Here is a highly select list of noteworthy films due out this season. Release dates are subject to change and reflect the latest information as of deadline.
November
Nov. 6
MARRIAGE STORY Noah Baumbach has already won the hearts of critics for this tragicomedy about spouses — a theater director (Adam Driver) and his longtime star (Scarlett Johansson) — whose plan for a friendly divorce runs, through no particular fault of either one, into embittering complications. Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta play lawyers with agendas of their own. Azhy Robertson plays the couple’s son.
Nov. 8
THE ALL-AMERICANS This documentary about four student football players in East Los Angeles reflects on issues of identity in America as it captures the run-up to a big game.
DANGER CLOSE The “Collateral” screenwriter Stuart Beattie scripted this account of the 1966 Battle of Long Tan, when a regiment of the Australian Army was cornered by far more numerous North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces in a rubber plantation in South Vietnam.
EARTHQUAKE BIRD A woman living abroad in Japan (Alicia Vikander) is thrown off balance when a young woman (Riley Keough) goes missing. Wash Westmoreland (“Colette”) directed.
THE KINGMAKER Lauren Greenfield, no stranger to portraits of cocooned wealth (“The Queen of Versailles”), directed this look at Imelda Marcos, the noted shoe collector and former first lady of the Philippines, as she works to polish the reputation of her husband, the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and to usher her family back into power.
KLAUS That’s Klaus as in Santa Claus. In this animated feature, Jason Schwartzman lends his voice to a postman who’s transferred to somewhere in the vicinity of the North Pole and meets St. Nick (J.K. Simmons).
LAST CHRISTMAS The filmmakers had an idea for a surprising movie, but the very next day — or rather, in the trailer — they gave it away. (Seriously, don’t watch the trailer: It reveals too much.) Emilia Clarke plays a woman working as a Christmas shop elf in London who meets cute with a mysterious man (Henry Golding). The film was inspired by the song “Last Christmas” and features the music of George Michael throughout. Emma Thompson and Bryony Kimmings wrote the script, from which Paul Feig directed.
MIDWAY Roland Emmerich restages the Battle of Midway with Patrick Wilson, Ed Skrein and Nick Jonas, among others. The aesthetic looks closer to that of Michael Bay (“Pearl Harbor”) than that of John Ford, who shot a documentary on the battle as it unfolded.
PLAYING WITH FIRE In the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s transcendent postwar classic “Record of a Tenement Gentleman,” a widow is saddled with an abandoned boy but takes a shine to him. This is basically the same movie — except instead of a widow, imagine burly firefighters, and instead of one boy, imagine three siblings they have rescued. And imagine a lot of goofy slapstick. With John Cena and Keegan-Michael Key.
PRIMAL You saw “Snakes on a Plane”? This is carnivores on a boat. The ever-busy Nicolas Cage is trapped on a ship that’s carrying a menacing menagerie.
16 BARS This documentary showcases the hip-hop artist Speech (a.k.a. Todd Thomas of the group Arrested Development), as he inspires inmates in Virginia to make music in a workshop.
DOCTOR SLEEP Stephen King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of “The Shining.” Yet this film, adapted from King’s 2013 sequel to the novel, appears to pay tribute to both S.K.s while following the further adventures of Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor). Kyliegh Curran plays one of his fellow telepaths. The talented Mike Flanagan (“Gerald’s Game”) directed.
WATSON Holmes and Watson? Watson and Crick? No, this documentary is a profile of Paul Watson and a look at the organization he founded, Sea Shepherd, which protects aquatic wildlife.
Nov. 13
MICKEY AND THE BEAR Annabelle Attanasio got favorable reviews at South by Southwest for this feature writing and directing debut, about a Montana teenager (Camila Morrone) and her father (James Badge Dale), a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Nov. 15
BLUEBIRD The legacy of the Bluebird Café — the Nashville club where country music stars have made their names — is explored in a documentary that features interviews with Taylor Swift and Garth Brooks.
CHARLIE’S ANGELS In this reboot of the TV series and the 2000 film, Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska and Naomi Scott play the latest team of sexy super-operatives. They get instructions from Elizabeth Banks, both onscreen (she plays Bosley, or one of several Bosleys) and as the movie’s screenwriter and director.
