Tom Cruise, Olivia Colman and the return of Rocky: the best films of autumn 2026

2 hours ago 7

Late Fame

Lee and Dafoe, both dressed in black coats and hats, sit holding hands on a park bench

Willem Dafoe is typically grizzled and poetic for this study of a near-retirement postal worker who, it turns out, was a beatnik rhymester of cachet – but no lasting renown – back in the day, and who has now been rediscovered by a new generation of literary hipsters. Director Kent Jones, adapting a novella by Arthur “La Ronde” Schnitzler, was the longtime head of the New York film festival; he might be in for a spot of late fame himself. AP
4 September

Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Grant Gee’s stylishly monochrome, coolly composed musical biopic finds the great jazz pianist at something of a crisis point in 1961, grieving for his bassist, facing down some demons, painfully thin and heroin addicted – and living with his parents while he tries to kick the habit. Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf are terrific as Mr and Mrs Evans, while Anders Danielsen Lie stars as the tortured artist on the cusp of making musical history and quitting. LP
11 September

Practical Magic 2

If you wait long enough, everything will go into development for sequel, but they don’t always happen. This one, almost randomly, has: Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman’s nicely judged 90s witch tale, with equal helpings of empowerment and romance, is broomsticking into cinemas. Bullock and Kidman are back, a quarter century on, with the younger generation represented by Joey King and Maisie Williams. AP
11 September

Queen at Sea

Courtenay in a blue shirt stares into face of Calder-Marshall

Another late-period acting masterclass from Tom Courtenay in a shattering drama from Lance Hammer. Courtenay plays Martin, whose wife (Anna Calder-Marshall) is in the grip of dementia. He tries to keep their connection alive with sex. But can she consent? Is it rape? Her daughter by an earlier marriage, played by Juliette Binoche, certainly thinks so, setting the stage for a heartbreakingly emotional confrontation. AP
18 September

De Gaulle: Liberté

National heroes don’t come much more totemic than Charles de Gaulle, wartime resistance leader turned peacetime statesman. This is the second instalment of the two part film in which Simon Abkarian plays the legendary general as the momentum to liberate Paris builds up towards the end of the second world war. AP
18 September

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

Everyone’s favourite flock is back for a Halloween instalment, 11 years after Shaun the Sheep Movie (masterpiece) and Farmageddon (superb). This plasticine mashup of Frankenstein and Weird Science sees Shaun brewing up a potion to supersize pumpkins ahead of the autumn fair, while the farmer turns to a hair-restoring lotion to pluck up the courage to ask the vet on a date. Hope the two bottles don’t get muddled … Catherine Shoard
18 September

Sense and Sensibility

Thirty-one years after Emma Thompson’s swift, witty take on Austen’s classic – still much loved today – Georgia Oakley (Blue Jean) gives us a version for the Instagram age, replete with Hamnet-ish strings and many shots of women in fields with closeups on bugs. Daisy Edgar-Jones is Elinor, Esmé Creed-Miles is Marianne, George MacKay is Edward Ferrars and Frank Dillane is the dastardly Willoughby. CS
25 September

Her Private Hell

We nearly lost Nicolas Winding Refn a couple of years back, when the Danish enfant terrible had a heart scare. Happily, everyone’s favourite sadomasochistic softie is back with a sci-fi set in a weirdly misty futuristic metropolis haunted by a “deadly and elusive entity”. Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton star. There will be blood. CS
25 September

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie

Oscar-winning film-maker Alex Gibney tackles the shocking assassination attempt on the great writer in this unsparing and remarkably graphic documentary featuring the man himself, as well as his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. CS
2 October

Digger

Taking a well-earned rest from running and jumping and saving the world, Tom Cruise teams with Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant) to do some acting, not action. He’s still trying to save the world but here he is the paunchy and balding oligarch oilman Digger Rockwell, who deigns to intervene to avert an environmental calamity of his own making. Filmed in VistaVision and billed as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions”, it looks like Dr Strangelove with shades of Les Grossman, Cruise’s hilarious cameo as a film studio head in Tropic Thunder. LP
2 October

