After premiering in Spain and then coming to Cannes Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature Bitter Christmas will finally be coming to North America this fall. After stopping at TIFF and NYFF, Sony Pictures Classics will open the meta drama on November 13 and has released the first full trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “Bitter Christmas tells two alternating stories, one starring Elsa, an advertising director, in 2004, during a long weekend in December. The second takes place in 2026 and stars Raúl, a screenwriter and director who is writing a script that we soon discover is the story of Elsa, her boyfriend Bonifacio, and her friends Patricia and Natalia. Mixed with fiction, Elsa is, in a way, Raúl’s alter ego, who, like him, resorts to autofiction as a solution to a long period of creative drought. He looks inside himself, and he can’t help but also look at the people who make up his most intimate universe: his partner and his assistant.”

Alistair Ryder said in his review, “Bitter Christmas announces that Pedro Almodóvar has entered his late era, returning once again to the metafiction well for another structurally ambitious analysis of the creative process with at least one character to whom he bears a passing resemblance. It will be nobody’s favorite Almodóvar film, but offers some simple delights because it might be the most Almodóvar film; its deconstruction of a director’s writing routine feels oddly comforting, despite attempts to confound each time it pulls the rug back to reveal a new layer in its Russian doll of character perspectives. An autofictional exploration of creation has been a recurring interest since 1995’s The Flower of My Secret, with 2019’s Pain and Glory feeling like the definitive statement in this regard, featuring his most barely concealed director surrogate to date (Antonio Banderas’ Salvador Mallo) and a direct address of the various chronic conditions which have affected his work. His latest doesn’t add a profound new perspective that justifies going back to such similar subject matter; the familiarity of this preoccupation means it becomes more of a surface pleasure than another revelatory look at how a master auteur gets inspiration.”

See the trailer below.

A true cult classic and an underground cinema landmark championed by the likes of Susan Sontag and Amos Vogel, E. Elias Merhige’s 1989 experimental feature Begotten has now received a new 4K restoration. Following the premiere of the restoration at the Telluride Film Festival last weekend, Kino Lorber will release the film beginning at NYC’s IFC Center on October 2 with the director in person on October 1 for a sneak preview. Ahead of the rollout, we’re thrilled to debut the new trailer.

Here’s the synopsis: “God Killing Himself tears open his body and dies. Mother Earth rises from what remains and takes his seed into herself. She gives birth to Son of Earth — Flesh on Bone. He is cast into a barren world, seized by the Nomads, tortured, killed, and briefly returned to life by his mother. The Nomads destroy her too. The Robed Figures gather what remains of mother and son, grind their bodies down, and return them to the soil. The ground flowers.”

Begotten was shot in black and white on 16mm reversal film, then rephotographed frame by frame through neutral-density filters. The process took four years and roughly ten hours of work for every finished minute. The image was worked by hand through repeated exposure through neutral density filtrations until the grain itself began to move like an atmospheric condition, thickening the dark and tearing open the light.

Begotten was restored in 4K from the original 16mm negative and optical soundtrack. Scanning, restoration, and final grading were completed at Filmscan & more in Munich, Germany, under the supervision of filmmaker E. Elias Merhige.

The great Amos Vogel called it “a hallucinatory masterpiece,” saying it’s “obsessional, nightmarish, flamboyantly unsettling, it invades our subconscious, dragging —however much we resist—our own primitive fears and unacknowledged desires to the surface.”

See the trailer below:

To say what Casey Affleck’s Company is really about is to spoil its major twist. It’s not a Sondheim thing, I can tell you that. But outside of setting and framework, there’s not much else I can divulge about plot. The film takes place across several generations of Americans who end up visitors in a stranger’s home with a story to tell. À la Inception, the stories within stories go deeper and deeper as the protagonists within tales tell tales that the person telling that tale must tack onto the larger tale they’re telling their rapt audience—a family at Christmas in the 1950s, a lone Nick Nolte slowly dying in his cabin in the wilderness, or a respectable religious couple living a meek Wild West life. 

