What to Do in New York City This Fall
Outer-Space Monsters, an Elon Musk Doc
Creature features arrive from around the world, starting with the South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s science-fiction drama “Hope” (Sept. 9), in which a small-town police officer joins with local hunters to fight reptilian monsters from outer space. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s comedic fantasy “Wicker” (Oct. 23) stars Olivia Colman as a medieval fishmonger who, when she can’t find a real-life husband, commissions one (Alexander Skarsgård) made of the titular material. Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” (Nov. 6), premièring at the New York Film Festival, brings back the kaiju icon, in a drama set in Japan in 1949.
The season’s wide-ranging documentaries include John Wilson’s first feature film, “The History of Concrete” (Sept. 18), an idiosyncratic exploration of the ubiquitous substance, which leads him from Queens to Rome, Ohio, and Las Vegas. The first part of Julia Loktev’s “My Undesirable Friends” showed the filmmaker’s journalist friends in Moscow facing persecution; in “Part II—Exile” (Oct. 9), she shows many of the same people continuing their work outside Russia. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” (Oct. 16), filmed in 1972, by the late William Greaves, gathers many of the then elderly luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance for discussions and reminiscences that bring the era’s personalities and achievements to light; the film was completed posthumously, in 2025, by his son, David Greaves. Little is known about “Musk” (Oct. 16), Alex Gibney’s investigative portrait of Elon Musk, other than its four-hour running time.
New literary adaptations include “Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day” (Sept. 4), based on the author’s 1919 novel, about a wellborn woman (Haley Bennett) who, in order to pursue a career as an astronomer, rejects an arranged marriage; Tina Gharavi directed. Georgia Oakley’s “Sense and Sensibility” (Oct. 16) gives Jane Austen’s novel, about the romantic tribulations of the financially straitened Dashwood daughters, a fresh workout; the cast includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Esmé Creed-Miles, Caitriona Balfe, and Bodhi Rae Breathnach. The thriller “Verity” (Oct. 2), based on a novel by Colleen Hoover, stars Dakota Johnson as a writer who comes to suspect that a successful author she’s been hired to ghostwrite for (Anne Hathaway) has committed murder.
Comedy is joined with the megawatt celebrity of Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” (Oct. 2), about an oil tycoon who is summoned by the President (John Goodman) to head off an environmental catastrophe. In Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” (Sept. 25), set in Tokyo, a widowed ballroom dancer (Rinko Kikuchi) becomes infatuated with a married dance teacher (Alberto Guerra). Maude Apatow directs her mother, Leslie Mann, in “Poetic License” (Oct. 16), about a middle-aged woman who audits a class at a local college and becomes romantically entangled with two younger students (Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman).
The season’s bio-pics veer between mind and body, modern times and history. “By Any Means” (Sept. 4), directed by Elegance Bratton, is based on the true story of the mobster Gregory Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg), who, in 1966, collaborated with an F.B.I. agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) to investigate the murder of civil-rights activists in Mississippi. Michael Dowse’s “The Stunt Driver” (Sept. 25) stars Jay Baruchel as the daredevil Ken Carter, who sought to drive a rocket-powered car across the St. Lawrence River in the nineteen-seventies. “Primetime” (Sept. 25) dramatizes the development of the TV program “To Catch a Predator,” featuring Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson); Lance Oppenheim directed. Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” (Oct. 9), a sequel to “The Social Network,” stars Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, whose former employee (Mikey Madison) discloses internal workings at Facebook to a journalist (Jeremy Allen White).—Richard Brody