FEAST OF THE SEVEN FISHES An eccentric family gathers for a traditional Italian dinner on Christmas Eve, potentially ruining the romantic pursuits of a son (Skyler Gisondo) and the young woman he’s just met (Madison Iseman). The director, Robert Tinnell, has adapted material that he had previously put into comic and cookbook form.
FORD v FERRARI Sound-effects editors get a chance to rev some engines in this fact-based celebration of individualism and industry. In the 1960s, after Ford’s prospective buyout of Ferrari fell through, the American car manufacturer sought payback at the 24-hour endurance race in Le Mans, France. Matt Damon plays the car designer Carroll Shelby, Christian Bale the racer Ken Miles. James Mangold, the director of “Logan,” is behind the wheel.
THE GOOD LIAR After “Ford v Ferrari,” here is knight versus dame: Sir Ian McKellen plays a con man who sets out to fleece a wealthy widow (Dame Helen Mirren). At stake are both her fortune and the crown for best actor in Britain. Bill Condon directed.
THE HOTTEST AUGUST The weather is just one subject on the mind of the Canadian filmmaker Brett Story in this essay documentary, filmed in New York in 2017. It ponders not only climate change, but also changes in the politics and social landscape of the United States.
I LOST MY BODY A sleeper at Cannes Critics’ Week this year, Jérémy Clapin’s animated feature arrives on the theoretically more prominent showcase of Netflix. A severed hand goes on a journey to reunite with the body it belongs to.
NO SAFE SPACES The comedian Adam Carolla and the conservative pundit Dennis Prager argue that the concept of “safe spaces” is antithetical to free speech. Interviewees include the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the professor and activist Cornel West and the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz.
RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT You’ve heard of outsider artists, but what about an outsider archivist? Marion Stokes is said to have recorded television for 24 hours a day for more than three decades, leaving behind a videotape library of American life that Matt Wolf’s documentary is able to draw on.
THE REPORT Adam Driver plays Daniel J. Jones, an investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee who concluded that the C.I.A. had misled the public about its use of torture and sought to expose what he knew. Annette Bening plays Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. Scott Z. Burns (a frequent collaborator with Steven Soderbergh, a producer here) wrote and directed.
SCANDALOUS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER If you’ve ever wondered how The National Enquirer prints the things it does, Mark Landsman’s documentary traces its history.
SEQUESTRADA Tim Blake Nelson and Gretchen Mol figure into this thriller, which concerns the impact of development of the Brazilian Amazon on the environment and on the life of an indigenous tribe.
THE SHED A teenager (Jay Jay Warren) gets revenge on the peers who bullied him when he discovers a bloodthirsty vampire living in his shed.
TO KID OR NOT TO KID Maxine Trump — not a relative of the president, and indeed the maker of a short called “Trumps Against Trump” — directed this documentary on women who have chosen not to have children.
THE WARRIOR QUEEN OF JHANSI Devika Bhise plays the warrior queen of the title, who in India in 1857 led a rebellion that challenged the British East India Company.
WAVES One of several movies this fall in which even the shape of the screen is unstable, Trey Edward Shults’s third feature (after “Krisha” and “It Comes at Night”) is an experiment with film form and structure that is difficult to describe without giving too much away. Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays a Florida high school wrestler faced with pressures — parental, athletic, romantic — that come to a boil. Taylor Russell plays his sister, who becomes a focus of the second half of the movie. Sterling K. Brown, Renée Elise Goldsberry and Lucas Hedges also star.
Nov. 22
A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD Tom Hanks zips on a cardigan to play Fred Rogers. Through a combination of patience, wisdom and Jedi-like concentration, he improves the life of a hard-bitten journalist (Matthew Rhys) who is assigned to write about him, and who has a chilly relationship with his father (Chris Cooper). The reporter character was inspired by Tom Junod, who profiled Rogers for Esquire. Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”) directed.
DARK WATERS One of the more intriguing questions hovering over this holiday movie season is what brought Todd Haynes (the ironist behind “I’m Not There” and “Far From Heaven”) to what looks like a foursquare social-issue drama, inspired by a New York Times Magazine article about a corporate lawyer who sued DuPont in an environmental case. Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway and Tim Robbins star.
FROZEN 2 Elsa investigates the truth about the past. Didn’t she already learn to let it go?