The person telling tales is a bit peculiar in each case: all random people who show up outside someone’s house in various states of consciousness, never in a hurry to get somewhere. Most of the stories take place in that fraught, gothic American period when people would just come upon new houses and feel things out with no idea as to whether the encounter would make their fortunes, ruin their lives, or be a forgettably polite flash in the pan. The presence of the guests is preceded by a Jalaluddin Rumi poem, “The Guest House,” that stays thematically present throughout and whose words keep finding their way back into the story:

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

As each guide from the beyond tells their story, and that nested story becomes about telling another nested story, one starts to wonder what Company is all about, when the real narrative will actually begin. And one of substance needs to begin when the stories being told don’t have much going for them as mere conduits for other stories that are mere conduits. We eventually figure out what it’s all about, but the mildly satisfying reveal doesn’t justify the lack of intrigue that dominates the movie up to this point. It is, credit where due, an unexpected twist from Affleck. As we learned with I’m Still Here, he loves to trick an audience.

Affleck has 31 years of acting under his belt, but this is only the third feature he’s written and directed. He started working behind the camera fifteen years in, and his films have come with seven- and nine-year gaps in between. The other two—a vile, fascinating Joaquin Phoenix mockumentary that the jury is still out on and a feel-good post-apocalyptic father-daughter drama—are nothing like Company, which vibrates at an Old Western period piece register, toys with genre, and leaves little to lambast or write home about in terms of filmmaking craft.

It wasn’t a bad idea for Affleck to team with co-writer Ron Hansen. The scribe behind The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The World to Come—both Old West Casey Affleck pictures—has two strong cases of bringing a very believable primeval American West to life in cinema, making him the right man for the job. You can feel the vibrations of Affleck’s past acting work in the Old West arena. Whether written into the screenplay or merely directed by Affleck, the bevy of tall grass shots captured through warped windows harkens back to Jesse James, and the hushed nature of its home life seeps in from The World to Come.

There’s the occasional quote worth ruminating on (“crave normalcy, and the thirst for wrongdoing will pass like a fever”). But usually, there’s not enough meat on Company’s bones to sink our teeth into. Affleck and Hansen’s Russian doll experiment is just that: a dull formal exercise.

Company premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.

Coal miners from Kentucky traveled to New York City months into their 1973 strike to increase their struggle’s profile. As documented by Barbara Kopple in Harlan County, USA, one of their most vocal supporters was an NYPD officer. It makes sense: the Police Benevolent Association represents over 20,000 of the city’s rank-and-file cops. They know what it means to be in a union that fights for their rights.

Thus it’s no coincidence that Kopple includes a New Yorker popping his head out a car window in Union Town to vociferously label the police contingent setting up barricades preventing Amazon Teamsters from picketing the location as scabs. Fifty years is all it took to go from one union man seeing another as his brother to a union adopting flimsy messaging about “just doing their job” to help a billionaire continue dehumanizing the members of another.

The contrast epitomizes America’s disintegrating sentiment towards the labor-rights movement that Kopple documented over the past half-century. She went from the optimistic white-hat victory in Harlan County to the angry confusion that resulted from the Reagan administration’s new world order shifting power back to corporations in American Dream. Some of that initial hope and solidarity returns this time to close out her labor rights trilogy, but the war has only grown worse.

How could it not after the wealth disparity between the one percent and those on the poverty line increased exponentially during the COVID shutdown? At a time when delivery drivers were considered “essential workers,” their tireless efforts ironically made their bosses billions of dollars that they never shared in. Why? Because the government allowed it via “contractor” designations and the dismantling of the social safety nets necessary to survive.

