Welcome aboard this flight LB24 to Fall Festival Season: keep your seatbelts fastened at all times and log your last four watched before assisting others. It is time again to either hunker down or get fired up for the time of year when there are more movies than hours in a day, across every part of the world, setting up the next year of conversation with a fresh crop of titles for us to sink our teeth into.

It’s also the first full fall festival season since the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike reached its end, bringing an enormous amount of new talent and storytelling to our hungry hearts once again. That covers but is not limited to: Chris Marker adaptations, Beat generation explorations, WWII ruminations, stardom fascinations, Hugh Grant going through something of a Jigsaw-ification (if we’re lucky).

This is, like every year, where the conversation begins, not where it ends: so get your watchlists ready and listen up as the Letterboxd crew whizzes through fifteen of the most curious titles to look forward to. See you at the movies!

Contributions from:  Siddhant Adlakha, Ella Kemp, Leo Koziol, Justin LaLiberty, Kadija Osman, Katie Rife, Rafa Sales Ross, Adesola Thomas, Mia Lee Vicino.

2073

Written and directed by Asif Kapadia from the film La Jetée by Chris Marker. Premiering at Venice.

Documentary tragedy is arguably the forte of British director Asif Kapadia. His films Senna and Amy chronicle the lives and untimely deaths of celebrities in the spotlight through race car driver Ayrton Senna and pop star Amy Winehouse, respectively. 2073 is set to be a major departure from the filmmaker’s usual style and focus, adapting Chris Marker’s landmark 1962 avant-garde science-fiction short La Jetée.

Little else is known about the film thus far, but while The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “documentary thriller,” it’s much more likely to be a piece of docu-fiction, since it stars actors like Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie and Hector Hewer. Marker’s film—which also served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys—follows a time traveler being ping-ponged between the past and a post-apocalyptic future, in an attempt to solve widespread problems that have arisen in the wake of World War III.

Kapadia hopes that the film will be “an epic about the state of the world,” and while his aesthetic approach to the material remains to be seen, his films have long proved emotionally piercing. It should be exciting to figure out how his eye for tragic figures will apply on a global scale.—SA

It was only two years ago that multi-talent Gail Maurice (Cree/Michif) premiered her first feature Rosie at TIFF, and now she’s back in a leading role as the eponymous Aberdeen in Ryan Cooper and Eva Thomas’s debut drama. Maurice has made a big impression in supporting roles (Night Raiders, Bones of Crows) and now has the chance to shine in a lead role playing a woman who must rise above hardships to save her grandkids, and herself.

Though Aberdeen looks to be a dark, gritty story, a clip also promises some dark humor as Aberdeen struggles with the maze of bureaucracy to get a Status Card proving that she is a Native person. Billy Merasty is also promised a role with great potential as Alfred. Discussing the film, TIFF programmer Kelly Boutsalis says: “Though elements of this story have been told before, Cooper and Thomas make Aberdeen a rich character, not a caricature. The film feels extremely personal and raw. Maurice’s performance, meanwhile, shows incredible emotional texture.”

Though this is the first feature for both co-directors, Thomas made an impression prior as director of the short film Red Lights (starring Kaniehtiio Horn, whose own film Seeds is premiering at TIFF) and also as one of the producers of Night Raiders.—LK

Apocalypse in the Tropics

Directed by Petra Costa. Premiering at Venice.

If Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here grapples with the ghosts of dictatorships past, Petra Costa’s newest deals with the very current ripples of Brazil’s military regime and its ultra-conservative past. Five years after receiving an Oscar nomination for The Edge of Democracy, an investigation of the Brazilian coup d’état that led to President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016 through the personal lens of her family history, Costa is back prodding at the country’s political landscape with her latest documentary.

Starting with the central question of where the lines between a democracy and a theocracy lie, Costa analyzes how the evangelical movement fueled Brazil’s plunge into far-right politics during Bolsonaro’s contentious presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic. With almost unprecedented access to some of the country’s most notorious figures on both sides of the political divide (including current president Lula and televangelist slash fervorous Bolsonaro supporter Silas Malafaia), Apocalypse in the Tropics promises to be a gripping watch, not only for those interested in Brazilian politics but for all curious about the global leaning into far-right idealism in the last decade and the fragility of the modern democracy.—RSR

Age-gap romances have been coming thick and fast in the last few years, which is arguably even more of a reason to pay attention to this one—Reijn is so acutely cognisant of online culture, the toxicity of frenzied youth and the endless complexities of sexual politics that you would hope she could only dare make something like this with some seriously good (however you interpret that) new learnings in her back pocket.—EK

Blitz

Written and directed by Steve McQueen. Premiering at BFI London Film Festival.