HALA A theatrical release from Apple TV+, the computing giant’s new streaming service, this is a Sundance coming-of-age drama about a high schooler (Geraldine Viswanathan) from a conservative Muslim background who, among other complications, has a crush on a boy (Jack Kilmer) who is not Muslim.
SHOOTING THE MAFIA The photographer Letizia Battaglia brought images of the Sicilian Mafia to the public in the 1970s. She is profiled in this documentary.
21 BRIDGES Chadwick Boseman plays a New York City police detective searching for the killers of eight of his colleagues. To ensnare them — and, inadvertently, several million other people — they close all the bridges that connect to Manhattan. (Even under these circumstances, nobody wants to swim the Hudson.) Sienna Miller and Stephan James co-star.
VARDA BY AGNÈS In self-portraits like “The Gleaners and I” and “Faces Places,” Agnès Varda, who died in March, put her life on film. So it’s unsurprising — and inspiring — that she would leave behind a final, free-form autobiographical work. At the New York Film Festival, her daughter, Rosalie Varda, encouraged the audience to see the movie as a conversation with the director. Varda reflects on her artistry in ways both small (shot choices) and large.
Nov. 27
KNIVES OUT The death of a wealthy mystery-book author (Christopher Plummer) — by suicide, it seems (or is it?) — is teased apart by a Southern sleuth (Daniel Craig) in the director Rian Johnson’s cunningly plotted tip of the hat to Agatha Christie. Lakeith Stanfield is with the police; Ana de Armas, Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Shannon are among the many-motived suspects.
QUEEN & SLIM Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith play what the trailer describes as “the black Bonnie and Clyde” after Kaluuya’s character kills a police officer in self-defense. Viral video makes them famous while they’re on the lam. Lena Waithe wrote the screenplay. Melina Matsoukas, who has made music videos for Beyoncé and Rihanna, directed.
63 UP The director Michael Apted is himself getting up in years, but his seven-year check-ins with his subjects — first seen as schoolchildren in the 1964 television documentary “Seven Up” — are a tradition that you hope will see a few more multiples.
THE TWO POPES Anthony Hopkins plays Pope Benedict XVI, and Jonathan Pryce plays the future Pope Francis in 2012. In the movie, the two men work to reconcile their different views of the future of the Catholic Church. Fernando Meirelles directed from a screenplay by Anthony McCarten (“Bohemian Rhapsody”).
Nov. 29
THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN Two women from indigenous cultures are brought together in East Vancouver, Canada, when one escapes domestic abuse.
FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY The filmmakers and journalists Michael Koresky, Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman directed this highly experimental feature, which begins with a dinner gathering and heads in an unexpected direction.
TEMBLORES A man sends shock waves through his evangelical family in Guatemala when he comes out as gay. Jayro Bustamante, whose “Ixcanul” had a following on the festival circuit, directed.
WHITE SNAKE This Chinese animated feature — in which an amnesiac woman and a snake catcher work to suss out who she is — is said to have been created as a prequel to a well-known Chinese legend.
XIMEI After contracting H.I.V. from a government initiative that involved contaminated equipment for blood donations, an activist from rural China becomes an advocate for those who suffered the same fate in this documentary. The artist Ai Weiwei, a familiar figure from documentaries (“Human Flow”), is an executive producer.
December
Dec. 6
THE AERONAUTS Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne set out to fly higher than anyone else ever has. It’s the 19th century, and their mode of transportation is a hot-air balloon. Tom Harper directed this reteaming of the stars of “The Theory of Everything” (for which Redmayne won an Oscar, and Jones was nominated).
THE BANKER In a film inspired by a true story, Anthony Mackie and Samuel L. Jackson play real-estate developers in the 1960s who hire a white frontman (Nicholas Hoult) to serve as the face of their business. That enables them to make loans and rent apartments to African-Americans.
DANIEL ISN’T REAL Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold, plays Daniel, an imaginary friend reconjured by a too-old-for-games college freshman (Miles Robbins) after a traumatic incident.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MY MOTHER The director Beniamino Barrese creates a portrait of his mother, Benedetta Barzini, a former Italian supermodel who worked with Richard Avedon and studied with Lee Strasberg. “Barzini is Barrese’s subject (and apparent muse), but she’s also his mother, which creates some productive friction,” Manohla Dargis wrote after the film played at the Sundance Film Festival.
GRAND ISLE Nicolas Cage plays one-half of a couple who give a man shelter from a hurricane. The man is then accused of murder. Kelsey Grammer also stars.
