As I type this, the high was 94 degrees today. It’s supposed to be around 92 tomorrow, then mid- to high 90s for the foreseeable future. Welcome to fall in Los Angeles. While I cannot vouch for the weather, I wouldn’t mind things heating up at the cinema a little over the next few weeks and months. While the highs (Sinners; Sorry, Baby; Warfare) have been very high, 2025 has been a little soft through the first eight months of the year.
Luckily, as happens every fall, it’s festival season, which bleeds right into Oscars season, and that means it’s time for the studios to release their best and brightest into the world for all of us to see. It’s not an ideal ecosystem for healthy moviegoing, wherein we get five months of blockbusters and maybe some counterprogramming, then the blockbusters go away and we get 12 weeks to cram in as many prestige pictures as we can stomach. But, things are only moving more in that direction, so for now, we’ll celebrate the best of what’s to come and try to plan for how to see it all.
Before we get to the top 10, some honorable mentions broken up into a couple categories:
Big-budget fun
Anaconda – The original 1997 Anaconda is one of the great B-movie creature features of the ’90s. I couldn’t possibly guess the number of times I saw it as a child. This appears to be Jack Black and Paul Rudd teaming up for a knowingly comic, meta-remake. Thanks to A Minecraft Movie and the continued success of the Kung Fu Panda franchise, Black could not be hotter. Rudd is always gold. And as someone currently working my way through Ione Skye’s tell-all memoir Say Everything, it will be fun to see her back on the big screen.
Avatar: Fire and Ash – I wasn’t the biggest fan of Way of Water, which is of course visually stunning but has some character issues and is too damn long. That said, James Cameron is really doing the thing here, and as long as he wants to deliver this level of spectacle, I will absolutely line up to see it on the biggest screen imaginable.
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery – Though it didn’t reach the heights of Knives Out, I liked Glass Onion more than a lot of people. I am fully in the bag for what should obviously be called the Benoit Blanc Mystery series, and Johnson clearly has a knack for moving around the pieces on his chess board in the most surprising, entertaining, and delightful ways every time.
Indie darlings
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You – I truly know nothing about this film except that it was highly lauded out of Sundance this year and Rose Byrne reportedly gives a tremendous performance. Also, what a title! I don’t need to know more than that.
Predators – All due respect to Dan Trachtenberg and his pair of franchise films in release this year, but this is the Predators movie I most want to see. A documentary about the world behind the scenes of the To Catch a Predator series, this seems tailormade to force us to ask the question: But who are the real predators? The answer is the child sex predators. But also the TV executives who profit from them, the internet vigilantes who often do more harm than good, and the audience that gets its vicarious thrill from all of this. Pourquoi pas tout?
Sacrifice – Another film I know very little about except that it is the English-language debut of French filmmaker Romain Gavras, son of legendary director Costa-Gavras and whose 2022 political thriller Athena went criminally underseen. If this film captures half of that feature’s magic, this will be one to watch.
Yorgos Lanthimos: or, I wish I knew how to quit you
From 2010 to 2018, Lanthimos might have been my favorite filmmaker on the planet. Certainly among them, anyway. The run of Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite is about as strong as I can imagine (I haven’t seen Alps, the director’s Dogtooth followup, but it’s long been on my watchlist). I liked a lot of Poor Things, but something about it kept me from fully embracing it. Kinds of Kindness was interesting but uneven.
Now, we get Bugonia, the director’s fourth collaboration with Emma Stone. In the wake of The Favourite, this would have been one of my most anticipated movies of the year, as Poor Things was the year it came out. But, I find myself wondering if the Stone era has been good for Lanthimos. Don’t get me wrong: She’s one of my favorite working performers, and he remains a fantastic director. I just wonder if something about their alchemy isn’t working for me. Anyway, I will absolutely be seeing Bugonia the minute it comes out. I hope it’s great, but my excitement is tempered.
Now, on with Last Cinema Standing’s 10 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2025:
10. The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Release date: Nov. 26
I was introduced to Mendonça Filho by his 2016 screed Aquarius, a bold, beautiful, angry film about the toll it takes to stand up against the oppressive forces in society. His followup, Bacurau, was similarly bold and angry but took a much more metaphorical approach to the material, reminding me a little of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville or Manderlay without quite so much artifice.
Starring Wagner Moura, who I thought was tremendous in last year’s Civil War, The Secret Agent covers a part of Brazil’s history that is well covered in the cinema, but I can’t wait to see what Mendonça Filho does with it. The film won numerous prizes at Cannes, including best actor for Moura and best director for Mendonça Filho.
9. Sound of Falling, directed by Mascha Schilinksi
Release date: TBA
Another hit at Cannes, where this film won the jury prize in competition (think third place, for whatever that’s worth), Sound of Falling is Schilinski’s second feature film after 2017’s little-seen Dark Blue Girl. The same fate will not befall this much-lauded tale of four generations of women and girls all connected by the same farm. In the little I have read about this film, it sounds haunting, ethereal, and generally right up my alley.
8. Orwell: 2+2=5, directed by Raoul Peck
Release date: Oct. 3
A feature-length documentary on George Orwell would be interesting in and of itself. A feature-length documentary that puts Orwell’s writing and philosophy in context then brings that context to bear on our current predicament, as I understand this film does, sounds fascinating. That all of that may be true and comes to us from Peck, director of the superlative James Baldwin investigation I Am Not Your Negro, makes this an asbolute must watch.
