The pandemic is over (mostly). So are the dual writers and actors strikes from last year, both of which lasted for months and delayed the number of movies set to open this fall. The good news is that summer gave us two mammoth blockbusters in "Inside Out 2" and "Deadpool & Wolverine," both of which grossed over $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Take that "Barbenheimer."
The bad news is that cinema attendance is still struggling, so the heat is on for fall movies to deliver big time. I'm expecting massive ticket sales for the sequels to "Beetlejuice," "Joker," "Gladiator" and "Moana," a prequel bonanza for "Mufasa: The Lion King" and gravity-defying grosses for the film version of the Broadway mega-musical smash "Wicked."
Emmy nominations 2024: Snubs and surprisesAnd don't forget Oscar, since fall is the prime hunting season for chasing gold. The buzz is at maximum sizzle for Edward Berger's "Conclave," about a cardinal (Ralph Fiennes) in charge of a papal election that mirrors the choices facing us at the November ballot box, Steve McQueen's historical epic "Blitz," about a London mother (Saoirse Ronan) trying to find her young son amid the World War II chaos of German bomb raids, and RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys," from the Pulitzer-winning Colson Whitehead novel about the horrors uncovered at a Florida boys academy.
And you can expect tour de force performances from Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown," Amy Adams tackling the title role in "Nightbitch," Daniel Craig playing against "007" type in "Queer," Nicole Kidman chasing a younger man in "Babygirl" and Angelina Jolie hitting operatic high notes in "Maria" (as in Callas).
On the newcomer front, keep your eyes on Mikey Madison ("Scream") as a stripper/sex worker in Sean Baker's "Anora" and Karla Sofía Gascón as the first openly trans woman to collect a major acting prize at Cannes for playing a drug boss in transition in Jacques Audiard's "Emilia Pérez." The first trans best actress Oscar winner is a tantalizing possibility.
It's quite a lineup as Hollywood brings out its top guns to get us back to the moviegoing habit again this fall. Here are the 30 contenders that I'm betting on to make the biggest noise.
"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"
"The Juice is loose." Those four immortal words should be enough to get you cheering for the horror-comedy sequel we've been waiting for since the 1988 original. Director Tim Burton is back with Michael Keaton in tow in the funniest role of his career as Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice), the lecherous, pasty-faced, motor-mouthed, rotting corpse who feeds on rats and insects and makes a hilarious art of being totally disgusting. Winona Ryder also returns as the living embodiment of goth, with newbie Jenna Ortega ("Wednesday") perfectly cast as her daughter Astrid, who opens a shiny new portal to the afterlife. Of course she does. It's showtime.
"Wolfs"
If you think you're not all that jazzed by an action-comedy about two lone-wolf fixers hired for the same crime job, you definitely will be once you add the cool factor that comes with casting the title roles with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. The "Ocean's Eleven" vibe is definitely on purpose. "Nobody can do what I do," says Clooney. Pitt thinks differently. And director Jon Watts of the Tom Holland "Spider-Man" trilogy thinks that two hours of basking in the Clooney/Pitt starshine can sustain two hours of screen time. He must be right. A sequel is already on the books.
"The Substance"
Can Demi Moore win an acting Oscar? It just might be possible going by the glowing reviews out of the Cannes Film Festival that claim Moore nails it as a washed-up Hollywood star who gets fired from hosting a second-rate TV exercise program. In the cruel words of bossman Dennis Quaid, "This is network TV, not charity." That's when Moore finds a substance that transforms her into a younger version of herself. Expect the unexpected as director Coralie Fargeat ("Revenge") takes aim at the ageism that renders women as finished at 50. Ha!
"A Different Man"
Sebastian Stan is astounding as Edward, a New York actor afflicted with neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic condition that caused benign tumors to grow on his face. After an experimental procedure, Edward emerges with Stan's own handsome face. But he loses a role in a new play to Oswald (Adam Pearson), a performer with the same condition in real life but with a natural actor's charisma that puts Edward in the shade. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg creates a comedy of shocking gravity about illusion and reality.
"Megalopolis"
Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola ("The Godfather," "Apocalypse Now"), 85, invested $120 million of his own fortune into this passion project about a visionary architect (Adam Driver). The film updates the fall of ancient Rome into a futuristic tale of modern New York. Despite the presence of great actors from Dustin Hoffman to Aubrey Plaza, advance buzz has already trounced the epic as the fall of Coppola. Screw that. I can't imagine any true cinema advocate with no interest -- boom or bust -- in seeing what a cinema master would make of themes of power and how it corrupts that have obsessed him for generations.
