12 of the most effective movies to look at in October 2024

In 1978, Rodney Alcala was a contestant on a US tv recreation present, The Dating Game, the place he “gained” a date with one other visitor, Cheryl Bradshaw. But Alcala was a serial killer who had murdered 5 girls, and had already served two jail sentences for baby molestation. This appalling true-crime story is the topic of Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman Of The Hour. Kendrick herself performs Bradshaw, who places up with all method of sexist and predatory behaviour as an aspiring actress in Los Angeles earlier than she encounters the “Dating Game Killer” (Daniel Zovatto). “An enthralling, kitschy 70s-set exploration of gender dynamics shortly provides approach to an unnerving, suspenseful stranger-than-fiction story,” says Meagan Navarro at Bloody Disgusting. “Kendrick’s incisive imaginative and prescient, mixing horror and humour with nonlinear storytelling, makes for an genuine, poignant and unsettling debut.” 

Released on 18 October on Netflix internationally

When any person appears at you with a broad grin on their face, after which kills themselves, that implies that a demonic “Smile Entity” has cursed you to do the identical factor your self inside every week. That was the premise of Parker Finn’s debut characteristic movie, Smile, a supernatural horror film that value a mere $17 million (£12.7m), however made $217 million (£162m) on the field workplace in 2022. Suddenly it was studio executives who had broad grins on their faces, and a sequel was inevitable. Lukas Gage, who co-stars with Naomi Scott, claims that taking pictures Smile 2 was so scary that it made him sick. “It was the primary time I’ve ever been on a set the place I used to be genuinely afraid,” he said on The Jess Cagle Show. “It was so gory and so disgusting. I’m not even simply mendacity. The crew was terrified filming as a result of Parker Finn is aware of that style so properly.”

Released from 18 October in cinemas internationally

For a whole bunch of years, the all-female haenyeo divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island have harvested seafood from the ocean flooring by swimming to the depths with out oxygen. Their magical but harmful lives would have offered sufficient materials for a documentary on their very own. But The Last of the Sea Women – which is directed by Sue Kim and produced by Malala Yousafzai – takes an pressing new flip when the Japanese authorities proclaims plans to dump radioactive wastewater into the ocean, and the divers are pressured to develop into globe-trotting eco-activists. The result’s “a sturdy and impeccably heat documentary with a easy project: to point out you the human value of environmental catastrophe and to care concerning the marginalised communities most straight impacted by it”, says Kayleigh Donaldson in Pajiba. “By the top of this movie, you are able to march on the streets with the haenyeo, and root for them to proceed their nice work for generations to return.”

Released on 11 October on Apple TV+ internationally

One of essentially the most acclaimed movies of 2024, Nickel Boys is customized from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was in flip impressed by actual occasions. Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson star as Elwood and Turner, two inmates in a Florida reform faculty in 1962. The brutality of the establishment extends to the torture and homicide of the youngsters there, and solely Elwood and Turner’s friendship retains them going. What separates Nickel Boys from earlier movies set in reform colleges is that the director, RaMell Ross, reveals occasions virtually completely from the 2 buddies’ views, so the viewer appears to see every thing via their eyes. David Ehrlich says in IndieWire that Nickel Boys is “as main and memorable an achievement as any American movie this decade… a uncommon testomony to the transformative potential of cinematic adaptation (Ross co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes), and a staggeringly lovely reminder that America’s most enduring narratives are solely topic to vary when persons are invited to have a look at them in a special mild”. 

Released on 25 October within the US

The movies within the so-called “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe” have not all the time achieved properly. To be much less tactful about it, Morbius and Madame Web had been each disasters. But audiences have taken to certainly one of Spidey’s villains-turned-anti-heroes, Venom, largely due to Tom Hardy’s twin efficiency as a shambling investigative journalist, Eddie Brock, and the gleefully damaging alien “symbiote” which bonds with him. In the third and ultimate odd-couple blockbuster within the collection, big monsters from the symbiote’s residence planet land on Earth, so the stakes – and the price range – are increased than ever. “By the third one, we have been given a lot artistic help to push it,” Hardy told Jeff Conway at Forbes. “I believe you bought to swing for the fences with this stuff. It’s the final one and we need to exit with a bang, and lay the foundations for optionality and potentialities as a result of it has been such an amazing experience.”

Released from 25 October in cinemas internationally

A four-time Oscar nominee, Saoirse Ronan hasn’t had a serious dramatic position for a number of years, however she may very well be in line for a fifth Oscar nod quickly. In November, she is in Steve McQueen’s Blitz, and earlier than that she stars on this adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir, directed by Nora Fingscheidt. Ronan performs a younger biologist who sank into alcoholism whereas she was learning in London. After a stint in rehab, she returns to her household residence in Scotland’s distant Orkney Islands. The rugged natural world would possibly support her restoration, however her divorced mother and father (Stephen Dillane and Saskia Reeves) would possibly complicate it. “This generally devastating, however in the end hopeful drama… feels bracingly genuine,” says Emma Simmonds in The List. “The Outrun could be stunningly shot and alive to the therapeutic energy of residence, nevertheless it’s additionally superbly unsentimental on Rona’s relationships along with her household and the native space.”

