Top 10 movies for this fall
Our hopes for streams and the cineplex, from Bond on down.
While spring can really hang you up the most, as a great old song put it, autumn 2021 feels like an honorary spring in the making. Suspended cultural animation. Uncertain variants and a million separate, often competing comfort zones.
Movie theaters have reopened, and people are going back, at least to some (much?) of what’s available, from “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” on down. Do the studios making those movies care? Or are they so invested in stocking their streaming platforms with new fish to fry to give much thought to the fate of the multiplex?
The movie capturing the moment best, I think, is the new James Bond film “No Time to Die.” Its very title suits the feelings of both the vaxed, masked portion of the country and the live-free-and-die faction, millions and millions strong. The movie’s coming out Oct. 8, some 18 months after the $250 million franchise item was first scheduled to open.
This is Daniel Craig’s final Bond picture, or so Craig says. It feels like a long goodbye, fulfilled at last. Unfashionably, “No Time to Die” will open in theaters only. Then it adds its streaming release option a few weeks later, date yet to be confirmed.
Now that our kids are nearing full vaccination, I’m feeling a little better about going out to a movie, i.e. going into a theater. Let’s all do what it takes to bid our goodbyes to the pandemic, and the behavior that got us where we are this fall — which is back, sort of, at a time of partial, hopeful recovery.
Here are 10 prospects, all of which I sincerely hope turn out to be pips. As always, release dates are subject to change.
‘The Many Saints of Newark,’ Oct. 1 in theaters and on HBO Max.
I’ve seen this one, and it’s good — a witty, melancholy “Sopranos” prequel in which teenage
Tony (Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini) and his loving, fraught relationship with his uncle Dickie (Alessandro Nivola) is framed by family torment and late 1960s unrest.
‘Diana: The Musical,’ Oct. 1 on Netflix for one day only; Broadway premiere, Dec. 16; Netflix streaming premiere to be determined.
This is Diana’s season, all right, with Netflix sneaking “Come From Away” director Christopher Ashley’s “Broadway capture” edition of the new musical on Oct. 1, two months prior to the show’s Broadway premiere. Meantime “Spencer,” “Jackie” director Pablo Larrain’s take on the Lady Diana Spencer travails starring Kristen Stewart, premieres in theaters Nov. 5.
‘No Time to Die,’ Oct. 8 in theaters.
Retirement doesn’t suit James Bond, which is handy, because there’d be no movie if his old friend Felix didn’t solicit his sense of surly obligation for a final, globe-saving gig.
‘Dune,’ Oct. 22 in theaters and on HBO Max.
Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction phenom, previously filmed, after a fashion, by David Lynch, returns to transfix/disorient/stun/frustrate/entice moviegoers looking for a little spice. “Arrival” and “Blade Runner