"Joker: Folie à Deux"
This wildly ambitious sequel to the Todd Phillips blockbuster that won Joaquin Phoenix a best actor Oscar as homicidal clown Arthur Fleck, aka Joker, has no intention of repeating itself. For starters, it's a musical with songs covered by Phoenix and reliably incandescent new cast member Lady Gaga as Arthur's music therapist and love interest, Harleen "Lee" Quinzel, a.k.a. Harley Quinn. In shrink terms, "Folie à Deux" is a madness shared by two people. It can also be applied to the crazy faith of filmmakers who think what the world needs now is a song-and-dance love story between two certified lunatics. They just might be right.
"The Outrun"
Saoirse Ronan, also starring this fall in "Blitz," brings her considerable grit and grace to the role of Rona, a raging London alcoholic just out of rehab and eager to find a kind of healing by returning home to the wild beauty of the Orkney Islands, off the north coast of Scotland. Based on the 2016 memoir by Amy Liptrot, Nora Fingscheidt's film is a poetic provocation about what it takes to know your demons and find the strength to move past them.
"The Apprentice"
Making it into theaters just under the wire for Election Day comes this provocative look at the young Donald Trump, played by an award-caliber Sebastian Stan. Please note that "The Apprentice" has nothing to do with the reality competition series of the same name that Trump hosted for more than a decade. Instead, we watch ambitious Donald grow from a son intimidated by his real estate baron father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), to an apprentice of cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn (a superb Jeremy Strong) who instructs his protege to "attack, attack, attack, admit nothing, deny everything and always claim victory." Director Ali Abbasi tracks Trump from the 1970s to the 1980s to show the key moments that helped form the once and future POTUS. The result is food for thought on both sides of the Trump divide.
"Saturday Night"
This unique experiment is not a documentary but an attempt to recreate the spirit of Oct. 11, 1975, when "Saturday Night Live" made its historic debut and made stars of its cast. Already buzzed as one of 2024's movie must-sees, "Saturday Night" only started shooting this year, and here it is ready for the Oscar race. Director Jason Reitman and cowriter Gil Kenan interviewed all surviving members of the original cast, handpicking young Gabriel LaBelle of "The Fabelmans" to play SNL's forever producer Lorne Michaels. Add in Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Matt Wood as John Belushi, Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd, and Nicholas Braun (the immortal Cousin Greg on "Succession") playing both muppeteer Jim Henson and self-described anti-comedian Andy Kaufman, and we're all in a wild party that changed the face of TV comedy. The anticipation for this movie is on fire.
"We Live in Time"
This love story begins with a hit-and-run involving driver Almut (Florence Pugh) putting Tobias (Andrew Garfield) in a neck brace. Much drama, clinical and sexual, takes place over time as the the two marry, have a daughter and deal with issues that will have audiences crying their eyes out. With shining stars Garfield and Pugh generating romantic sparks and "Brooklyn" director John Crowley at the helm, even the soap suds have class.
"Anora"
The darling of the Cannes Film Festival -- the Greta Gerwig-led jury awarded it the coveted Palme d'Or -- "Anora" will finally put director Sean Baker where he belongs, up there with other world-class filmmakers. Baker's distinctive take on life on the fringes, seen in "Tangerine," "The Florida Project" and "Red Rocket," comes to the fore in this tale of Anora (Mikey Madison), a stripper at a Manhattan club who also does sex work. She lives among the Russian enclave in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach and thinks she's hit the jackpot when Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the stringbean son of a Russian oligarch, offers her $15,000 to be his girlfriend for a week. What happens next, including a knockout ending you'll never forget, is essential Baker. Madison, 25, gives a star-making performance that awards are made for. Expect Oscar love to flow for her and Baker. No list of 2024's best films would be complete without "Anora."
"Nickel Boys"
Signs that this one is a powerhouse include its opening night slot at the prestigious New York Film Festival. It's a film adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel based on an infamously abusive reform school in 1960s Florida, called the Nickel Academy. The film sees these horrific events through the eyes of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse of "When They See Us"), a young Black student sent to the academy on false charges that later led to discovering murdered bodies on the property. Noted documentarian RaMell Ross is making his feature debut in the film, which also stars the reliably magnificent Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor ("King Richard"). This is a movie that matters.
"Conclave"
The Oscar race for best picture will really heat up with the release of this film version of the 2016 Robert Harris bestselling suspense novel about the death of a pope and the conclave of cardinals called to Rome to vote on his successor. Any resemblance to the in-fighting in our own U.S. elections is purely intentional. Director Edward Berger, whose "All Quiet on the Western Front" certified him as a major talent, stages the action starring Ralph Fiennes as the cardinal trying to bring order out of chaos as two prelates, played by Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, fight for papal dominance. With the great Isabella Rossellini as a nun struggling with men in robes making all the rules, look for an ending that really speaks to our changing times.