With narrative features like Hunger, Mangrove, and Lovers Rock under his belt, Steve McQueen’s filmography is undeniably marked by an ardor for historical drama filmmaking, especially that which contends with ethnic affinity and empire in the UK. So it’s fitting that the British director’s latest London-set World War II film Blitz is the opening film at the 68th London Film Festival.

In Blitz, loving mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) evacuates her nine-year-old Black son George (Elliott Heffernan) to the countryside with hopes of protecting him from the German Blitzkrieg. However, George has plans to make the solo journey back to his beloved metropolis, plans to reunite with his mother, plans pointed homeward.

Through its focus on a parent-child relationship in the midst of 20th century global conflict, Blitz will join the breadth of films like Life Is Beautiful and Come and See—features that disrupt the prototypical, boots on the ground, “war is hell” framework by entering the narrative through the perspective of innocent, affected children—an especially prescient vantage point to uplift. Blitz’s sheer scale and production design contributions of longtime McQueen collaboration Adam Stockhausen’s, are sure to transport us to London’s wartime yesteryear.—AT

The End

Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer. Premiering at Telluride.

Joshua Oppenheimer is a filmmaker who upends expectations every chance he gets. He’s best known for companion documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, which use fantastical reenactments of atrocities that occurred in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 to explore the psychology of genocide from both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s points of view. The End brings a whimsical touch to dark subject matter as well: it’s Oppenheimer’s first fictional work, following a wealthy family that has survived for twenty years after an unnamed apocalyptic event, living in a bunker lined with priceless works of art.

Then, a stranger arrives and challenges the family’s dynamic, forcing the parents (Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon) to confront their role in making the world what it’s become—and the secrets they’ve kept from their son (George MacKay) over the years. They do so in song, as one does. Yep: it’s a musical.—KR

From a screenplay by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, The Fire Inside (formerly known as Flint Strong) follows the travails of high school boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (Ryan Destiny) as she trains for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Though it reads like standard feel-good biopic fare, the combination of a Jenkins screenplay and the directing debut of Rachel Morrison—cinematographer of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Fruitvale Station—promises a nuanced and powerful cinematic eye.

The film has tons of dramatic potential, between Star and Grown-ish actress Destiny leading a true story with enormous physical and emotional hurdles, and the understated powerhouse Brian Tyree Henry (Causeway) playing Shields’ volunteer coach, Jason Crutchfield. Morrison, who also shot Dee Rees’ extraordinary historical drama Mudbound, has proved her ability to capture impactful Black stories for the silver screen several times over, with an eye for not only rollicking action but intimate drama against the wider backdrop of American and global politics. At the time the film is set, Shields’ hometown of Flint had fallen into financial ruin (and would eventually become a national talking point for its infamous water crisis), imbuing this tale of an underdog American fighter with the ability to capture the country’s own scrappy, underdog spirit too. —SA

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2

Written by Kevin Costner and Jon Baird, directed by Kevin Costner. Premiering at Venice.

That Kevin Costner has enough cachet as a filmmaker, despite only directing three prior features (with one of them being notoriously, unanimously panned) to embark on a four-film, approximately twelve-hour saga detailing the expansion of America in the years surrounding the Civil War, is as much a testament to his pedigree as a star in front of the camera as an approval of his work behind it. Costner won himself the highly coveted Best Director Oscar more than three decades ago for Dances with Wolves in 1991 and has spent much of his career since then as a bankable Hollywood lead, with a couple of directorial stints sprinkled in for good measure: 1997’s ill-fated, post-apocalyptic fable The Postman and 2003’s brass tacks revisionist western Open Range. That Horizon immediately seemed more similar to the latter, not to mention its overbearing lineage to Dances with Wolves, should have cemented it as a major cinematic event.

