The return of Beetlejuice, Gladiator, Paddington and the Joker – the best films of autumn 2024

Tim Burton’s fantasy horror-comedy, with Michael Keaton as the anarchic supernatural exorcist Beetlejuice, was a big hit in the 1980s. Now, Burton returns with a sequel and the promise (or threat) of a franchise. Keaton is back as the titular character and Winona Ryder, once the tricky teenager, has a difficult daughter of her own, played by Jenna Ortega.
6 September

The Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz makes his English-language debut with this amusing, counterfactual Tudor drama. Jude Law is on roaring, smirking, pining form as Henry VIII, desperate for reassurance and love and at one stage showing us his fleshy and unlovely royal buttocks. Alicia Vikander is inscrutable as his sixth and final queen, Catherine Parr.
6 September

Maryam Moghadam and Behtash Sanaeeha, the Iranian directors of this wonderfully sweet, funny and politically sharp work, were forbidden by their government from travelling to Berlin for its premiere. But the film speaks for itself. Mahin, played marvellously by Lili Farhadpour, is a 70-year-old widow living on her own, who has a gentle romance with a taxi driver and stands up to the morality police bullies who drive around threatening women not wearing hijabs.
13 September

A film that promises the old‑school pleasures of intimate drama, heavy-hitting grownup performances and intelligent writing. Juliet Stevenson and Jared Harris play a troubled couple whose daughter disappeared as a teenager a decade previously. Then she returns suddenly, now a twentysomething played by Erin Doherty. Her re-emergence triggers complex, painful questions, including: is she who she says she is?
13 September

The author and film critic Anthony Quinn created a wonderful character for his murder mystery bestseller Curtain Call: the flamboyant and arrogant theatre critic Jimmy Erskine, who finds himself at the centre of a scary situation in 1930s London. In the film, he is played by Ian McKellen, with Lesley Manville and Gemma Arterton supporting.
13 September

Despite the title, this is a vehicle for the two silverest, foxiest silver foxes in Hollywood – a kind of Mr��and Mr Smith action bromance comedy. Brad Pitt and George Clooney play two shady freelancers who charge a great deal for covering up criminal messes. Their lives turn into one almighty mess when they are hired for the same job.
20 September

Coralie Fargeat’s Los Angeles body‑horror satire caused a sensation in Cannes this year, with audiences saying that it could do for its star Demi Moore what Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta. Moore plays a fading movie actor in career crisis; a mysterious young doctor tells her she can be secretly treated with “the Substance”, which will allow a younger, sexier self to be extruded from her body.
20 September

This debut feature was an award-winner at Sundance for the Indian film-maker Shuchi Talati. It’s a boarding-school drama based partly on her own experiences in Gujarat and partly on Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers. (Some even wondered about the possible additional influence of Black Narcissus.) A 16-year-old becomes head girl, but feels that the school rules she must enforce stifle her burgeoning romance with a boy. Then her mum interferes.
20 September

For Aubrey Plaza fans, and fans of body-swap-style fantasy comedies, this film from actor turned director Megan Park is a must. You’ve heard of 13 Going on 30? This is 18 going on 39. Maisy Stella plays Elliott, a lippy teenage girl who does shrooms one summer – after which her future, careworn, middle-aged self appears, played by Plaza. She gives her younger self some good advice, including an instruction to avoid a certain boy whom Stella meets the next day, with alarming results.
27 September

Francis Ford Coppola’s all-star self-funded folie de grandeur won mixed notices at Cannes, but no one could deny his ambition and cinephilic idealism. It’s a sci-fi conspiracy drama in the spirit of Ayn Rand and Fritz Lang, inspired by the Catilinarian plotters of ancient Rome. Adam Driver plays a brilliant but troubled architect and scientist living in a kind of steampunk, alternative-reality New York who gets mixed up in political scheming.
27 September

Saoirse Ronan stars in an adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir about surmounting addiction and leaving London, a city where there was nothing for her but pain and shame, and returning to her childhood home in Orkney. However, this was where she grew up with an evangelical Christian mother and a bipolar father, so things are hardly straightforward there, either.
27 September

Alice Lowe has long been a welcome and valuable presence on the British cinema scene, as an actor, writer and director. She returns with this fantasy romantic comedy, in which she stars as Agnes, a woman eternally condemned to be reincarnated as herself in a different historical period whenever she falls in love with a toxic man – which she does repeatedly.
27 September

Awards and saucer-eyed praise were showered on the indie-mainstream reinvention of the DC villain Joker in 2019, in a film that starred Joaquin Phoenix channelling the spirits of two Scorsese antiheroes, Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. Now, the director and co-writer Todd Phillips has embraced the inevitable and given us a sequel. Joker falls in love with Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga.
4 October

A star is born in the form of the LA-born actor Mikey Madison, who appears in this uproarious drama from Sean Baker, which won this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. She plays Anora, or Ani, a New York table-dancer from an Uzbek-Russian background who one night entrances Vanya, the spoilt son of an oligarch who becomes obsessed with her. They go to Las Vegas to get married – to the earth-shattering fury of his family.
1 November

Those innocent souls who still in their hearts associate Paddington with the Michael Bond books or the 70s TV adaptation may not yet have got their minds around his global movie celebrity. But here is Paddington 3, which brings our ursine hero back to the land of his Aunt Lucy: Peru. What will happen? And will the film touch on the question of his mum and dad?
8 November

This documentary, directed by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, was an award-winner at Berlin. It concerns the remarkable friendship between the Palestinian activist Basel Adra in the West Bank and the��Israeli writer and journalist Yuval Abraham.
8 November

Are you not entertained … again? Time, once more, to rub your hands in the dirt and get back to business. Twenty-four years after the original Gladiator, Paul Mescal plays Lucius, the grandson of Marcus Aurelius, who is forced into slavery and inspired to rise up against his oppressors as a gladiator kicking the asses of various wild animals in the Colosseum.
15 November

Hugh Grant continues one of the most sensational career second acts in British screen-acting history. Once a floppy-haired romcom dreamboat, he is now capable of the most complex and disquieting villain roles. For Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the creators of the A Quiet Place franchise, he plays a strange man who intimidates the two Mormon women who try to convert him.
22 November

A lovely fiction feature debut from the Indian auteur Payal Kapadia, which revives the memory of the great master Satyajit Ray and his films Days and Nights in the Forest and The Big City. It’s the story of three nurses in modern-day Mumbai, women delicately negotiating their lives and their futures.
29 November

Nicole Kidman is no stranger to age-gap shenanigans – she had them with Zac Efron in two films, The Paperboy and A Family Affair and also in Jonathan Glazer’s cult classic Birth. Now, Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller gives us Kidman as a CEO infatuated with a young male intern played by Harris Dickinson. Is this a return to the world of a 90s-style erotic thriller such as Barry Levinson’s Disclosure, only with a contemporary twist?
20 December