If you thought it was bad in the 1980s, when Hormel simply hired people even poorer than the contracted employees they refused to negotiate with in good faith, we’re a full circle of Hell lower now. It’s all a lot more fractured, too: loopholes, cronyism, and outright corruption allow companies to test just how immoral they can get, knowing the slap on the wrist received if caught is peanuts compared to what it would cost to do the right thing.

Kopple expertly moves between three separate conflicts within Union Town over the course of three years, starting in 2023. The first is the Teamsters vs. UPS, the former seeking raises for full-time employees and a living wage for the part-timers who’ve barely seen a bump since their last strike in 1997. The second is Amazon employees realizing they only make half what Teamsters do. And the third sees immigrant app drivers yearning for transparency.

As with her previous two Oscar-winning documentaries, the candid footage and interviews captured here are invaluable. They supply the raw emotion shared by people on three different tiers of the same nightmare and how an almost imperceptibly incremental victory can often feel like winning the lottery after so many years of thinking progress of any kind was a pipe dream. It’s as much a tactic as union-busting, though: give a crumb and pretend it’s a feast.

The overlap between UPS and Amazon is easily made, in large part because the latter ultimately votes to join the former’s Teamster union. The app workforce is kind of on an island of its own beyond the delivery connection (probably why Starbucks workers are thanked in the end credits despite no screen time), but Kopple thematically works their plight in while expanding their story to union-like organizations Deliveristas United and The Worker’s Justice Project.

Their piece to this puzzle is actually the most harrowing and memorable. That’s not to belittle what the Teamsters are doing (and some pushback is seen due to the breadth of who they represent guaranteeing not everyone is happy when a “landmark agreement” is made). It’s just to say these majority immigrants have a lot more going on with deactivation (firing without cause), violent attacks, murders, and, as Trump’s second term begins, ICE deportations.

We’re literally seeing the full spectrum of our country’s most vulnerable citizens and neighbors sacrificing everything while those worth more money than can ever feasibly be spent in a lifetime hoard even more via tax breaks. UPS drivers fight for more than $40 an hour. Amazon warehouse workers fight for air conditioning. “Dashers” fight for the right to appeal their overnight terminations. Context and relativity prove their equal value.

Everyone who participated is equally a hero, too. You know entities like Amazon will use this film as a means to put employees on a list if they haven’t already been singled out or fired. You know the Trump cabinet will do the same for every app worker with an accent, regardless of their citizenship. They told their stories, anyway. They trusted Kopple to foster their truth in a way that will hopefully assist future generations to reach higher.

That’s the real worth of these documentaries. Harlan County and American Dream also benefit from the intense uncertainty of their eras turning their watershed moments into potential bloodbaths (literally and figuratively, respectively), but Union Town holds its own with the stakes bubbling over, portraying just how crucial it is for public sentiment to get behind these unions as a foundation for potentially preserving their own survival.

Because you’ll always be exponentially closer to losing everything than closing down Venice, Italy, for your wedding. Don’t be the smug SOB in this film playing the semantics game with a Teamster about “where’s the line on laws you’ll break?” while the one percent proves time and again that no line exists for them. Kopple documents how the system (unions included) often works against those it’s meant to support. The real victory would be rebuilding it.

Until that time comes, however, we must at least acknowledge the bravery of those putting their jobs, health, and lives on the line to remind the world that injustice is a choice. Does it bode well that the Teamsters’ straw poll for the 2024 election overwhelmingly showed its membership supported Trump, despite his policies doing more to hurt their livelihood than anyone else? No. Take yesterday’s win, fight for today, and keep hoping for a better tomorrow.

Union Town premiered at the 2026 Venice International Film Festival.

We’re now just about three weeks away from the release of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s next film Digger, featuring Tom Cruise undergoing quite the transformation to play oil tycoon Digger Rockwell. While the film is going the One Battle After Another route of skipping festivals, the strategy doesn’t seem to be generating the same kind of buzz, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning masterpiece at least screening for some notable names by this time last year.