"Blitz"
Sir Steve McQueen, the Londoner who became the first Black filmmaker and producer to win a best picture Oscar for "12 Years a Slave," revisits another tumultuous historical moment in "Blitz," about the German air raids on the U.K. during World War II. On a personal level, this epic concerns a mother, played by the sublime Saoirse Ronan, trying to locate her young son (Elliott Heffernan) as the bombs fall. McQueen is just the talent to deliver on the intimate and the epic.
"A Real Pain"
Welcome Jesse Eisenberg to the ranks of actors who also have what it takes to write and direct. His talents shine in this riveting road movie about two Jewish cousins, played by Eisenberg and an all-systems-go Kieran Culkin, who take what they call a Holocaust tour of Poland, where they visit the grave of their grandmother, a survivor of the camps. Eisenberg makes something funny and fierce out of this generational mashup, but it's Culkin who finds the real pain inside this comedy of shocking gravity. You can't shake Culkin's performance. It takes a piece out of you.
"Here"
What to make of a movie that reunites the stars of "Forrest Gump" -- Tom Hanks and Robin Wright -- in a love story that reaches across time to follow lives that are definitely not a box of chocolates? Working from a script he wrote with Eric Roth, "Gump" director Robert Zemeckis uses a form of artificial intelligence to de-age and face-swap the characters as they move from young love and marriage into their 80s. Set in the same house we watch being assembled during the colonial era, "Here" is the kind of claustrophobic experiment that's hard to pull off, but Zemeckis seems to thrive on films that threaten to go off the rails. Reason enough to join him on the high-wire.
"The Piano Lesson"
Before streaming on Netflix on Nov. 22, this film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by August Wilson will open in theaters, where debuting director Malcolm Washington -- son of producer Denzel -- will direct his brother John David Washington in what is a true family affair. Set in 1936 Pittsburgh in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the play and now the movie revolve around a piano, a Black family heirloom carved by an enslaved ancestor. Oscar buzz is humming for Samuel L. Jackson as the family patriarch and Danielle Deadwyler as his niece, both coping with the ghosts of slavery that the piano evokes.
"Emilia Pérez"
What to call director Jacques Audiard's Spanish-language telenova about Manitas, a Mexican drug boss sensationally well-played by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who leaves wife (a revelatory Selena Gomez) and kids for a new love (Adriana Paz), while hiring a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña, dynamite) to dodge attention, while Manitas surgically transitions and takes the name Emilia Pérez? (Got that?) I should point out that this indelibly indescribable movie event is a musical with songs by pop star Camille. You should also know that Gascón, Gomez, Saldaña and Paz deservedly shared the best actress prize at Cannes, and that the key to enjoying this one-of-a-kind cinema dazzler is to embrace its heart and lose yourself in its glorious aura. You've never seen anything like it in your life.
"Gladiator II"
Though 2000's "Gladiator" won the best picture Oscar, its director -- the great Ridley Scott -- did not. He never has, which is just plain wrong. Maybe this sequel will do the trick. Since Russell Crowe's character died in the first film, Paul Mescal steps into the fray as an heir to the Roman Empire who must fight for his rights in the ring as a gladiator. Denzel Washington plays a former slave hungry for control. Fred Hechinger and Joseph Quinn go freaking nuts as brothers in line for the throne. Pedro Pascal is, well who cares, he's killer good in everything. With this cast and stunts that include a rhino battle, how can this budget-buster miss?
"Wicked Part One"
That's right, it will take two movies to bring this smash Broadway musical to the screen. Anyone who's seen the show or heard its soaring Stephen Schwartz score, led by "Defying Gravity," knows that this tale of Oz before Judy Garland's Dorothy got there (expect her in Part Two) has what it takes. It's a battle in song and story between Ariana Grande as the good witch Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as the green-skinned wannabe Wicked Witch of the West. All director Jon M. Chu ("Crazy Rich Asians," "In the Heights") needs to do is not screw it up. I'm still not convinced it needed to be in two parts. Who wants to wait a full year to see how it ends? But my money is on Grande and Erivo doing "Wicked" proud.
"Moana 2"
Admit it, you really liked the animated 2016 original with those terrific songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and top voice work from Auli'i Cravalho as Moana, the Oceania chief's daughter, and Dwayne Johnson as Maui, the shapeshifting demigod. Miranda has been replaced with new songwriters, but Cravalho and Johnson are back voicing two characters who must now defy dangerous seas in search of a hidden island that could break a curse. Johnson says no expense was spared on the effects. Do you doubt The Rock? I didn't think so.
