10 films to watch this fall: Anemone, Nuremberg and a Springsteen biopic

Even with the film and streaming industries in an upheaval, and too few new titles finding their under-marketed way to theatres this year, the movie summer of 2025 stayed alive. Job one: done. Autumn comes next, and this lovely season has a way of raising our quality expectations.

We have the usual quotient of critical successes coming soon, having premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. More of these prestige titles will follow suit after first-look appearances at the Venice, Telluride and Toronto festivals this month.

Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut stars June Squibb – 95, if you can believe it – as a newly minted New Yorker, relocated from Florida to be with her daughter and grandson. It’s a tale of a falsehood that escalates quickly; the film had people laughing and in tears at Cannes, they say.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, marking the writer-director’s second Pynchon adventure (Inherent Vice was the first). The cast of this project, which I’m guessing, recklessly, may combine comic and kinetic action-thriller elements in a bracing way, includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall and Benicio del Toro.

Since we just mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson, we should make note of his 2017 film Phantom Thread, after which Daniel Day-Lewis pointedly retired from film acting. Or so he said at the time. But retirement can last as long as the retiree chooses. The magnificent actor co-wrote the script with his son Ronan Day-Lewis, who is also the director. He leads the cast of a story described as a generational struggle, with politics and bloodshed lurking in the background.