At nine in the morning, a cinema auditorium in Riverton is a strange place. Critics in winter jackets clutch paper cups of coffee, phones are sealed in pouches at the door, and nobody claps when the lights go down. Over the past six weeks, News. sat through 31 press and festival screenings of films due in cinemas and on streaming services this fall. Most were competent. A few were forgettable. Eight stayed with us long after the projector beam went dark.
Here they are, with release windows where distributors have confirmed them, and a warning or two where one is deserved.
The big nights out
The Harbor Keeper. Director Ilse Marrow’s thriller opens with a ferry arriving in a fog-bound port and a body that is not where it should be. What follows is two hours of tightening tension, almost all of it set inside a single harbor office. Tomas Varga plays the night watchman who knows more than he says, and his performance is the kind people will still be discussing when the awards season comes around. It reaches cinemas at the end of October.
Every Bridge at Once. A heist film that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and enjoys every minute. A crew of retired engineers plans to steal a painting by closing every bridge in a river city at the same moment. The final half hour is a lesson in cross-cutting, and the soundtrack, all brass and drums, will be in your head for days. Pure fun, in cinemas from mid-November.
Northern Lights Over Lowfield. The season’s biggest budget, and it shows: sweeping aerial shots of frozen lakes, a cast of hundreds and the story of a village that refuses to leave its land as a dam rises in the valley. It runs nearly three hours and sags in the middle, but the last 40 minutes are as moving as anything we saw at the screenings.
Small films, big hearts
Bread on Sunday. A first feature from director Leyla Osman, filmed in a single working bakery over one weekend: a widowed baker, his estranged daughter and a delivery van that will not start. Nothing much happens, and everything does. At the screening we attended, the critic beside us quietly wiped his eyes twice. It opens in a handful of art-house cinemas in November before a wider release.
Comments 3
Thank you for being honest about the superhero sequel. Saved me a ticket.
Booked Tram After Midnight for the school break already. The kids are counting the days.
Bread on Sunday sounds exactly like my kind of film. Hope it comes to the cinema in Westmoor.