Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Finally we are back to Hogwarts! At least that’s what’s teased in the trailers of this 10th blockbuster set in JK Rowling’s wizarding world – the second in her Fantastic Beasts series. But even though there’s a glimpse of what is to become Harry Potter’s school, actual children are largely absent from an adventure bristling with darkness, monsters and moral conflict. Unlike the Potter movies, which these chronologically predate, the added thrill of the Beasts series is none of us muggles (or ‘no-maj’-es, as we non-wizarding folk are known in the US) know what the story will be in advance – and we won’t spoiler them for you, except to say that this one centres around that nice Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and a younger Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) attempting to stop and kill the powerful dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp). Released 16 Nov in the US (Credit: Warner Bros)

Bohemian Rhapsody

Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Whishaw and even Daniel Radcliffe (it’s a kind of magic…?) were all once in the frame to portray Freddie Mercury, but surely none of them could have rivaled this uncanny transformation by eventual choice, Rami Malek. “He makes the role his own,” writes BBC Culture’s film critic Nicholas Barber of the star of TV’s Mr Robot. Malek dons fake teeth to triumphantly strut his stuff as the flamboyant Queen frontman, who died of Aids-related pneumonia in 1991. This conservatively rated biopic doesn’t quite go there, instead following the British rock band’s formation and rise up until their stadium-storming 1985 Live Aid performance. The trailer drew much flak for seeming to airbrush over Mercury’s homosexuality and Aids diagnosis. And with original director Bryan Singer dropped after facing sexual assault charges (he was replaced by Dexter Fletcher), it’s a movie already almost as controversial as its legendary subject. Released 1 Nov Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Columbia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Singapore and Slovakia, 2 Nov Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Lithuania, Mexico, Norway, Nepal, Poland, Romania and US, 7 Nov Philippines, 9 Nov Japan, 29 Nov Italy (Credit: 20th Century Fox)

Girl

Fifteen-year-old Lara dreams of being a ballerina, but she faces a tougher challenge than most. As well as the usual blood, sweat and tears demanded by classical training at her top-flight Belgian academy, Lara is simultaneously preparing for gender reassignment – she was born in the body of the boy. A sensation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it won the ‘Queer Palm’ and boasting the coveted 100 per cent ‘fresh’ rating on film reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Lukas Dhont’s achingly intimate coming-of-age drama is brilliantly believable. A couple of wounding moments at school aside, Lara’s conflicts are largely internalised – rather than the slings and arrows of anti-trans prejudice her biggest battle being with the mirror (there’s a lot of unflinching nudity). Young actor/dancer Victor Polster is mesmerising as Lara – this is a star-making turn, whether or not you agree with the casting of another cisgender male in a transgender role. Released 1 Nov in the Netherlands, 2 Nov in Norway, 15 Nov in Hungary, 16 Nov in USA and 22 Nov in Greece (Credit: Netflix)

Widows

To say this heist thriller was feverishly anticipated would be an understatement. Thrillingly, it doesn’t disappoint. Widows is the first film in five years from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen, who became the first black film-maker to win the Oscar for best picture. If that wasn’t enough of a draw, he co-wrote this film with Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn (based on a 1983 British TV series by Lynda La Plante) and led a charge on the zeitgeist by creating a female-driven, ethnically diverse cast packed with hot rising talent (Cynthia Erivo, Elizabeth Debicki and Daniel Kaluuya) as well as wise older hands (Liam Neeson, Jacki Weaver, Robert Duvall). Viola Davis, always magnetic, leads a gang of women who decide to carry through with a heist after their criminal husbands were killed on the job. “Should we call it fun? Let’s not get carried away” says Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out, rather “McQueen has made a first-rate genre exercise that doubles as a treatise on race and gender,” writes Eric Kohn of IndieWire. After the punishing likes of 12 Years a Slave and Hunger it’s definitely McQueen’s most all-out entertaining work to date.
Released 6 Nov in the UK, 15 Nov in Argentina, Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal and Turkey, 16 Nov in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Sweden, US and South Africa, 22 Nov in Australia, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands and Russia, 23 Nov in Romania, 28 Nov in France, 29 Nov in Brazil, 30 Nov in Spain (Credit: 20th Century Fox)

The Grinch

Dr Seuss’s zany 1957 picture book, How The Grinch Stole Christmas! is a much beloved classic in the US. The rest of the world, however, is more likely to have nodding acquaintance with the Grinch via the 2000 box-office smash featuring Jim Carrey, smothered under a Santa’s sack-worth of lurid, pea-coloured make-up. Thankfully technology’s moved on a bit since then and this third screen adaptation (there’s also a cult 1966 TV movie narrated by Boris Karloff) is a whizzy 3D, state of the art CG animation, promisingly brought to you by the makers of Despicable Me, Sing and The Secret Life Of Pets. This time it’s Dr Strange and Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch who voices the hairy, scary, grumpy green anti-hero who resolves to spoil everyone’s fun and steal Christmas. A gift to all you bah-humbuggers out there. Released 8 November in Brazil, Czech Republic, Lebanon and Slovakia, 9 November in the UK, Norway, Sweden, US and Vietnam, 22 November in Argentina and Portugal, 23 Nov in Bulgaria and Romania and 28 Nov in France, 29 Nov in Australia, Columbia, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore, 30 Nov in Spain, Lithuania and Poland (Credit: Universal Pictures)