Cruise is joined by a cast including Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D’Arcy, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, the final trailer has now arrived ahead of an October 2 release.

Here’s the brief synopsis: “The most powerful man in the world races to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything.” Iñárritu revealed at CinemaCon that he had been planning the film for around a decade and speaking to Cruise about it for around seven years before production began.

Watch the trailer below:

There are several reasons a director can decide to remake their own work. It could be an instance of having greater resources and being more confident in your skills, as was the case with Alfred Hitchcock revisiting The Man Who Knew Too Much. For William Wyler, the decision to re-adapt the play The Children’s Hour in 1961 allowed him to more accurately reflect the queer themes inherent to the original text that were snuffed out in his original 1936 adaptation (getting to work with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn on the second run probably didn’t hurt). Or for Michael Haneke, an English-language shot-for-shot riff on his Funny Games a decade after he first brought the story to screen gave an added layer to thematic provocations. 

When French producers approached Kiyoshi Kurosawa about remaking one of his own features, the answer for him was obvious: Serpent’s Path. Released in 1998, the original project was part of a duo of V-Cinema productions made simultaneously, shot fast and cheap over the course of two weeks (the other was Eyes of the Spider). Despite those limitations, it’s an absolute scorcher of a picture (and has recently received a 4K restoration from Janus, which Nick Newman spoke with Kurosawa about), unraveling a knotty narrative in which a man and his schoolteacher friend abduct and torture a low-level yakuza member in pursuit of vengeance over the murder of the man’s daughter. Anyone familiar with Kurosawa’s canon will feel his trademarks all over the film, which he directed from a script by Hiroshi Takahashi (writer of Ringu, released the same year). With this offer, though, he saw an opportunity to revisit Serpent’s Path while fashioning it more distinctly in his own voice. 

Transplanting the action from Tokyo to Paris, the new Serpent’s Path is fairly faithful to its predecessor in terms of story beats. Albert (Damien Bonnard) joins forces with Japanese psychiatrist Sayoko (Ko Shibasaki), with the latter being a gender-flipped interpretation of the previous schoolteacher role. The film kicks off with them abducting Laval (a brilliant weasel of a performance from Mathieu Amalric), a low-level accountant for the company Minard, whose employees are secretly involved in a child-trafficking organization known as The Circle. Laval’s interrogation takes place in the kind of decrepit, abandoned warehouse we’ve seen in much of Kurosawa’s work, and with the aid of deeper shadows and sharper framing from cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine (who worked with the director on his previous French-language feature, Daguerrotype), the palpable sense of terror is turned up further from the very beginning. Serpent’s Path is the type of film that makes you want a shower afterwards, the hours spent in the muck of this environment and the psychology of these characters taking a toll on your spirit. 

There are two symbiotic forces at play here. One is an evisceration of men like Laval and his cohorts (played by Slimane Dazi and Claire Denis regular Grégoire Colin), pathetic mongrels who waste no time in throwing their pals under the bus in order to spare their own lives when they know what the future holds, chained to this wall and forced to defecate on the same floor off which they’ll be eating. There’s little chance of evading death here, but better to take the shot at passing the buck onto someone else and see if they can take the fall instead. After all, you were just a middleman following orders. 

The pulsing momentum of Serpent’s Path is its tale of revenge—a mission driven by rage with no hope for resolution in sight. As we chart this labyrinthine course to get to those ultimately responsible, Albert and Sayoko reflect two very different approaches. While Albert is consistently frantic, the disheveled visage of a father consumed by the devastating loss of his child, Sayoko is eerily composed. Apart from surface differences such as language and the gender of its protagonist, the greatest difference in the two Serpent’s Path films is that the remake expands upon Sayoko’s life, including an extensive side plot in which she treats Yoshimura (Drive My Car’s Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Japanese man living in Paris who is suffering from extreme culture shock in being removed from his home and his people. Wisely, Kurosawa sticks true to himself by never spelling out the details of this story, maintaining Sayoko’s ambiguity while offering tantalizing teases as to what her stake in this ultimately is. 

