THE BURIAL (MGM/Amazon – Oct. 13):  A yarn that’s also a true story.  Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) was the owner of a family-run, regional Mississippi business that for decades had offered funeral services and burial insurance to its customers.  When Jeremiah’s finances took a turn, he made a deal with a conglomerate headed […]

  AMERICAN FICTION (Orion/MGM/Amazon – Nov. 17):  The Toronto People’s Choice Award has been something of a golden ticket to a Best Picture nomination over the years, and this year the prize went to Cord Jefferson’s directing debut American Fiction.  Jefferson’s script (based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett) for the most part deftly toes […]

  RUSTIN (Netflix – Nov. 17):  The director and producer George C. Wolfe is a towering figure in American theater, but his films to date have been wobbly at worst (A Night in Rodanthe, You’re Not You) and sturdy at best (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  Rustin marks his most accomplished […]

  THE BOY AND THE HERON (GKids – Dec. 8):  Hiyao Miyazaki, a legend of animation (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke), had announced his retirement as a feature film director a decade ago, upon the release of The Wind Rises.  But at the age of 82, he’s returned with The Boy and the […]

  HIT MAN (no distrib):  A clever, funny, sexy entertainment from Richard Linklater and emerging star Glen Powell, who co-wrote the script with the director (both also produced), inspired by an already-wild true story.  Powell plays Gary Johnson, a philosophy teacher moonlighting as a consultant for a local Texas police department.  He’s supposed to be […]

  HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (no distrib):  The premise of Azazel Jacobs’ film is simple enough to be staged as a play:  as their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) lies dying in an unseen room of his Bronx apartment, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) get in each others’ ways as they wait […]

  WICKED LITTLE LETTERS (no distrib):  In The Lost Daughter, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley played the same character at different ages, which prevented them from sharing the screen.  That’s remedied in the fairly irresistible Wicked Little Letters, an English small-town comedy in the classic (if exceptionally foul-mouthed) mode.  Inspired by a true incident, it tells the […]

  THE ZONE OF INTEREST (A24 – TBD):  Jonathan Glazer has only directed 4 feature films in his 23-year career (the most recent was Under the Skin a decade ago).  His latest, The Zone of Interest, is a work of formal brilliance, although unlikely to be to the taste of mainstream audiences.  So rigorous and painstaking in its […]