As fate would have it, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 fizzled at the box office, perpetuating the oft-cited narrative that old-fashioned, decidedly adult films don’t belong on cinema screens in the 2020s. Costner’s first entry into his personal (and personally financed) epic saga is a rip-roaring genre film from one of America’s great storytellers. It’s the type of grandiose filmmaking that we rarely see filmmakers—and, crucially, studios—taking a gamble on in the contemporary marketplace. That it only told a portion of a story makes its defiance of market trends even more admirable, until Warner Bros pulled Costner’s second installment from theatrical release. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 currently has no theatrical, or even digital, release scheduled. The only way to guarantee seeing it, at least anytime soon, is at its festival premiere this fall—picking up where the Cannes premiere for Chapter 1 left off. Nobody, (save for perhaps Letterboxd member Martin Scorsese with Killers of the Flower Moon) is making films like this in America in 2024. That, if nothing else.—JL

Love in the Big City

Directed by E.oni, based on the book by Sang Young Park. Premiering at TIFF.

Every once in a while, people in their twenties (early, mid, and late) need and deserve a coming-of-age story. One that encapsulates the feeling of being lost, of making new friends, of figuring out what you actually want to do with the rest of your life.

The most recent and revered films that fit the ‘coming of age of people in their 20s’ category are The Worst Person in the World and Cha Cha Real Smooth—soon joined by Love in the Big City. E.oni helms this South Korean slice-of-life rom-com starring Exhuma’s Kim Go-eun as the rebellious and vivacious Jae-hee and Steve Sanghyun Noh (Pachinko), as Heung-soo, a closeted gay man. Misunderstood by the people around them and only with each other to rely on, the two set on a quest to find love and themselves amidst the bustling city of Seoul. Based on the movie’s tagline: “Love without regrets, live life to the fullest”, this movie will either feel like a warm hug or a gut-punch. No bad options.—KO

Measures for a Funeral

Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz, written by Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell from the short film Veslemøy’s Song by Bohdanowicz. Premiering at TIFF.

TIFF may often be a destination for major Hollywood fare, but it’s a Canadian festival at heart, where the best of Canada’s independent movies can shine. Case in point: the return of director Sofia Bohdanowicz and her frequent collaborator Deragh Campbell, who not only stars in Measures for a Funeral but also co-wrote the screenplay. Campbell, an underrated and highly captivating screen presence, plays Audrey Benac, a woman researching the oft-forgotten 1920s Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow at a fraught time in her own life. Not only is Audrey fleeing her dying mother—a failed musician—but she hopes to escape the shadow of her famous violinist father, whose legacy haunts them both.

The film is set to blend fiction and reality in intriguing ways—Parlow was once the musical mentor of Bohdanowicz’s own grandfather—but what makes the movie’s promise especially compelling is the history between director and star. This is the sixth in a loosely connected series of films by Bohdanowicz (including TIFF selection A Woman Escapes, a 3D experiment she co-directed), in which Campbell plays the character of Audrey. These include not only the TIFF feature MS Slavic 7(co-directed by Campbell), but the short film Veslemøy’s Song, which serves as the basis for Measures for a Funeral. Over the last eight years, Audrey’s fictional experiences with grief and historical rediscovery have made her feel palpably real, positioning Bohdanowicz and Campbell’s latest collab as a must-watch for fans of eccentric indie cinema.—SA

The Room Next Door

Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Premiering at Venice.

The last time that Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton collaborated was on their minimalist, pandemic-era short film The Human Voice, a film born out of circumstance but nonetheless captivating due to its creators and collaborators. Since then, Almodóvar has made only one feature, 2021’s maternal melodrama Parallel Mothers. The Room Next Door is not only Almodóvar’s return to features following two short films—the aforementioned The Human Voice followed by 2023’s Strange Way of Life—but his first feature in English.

Swinton is joined in the film by Julianne Moore, the duo playing friends rekindling a relationship after being apart for years. It’s hard to say how this will play out as Sony Pictures Classics has released very little apart from a couple of stills of the film which, unsurprisingly, showcase Almodóvar’s signature warm color palette as well as his two new muses. On paper, this sounds like it could be Almodóvar’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, a histrionic chamber drama with two of contemporary cinema’s great actresses being directed by a revered iconoclast. It’s too early to say, and it could be wishful thinking, but The Room Next Door has the makings of another Almodóvar favorite. And, at the very least, it could garner him and his film some serious awards attention following the two Oscar nominations for Parallel Mothers, and perhaps his first directing nomination since Talk to Her in 2003.—JL