Things to come: an Autumn preview

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik’s none-more-indie drama, centring on a fracturing homestead in the remote Ozark Mountains, arrives on the back of rapturous U.S. notices. (Opens September 17)

Eat Pray Love/Enter the Void
Something for everyone here: Eat Pray Love, Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s take on Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling lifestyle guide, has Julia Roberts as a disillusioned fortysomething saying ready, steady, Goa to life (and Javier Bardem) while passing through India; meanwhile with Enter the Void, a very different account of Far Eastern tourism, French enfant terrible Gaspar Noe follows up the crushing Irreversible with a psychedelic plunge into the fleshpots of Tokyo – less eat, pray, love, perhaps, than tune in, turn on, drop out. (Both September 24)

The Town
Ben Affleck’s second directorial outing – casting himself as a bank robber burdened with regrets – should prove whether 2007’s Gone Baby Gone was merely beginner’s luck. (September 24)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Über-yuppie Gordon Gekko returns in Oliver Stone’s high-finance sequel. Will greed be as dramatically profitable as it was in 1987? (October 6)

The Social Network
Hollywood’s latest attempt to draw our attention away from our consoles and laptops is – curiously enough – an apparently straight-faced account of the rise of Facebook, with Zombieland nerd du jour Jesse Eisenberg as the company’s youthful frontman Mark Zuckerberg and, er, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster. David Fincher – whose Zodiac suggested a tremendous facility with meshes of information – directs, The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin scripts; onlookers remain uncertain whether to throw sheep or rotten tomatoes. (October 15)

Carlos
Olivier Assayas’ biopic of Venezuelan revolutionary/terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal, stormed Cannes in May. This year’s Che? (October 22)

The Kids Are All Right
Artificial insemination comedies rarely offer much cause for cheer, but this U.S. sleeper hit – with Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as flustered civil partners – reportedly bucks the trend. (October 29)

Another Year
Mike Leigh’s latest charts twelve months of muddling through from Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen’s suburbanites; Cannes chatter indicates it’s Leigh on peak observational form. (November 5)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Part One, of course, with Part Two to follow (and conclude a truly wizard decade of box-office spell-casting) in July 2011. For those twelve of us who haven’t read the books, everything remains up for grabs: will Harry finally defeat Voldemort? Will David Yates’ sure touch continue behind the camera? And are there any Equity members who haven’t signed up for a bit-part? Team Hermione may now seem a quaint proposition set against the yearnings of Team Bella, but we can expect a cliffhanger or two to tide us over for winter. (November 19)

Machete [above]
The Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse project didn’t offer much, all told, but this mocksploitation feature derived from one of its phony trailers – about a vengeance-seeking Mexican mobster – may just redeem it. (November 26)

(First published in The Sunday Telegraph, September 12, 2010)