Ko Shibasaki is a force of nature as Sayoko, delivering expertly calibrated menace and simmering rage. She’s ultimately the center of Serpent’s Path, with her motivations coming to the forefront in a stunning final act that marvelously pays off the mounting dread that Kurosawa methodically builds over the course of the film. With stronger formal panache on display, this remake maintains the power of its predecessor while offering greater development in its characters and a few surprises along the way, even for those familiar with its story. 

Serpent’s Path opens in theaters on Friday, September 11.

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2026 Cannes coverage. The film opens on September 9.

It’s never night in Hope Harbor. At least so long as we’re there. The eschatological events of writer-director Na Hong-Jin’s high-octane, highly anticipated Hope unfold over the course of one long, grueling, nonstop chase of a day for its rag-tag team of small-town South Korean cops, yokels, and hicks, an ensemble that ranges from heroic to hilarious in this blathering creature-feature phantasm.

Police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is a hard-headed, short-tempered dimwit who thinks himself a prominent, powerful figure in his rural district, if not the smartest man alive, a disposition that makes every word out of his mouth condescending. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe Cross, Bum-seok thinks he knows better than everyone, but the joke is on him. When a group of farmers alert him to the mysterious death of a cow that was slashed all over but left uneaten, he speeds into an investigation that immediately becomes an inverted hunt. Bum-seok is suddenly the prey to an unknown, unseen predator that’s torn every square inch of Hope Harbor apart. 

It takes a tension-packed 45 minutes for Na to reveal the giant alien-demon responsible, an unveiling that begins with intrigue and quickly sours into willful ignorance for anyone who wants to enjoy the experience without focusing too much on the shoddy CG craftsmanship of the monster in motion. It takes the same amount of time for Bum-seok’s fellow officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon)—whose entrance made the audience go wild in true blockbuster-fandom form–to save the day. But that doesn’t last for long. As it turns out, the first monster is only one of many, and as more people flock to the duo of cops to help, Hope begins losing footing in overlong sequences, CGI screwery, and a flimsy screenplay fit for Kevin Feige. 

The easiest way to describe Hope, while leaving the lion’s share of its monster mysteries intact, is: Eddington meets Spielberg’s War of the Worlds meets Attack on Titan. The irony of those obvious and worthy influences is the fact that they contain what Hope can’t muster. Na’s passion project matches some of Ari Aster’s small-town comedy. Consider a sequence in which a local ginseng hunter unleashes an absurd amount of detail about the shit he was taking when he first spotted one of the monsters in the woods. Yet it can’t lift a finger to Eddington‘s depth of character, narrative complexity, or dense package of ideas across political and thematic spectrums. 

Like War of the Worlds, Hope bears impressive set pieces and hot-pursuit sequences. But there’s narrative weight in Spielberg’s invasion opus, like there was in the 1953 original—a heaviness that builds stakes in which an audience can invest and ultimately lose themselves. Hope is hopeless in such regard. Trace explorations of xenophobia peek out from behind the curtain in Na’s attempt to humanize the aliens with a sense of soul and tragic drama. Wiry-thin displays of symbolism lack the spirituality and thematic sophistication of his previous work, especially The Wailing.

What Hope does have, however, is an approach to cinematography that radiates creativity and consideration, capturing production design that will leave your jaw on the floor. With the former, DP Hong Kyung-pyo sets up gorgeous wide shots aplenty across Jeju Island’s mountainous island-village landscape. The cinematographer behind The Wailing, Burning, and Parasite finds seemingly infinite ways to reimagine the ongoing chase in gripping, lighting-paced camera work, and captures the rich, mossy greens and tall, looming trees of Romania’s Retezek National Park with astonishing artistry. To envision the village, production designer Lee Hwokyoung took on a massive project in creating monster-sized holes that run through the entirety of obliterated buildings, streets littered with the debris of disaster at an extraordinary, Hollywood-level scale. 