Searching for Ingmar Bergman

Happy Birthday Mr Bergman! To celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth (Bergman died aged 89), German director Margarethe von Trotta made this

documentary analysing the art, the life and the legacy of the legendary Swedish director, consistently regarded as one of the greatest and most influential film-makers of all time. His biggies are all discussed: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander et al, but there’s also a feast of rare and fascinating archive footage, alongside fresh interviews with the likes of Olivier Assayas, Ruben Ostlund, Mia Hansen-Love and, obviously, Bergman’s muse and former lover, Liv Ullmann. “Searching for Ingmar Bergman largely dispenses with a conventional biographical structure and assumes a fair degree of prior knowledge or interest from the viewer” warns Allan Hunter on ScreenDaily, but it “is essential viewing for cinephiles.” Released 2 Nov in Estonia and the US (Credit: Oscilloscope)

Shoplifters

“Throughout his career, film-maker Hirokazu Kore-eda has worried family relationships like a bone (particularly the father-son bond), as though they held the key to deciphering the soul of Japanese society. And perhaps they do” writes Deborah Young in her review for The Hollywood Reporter. Literally titled ‘Manbiki Kazoku’ (‘The Shoplifting Family’ in Japanese), Shoplifters sees Kore-eda return to his pet preoccupation. The family who shoplifts together stays together in the case of this film’s makeshift group of impoverished folk who uneasily share both lodgings and loot to stay afloat. Things get even tougher when one day a starving, battered little girl is co-opted into their number. Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where Kore-eda previously won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son. Shoplifters is a typically subtle, modestly scaled, thoughtfully paced (film critics’ speak for slow) offering, whose borderline plotless story will repay patient viewers with a wealth of warmth and tender humanity. Released 8 Nov in Russia, 15 Nov in Australia, 22 Nov in Portugal, 23 Nov in the UK and 23 Nov in the US (Credit: Magnolia Pictures)

The Other Side of the Wind

A new movie by Orson Welles? Not exactly. Almost all of Welles’s films were seemingly troubled productions, but none more so than this Hollywood satire he started shooting in 1970 and finished in 1976. He’d only edited about 40 minutes of it by 1979, which existed in a rough print and 10 hours of raw footage when he died, and it finally achieved its posthumous premiere at the Venice Film Festival via Netflix on 31 August 2018. Shot in an experimental, mockumentary style, it focuses around a legendary and bullish film director (John Huston – though Welles considered casting himself in the role) struggling to complete his comeback masterpiece. It was originally inspired by the suicide of Welles’s old pal, Ernest Hemingway. This “dizzying”, “fascinating” and “extravagant” film, very much a product of its time, is “one of Welles’s grandest unfinished projects” writes Glenn Kenny of rogerebert.com though, “watching

this assemblage it occurred to me that it remained unfinished by Welles in his lifetime by design.” Released 2 Nov on Netflix, with a limited theatrical release (Credit: Netflix)

At Eternity's Gate

There’s no shortage of remarkable biopics of Vincent van Gogh, the troubled visionary artist almost as famous for cutting off his own ear as for his swirling post-impressionist masterpieces. However, this one is a class apart. Premiering to rave reviews at this year’s Venice Film Festival, it’s luminously directed by Julian Schnabel, a painter himself, whose Oscar-nominated 2007 masterpiece The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was an exquisite depiction of a man with locked-in syndrome. Here Schnabel captures Van Gogh’s final days spent in the small French town of Arles with a rare and luminous intensity and proves he was right to cast the 63-year-old Willem Dafoe as Van Gogh (who died aged just 37). “Willem Dafoe has his greatest role since Jesus Christ” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “The movie is not just a pleasure to watch, but actually puts forward some new ideas about Van Gogh” says Glenn Kenny of rogerebert.com
Released 15 Nov in Hong Kong, 16 Nov in the US (Credit: CBS Films)

The Girl in the Spider's Web

Oh what a tangled web indeed… This is the fifth film adaptation of the bestselling ‘Millennium’ thrillers that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: there’s already been a trilogy of Swedish movies starring Noomi Rapace and one US remake directed by David Fincher, with Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig. But The Spider’s Web is actually based on the fourth novel in the series, which is the first not to be written by original author Stieg Larsson (who died in 2004) and launches a whole new trilogy of books and movies featuring an all-new, English-speaking cast. Clear? Key intel is that The Crown’s Claire Foy is kicking her plummy type-casting in the face as Lisbeth Salander, the series’ cult punk-grrrl heroine, a heavily tattooed and pierced hacker, here on a mission to rescue and avenge a group of abused women. Released 1 Nov in Denmark, 8 Nov in Australia, Brazil, Columbia, Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Russia, Singapore and Ukraine, 9 Nov in Bulgaria, Estonia, Spain, Lithuania, Romania, US and South Africa, 21 Nov in the UK, Hong Kong, Ireland and Philippines, 22 Nov in Argentina and Germany (Credit: Columbia Pictures)