A man in a blue top, with headphones around his neck, sits very upright at a glass desk with his back to a window in an office with tower blocks visible in the background

Jeremy Strong pulls on the geek-chic fleeces and takes over from Jesse Eisenberg in Aaron Sorkin’s what-Zuckerberg-did-next companion piece to The Social Network. Oscar-winning Anora star Mikey Madison plays whistleblower Frances Haugen, who went public about all of Facebook’s algorithmic wrongdoings in 2021. LP
9 October

The Uprising

Garfield in dirty-looking peasant clothing

Taxes are too high, the boy-king Richard II is out of touch with his subjects and serfdom needs abolishing … say Wat?! Andrew Garfield plays the hunky farmer turned sword-wielding leader of a revolt against tyranny in a medieval action film from Paul Greengrass, the director of several docudrama classics and multiple Jason Bourne movies. LP
9 October

Klara and the Sun

Jenna Ortega plays Klara, a solar-powered companion robot yearning and learning to become a real family member, in a colourful adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s soulful sci-fi novel by Taika Waititi. Waititi looks to have mined the story for every bit of comedy he can, and Ortega inhabits the uncanny valley with bright-eyed good cheer. Amy Adams and Natasha Lyonne also star. LP
23 October

Ali G: Who Iz I?

Courting controversy? … Sacha Baron Cohen, who returns as Ali G in Ali G: Who Iz I?, is seen in character at this year’s Wimbledon tennis tournament. Photograph: Eleventh Hour Photography/Alamy

It’s the return of the West Staines Massiv, Mr Shell Suit himself, Alistair Graham – otherwise known as Ali G. Sacha Baron Cohen (for it is he) has unretired the character and has shot a new film in secret … though perhaps not so secret, as he was spotted in full costume at Cotswold Wildlife Park and at Wimbledon this summer. Baron Cohen is in the director’s seat for the first time; it’ll be interesting, as much as anything else, what sort of fist he makes of it. AP
23 October

Fatherland

Polish film-maker Paweł Pawlikowski made his early strides in the UK, with a series of brilliant literary documentaries and then a shift into features including Last Resort and My Summer of Love. Since moving back to mainland Europe, Pawlikowski has gone from strength to strength; this latest, his third black-and-white film in a row, takes us into Germany of the immediate postwar era, using a trip by novelist-in-exile Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika (Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller) back to their homeland as a way of examining both sides of the east-west divide. AP
23 October

Gentle Monster

Léa Seydoux gives an awards-tipped performance as a musician and mother whose comfortable domestic life fractures the moment that police arrive at her door to arrest her husband and confiscate his hard drives. An impressive handling of tricky material by Austrian film-maker Marie Kreutzer, inspired in part by the arrest of an actor in her previous film, Corsage, for possession of child sexual abuse imagery. LP
30 October

Animol

After So Solid Crew, Top Boy and – yes – Grange Hill, Ashley Walters steps into the director’s chair for this jailhouse drama written by The Football Factory’s Nick Love. Tut Nyuot is a new arrival who pals up with Polish kid Vladyslav Baliuk; Sekou Diaby is the fearsome inmate who runs things, and Stephen Graham is on hand as a prison care worker. Tough stuff, not unlike Wasteman from earlier this year. AP
30 October

I Love Boosters

The three women all dressed in yellow stand merged into a yellow background

Keke Palmer, LaKeith Stanfield and Demi Moore star in this wacky, maximalist, anticapitalist agitprop and fashion-biz satire weird-a-thon from rapper and Sorry to Bother You creator Boots Riley. It’s a madcap, colour-saturated crime caper about a gang of shoplifters raiding fashion stores to redistribute style to the masses. There are also claymation sequences, cartoony slapstick and demons. LP
30 October

