Peter Travers’ Fall Movie Preview
It's time to kick summer's tired ass right on outta here. Fall movies always have that extra zip, helped along by Oscar buzz and the exhilarating sense that Hollywood likes to save its best for last. If summer produces escapism that numbs us, fall rushes in with movies that just might be worth remembering. There are nearly 100 of these suckers heading our way between now and year's end. Here's my pick for the cream of the crop — 21 in all, plus five with a bad vibe. Dig in.
By Peter Travers
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‘Drive’
Opening: September 16th
Ryan Gosling is on fire in this fever dream of a film noir playing a Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a getaway driver. That quickie plot summary doesn't begin to suggest how hard director Nicolas Winding Refn's film will hit you in the head and the heart. Brace yourself.
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‘Straw Dogs’
Opening: September 16th
Director Rod Lurie has him some brass balls, remaking Sam Peckinpah's polarizing Straw Dogs. Critics are still obsessively chewing on Bloody Sam's 1971 take on violence and what defines rape. They'll chew again – in a different but equally provocative way – as a wussy L.A. screenwriter (James Marsden) relocates with his TV actress wife (Kate Bosworth) to her home in the South and encounters the stud (Alexander Skarsgård) she once loved. Lurie's incendiary film means to shake you – and it sure as hell does.
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‘Moneyball’
Opening: September 23rd
One of the best movies of the year. Goes inside baseball with Brad Pitt at his live-wire best playing Billy Beane, the Oakland As general manager who put together a team on a budget by using a computer wiz (Jonah Hill) to help draft his players. In a no-joke role, Hill is a revelation. Director Bennett Miller, up at bat for the first time since 2005's Capote, hits all the bases in a homerun script by Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. Forget knowing baseball. Moneyball is about any business that lets greed rule its destiny. Dynamite stuff.
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’50/50′
Opening: September 30th
Put Joseph Gordon-Levitt on the list of the year's best performances in director Jonathan Levine's achingly hilarious and heartfelt film based on the life of screenwriter Will Reiser, who faced a diagnosis of spinal cancer at age 25. Reiser leaned on his acerbic pal Seth Rogen, who plays himself in the film and does a great Rogen.
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‘The Ides of March’
Opening: October 7th
Talk about timely. George Clooney directs a big, juicy, bruisingy funny political thriller about a young press secretary (Ryan Gosling) to a midwest governor (Clooney, oozing charm laced with slime) gunning for the Democratic presidential nomination. Clooney sticks it to the left as well as the hard right. And Gosling is indisputably terrific, putting flesh and blood on a character whose idealism is the moral battleground on which opposing forces do battle.
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‘J. Edgar’
Opening: November 9th
F.B.I. chief J. Edgar Hoover, who ran roughshod over the American justice system for half a century, gives star Leonardo DiCaprio the hugest acting challenge since he took on Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Armie Hammer (The Social Network) plays Hoover's assistant and maybe lover Clyde Tolson. Dustin Lance Black's powderkeg screenplay is fortunate to have director Clint Eastwood lighting the fuse. Expect fireworks.
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‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1’
Opening: November 18th
OK, anyone who reads my reviews knows that I don't care much for the castrated film versions of Stephenie Meyer's vampire bestsellers. But I have hopes for Breaking Dawn, Part 1 and even Part 2 because both are directed by Bill Condon, who's the real deal (see Gods and Monsters, Kinsey and Dreamgirls). If anyone can put life into the marriage and long-awaited sex betweem the human Bella (Kristen Stewart) and the bloodsucking Edward (Rob Pattinson), it's Condon. Twi-hards, I'm with you this time.
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‘The Descendants’
Opening: November 23rd
George Clooney (The Ides of March) becomes a double Oscar threat as the star of this family saga (heartbreak laced with humor) about a Hawaiian land baron who finds his cheating wife has landed in a coma, leaving him to deal with their two daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller) and the wife's lover (Matthew Lillard). With Alexander Payne directing his first film since the 2004's classic Sideways, Clooney is said to give the most purely emotional performance of his career.