7. It Was Just An Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi
Release date: Oct. 15
Five of the past six years in which I have compiled this list, the Palme d’Or winner has made the cut. How could it not? Panahi’s film, however, feels particularly worth anticipating, given what it represents just by existing, let alone its many plaudits and near-certain quality. Panahi is perhaps the most important filmmaker to come out of the Iranian New Wave, a rebellion against the oppressiveness of that nation’s regime. You will recall last year’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by exiled filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, as part of the same movement.
Panahi is banned from making films in Iran, but during the ban, he has produced some of the finest experimental films of our time, from the meta-documentary This Is Not a Film to the slice-of-life docudrama Taxi. Panahi continues to battle against the forces that would silence him and come out victorious, this latest film succeeding on the world’s grandest stage for cinema.
6. Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger
Release date: Oct. 15
Bless Berger for continuing to take on new genres and new styles of filmmaking, stretching his muscles and giving us something we’ve never seen before – or rather, something we have seen before done better. From the domestic dramas of Jack and All My Loving to the epic war film All Quiet on the Western Front (the further removed from which I get, the more I think it is a masterpiece) to the paperback thrills of Conclave, Berger is a chameleon.
Now, here comes the Colin Farrell-starring Ballad of a Small Player, a drama about life, death, and redemption in the seedy world of Macau casinos. The Farrell renaissance appears to be chugging along quite nicely still, and I can’t wait to see what Berger’s eye will make of the surface-level glitz and glam of Macau.
5. Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier
Release date: Nov. 7
Trier’s Louder Than Bombs hit the indie scene in New York like, well, a bomb in 2015. That’s when I was living there and trying my best to see just about everything that played at the Lincoln Center. That said, I missed both Bombs and Trier’s followup, Thelma. I didn’t miss The Worst Person in the World, which remains one of the most tender and insightful films of this half-decade.
For his Cannes hit this year (Grand Prix, second place basically), Trier has brought along some familiar favorites like Worst Person stars Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, while adding in heavy hitters Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning, among others. I hear Skarsgard gives the performance of his career, which is saying something when you consider the career we’re talking about here.
4. Kontinental ’25, directed by Radu Jude
Release date: TBA
It is unclear to me whether this movie will actually come out in the U.S. this year – it currently has only European distribution in place – but rest assured, whenever it comes out, I’ll be there. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and it will play at AFI Fest this year, where I caught Jude’s excellent Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World in 2023. The director has an AI-skewering Dracula epic making the rounds now, too, but this seems the more likely of the two to be coming out sooner rather than later.
Jude has entered that rare air for me where any film he makes is appointment viewing. There is no one out there right now pushing the bounds of what cinema can be and what it can express quite like Jude. From what I know of both Kontinental ’25 and Dracula, it seems that instinct toward boundary pushing has only grown sharper and more astute.
3. Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao
Release date: Nov. 27
Speaking of Dracula, not so long ago, Zhao was attached to a radical reimagining of Bram Stoker’s classic novel. It was to be her next film after Eternals. Instead, we are getting Hamnet, a lush romantic drama that in lesser hands would seem like Shakespeare in Love but for Hamlet instead of Romeo and Juliet. However, I trust Zhao to bring her keen sense of human frailty and the little dramas of life to this epic tale.
I never want to tell a filmmaker what to do – because who the hell am I – but this is the film, or at least the type of film, I wish we’d gotten after the Oscar-winning Nomadland. I’m among the few folks who was not entirely negative on Eternals, Zhao’s entry into the MCU, but that was not what I wanted for her. Happily, we seem to be moving away from independent-minded directors being swallowed up by the Marvel machine, and hopefully, that means more films like this.
2. Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo del Toro
Release date: Oct. 17
If asked to design in a lab – perhaps the lab of a mad scientist? – the perfect pairing of art and artist, filmmaker and subject, I feel one could do no better than Guillermo del Toro and Frankenstein. No one embodies the love of classic cinema and its classic monsters more than the Mexican auteur who won his first Academy Award for the Creature from the Black Lagoon homage The Shape of Water. In so many ways, del Toro has been moving toward this film his whole career.
Of course, it does not hurt that in a recent interview, del Toro decried the overreliance on green screens and CGI to tell stories, stating emphatically that he films on real sets with practical effects (a little rich from the guy who made Pacific Rim, but the spirit is in the right place). Throw in Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as The Creature, and Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz in supporting roles, and you’ve got the potential for something truly special. I only wish it weren’t produced by Netflix and that more folks would have the opportunity to see it on the big screen.
1. One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Release date: Sept. 26
As Stanley said to Blanche, “We’ve had this date with each other since the beginning.” Anderson was supposed to work with Leonardo DiCaprio on Boogie Nights, just as each was beginning his ascent. Instead, DiCaprio went off to do Titanic and Mark Wahlberg subbed in on Boogie Nights. It happened the way it had to happen.
Ever since, DiCaprio has gone around collecting our greatest (male) auteurs like pogs, working with mononymic giants like Cameron, Spielberg, Nolan, Eastwood, Tarantino, and of course Scorsese. Meanwhile, PTA has attached himself to many of the greatest actors in the world like Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix, and his early muse Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hell, Anderson even worked with Leo’s dad on Licorice Pizza. But, they have never found each other until now.
That alone would make this enough to be the event of the decade for me, as a devotee of Anderson and with DiCaprio being my favorite actor. And yet, lucky us, we also get Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, and a seemingly committed Sean Penn. The trailers, cut as always by Anderson, look fantastic. PTA has always specialized in making grand stories feel human and making the human feel grand. This appears to be his grandest story yet, and I have no doubt that it may also end up being his most human.
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