Wicker

Olivia Colman continues her journey into the wilder reaches of the cinematic imagination, and you can’t say she hasn’t earned it. This is one of her weirdest films yet: a kind of satirical fairytale in which she plays a fisher whose pungency is such she is doomed to remain single, so she gets the local basket-maker to make her a husband out of, yes, wicker. (Cue wicker sex, for those interested.) It’s a film that has produced divided reactions, shall we say, but will definitely kick up a stink, to coin a phrase. AP
30 October

Godzilla Minus Zero

The 2023 period-set Japanese kaiju epic Godzilla Minus One was almost certainly the most real, most sincere, most impressive Godzilla film made to that point – and there have been about 40 so that’s no small boast. Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki brings back the surviving characters for the follow-up – and it’s filmed for Imax, to make all the enormo-destruction extra enormo. LP
6 November

Wild Horse Nine

After the comparatively sombre and reflective Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh revisits larkier In Bruges territory with this bickering odd-couple black comedy. In place of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as hitmen in Belgium, we have John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA agents/hitmen on Easter Island, prior to the 1973 Chilean coup. LP
6 November

I Play Rocky

Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone is wearing a white vest and holding on to a bar above his head while someone wearing a thick coat and hat stand with his/her back to the camera, facing him

When Rocky took on all comers at the box office and Oscars in 1976, the legend of its production fed into its rousing tale of an underdog having his day. Sylvester Stallone was a penniless nobody when he reputedly wrote the script in three days – then turned down six-figure offers for it, as he insisted on playing the lead role himself. Now Green Book’s Peter Farrelly directs a biopic telling that story, and fires up the brassy theme music to rouse audiences all over again. LP
6 November

La Bola Negra

This won the best director award at Cannes, jointly with Fatherland, for its sweeping, time-crossing evocation of queer identity and experience in Spain. Starting in the early 1930s, it moves from Spain’s suffocating patriarchy through the turmoil of the civil war years, and on to the 21st century, showing how persecution and trauma descend through the decades. Penélope Cruz puts in a cameo as a nightclub singer. AP
6 November

Josephine

Beth de Araújo made a splash and won the top two prizes at Sundance with this raw and intense study of the after effects of a sexual assault on the family of an eight-year-old girl who witnesses it, has nightmares about it and is called on to testify against the perpetrator. Channing Tatum gives a nuanced turn as the traumatised girl’s father. LP
20 November

Focker-in-Law

Ariana Grande sits beside Robert De Niro with a cuff around her upper arm connected to a machine spewing out a graph of some kind.

Ariana Grande is the new blood added to the Focker family in this next-gen fourquel to Meet the Parents. Or she will be, if avuncular grandpa Robert De Niro admits her to his circle of trust, and if overprotective prospective father-in-law Ben Stiller doesn’t do as was done unto him all the way back in 2000, and put her off marrying his son. LP
25 November

The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth

The cool-under-fire character Brad Pitt played in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood gets to perform more laid-back (anti-)heroics in a spin-off episode – but now he has been promoted from a stuntman to a studio fixer. Twice upon a time, Tarantino has written the script but David Fincher – whom Pitt previously worked with on Seven and Fight Club – directs. LP
25 November

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

This is British director Clio Barnard’s first film since Ali & Ava in 2021, put together with what we now know is her customary empathy and intelligence, in a drama about life choices and the way things work out differently for different people. Five friends get together for a birthday; some have made good, others less so, and they each face up to their uncertain futures. The title refers to the demolition of tower blocks in Birmingham: a key symbolic event. AP
4 December

Avengers: Doomsday

Can the Avengers (Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Paul Rudd, et al) unite with the X-Men (Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Channing Tatum), the Thunderbolts (Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan) and the Wakandans (Letitia Wright, Winston Duke) to save the universe from ~~superhero fatigue~~ Doctor Doom (Robert Downey Jr)? Marvel is betting a cast this star-studded must surely obliterate any and all resistance. LP
18 December