IN FABRIC The British director Peter Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy”) seems to be working almost single-handedly to revive the Italian giallo tradition. The movie follows the journey of a killer dress (and not just in terms of style). Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays the first unlucky buyer. Hayley Squires and Leo Bill have the garment later on.
KNIVES AND SKIN Jennifer Reeder directed what sounds like an extremely Lynchian coming-of-age film in which a teenage girl’s disappearance brings a town’s secrets to the surface.
LITTLE JOE Emily Beecham, who won the best actress prize for this movie at Cannes in May, plays one of a team of scientists who genetically engineer a flower that has a strange property: It makes people happy. The same, of course, was also true of the Pod People, and the aroma of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” wafts through this austerely chilling feature from Jessica Hausner.
MIDNIGHT FAMILY This nonfiction chronicle trails a family that operates a private ambulance service in Mexico City. “Fantastically shot by the director Luke Lorentzen, the documentary develops an urgency that suits the life-or-death stakes onscreen,” Manohla Dargis wrote when it played at New Directors/New Films.
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES James Frey’s dubious 2003 book — ostensibly a memoir though the author later admitted making up details — gets a big-screen adaptation with Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a 23-year-old drug addict. Sam Taylor-Johnson directed.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE Céline Sciamma won wide acclaim (and a screenplay award) at the Cannes Film Festival for this understated, immaculately appointed 18th-century drama. Noémie Merlant plays an artist hired to paint a portrait of Adèle Haenel, who won’t sit for anyone. At first, Merlant’s character is forced to work from memory, but the two grow closer.
WHEN LAMBS BECOME LIONS Two cousins on opposite sides of the ivory trade in Kenya — a dealer and a ranger who is permitted to use violence to halt poaching — are followed over three years in this documentary.
THE WOLF HOUR Naomi Watts plays a shut-in author holed up in a Bronx apartment — the setting for almost the entire film — during the summer of 1977, when New York contended with a blackout and the Son of Sam. Alistair Banks Griffin directed.
Dec. 13
BLACK CHRISTMAS Sophia Takal directed (and wrote, with the film critic April Wolfe) this second remake of Bob Clark’s 1974 Canadian slasher-film standard. A sorority is terrorized; Imogen Poots leads the cast.
BOMBSHELL It’s hard to overstate the degree to which Charlize Theron looks like Megyn Kelly in the trailer for this portrait of the culture of sexual harassment that pervaded Fox News during the reign of Roger Ailes (John Lithgow). Margot Robbie also stars. Jay Roach, who did similar dramatizations in the HBO movies “Game Change” and “Recount,” directed.
CUNNINGHAM Earlier this year, the documentary “If the Dancer Dances” suggested that video, by virtue of being in two dimensions, was limited in its ability to capture Merce Cunningham’s choreography. It’s fortunate, then, that his centennial year closes out with a documentary that’s in 3-D, and that — through a combination of archival footage and contemporary stagings for the screen — showcases the breadth of Cunningham’s career. Alla Kovgan directed.
THE DEATH & LIFE OF JOHN F. DONOVAN The Québécois enfant terrible filmmaker Xavier Dolan caused a minor stir in the film world when he announced that he had cut Jessica Chastain from this movie, his first English-language feature. (Who does that?) The film revolves around an actor as he recalls his interactions with a deceased TV star. Kit Harrington and Natalie Portman are in it.
HELL ON THE BORDER David Gyasi plays the real-life African-American cowboy Bass Reeves — who has been called the first black marshal in the West and is believed by some to be the inspiration for the Lone Ranger — as he trails an outlaw (Frank Grillo).
A HIDDEN LIFE At Cannes, Terrence Malick polarized critics with this portrait of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian conscientious objector who refused to swear allegiance to Hitler. His stance led to his execution by the Nazis in 1943 and later his beatification by the Catholic Church in 2007. The director’s signature style — nature shots, fragmentary voice-over — struck some as an odd fit. “Malick’s prettification of this world is as appalling as is his lack of interest in history,” Manohla Dargis wrote from the festival.
JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL Karen Gillan, Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart and Jack Black return as video game avatars, but the players who are their puppeteers aren’t all the same. The director Jake Kasdan, who had the controller for “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” (2017), returns as well.