The alien creatures (played by Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton) were meticulously motion-captured into their gargantuan extraterrestrial performances, faces mapped onto hulking creatures whose expressions and semi-imaginative designs are fully hampered by the rudimentary CGI, rendering sentimental moments comical and action-packed potential idle. It’s a terrifically damning example of what happens when a production doesn’t provide its visual effects team(s) with enough time, money, or personnel.

As the new titleholder of South Korea’s most-expensive film, Hope teases the promise of a fresh international arthouse approach to a long-stale subgenre in the sci-fi blockbuster. While it might offer more than a Marvel movie in cinematic craft, it suggests little more in story, character, and depth. What begins as a riveting romp through monster mystery ultimately falls flat as a fun, middling creature feature that’s a whole hour too long.

Hope premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released this fall by NEON.

The most interesting thing about Bunker is a moment of visual repetition. Early on, a husband and wife, Miguel (Javier Bardem) and Julia (Penélope Cruz), snicker amongst themselves, as lovers do, at an art opening, amused at three abstract paintings that are uniformly black—a process, the Captain Jack Sparrow-styled curator explains, that involved covering already-painted still lives. The film then calls back to this a while later, when the couple’s neighbor covers a hole he knocked out of their backyard wall with a jet-black piece of tarpaulin that briefly mirrors the paintings that Miguel and Julia scoffed at. For a moment, you start to wonder about the cosmic alignment that might have caused this to happen, but—like most things in Bunker—the eventual answer underwhelms.

Before we get back to all that, it’s important to note that those two sections of the film also point to its least appealing aspects—namely the ideas about art itself and its farcical depictions of working-class characters, either of which the director and writer of this film, Florian Zeller, seems to not understand or, worse still, openly despise. The former is embodied in the character of Andrew (the aforementioned neighbor, played by the great Steven Graham), who is attempting to renovate his uncle’s shed as a living space, since he can’t afford the rent in the neighborhood he grew up in anymore. 

In order to let in the light, Andrew decides to build a window—not into the roof or front side of the shed, but one looking into Julia and Miguel’s garden, where their 10-year-old daughter plays and almost everything in their modernist house can be observed. When Miguel confronts him about this, Andrew plays the “people around here used to look out for each other” card. Which struck me as implausible, given that he never even ran it by them. This, of course tests Miguel’s liberal mores, but despite his best efforts, the man can’t help but let words like “lawyers” and “money” into the convo, which hardly helps matters. Andrew’s first response as he walks away is to drop the C-word, and as the film progresses, Zeller leaves you guessing what other obscenities this man might be capable. 

This potential for insidious behavior acts as just the B storyline in Bunker, which is actually a film with more than one architectural plan in mind. As flagged by the Caspar David Friedrich postcard on Miguel’s office wall, he and Julia are both creative types: respectively an architect so renowned that a tech billionaire (a fun, Musky cameo from Paul Dano) is willing to pony up a blank check for him to build the survival shelter from which the film takes its name (yes, it’s a metaphor); and a translator’s assistant at a bustling London publishing house where a flavor-of-the-month author with a crush on her (a hunky, bearded Patrick Swartzenneger) is about to publish his latest novel. (Her professional insights on this tome appear to begin and end with her suspicion that the protagonist is secretly a stand-in for the author.)

If this all sounds like a sniffly way to talk about a juicy slice of melodrama, it’s not. There are more than a few great filmmakers working today with the ability to make this kind of material sing, but I sense Zeller’s talents lie elsewhere—even an out-of-sorts François Ozon could have squeezed more camp from this script than Bunker manages. What ultimately saves it are the actors, not least the plug-and-play chemistry you get by casting Cruz and Bardem; this marks the happily married heartthrobs’ seventh movie together but just their first since Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows eight years ago. If anything, their connection might be too warm for a film ostensibly about a marriage on the rocks, but they’re an undeniable pleasure to be around. Most credit for this can go to Cruz, who comes into the role on a bit of a heater after her acclaimed turn in Olivia Wilde’s The Invite earlier this year.

