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From the big screen debut of a classic musical to the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s Roman epic, here are the films you need to see this month.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
The story behind Seed of the Sacred Fig is as remarkable as what happens on screen. Writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof shot the film in secret, as he was imprisoned in Iran for making anti-regime statements. Shortly after the film was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, Rasoulof was sentenced to another eight years in prison, but managed to escape the country and arrive in Cannes in time for the red carpet premiere. Seed of the Sacred Fig became one of the most highly acclaimed films at the festival. The protagonists, Iman (Misagh Zareh) and Najmeh (Sohailah Golestani), are determined to keep Iman out of trouble after she is promoted to a high-paying government job. So tensions rise when her two daughters, Rezvan (Matha Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), show signs of rebellion. “This passionate thriller deserves the widest possible audience,” Ryan Lattanzio told IndieWire. “Rasulov creates a compelling allegory about the corrupting cost of power and the oppression of women under a religion that oppresses the very people religious patriarchy claims to protect.”
Available in the U.S. on November 27th
The Piano Lesson
The Piano Lesson is a family affair. This supernatural drama is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson, produced by Denzel Washington, directed by one of his sons, Malcolm Washington, and stars the other half of the duo, John David Washington. The story is also about family. John David Washington and Daniel Deadwyler play brother and sister, Boy Willie and Berniece. In 1936, Boy Willie returns to Pittsburgh after serving time in prison and offers to sell his precious heirloom, a century-old piano carved with the faces of his enslaved ancestors. The brothers’ uncle is played by Samuel L. Jackson, who played Boy Willie in the original production of Wilson’s play in 1987. “With heartfelt performances and an instantly unforgettable directorial debut, The Piano is a lesson in love, friendship and family,” Carla Renata told The Wrap. “It reminds us that generational wealth isn’t just financial, it’s also emotionally and genetically tied to our ancestors.”
Emilia Pérez
Director Jacques Audiard is known for hard-hitting contemporary thrillers like The Beat of My Heart, A Prophet, The Rust and the Bones, and Dheepan, but the plot of his latest film, Emilia Pérez, suggests it’s more of the same: Zoe Saldanha plays a lawyer who helps a Mexican gangster (Carla Sofía Gascón) get gender reassignment surgery so she can start a new life as Emilia. The kicker is that the film is a musical, which means Saldanha and her co-stars, including Selena Gomez, belt out songs written by French pop star Camille on repeat. “Emilia Pérez is a hip-shaking, scalpel-wielding, bizarrely brilliant work,” Nick Howells said in the Evening Standard. “It’s a brilliantly original tribute to all those who are genuinely trying to forge their own path, and especially the incredible women who do so under extreme pressure.”
Here
Directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Eric Roth, with Tom Hanks as the hero and Robin Wright as the heroine, this is the first time that this has been said about a film since Forest Gump 30 years ago, but the project in which these four old colleagues finally reunite and in a way explode across time and technological boundaries is no less ambitious. Based on Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, Here tells the story of a couple’s marriage, but focuses on the space seen from a single perspective across several decades. It even shows how the same landscape looked in the distant past and the distant future. “The individual’s perspective never changes, but everything around it changes,” Zemeckis told Anthony Breznican in Vanity Fair. “In fact, nothing like this has ever happened before. There were similar scenes in very early silent films, before the language of montage was invented. But aside from that, this was dangerous work.”
Available in the U.S. on November 1st and Canada on November 29th
Juror #2
Ridley Scott may have made Gladiator II at age 86, but he’s still a rookie compared to Clint Eastwood, who, at age 94, just made his 40th film as a director. “I honestly thought he’d have quit by now,” said producer Robert Lorenz, Eastwood’s friend and collaborator. “I spoke to him right before Juror #2 and he said, ‘No, I don’t think I’m going to do any more of this.’ So it wouldn’t be surprising if this is his last movie. But you never say never. He’s always full of surprises, this guy.” Juror #2 might have a few surprises in store, too. Written by Jonathan A. Abrams, the film is a legal thriller in which Nicholas Hoult plays family-minded Justin Kemp, who is selected as a juror for a highly publicized murder trial. The defendant is accused of running over his girlfriend with his car, but Justin remembers crashing his car into something or someone on the dark, stormy night in question. Can he stop an innocent person from going to prison without incriminating himself?
Available in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland on November 1st and in Italy on November 14th
Moana 2
Ridley Scott may have made Gladiator II at age 86, but he’s still a rookie compared to Clint Eastwood, who, at age 94, just made his 40th film as a director. “I honestly thought he’d have quit by now,” said producer Robert Lorenz, Eastwood’s friend and collaborator. “I spoke to him right before Juror #2 and he said, ‘No, I don’t think I’m going to do any more of this.’ So it wouldn’t be surprising if this is his last movie. But you never say never. He’s always full of surprises, this guy.” Juror #2 might have a few surprises in store, too. Written by Jonathan A. Abrams, the film is a legal thriller in which Nicholas Hoult plays family-minded Justin Kemp, who is selected as a juror for a highly publicized murder trial. The defendant is accused of running over his girlfriend with his car, but Justin remembers crashing his car into something or someone on the dark, stormy night in question. Can he stop an innocent person from going to prison without incriminating himself?