Released on 2 October in France, 4 October within the US, and 5 October in Germany

If this 12 months’s Netflix adaptation of One Day left you hankering for some extra British romantic tragicomedy, look no additional than We Live in Time, directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn). Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh star as two thirtysomething Londoners – he a breakfast cereal marketer, she an bold chef – who’ve a passionate, rom-com-worthy relationship, till she is recognized with ovarian most cancers. The twist is that Nick Payne’s screenplay retains slicing between three completely different durations, so the most effective of instances bump up towards the worst of instances. Hankies on the prepared! “There’s an achingly palpable, playful chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that leaps off the display screen,” says Michael Rechtshaffen in The Hollywood Reporter. “But in addition they refuse to shrink back from letting their characters’ much less engaging qualities bleed via… seldom has such an unflinchingly trustworthy tackle mortality felt so transcendently life-affirming.”

Released on 11 October within the US

The newest screwball comedy-drama from Sean Baker (The Florida Project) gained the Palme d’Or, the highest prize at this 12 months’s Cannes Film Festival, and it is positive to choose up extra trophies all through awards season. In explicit its star, Mikey Madison, deserves to be on each “greatest actress” shortlist there may be. She performs Ani, a Russian-American strip-club dancer who catches the attention of Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), an oligarch’s ridiculously spoilt son. He gives to pay her to be his girlfriend for every week, however Anora isn’t any Pretty Woman-style fairy story. It’s far more durable, earthier, extra farcical and extra hectic than that – and all the higher for it. “Sean Baker’s highly effective, spirited and rollicking Anora… is nothing in need of pure film magic,” says Tomris Laffly at RogerEbert.com. “His neatly interwoven city machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (generally inside the identical sequence), whereas by some means holding you conscious about the sorrow that’s sure to rise to the floor.”

Released on 18 October within the US

Pharrell Williams’s greatest single, Happy, was on the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, so it is acceptable that this documentary about his life and music is not shot on movie or video: it is a cartoon, animated within the fashion of The Lego Movie. Directed by Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?), Piece By Piece is a… errr… blockumentary, that includes the voices of Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Snoop Dogg and others. They all keep in mind how Pharrell was found in Virginia and went on to provide numerous pop hits. But all of them seem as brightly colored Lego collectible figurines. “Pharrell’s rags-to-riches story is a well-known story re-energised not simply together with his distinctive sound however the primary determination to animate his life,” says Radheyan Simonpillai in The Guardian, “in order that it could possibly thrive together with his creativeness and hit so many visible grace notes…  A hilarious, propulsive and disarmingly joyous experience”.

Released on 11 October within the US and Canada

How would the leaders of the free world fare in a zombie apocalypse? That’s the query requested by this delirious political comedy set throughout a G7 summit. Co-directed by Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson, the movie options Cate Blanchett because the German chancellor and Charles Dance because the US President. Along with their fellow prime ministers and presidents, they lounge across the grounds of a stately residence in Germany, making an attempt to put in writing a joint assertion about their grand plans. But then a thick fog descends, and a few 2,000-year-old mummified bathroom folks stumble out of the gloom. A joint assertion may not be sufficient to save lots of the day. “The ineffectiveness of rhetorical politics and symbolic diplomacy is kookily however ruthlessly skewered in a wildly entertaining shaggy-dog satire,” says Guy Lodge in Variety, “scoring constant belly-laughs with a combination of broad goofball gags, puckish surrealism and extra pointedly topical critique”.

Released on 18 Oct within the US

The 12 months’s most provocative movie, The Apprentice chronicles how a sure Mr Donald J Trump turned a real-estate mogul in New York within the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. As performed by Sebastian Stan, the younger Donald is a bumbling naif who would not know find out how to realise his sky-high ambitions till he meets Roy Cohn, a proudly vicious lawyer performed by Jeremy Strong (Succession). Ali Abbasi has directed an “entertainingly salacious tragicomedy (that) charts that master-pupil dynamic in forensic element,” says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. But your opinion of the movie will rely in your opinion of Trump. The Apprentice, says de Semlyen, “is both an inspiring Secret of My Success story of bromance, entrepreneurship and reinvention or a ugly origin story for a capitalist goblin who sheds his few human qualities in pursuit of the mighty greenback, relying on who’s watching”.

Released on 11 October within the US and Canada, and 18 October within the UK

In 2019, Todd Phillips’ Joker turned the superhero film on its head. Not solely was the movie a few supervillain (performed by Joaquin Phoenix, who gained a greatest actor Oscar), nevertheless it was a gritty city psychodrama which detailed the protagonist’s anguished despair. The sequel ventures even farther from typical Batman blockbuster territory. Joker: Folie à Deux is nearly all set inside the partitions of an asylum and a courtroom, and when Arthur/ Joker begins singing and dancing with Harleen Quinzel/ Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), the movie turns right into a full-blown musical. “Folie à Deux is simply as edgy and disturbing as its forerunner,” says Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent, “replicating the concept of contemporary American cities as terrifying powder kegs perpetually on the cusp of explosion. This ingenious and deeply unsettling movie rejects comic-book conventions in favour of psychological depth. The genius of it’s that we won’t assist however look after Arthur, even in the course of the movie’s most apocalyptic and violent moments.”

Released from 4 October in cinemas internationally