Culture Crash: Fall Film Lineup

September is here, school is back in session and the fall slate of movies is just around the corner. It’s been a slow year for movies. Besides Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, there hasn’t been much playing in the cinema over the past few months. Very little has been able to score big at the box office except for sequels and dull live-action remakes of vastly superior animated classics, so a lot will come down to the year’s final stretch run to make 2019 a movie year to remember.

Netflix has a strong offering of movies set for release, including the October 11 release of El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which promises to continue the story of Breaking Bad’s Jesse Pinkman and his pursuit of freedom. The streaming giant will also release Martin Scorsese’s latest mob movie, The Irishman, which stars Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. Finally, Netflix is set to release Steven Soderbergh’s latest, called The Laundromat, which stars Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas in a dramedy about an off-shore tax scheme.

Off streaming, the Brad Pitt sci-fi film Ad Astra is slated for release on September 30 from James Gray, the director of the fantastic 2016 film, The Lost City of Z. I’m especially excited for The Lighthouse, an A24 black and white thriller from Robert Eggers, the director of the horror film, The Witch, that stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two lighthouse keepers unraveling on a remote island.

This fall will also see the release of Harriet, a Harriet Tubman biopic, Motherless Brooklyn, an adaptation of the Jonathan Lethem novel of the same name, and Doctor Sleep, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name, which serves as a sequel to The Shining.

Like I said, 2019 has been a tough year for movies so far. Luckily, this fall slate seems like it could be just the antidote we’re looking for.

I’m Evan Rook.