"Nightbitch"
Come on, isn't it time for Amy Adams to win an Oscar after six nominations? Maybe this film version of Rachel Yoder's 2021 bestseller will do the trick since it's the bizarro story of a stay-at-home mom who sometimes transforms into a dog. Yoder wrote the novel to express the changes and the anger that motherhood brought to her personal and professional life. Now, with director Marielle Heller ("A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood") guiding Adams though the biggest acting challenge of her career, I'm expecting fireworks. Game on.
"Hard Truths"
British director Mike Leigh makes movies, many of them classics ("Naked," "Topsy-Turvy"), by letting his actors improvise and then assembling the best results into a script. "Hard Truths" marks a re-teaming for Leigh and Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who starred in Leigh's 1996 film "Secrets & Lies" and earned a supporting actress Oscar nod for her work. Jean-Baptiste follows that sympathetic character with the role of working-class Londoner who is damn near impossible to like. Leave it to Jean-Baptiste to find her bruised soul.
"Mufasa: The Lion King"
Here's a prequel to "The Lion King" directed by no less a luminary than Barry Jenkins, whose "Moonlight" won a best picture Oscar. These photorealistic revamps usually leave me cold -- look no further than the 2019 remake of the traditionally animated 1994 "Lion King" classic -- but I'm stoked to see what Jenkins can do with the tale of Mufasa, voiced by Aaron Pierre, a lion who grows up to become the future king of the Pride Lands and the father of Simba.
"The Room Next Door"
This one is already an event just for being the first full-length feature in English from Spain's legendary wild man Pedro Almodóvar. The icing on the cake is the double-barreled casting of Tilda Swinton as a war correspondent and Julianne Moore as an author who is the object of her obsession. No true film junkie will need to know more. No one invests more ferocity and feeling into women on the verge than Almodóvar.
"Babygirl"
On the surface, it's an erotic free-for-all from writer-director Halina Reijn that stars the ever-powerful and incandescent Nicole Kidman as a CEO in a failing marriage to a theater director (Antonio Banderas), who finds herself in sexual thrall to a much younger intern, played by ascendant star Harris Dickinson ("Triangle of Sadness"). Reijn, who directed the breakout hit "Bodies Bodies Bodies," is still obsessed with alleged sins of the flesh, prompting Kidman to call "Babygirl" one her most exposing films yet. Sounds like a provocation. Who's ready?
"A Complete Unknown"
From the trailer, you can tell that ever-fearless Timothée Chalamet is giving himself, body and soul and voice, to the role of a young Bob Dylan, leading up to the Minnesota folkie shocking such music gurus as Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) by switching from acoustic to electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. And that was just the beginning of the times changing for the future Nobel Prize-winning poet. How does it feel to live, love and create during a momentous cultural moment? Director James Mangold, who hit all the right notes with Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in "Walk the Line," says Chalamet nails it. Can awards glory be far behind?
"The Brutalist"
Expect this big-screen epic to sneak in under the wire for the 2024 awards season the way Clint Eastwood triumphed with 2004's "Million Dollar Baby." Everyone loves a left-field surprise. So what if it takes indie director Brady Corbet ("Vox Lux") nearly four hours to detail 30 years in the fictional life of László Tóth ("The Pianist" Oscar winner Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who sets out for America with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), only to endure personal hell until a patron, played by Guy Pearce, offers him a life-changing architectural project. It sounds like "The Fountainhead" on steroids, a big risk that could pay off or go spectacularly off the rails. Isn't this the kind of artistic gamble we go to the movies for? What a way to end the cinema year by rooting for the underdog. Place your bets.
"Maria"
At press time, the studio was still fooling around with the release date for this biopic of opera prima donna Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie) in her final days in 1970s Paris. Still, Oscar will be eagerly waiting to see if Chilean director Pablo Larraín can pull off the biopic nominee hat trick, after Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart scored best actress nods for Jacqueline Kennedy in 2016's "Jackie" and Princess Diana in 2021's "Spencer." I'm betting he can. And I'm betting on Jolie to catch the snarl, the flashing eyes and the tempestuous talent of Callas. It's been more than 20 years since Jolie won her first Oscar for "Girl, Interrupted." She's overdue for a golden bookend.
"Queer"
No one yet knows the exact opening date for this historical midcentury romance, but it will be in time to Oscar qualify. Daniel Craig kisses off the straight sexism of James Bond to play an expat in Mexico City who falls for a much younger, now-discharged Navy man (Drew Starkey), a junkie who doesn't seem that interested. Based on the semi-autobiographical 1985 novel by William S. Burroughs, known for breaking barriers with "Naked Lunch," the film is directed by Luca Guadagnino ("Call Me By Your Name," "Challengers"), eager to bring his own livewire modernity to what might have been a musty period piece. This is a big swing for Craig and only a fool would miss it.