The movie duly lights up whenever she’s onscreen, despite her not getting a huge amount to work with, aside from an opening dinner scene in which Bardem, much like his intro in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Cannes film The Beloved, recounts the story of when they first met—allowing Cruz, in a gorgeous close-up, to give a masterclass in shifting expressions and break out that weapons-grade smile. A beat later in the art-show scene, she pauses over a nice painting of two lovers in a morning embrace, one that Zeller, as with the tarpaulin, will finally call back to with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer through a garden wall. The film eventually leaves us with two messages: the first is a kind of assurance that it’s best not to worry too much about working-class revolt (God forbid); the second is that a plaintive image is like an “open window,” an ideal that, according to Zeller, we should all be striving for in our art and in our lives, and that a more challenging one can only mean the opposite. But I guess he would say that.

Bunker premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival and will be released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Back not a moment too soon (and off one of his best films), M. Night Shyamalan has directed Remain, a VistaVision-shot romantic thriller that arrives on February 5. Ahead of this comes a first preview of Jake Gyllenhaal and Sophie Dynevor’s less-than-normal romantic dynamic and the work of DP Adolpho Veloso (Train Dreams), plus—why not—a Mitski song.

Here’s the super-concise synopsis: “She’s unlike anybody he’s ever met.” Shyamalan’s film has also been described as a “supernatural romantic thriller,” which is like asking Michael Jordan to make a free throw, layup, and slam dunk. (I’m running out of basketball metaphors to encapsulate it; let’s just establish that I’m excited.) Though the collaboration with über-hack Nicholas Sparks gives one pause, Shyamalan is simply unparalleled at turning material from eye-rolling to eye-welling. Also: Julie Hagerty is in this?

Watch the preview below:

Is any movie this year more compelling than the frayed story of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial? The star-studded, $40 million Sam Altman biopic (or exposé or spoof or something altogether different) was dropped by Amazon MGM Studios just before a likely fall-festival run after their Amazon overlords secured a $50 billion deal with Altman’s OpenAI. Amidst (apparent) scaredy-cat reactions from potential new distributors, Neon acquired the film and have set a fall release, with a New York Film Festival premiere occurring October 5. Altman is, to put it lightly, a fascinating figure, and the consternation just one movie can engender is great fun to witness. Now let’s see if Guadagnino, Andrew Garfield, his supporting cast—Yura Borisov, Mark Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz (as Elon Musk!), Jason Schwartzman, and Chris O’Dowd—and composer Damon Albarn have actually worked up something worthwhile.

Here’s NYFF’s synopsis: “The stakes couldn’t be higher in Luca Guadagnino’s thrilling, funny, and very human Artificial, a drama of immense moral urgency that propels the viewer through the two decades of machine learning research and technocratic recklessness that have brought us to our current AI crisis point. In 2003, Soviet-born computer scientist Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov) began studying artificial neural networks under University of Toronto professor Geoffrey ‘Godfather of AI’ Hinton (Mark Rylance). A decade later, while employed by Google, Sutskever fatefully crosses paths with a young entrepreneur named Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield), the eventual co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. Among our boldest auteurs, Guadagnino (previously at NYFF with Call Me by Your Name, Bones and All,Queer, and After the Hunt) takes his biggest swing yet for this headlong plunge into our doomsday moment, with a script by Simon Rich that probes the increasing gray areas between human and machine, truth and lie. Anchored by brilliant, fully inhabited lead performances by Garfield and Borisov; a remarkable supporting cast, including Rylance, Monica Barbaro, Cooper Hoffman, Ike Barinholtz, Jason Schwartzman, and Chris O’Dowd; and original songs and score by Damon Albarn, Guadagnino’s film moves like a machine in unstoppable, constant motion—a history being written as we’re watching it. A NEON release.”

