By Nicholas BarberFeatures correspondent

This month sees the release of Aaron Sorkin’s latest, as well as a post-Taken Liam Neeson action movie.

The Trial of the Chicago 7

In 1968, an anti-Vietnam War protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago escalated into a violent clash with the National Guard. A different time, maybe, but this Netflix drama about the protest, and the six-month trial that followed, seems spookily similar to recent US news footage, as its writer-director, Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The West Wing), admits. “The movie was relevant when we were making it [in early 2020],” Sorkin told Vanity Fair. “We didn’t need it to get more relevant, but it did. The polarisation, the militarisation of the police, the fear of black activists, even the intramural battle between the left and the far left.” Sorkin is supplying his trademark bravura dialogue to Mark Rylance, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Keaton, Eddie Redmayne, and Sacha Baron Cohen in a rare dramatic role as Abbie Hoffman.

Released on 1 October in Denmark and the Netherlands and on Netflix from 16 October

Possessor

Brandon Cronenberg’s surreal techno-thriller might echo the work of his father, David Cronenberg, but it also sounds like a Christopher Nolan or Charlie Kaufman film, except with more stabbings and eyeball squishings. Andrea Riseborough stars as an assassin who can telepathically control other people’s bodies and get them to do the killing for her. Her latest job is to bump off an IT tycoon (Sean Bean) and his daughter (Tuppence Middleton) by possessing the daughter’s fiancée (Christopher Abbott). When Possessor premiered at the Sundance Festival in January, David Ehrlich of IndieWire called it “unnervingly good”, adding, “90 minutes of Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott engaging in ultra-gory psychic warfare over control of the latter’s body is more satisfying than what most of the current best picture nominees have to offer”.

Released on 2 October in the US and 9 October in Canada

Summer of 85

François Ozon, the prolific, genre-hopping French writer-director, gets back to his roots – and, perhaps, his own adolescence – with an adaptation of Aidan Chambers’ ground-breaking gay coming-of-age novel, Dance on My Grave. The young lovers are 16-year-old Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) and a swaggering 18-year-old, David (Benjamin Voisin), who saves him from drowning when his boat capsizes off the coast of Normandy. Critics have compared Ozon’s nostalgic recreation of a sun-kissed summer fling to Call Me by Your Name. But in this case, as Alexis’s voice-over warns us, David doesn’t have long to live, so the mystery of who killed him and why looms over their intoxicating time together. Boyd van Hoeij of The Hollywood Reporter praises “a story that’s frequently awkward and a little painful to watch but also sincere and truthful about adolescence in a way seldom seen in films about teenagers made by middle-aged directors”.

Released on 9 October in Spain and 23 October in the UK

Over the Moon

One of the first cartoons to be financed by Netflix, and one of the first cartoons to be co-produced by American and Chinese studios, Over the Moon is a musical inspired by the legend of moon goddess Chang’e. When a 12-year-old girl (Cathy Yang) hears the legend from her parents, she builds a rocket ship so that she (and her pet rabbit) can visit her. The director, Glen Keane, has talked about the film’s painstakingly authentic depiction of Chinese family life, although he had an American fairy tale in mind, too. “So much of the story in Over the Moon is like Wizard of Oz,” he explained to Animation Magazine, “and believing that Dorothy goes up in the tornado and visits Oz. Our main character is going to the Moon to meet a moon goddess, and just like Dorothy, she has to go through this experience to be able to deal with the problems she is facing at home.”

On Netflix from 23 October

I Am Greta

It was just two years ago that Greta Thunberg, then aged 15, went on her first ‘School Strike for the Climate’ by sitting outside the Swedish parliament. Nathan Grossman was there with his camera on day one, and his documentary follows Thunberg every step of the way to worldwide fame. I Am Greta shows her at home with her parents, in public with supporters including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Emmanuel Macron, and crossing the Atlantic by boat to address the United Nations in New York. It’s a stirring film about the need for activism, writes Lee Marshall at Screen International, but also “an uplifting, inspirational story about a girl with Asperger’s who turns her difference from ‘normal kids’ into a strength”.

Released on 16 October in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and on 22 October in the Netherlands

Rebecca

The most famous adaptation of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic romance, is the Oscar-winning Alfred Hitchcock classic starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. How can Ben Wheatley’s new version possibly compete? Well, one answer is to have Kristin Scott Thomas as the formidable Mrs Danvers, a stroke of casting genius which is enough to justify the film’s existence. Another answer, which Wheatley gave at the 2019 London Film Festival, is “going back to the book and trying to get closer to the actual story... You think you know it and you just don’t.” Lily James stars as the innocent young woman who is swept off her feet by a handsome English widower (Armie Hammer) in Monte Carlo. But when she marries him and moves into his Cornwall mansion, she is haunted by the reputation of the previous Mrs de Winter. 

On Netflix from 21 October

On the Rocks

On the Rocks might not be a sequel to Lost in Translation, exactly, but it’s as close as we’re ever likely to get. Like 2003’s beloved comedy-drama, it’s written and directed by Sofia Coppola, and she has again cast Bill Murray as a man dispensing marital advice to a younger woman. This time, though, the late-night heart-to-hearts take place in the swanky hotel bars of New York City rather than Tokyo. Murray plays a wealthy playboy who suspects that the husband (Damon Wayans) of his daughter (Rashida Jones) is cheating on her. BBC Culture’s Caryn James gave it four stars, and according to Alonso Duralde in The Wrap, “Coppola may well have crafted the quintessential Bill Murray role. But... Jones is enough of a skilled actor and comic that she more than holds her own opposite the larger-than-life Murray.”

On limited theatrical release from 2 October and on Apple TV+ from 23 October

Honest Thief

Sometimes you want art, innovation and examinations of the human condition. At other times you want explosions, car chases, shoot-outs, and threats muttered down the phone in a gruff Irish brogue. In short, you want a post-Taken Liam Neeson action movie – and that’s what Honest Thief is. It follows the formula so precisely, in fact, that Mark Williams (co-creator of Ozark) might as well have used ‘Post-Taken Liam Neeson Action Movie’ as his film’s title. Neeson plays Tom, a retired bank robber who promises to return his ill-gotten gains in exchange for a reduced prison sentence so that he can settle down with the woman he loves (Kate Walsh). But the two FBI agents (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) assigned to retrieve the money decide to steal it instead and frame Tom for murder. Unfortunately for them, he is a “former Marine, demolitions expert” – of course he is – with a very particular set of skills, hence the explosions, car chases, shoot-outs, and muttered threats. What’s not to like?

Released on 14 October in France, 15 October in Portugal and 16 October in the US

Eternal Beauty

Craig Roberts made his big-screen debut 10 years ago playing Sally Hawkins’s son in the stylised indie comedy-drama Submarine. Now, he is directing her in a stylised indie comedy-drama of his own. Hawkins (The Shape of Water) stars as Jane, a woman with schizophrenia, a toxic family, and a dreary hometown, but enough positivity to keep moving forward, especially when she comes off her medication and meets an aspiring musician (David Thewlis) with his own mental health issues. Leslie Felperin in The Hollywood Reporter calls Eternal Beauty “a highly unusual and welcome look at schizophrenia [which] borrows buckets of quirk from the likes of Wes Anderson (design sensibility), Michel Gondry (in-camera trickery) and Paul Thomas Anderson (general gestalt)”.

Released on 2 October in the UK, Ireland and the US

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