Available in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland on November 1st and in Italy on November 14th
Gladiator II
Ever since Gladiator hit theaters in 2000, people have been wondering how to make a sequel, but it was no easy task considering the original movie’s protagonist, Maximus Decimus Meridius, played by Russell Crowe, was killed at the end. Crowe even commissioned rock star Nick Cave to write a script in which Maximus meets the Roman gods in the underworld before being reincarnated. But now that enough time has passed, there is an easier way to continue Ridley Scott’s romantic saga. In Gladiator II, Paul Mescal plays Lucius, the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) and presumably Maximus. After his family is killed by soldiers of General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), Lucius receives combat training from Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave who plots to overthrow the emperor (Joseph Quinn). “Gladiator II is much bigger, rougher and more brutal than the original,” Gabriella Paiella said in GQ. “There are full-scale fight scenes, as well as some wild one-on-one battles. You’ll spend a good chunk of the movie trembling and twitching.”
In cinemas worldwide November 22nd
Wicked
This Wizard of Oz musical spinoff is directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights). The film stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, and Ariana Grande as Galinda Upland, the future good Glinda. First, they are roommates at the magical Shizu University. So how do they become enemies? Audiences will find out the answer to this question next year. Wicked is 160 minutes long, but it only covers half the show. For the first time in history, a Hollywood musical will be released in two parts, with the second part not coming out until November 2025. “When we were preparing for production last year, it became impossible to fit the story of Wicked into a single film without compromising it. The extra space allows us to tell the story the way it should be told,” Chu explained.
It will be in theaters worldwide from November 22nd. ”
A Real Pain
If you’ve seen Kieran Culkin in Succession and Jesse Eisenberg in Well, Whatever, you know just how far apart their usual movie roles are. While Eisenberg tends to play nervous, anxious characters, Culkin, as the Toronto Star put it, is “a human exclamation point, eager to grab attention and make a buzz.” The gap between the pair is filled with hilarious and painful disagreements in A Real Pain, the acclaimed, soulful comedy that Eisenberg wrote, directed and produced. He and Culkin play estranged cousins who reunite on a road trip through Poland in honor of their late grandmother. “There’s a comical clash, punctuated by a gorgeous Chopin piano score,” Howell says. He deploys a humanistic style in the vein of Hal Ashby or Alexander Payne that is a joy to watch.”
Coming November 1 in the US
Blitz
British films about the Second World War tend to focus on fighters (Dunkirk), spies (Operation Mincemeat) and leaders (Darkest Hour), but Steve McQueen’s Blitz shows what life was like for ordinary Londoners, the people whose nighttime bombing raids the German Luftwaffe had to endure. The focus is on two EastEnders, a single mother (Saoirse Ronan) and her nine-year-old son George (Elliot Heffernan). George is put on a train to the countryside with thousands of other London children to stay safe, but determined to get home, he sneaks back into the war-torn metropolis. Written and directed by McQueen, the Oscar-winning creator of 12 Years a Slave, the adventure is “innovative and insightful,” says Clarice Laurie in The Independent, “and that’s precisely because it’s told through the eye of a unique director — expressionistic but rarely sentimental, disturbing in its horror but tender in its hope, and deeply concerned with the everyday lives of others.”
It’s available in the US and UK on November 1st and on Apple TV+ worldwide on November 22nd.
Queer
Luca Guadagnino, director of Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All and The Challengers, has made another lavish drama about passionate but not always happy relationships. It is an adaptation of William Burroughs’ autobiographical novel Queer. Daniel Craig plays William Lee, a dissolute American expatriate who bounces from bar to bar in Mexico City in the 1950s. He is obsessed with a handsome young man (Drew Starkey) and is determined to find a herb in the South American jungle that will give him telepathic powers. “It’s not just the explicit love scenes that leave little to the imagination,” David Fear said in Rolling Stone. “What’s striking is the vulnerability the actor displays…. Embodied as Burroughs’s alter-ego, experiencing Lee’s lust, jealousy, world-weariness, want and bliss, Craig perfectly unravels this lovesick, doomed romantic.”
Available in the U.S. on November 27th
September 5
On September 5, 1972, a Palestinian terrorist group took several Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics. Eleven athletes and five terrorists were killed. The incident was the subject of Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning Storyville documentary One Day in September, and its aftermath was the subject of Steven Spielberg’s thriller Munich. Director Tim Fehlbaum’s new docudrama tells the story from the perspective of the US news team on the scene. Featuring Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin and Leonie Benesch, the ABC sports reporters expected to report on nothing more important than the swimming, but found themselves faced with enormous technical and ethical challenges. Is it justifiable to broadcast a potentially horrific event live on television? If so, how can they do it with the limited facilities available? “Editor Hansjörg Weisbrich keeps this intimate drama moving at a brisk pace, harnessing the wild energy of his diverse cast of characters,” Tim Grierson wrote in Screen Daily. “With a stripped-down documentary style that accentuates the tense situation… September 5th recounts that tragic day of electrification and terror, drawing on powerful performances to reflect on the media’s responsibility in such a volatile situation.”
Release date: November 27 in the US
