By Sara Bright
So, the October film lists are out. The usual glossy round-ups of what we’re supposed to be watching. And you look at the collection of names and titles, and the first thought is… what a strange, jumbled-up pile of things.
It feels a bit like one of those mystery boxes you can buy online. You might get something incredible, you might get something you have absolutely no use for, and you have no idea how any of it is supposed to fit together. A brooding biopic with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, the return of Daniel Day-Lewis, another Tron film, a campus drama with Julia Roberts, and a film with a title like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. What is the logic here? Is there any?
Maybe the logic is that there is no logic anymore.
I remember a time, maybe ten years ago, when a month’s releases felt… coherent. You had the big, dumb blockbusters over here. The serious awards-contenders over there. The quirky indie comedies in the corner. They all knew their place. Now, it seems, the walls have come down and everyone’s just milling about in the same room, hoping someone notices them.
Look at the big names. The ones who are supposed to guarantee an audience. Dwayne Johnson. He’s built an entire career, an empire, on being the biggest, most bankable man in the room. And now he’s in a Benny Safdie film about a mixed martial artist battling addiction. The Safdie brothers make films that feel like a two-hour anxiety attack. They’re brilliant, but they are not comfort viewing. So what is this move? Is it a genuine desire to stretch himself as an actor? Or is it a calculated awards-season gambit, the kind of thing Stallone did with Cop Land all those years ago? It’s hard not to be cynical. But then you see Channing Tatum doing something similar with Derek Cianfrance in Roofman. Another big, handsome movie star in a story about a real-life, slightly pathetic criminal. Maybe they’re all just getting bored of saving the world in green-screen studios. Maybe they just want to feel something real.
Then you have the proper royalty. Daniel Day-Lewis. Back from a retirement that everyone assumed was permanent. And he’s not coming back for some grand, sweeping epic. He’s coming back for a film he’s co-written with his son, who is also directing. Anemone. That feels personal. It feels like it’s being made for reasons that have nothing to do with us, the audience, or the box office. And in an industry that feels increasingly driven by algorithms and marketing data, that is a rare and precious thing. It’s an event. Will the film be any good? Who knows. But the fact of its existence is what matters. It’s a statement.
Of course, for every bold, personal statement, there has to be a counterbalance.
And that counterbalance, this month, is called Tron: Ares. A sequel to a sequel to a film from 1982. They’ve taken fifteen years to get this thing made. And they’re talking about how its themes of artificial intelligence are more relevant than ever. Are they? Or is this just a studio dusting off a recognisable brand name because they’re terrified of launching anything new? It’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a film born out of a board meeting, not a passion. A piece of intellectual property to be managed.
Actually, scrap that. The most interesting tension on this list isn’t the obvious one between art and commerce. It’s between the different kinds of difficult films. The different flavours of unease. You have Yorgos Lanthimos with Bugonia. He’s become the industry’s court jester, the respectable face of the bizarre. He makes these strange, unsettling, sometimes gruesome comedies, and because he gets big stars like Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, he’s allowed to play in the sandpit. He’s found a loophole.
But then you have someone like Jafar Panahi. A man who is literally banned from making films in his own country. Who has been imprisoned for his work. And yet, he keeps making them. And they keep winning awards at places like Cannes. His film, It Was Just an Accident, sounds like a thriller, but the descriptions make it clear it’s about something much deeper. Morality, forgiveness, humanity. When a man like that makes a film, it’s not just a story. It’s an act of defiance. It puts all the other ‘brave’ and ‘risky’ films on the list into a rather stark perspective, doesn’t it?
Anyway. The thing is, the whole monthly film release schedule is starting to feel like the weird middle aisle in a Lidl. You go in for milk and bread, and you come out with a German power drill, a pair of ski gloves, and a musical about an Argentinian prison. You don’t know how it all fits together, but you’re vaguely intrigued by the sheer randomness of the selection. That prison musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman, has Jennifer Lopez in it. Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna in a Bill Condon musical. On paper, that sounds completely mad. Or brilliant. Probably both.
And among all this, there’s a current of what you might call… contemporary discomfort. Films that seem to be plugging directly into the anxieties of the moment. After the Hunt. A campus drama directed by Luca Guadagnino, which is already a recipe for intense, sun-drenched angst. But this one is about cancel culture, consent, institutional power. With Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield. It’s going to be picked apart and argued over for weeks. And then there’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which, based on the description, sounds less like a film and more like a diagnosis. A panic attack on screen. And Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, a retelling of an Ibsen play from 1891, but reframed to talk about race and power in the 1950s.
None of this sounds like escapism. It’s the opposite. It’s cinema as a mirror, and a rather unflattering one at that. It feels like filmmakers are grappling, in real time, with a world that feels increasingly chaotic and stressful. They’re not offering answers. They’re just reflecting the noise.
So, you look at the list again. The Rock trying to be a serious actor. The ghost of Daniel Day-Lewis. A shiny new Tron. A Springsteen biopic that only covers the making of one album. A John Candy documentary for a dose of warm nostalgia. It’s a mess. It’s a beautiful, confusing, contradictory mess. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is what a film culture looks like when it’s no longer dominated by one single idea of what a movie should be. It’s just a collection of very different people, all trying to tell a story they think is worth telling. And we’re the ones left to make some sense of it all. Good luck with that.