Watch the preview below:

After Takashi Yamazaki’s smash, Oscar-winning hit Godzilla Minus One, he’s back with Godzilla Minus Zero, a sequel set for release on November 3 in Japan and three days later in the United States. Ahead of a roll-out of the film—including a world premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 26—which was shot entirely in Japan (and the country’s first-ever production filmed for IMAX), a new trailer has landed.

Joining the film is legendary actor Min Tanaka (Kokuho), playing Kanji Murakami, a biologist carrying deep psychological scars from the war. In addition, “Hidetaka Yoshioka reprises his role as Kenji Noda, who fought alongside protagonist Koichi Shikishima in Godzilla Minus One and now battles the new threat as the director of the Disaster Response Bureau. Yuki Yamada returns as Shiro Mizushima, the young crew member of the Shinseimaru who fought on the front lines, alongside Kuranosuke Sasaki as Seiji Akitsu, the captain of the same vessel. Furthermore, Sakura Ando reprises her role as Sumiko Ota, Shikishima’s neighbor who now runs a local orphanage, and Mio Tanaka returns as Tatsuo Hotta, the former captain of the destroyer Yukikaze. Having survived the previous deadly struggle alongside Shikishima, these beloved characters stand ready to face Godzilla once again.”

Here’s the NYFF synopsis: “After Godzilla Minus One’s triumphant reimagination of the timeless Godzilla franchise in 2023, with its ingenious, Oscar-winning visual effects and emotionally gripping back-to-basics storytelling approach, director Takashi Yamazaki returns with a supremely satisfying sequel. Godzilla Minus Zero picks up in 1949, two years after the tumultuous events of Godzilla Minus One, and continues the story of the Shikishima family as they face an all-new calamity. An experience that demands the big screen, featuring even more astounding effects choreography than its predecessor, Godzilla Minus Zero cranks up the terror while always keeping its post-WWII Japan narrative at human eye level. A GKIDS release.”

Watch below:

Following its acclaimed world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, Nicolás Pereda’s witty, deadpan comedy Everything Else Is Noise (Lo demás es ruido) is coming to North America. Ahead of a premiere in the Wavelengths section of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, followed by its U.S. premiere in the Main Slate of the 64th New York Film Festival, we’re pleased to exclusively unveil the new trailer. Recently picked up by Pragda for a North American release, the film follows a television interview with a contemporary composer that spirals into a comedic chamber piece of tensions and old affections.

Here’s the New York Film Festival synopsis: “In this incandescent yet barbed comic portrait of a family of musicians, a middle-aged composer named Tere (Teresita Sánchez) allows her friend and colleague Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas) to use her apartment to film a television interview. When no-nonsense Tere and her waggish cellist daughter Luisa (Luisa Pardo) join in the process, the recording opens up a quietly revealing space—despite persistent technical hiccups and sound disruptions. Confirming his status as one of contemporary international cinema’s most skilled balancers of realism and subtle absurdity, Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda (Lázaro at Night, NYFF62) has crafted a gratifyingly funny, minimalist tale about music-making that keeps uncovering new edges—it’s both a feminist-minded domestic comedy about professionally ingrained sexism and an exploration of the creative impulse itself. A Pragda release.”

“What really captured me about Everything Else Is Noise is how risky and hilariously political the film is— the kind of film we so need nowadays,” said Marta Sánchez, CEO of Pragda, upon the acquisition. “We are especially excited to begin a broader collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, whose body of work represents one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema. Nicolás has built an internationally recognized canon that has screened at leading festivals including Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Locarno. Now is the time for wider North American audiences to celebrate his talent fully.”

See the exclusive trailer premiere below: