FROM EVIL CLOWNS TO LEGOS, 10 MUST-SEE FILMS
The weather may be getting cooler, but movies are coming in hot this fall, with evil clowns, suave superspies, animated ninjas and Tom Cruise flying a plane (again). USA TODAY’s Brian Truitt offers 10 films you won’t want to miss in September and October.
IT (FRIDAY)
STARS: Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, Finn Wolfhard DIRECTOR: Andy Muschietti
THE SKINNY: The first month or so filming the Stephen King adaptation was full of hanging out and riding bikes for Lieberher and his kid co-stars, with a few emotional scenes here and there as the bullied outsiders known as The Losers Club in Derry, Maine, circa 1989. But once they met Skarsgård done up as Pennywise, the preternaturally evil clown, Lieberher realized he was really in a horror movie. “It was pretty terrifying just being in the room with (Skarsgård) in his makeup and costume.” Just as freaky? When Lieberher’s character comes face to face with his dead younger brother, who has been turned into a malevolent creature by Pennywise. “It’s scary for my character and for me, too,” Lieberher says.
MOTHER! (SEPT. 15)
STARS: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky
THE SKINNY: Aronofsky owes his new psychological thriller to an idea that “poured out of me in this crazy fever dream” over five days. Lawrence stars as a woman who’s trying to fix up the old house she bought with her husband (Bardem) when strangers begin to inexplicably show up and interrupt their quiet life. There’s a relationship drama to be had, but also a thicker allegory throughout the film. “It’s a crazy time we live in, these headlines popping up non-stop, endless notifications on our smartphones,” Aronofsky says. “When you scratch right beneath the surface of this kind of comfortable reality we have here, you suddenly see all this chaos and war and discord. But it’s very
hard to figure out what to do about that. ... I decided to try to create something with that emotion.”
BATTLE OF THE SEXES
(SEPT. 22)
STARS: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Bill Pullman
DIRECTORS: Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris
THE SKINNY: On the surface, the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King (Stone) and Bobby Riggs (Carell) was “this silly spectacle,” Dayton says. But he and wife Faris “liked the personal stories behind the headlines,” with King having her first relationship with a woman and Riggs trying to salvage his marriage and restart his career. The actors went to great lengths to match their real-life figures’ physicality. Carell, already a tennis player, took lessons with Riggs’ coach. Stone worked with King a couple of times, “which was incredibly intimidating,” Faris says, and put on 15 pounds of muscle in four months to look like a world-class athlete. “She loves a challenge, loves the pressure, like Billie Jean. It felt like a great match personality-wise.” KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE (SEPT. 22)
STARS: Taron Egerton, Channing Tatum, Colin Firth DIRECTOR: Matthew Vaughn
THE SKINNY: After Kingsman headquarters blows up in the spy sequel, young English superspy Eggsy (Egerton) teams with his American counterparts in Statesman to take on supervillain Poppy (Julianne Moore), a criminal mastermind behind the nefarious global organization The Golden Circle. But back-from-the-dead father figure Harry Hart (Firth) is uncomfortable with Eggsy’s Southern-accented, mustached new mentor, Agent Whiskey. Pedro Pascal says there’s “real effortlessness, charm and danger” with his secret agent, whose weapons include an electric lasso and a whip that creates sonic booms. The actor says he has been cracking whips since he was a kid obsessed with Indiana Jones. “My parents were like, ‘Fine, hurt yourself with this.’ Which I did. And which I did in training as well,” Pascal says.
THE LEGO NINJAGO
MOVIE (SEPT. 22) STARS: Dave Franco, Justin Theroux, Jackie Chan
DIRECTORS: Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan
THE SKINNY: In the latest Lego film, Lloyd (voiced by Franco) is a young dude who’s part of a secret ninja force made up of high school outcasts — and Lloyd is especially uncool at school because his dad, Lord Garmadon (Theroux), is always trying to destroy the city. “He is desperately trying to understand his father,” Theroux says. But Garmadon also has some internal struggles, Theroux says. “He doesn’t even know why leaving your child is a bad thing. ... It’s more about the son’s journey of forgiving him and learning to accept him for who he is.”
AMERICAN MADE
(SEPT. 29)
STARS: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Sarah Wright
DIRECTOR: Doug Liman THE SKINNY: Usually Cruise and the friendly skies make for a great combo, though Liman initially approached the icon “because I thought he might enjoy doing something that had planes in common with Top Gun and nothing else,” the director says. Set in the 1980s, American Made is based on the true tale of Barry Seal (Cruise), a former TWA pilot and “incorrigible rule breaker” who was recruited by the CIA for some questionable dealings in Central America and ultimately became a drug smuggler for the Medellin Cartel. “It’s a fun story about an outrageous character doing outrageous things with airplanes in an era where those things were still possible,” Liman says. “I’m drawn to characters who are antiheroes, and I know I’ve done my job when the audience uses nothing but the most horrendous adjectives to describe Barry Seal and then talk about how much they love him.”
BLADE RUNNER
2049 (OCT. 6)
STARS: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Jared Leto
DIRECTOR: Denis Villeneuve
THE SKINNY: In the much-anticipated sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic, Gosling stars as Officer K, an L.A. cop and special operative known as a Blade Runner tasked to track down android replicants, which are now manufactured by the shady businessman Niander Wallace (Leto). When he uncovers a secret that could change mankind forever, K goes on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Ford), a former Blade Runner “who’s still dealing with a lot of melancholia and loneliness,” Villeneuve says. Like the original, the new Blade Runner explores how we’re defined by our own memories. “As human beings, we are confronted with compulsions or instincts, what makes us sometimes go away from our humanity or come back to our humanity,” the filmmaker says. “We can be blinded by our desires.”
MARSHALL (OCT. 13) STARS: Chadwick Boseman, Josh Gad, Kate Hudson DIRECTOR: Reginald Hudlin THE SKINNY: Marshall is an origin story of sorts for the future Supreme Court justice, when Thurgood Marshall was a young NAACP attorney in 1940 tasked with helping Jewish lawyer Sam Friedman (Gad) defend an African-American man (Sterling K. Brown) accused of the rape and attempted murder of a rich white woman (Hudson). While maybe not on the level of fame of Brown v. Board of Education, the case showed a period in history where the war for white supremacy happening in Europe mirrored what was happening in parts of America. “On one hand, we see ourselves as superior to Nazis. On the other hand, you have this racism and anti-Semitism in our own country,” Hudlin says.
ONLY THE BRAVE
(OCT. 20)
STARS: Josh Brolin, Miles Teller, Jeff Bridges
DIRECTOR: Joseph Kosinski
THE SKINNY: The responsibility of honoring fallen firefighters and their families weighed heavily on Kosinski in his latest project, based on a GQ article about 19 firefighters who died battling a wildfire in Yarnell, Ariz., in 2013. Brave centers on Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin), the superintendent of the elite Granite Mountain Hotshots crew, and Brendan McDonough (Teller), a rookie. “The focus is on the team ... the brotherhood that holds these wildland fire crews together,” says Kosinski, who had a giant forest set built lined with propane lines to create controlled fires. “It was amazing how hot it got. When you imagine what a real wildfire is to be near, we were in awe of what these real Hotshots actually work around and amongst every day.”
WONDERSTRUCK
(OCT. 20)
STARS: Oakes Fegley, Millicent Simmonds, Julianne Moore DIRECTOR: Todd Haynes
THE SKINNY: Haynes’ latest is “a complicated love poem to New York City.” In the 1920s, Rose (Simmonds) is a deaf girl who runs away to Manhattan to find her Hollywood idol (Moore), while 50 years later, Ben (Fegley) goes there to search for his dad after his mother (Michelle Williams) dies and a freak accident takes his hearing. “The mystery is really, why are these stories paralleling each other and what is the meaning behind it?” Haynes says. The fact that it was a tale about two deaf children informed every aspect of filmmaking, from score to costume design. “You become very acutely aware of what it means to hear and what it means to not hear in ways that most movies take for granted.”