RICHARD JEWELL Still astonishingly prolific at 89, Clint Eastwood has directed a recent string of movies focusing on real-life acts of heroism (“Sully,” “The 15:17 to Paris”). The latest centers on Richard A. Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a security guard who was first hailed as a hero who saved lives in the bombing of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta — then vilified when several news media outlets prematurely reported he was a suspect. Jewell, who died in 2007, was ultimately cleared. Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates and Jon Hamm also star.
SEBERG Kristen Stewart received good reviews at the Venice Film Festival in the summer for her turn as the “Breathless” actress Jean Seberg (1938-79). This account covers the period when she was the object of an F.B.I. smear intended to undermine her support of the Black Panther Party. Anthony Mackie plays the writer and activist Hakim Jamal. Benedict Andrews directed.
6 UNDERGROUND Does any director love blowing stuff up as much as Michael Bay? More to the point, if even the architect of the “Transformers” franchise has now made a feature for Netflix, does the concept of “big-screen entertainment” mean anything anymore? Ryan Reynolds stars as the head of a team of operatives who wipe out all traces of their pasts to complete their work.
UNCUT GEMS Adam Sandler stars as a diamond dealer and inveterate gambler whose latest impulsive scheme — it involves lending a gem-studded rock to Kevin Garnett (who plays a version of himself during his N.B.A. career) — is just one more card in a house that is dangerously close to collapsing. The brothers Josh and Benny Safdie directed with their customary flair for grungy New York color and tense, escalating absurdity.
Dec. 20
CATS The “Les Misérables” director Tom Hooper uses the latest in what a promotional video calls “digital fur technology” to transform Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, Judi Dench and many others into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s singing kitties. The trailer has already been widely mocked, but to quote Rum Tum Tugger, there’s “no doing anything abowwowtit.” Swift and Lloyd Webber wrote an original song for the film.
INVISIBLE LIFE Called “The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão” when it won a major prize at Cannes in May, this film from the Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz follows two sisters over several decades of life in Rio de Janeiro. Neither is aware that the other is living in the city.
STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER How exactly is J.J. Abrams going to run with the baton that “The Last Jedi” left him? Will Rey really turn out to have come from nothing? Is that little kid with the broom a Jedi? Will die-hard fans cry heresy no matter where this movie goes? (The answer to that last question is probably yes.) Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Adam Driver return to that galaxy far, far away.
Dec. 25
JUST MERCY Michael B. Jordan plays the lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who in Alabama in the early 1990s defended Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), a man sentenced to death even though, The New York Times wrote in 1993, the state built “a case on suspect testimony and withheld crucial evidence that called that testimony into question.” Brie Larson plays a colleague also fighting for McMillian’s exoneration. Destin Daniel Cretton (“Short Term 12”) directed.
LITTLE WOMEN Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanlen are Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters in the latest adaptation of “Little Women.” It’s given a new spark by Greta Gerwig, who (as with “Lady Bird”) wrote the screenplay and directed. Meryl Streep, Laura Dern and Timothée Chalamet also star.
1917 Sam Mendes directs his version of an old-fashioned war epic with this story of a pair of British soldiers (George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) during World War I. Their assignment: To deliver a message calling off an attack that would, if executed, lead to a battalion’s slaughter. There is a twist: Mendes and his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, have reportedly designed the movie to appear as if it unfolds in one continuous shot. With Benedict Cumberbatch.
THE SONG OF NAMES The fates of two children are intertwined when a Polish Jewish boy moves in with a British family at the start of World War II. As an adult, he disappears, and his surrogate brother (Tim Roth) searches for him. Clive Owen also stars. François Girard directed.
SPIES IN DISGUISE In this animated feature, Will Smith provides the voice of a secret agent who is transformed by his colleague (Tom Holland), a scientist, into a pigeon, because that’s an easy way for him to go undetected. With Rashida Jones.
WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL The legacy of the longtime New Yorker film critic is celebrated and debated in this documentary, which features interviews with acolytes and a handful of directors. Rob Garver directed.
Dec. 27
CLEMENCY The director Chinonye Chukwu won the top prize at Sundance for this character study of a prison warden (Alfre Woodard) who has been hollowed out by her work. The movie follows her after a botched execution as she prepares to administer the death penalty to another inmate (Aldis Hodge).
Listings compiled with the assistance of Lauren Messman.
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