10 films to keep an eye on between September and December

Autumn arrives full of cinema and, this time, it is advisable to make room in the agenda. From the big names of auteur cinema to the phenomena destined to monopolize the conversation—through comebacks, Spanish surprises and films that are already endorsed by festivals and awards—the coming months promise a particularly ambitious harvest. Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Los Javis and much more... These are 10 movies to keep an eye on between September and December.

LIONEL, BY CARLOS SAIZ ESPÍN

A son, a father and a trip from Murcia to the south of France. Round trip. With these elements, essentially and scandalously familiar, Carlos Saiz makes a film that is pure thunder; an explosion of true cinema with classic themes such as forgiveness, guilt and blood ties that scratches the screen with unusual force. After surprising at the Seminci in Valladolid, the film has been winning awards every time it has been presented at the competition.

Premieres September 11.

THE BLACK BALL, BY JAVIER CALVO AND JAVIER AMBROSSI

If there is a film with the production of the year seal, without a doubt Los Javis's approach to Lorca is the one. After winning the best director award at Cannes (an award shared with a sacred cow like Pawe Pawlikowski), The Black Ball's international career seems irrefutable. It is endorsed by international critics and the sponsorship of the Netflix platform, which has made it its choice for the Oscars. The film tells three periods, each with its own handwriting, three stories, three characters but always the same wound. It is emphatic, baroque and emotional cinema thrown against the screen for shock.

Premieres September 25.

DIGGER, BY ALEJANDRO GONZÁLEZ IÑÁRRITU

After the irresistible failure of the autobiographical delirium Bardo, the Mexican director of four Oscars returns with desire and will for redemption. The story is told of the most powerful man determined to save all of humanity from its errors. Few arguments match so faithfully with the always disproportionate aspirations of both González Iñárritu and the protagonist, a Tom Cruise determined to do his last thing outside of the exquisitely commercial cinema of which he is, without a doubt, the king.

Premieres on October 2.

THE INVITATION, BY OLIVIA WILDE

Few recent plays have given so much play to filmmakers out of ideas (or on a bad day). The debut on stage by Barcelona native Cesc Gay in 2015 became the film Sentimental, directed by himself, five years later. A single space and two very different couples who doubt, investigate and are surprised by the multiple possibilities of issues such as sex and, if any, everything else. Then came the Swiss version in German, the French version and, finally, the global version, the American one. Filmmaker Olivia Wilde places herself alongside Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton and everything indicates that: bingo! After sweeping Sundance, he has the world left.

Premieres October 16.

WILD HORSE BY NINE MARTIN MCDONAGH

Do you remember Inisherin's Banshee? Well, the same thing, or almost, but on Easter Island. McDonagh writes as only he knows the infinite and perfect dialogue between two men who are also friends; who are also CIA agents and who also know that they are going to die very soon. With the Chilean coup d'état of 1973 as a backdrop and accompanied by two memorable performances by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, what follows wants to be a perfect x-ray of many things: the disgust of the world that the American empire has left us, the loneliness, the cruelty, the emptiness of everything.

Premieres on November 13.

ADOLESCENCE, SEX AND DEATH IN CAMP MIASMA, BY JANE SCHOENBRUN

The proposal from the director of the hidden and instant classic The Brilliance of Television burst into the last edition of Cannes like a true cataclysm. The somewhat banal, or just strange, story of the filming of a new version, the umpteenth, of a horror film (slasher) is cinema within cinema and something more. A lot more. What follows, in fact, is very much a farce, a parody, even, or a meta-movie just for the sake of it, but above all it seems like a brilliant exploration of both identity and one's own consciousness in times of multiple screens.

Premieres on November 20.

FATHERLAND, BY PAWE PAWLIKOWSKI

The Polish director completes his trilogy in an illuminated and sad black and white, essentially sad, revolving around the Second World War and what emerges from the screen is a kind of beautiful funeral cantata about time. After Ida and Cold War, the journey through a Germany in ruins of the writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika is told. Identity, family, love and guilt are the themes gathered in this kind of end-of-the-century coven of captivating and very painful beauty.

Premieres December 4.

CLUB KID, BY JORDAN FIRSTMAN

The expression, word or slogan hype was invented for productions (or phenomena) like this one. Defined here and there as a madness with a heart, the film follows the steps of a kind of parsley of all sauces or a more or less underground party promoter who one day discovers that he is a father and that, like almost all fathers, he loves his son. Directed and starring Jordan Firstman, Club Kid is the film you need to have an opinion on.

Premieres December 4.

FAR FROM THE TREES, BY MERITXELL COLELL

Few Spanish films in this year of so many Spanish films dare to do as much as Meritxell Colell's third fiction. With an excessive and all-embracing vocation, the film narrates the journey through the Andes of an artist behind the hidden sounds of languages ​​that are lost. This at the same time that an epistolary account of the memory of the Spanish exile after the Civil War in Mexico is filtered. That without giving up a reflection as profound as it is enlightened about time, death and, while we're at it, oblivion. A prodigy of sincere, meticulous and evocative cinema.

Premieres December 11.

YELLOW LETTERS, BY IKER ÇATAK

The latest winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin is a German film, but a Turkish one; It is a family drama, but political; It is a tragedy, but disguised as a thriller. Yellow letters takes its name from the yellow letters that the Turkish government sends to teachers it considers uncomfortable with the regime. It is, obviously, a dismissal notice. From there, from the immanence of a political drama, Çatak's proposal advances to become an accurate and serious reflection on the power of art and on the dilemma that every artist faces: resisting or selling out to power.