Real-life stories of Hollywood royalty, chronicles of singing poets and lovers, displays of supernatural super-heroics, and much more will vie for your attention across multiplex and media as the fall film season gets fully underway.
Filmmakers continue to showcase the movies they’ve been safely creating during the pandemic, and you’ll get a variety of new fare to enjoy on both big screens and home streaming in the months ahead.
Anticipated sequels and franchises include “No Time to Die,” the latest Daniel Craig 007 film; “Dune,” which covers half of the dense sci-fi novel about outer- space wars; “Halloween Kills” with further mayhem between Michael Myers and scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis; and “Maverick,” Tom Cruise’s long-awaited follow-up to “Top Gun.”
True-life sagas range from director Ridley Scott’s chronicle of a murderous fashion family with “House of Gucci,” starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver to Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos,” with Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as television idols Lucy and Desi Arnaz. Two tragic legends also get the big-screen treatment as Kristen Stewart plays Princess Diana in “Spencer” and Ana de Armas embodies Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” And “King Richard” stars Will Smith as the father and coach of the Williams tennis sisters.
After the recent successes of Marvel on television, an emboldened box office run should continue with recent Oscar winner Chloé Zhao’s ”Eternals,” featuring an ensemble of immortal gods such as Richard Madden, Angelina Jolie, and Salma Hayek plus the third in the latest “Spider-Man” trilogy,” “No Way Home,” injecting a bit of twisty multiverse time travel into the teen webslinger’s adventures.
“Dear Evan Hansen” with Ben Platt as a troubled teenager opposite Amy Adams and Julianne Moore, ushers in a season of musicals, followed by Peter Dinklage in an acclaimed crooning performance as “Cyrano”; Andrew Garfield as an artist on the brink of hitting it big as he faces an early mid-life crisis in “Tick Tick Boom”; the Colombia-set Disney animated family feature “Encanto,” about a magical family and Steven Spielberg’s version of “West Side Story,” starring Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler as star-crossed lovers in the ganglands of New York.
Awards season will heat up when Martin Scorsese presents “Killers of the Flower Moon,” starring Leo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro, Jane Campion showcases “Power of the Dog” with Kirsten Dunst and Benedict Cumberbatch, and Guillermo del Toro delivers “Nightmare Alley” with Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett. The next movie by the droll Wes Anderson, “The French Dispatch,” features talent such as Timothée Chalamet and Bill Murray.
Some other anticipated fare includes “Don’t Look Up,” a comet comedy with DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence; Kenneth Branagh’s personal black-and- white historical drama “Belfast” with Jamie Dornan and Judi Dench; and the artsy “Last Night in Soho” with eccentric leading lady Anya Taylor-Joy. Plus there’s some unexpected casting including Denzel Washington as the title character in “Tragedy of Macbeth” and Brendan Fraser as a 600-pound man in “The Whale.”
There’s something for everyone, and expect these and many more to receive their bite-sized reviews weekly at www.SilverScreenCapture.com.
(Silver Screen Capture) By Stephen Michael Brown – Chief Film Critic, Silver Screen Capture