Journalist Tim Robey fills us in on the must-see films coming soon to the big screen.
Will Dune (22 Oct) fulfil its main requirement – to satisfy Frank Herbert fans and a mainstream audience more successfully than David Lynch’s 1984 flop did? Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) certainly has the sci-fi credentials to get our hopes up, not to mention a hip multinational cast headed by Timothée Chalamet as royal heir Paul Atreides.
More of a niche prospect is the critically admired Gagarine (24 Sept), a star-gazing French drama set in a housing estate on the brink of demolition.
Dune has two weeks to score commercially before Bond film No Time To Die (30 Sept) comes bounding in, at long, long last. We’ve lost count of the postponements, and Daniel Craig must look way older now than when he shot it, but Cary Fukunaga’s film is the big one to get bums back on cinema seats: if Bond can’t, nobody can.
There’s more Chalamet in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (22 Oct), along with just about everyone who’s ever graced the director’s films before: his nostalgic comedy is a portmanteau layer cake, with typically finicky art design, about the bygone days of luxury journalism.
Finally, in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (29 Oct), we’ll hop back and forth between Swinging Sixties London and the present day for a modish, body-swapping horror tale inspired by Repulsion.