This season of Oscar hopefuls offers a batch of stories spotlighting misunderstood heroes and antiheroes, including “Uncut Gems” (Dec. 13), starring Adam Sandler, in a frenzied dramatic role, as a jewelry dealer in New York’s diamond district whose effort to sell smuggled goods is both sparked and complicated by his heavy sports-gambling debts. His desperate quest to raise funds involves his wife (Idina Menzel), his girlfriend (Julia Fox), a ruthless mobster (Eric Bogosian), and the pro basketball player Kevin Garnett (playing himself); the script, co-written by Ronald Bronstein and the film’s directors, the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, daringly intertwines the drama with real-life sporting events. In Marielle Heller’s drama “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (Nov. 22), Tom Hanks plays the children’s-television luminary Fred Rogers, who is being profiled by a skeptical journalist (Matthew Rhys); the story is based on the journalist Tom Junod’s acquaintance with Rogers. Kristen Stewart plays the title role in “Seberg” (Dec. 13), a drama, directed by Benedict Andrews, about the persecution of Jean Seberg—the American actress who became a French New Wave icon—by the F.B.I., in the late nineteen-sixties, as a result of her political activism. Clint Eastwood directed “Richard Jewell” (Dec. 13), based on the true story of a security guard at the 1996 Summer Olympics, in Atlanta, who was falsely accused of involvement in a terrorist bombing that he in fact tried to prevent. Paul Walter Hauser plays Jewell; Kathy Bates co-stars as Jewell’s mother, and Sam Rockwell plays his attorney.
A series of ambitious remakes begins with “Charlie’s Angels” (Nov. 15), written and directed by Elizabeth Banks, in which the three secret agents (Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott, and Ella Balinska) are joined by three detectives named Bosley (Banks, Djimon Hounsou, and Patrick Stewart). Sophia Takal directed and co-wrote, with April Wolfe, a new version of the 1974 horror film “Black Christmas” (Dec. 13), starring Imogen Poots, Lily Donoghue, and Aleyse Shannon, about a group of female college students who are being menaced by a stalker and, having no confidence in the authorities, fight back. Greta Gerwig wrote and directed a new, nonlinear adaptation of “Little Women” (Dec. 25), starring Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Meryl Streep, Emma Watson, Laura Dern, and Timothée Chalamet.
Tales of political resistance are at the fore this season, including Terrence Malick’s historical drama “A Hidden Life” (Dec. 13), based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter (played by August Diehl), an Austrian man who refused to serve in the German Army during the Second World War. “Clemency” (Dec. 27), directed by Chinonye Chukwu, stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden who comes to question the practice of capital punishment. In “Just Mercy” (Dec. 25), Michael B. Jordan plays Bryan Stevenson, a defense attorney who takes the case of a death-row inmate (Jamie Foxx) who has been wrongly convicted of murder. Destin Daniel Cretton directed and co-wrote the script with Andrew Lanham, based on a memoir by Stevenson. ♦
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