Thirty (Dec. 19) ― As Hillary Clinton once said “It takes a village…” and she could have been talking about ridding the world of terrorist figureheads. We may never know the full story of the tracking down and assassinating of Taliban honcho Osama bin Laden, but director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal ― the Oscar-winning team of The Hurt Locker ― will fill in some of the details and supply some visuals through their re-enactment of events. Much of the movie takes us on deep background, watching the grunt work of CIA operatives like Jessica Chastain, before Navy SEALs such as Joel Edgerton ever stepped in. Still, with such a politically charged subject, expect this one to split audience opinions.
Amour (Dec. 19) ― Controversial Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke (Cache, The White Ribbon) walked off with this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for this disturbing portrait of two octogenarians that seems tailored to a South Florida audience. Actors of a certain age, Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Emmanuelle Riva, play a Parisian couple that has to face the realities of her drift into dementia. Painful to watch, it is the opposite of a holiday feel-good film, which is part of the reason why we cannot wait to see it.
Les Misérables (Dec. 25) ― Carrying the hopes of the movie musical genre is this big-screen epic version of the international stage hit. It is based on Victor Hugo’s sprawling 19th-century novel of the cat-and-mouse pursuit of former prisoner Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) by police inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), set against a backdrop of a student uprising and general unrest. Coming off his Oscar win for The King’s Speech, director Tom Hooper wants to show off his versatility and the early trailers on the Internet certainly look and sound very promising. OK, the studio is keeping Crowe’s singing under wraps, but the rest of the cast ― including Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne ― sound good. If theater fans look closely, they may notice a cameo by Colm Wilkinson, Broadway’s original Valjean, more than 25 years ago.