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‘Hugo’
Opening: November 23rd
Martin Scorsese directing a kids' movie in 3D? Sounds nuts! But it's true. And this film, based on Brian Selznick's 2007 novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, takes the maestro of violence into the life of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old orphan living in a 1932 Paris train station where he finds a mechanical toy built by George Melies (Ben Kingsley), the pioneering French filmaker who's visions of light have long influenced Scorsese. OK, now we get it. A family flick about the invention of movies. Of course!
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‘The Artist’
Opening: November 23rd
Expect this black-and-white silent film (you heard me!) to land high up on the Academy's 2011 honor roll. The great Jean Dujardin won the best actor prize at Cannes for playing a silent-era Hollywood star who can't adjust to talkies. Michel Hazanavicius has directed a film like no other, unique and unforgettable.
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‘A Dangerous Method’
Opening: November 23rd
Need I say more to intrigue you than David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises) directs a movie with Viggo Mortensen, as Sigmund Freud, coming into conflict with Michael Fassbender, as Carl Jung, over the sexual hysteria of Keira Knightley as a – well, who says you have to know everything right now?
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‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’
Opening: December 9th
If, like me, you believe Gary Oldman has too long been denied his shot at an Oscar, here's the remedy. As George Smiley, the Brit spy (a sort of anti-James Bond since he's mousey and wears glasses) created on the page by John le Carré, Oldman gets to ferret out a mole in MI6 that could be Ciaran Hinds, Tom Hardy or last year's Oscar King Colin Firth. That cast, directed by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), ought to say "Let me in" to the rest of us.
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‘Young Adult’
Opening: December 16th
Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody, respectively the director and Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno, reunite to give Charlize Theron her sharpest role in years as a young-adult novelist who's emotionally stuck in junior high school, especially when her adolescent love (Patrick Wilson) moves on to parenthood.
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‘Carnage’
Opening: December 16th
Yasmina Reza's Tony-winning comedy God of Carnage, about two Brooklyn couples moving from polite discussion to total war in a battle over their kids, hits the screen under the direction of Oscar-winning fugitive Roman Polanski. Jodie Foster and John C. Riley take the roles created on Broadway by Marcia Gay Harden and James Gandolfini. And Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz do the honors for Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels. Fireworks are inevitable.
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‘The Iron Lady’
Opening: December 16th
Who doesn't want to see Meryl Streep go for her third Oscar as former British PM Margaret Thatcher?
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‘Albert Nobbs’
Who doesn't want to see Glenn Close go for her first and long-overdue Oscar as a woman who lived as a male butler in 19th-century Ireland?
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‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’
Opening: December 21st
The one movie everyone wants to see for Oscar season. Come on. David Fincher directs the American film version of Stieg Larsson's global bestseller. In a search to rival the hunt for Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, he picks relative unknown Rooney Mara as the pierced, tattoed, bi-sexual heroine Lisbeth Salander and Daniel Craig, 007 himself, as journalist Mikael Blomkvist, to unearth deadly secrets in a Swedish dynasty. What a gamble. And what a potential payoff.
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‘We Bought A Zoo’
Opening: December 23rd
The gifted Cameron Crowe returns to feature filmmaking for the first time since 2005's Elizabethtown with a film based on Benjamin Mee's memoir about Mee's family project to reopen a rundown zoo after his wife's death. Matt Damon takes the lead with Scarlett Johansson as a much-needed helping hand. Crowe has been much missed.
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‘The Adventures of Tintin’
Opening: December 23rd
Using performance capture and 3D, Steven Spielberg directs this action-adventure about Tintin (Jamie Bell), a young reporter on a treasure hunt that pits him agaunst marauding pirates. Spielberg and co-producer Peter Jackson are mucking around with generations who harbor strong memories of what Belgian cartooonist Herge created in 1929. Can't think of better team to pull it off.
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‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’
Opening: December 25th
On this 10th anniversary of 9/11, director Stephen Daldry presents his film of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel about an 11-year-old boy (Thomas Horn) coping with death of his father (Tom Hanks) in the World Trade Center. Sandra Bullock plays the mother of the boy, who thinks a key his dad left behind can help him unlock feelings he can't express. A risky film for sure, but one that represents the daring of fall films after a play-it-safe summer.
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‘War Horse’
Opening: December 28th
Spielberg again, this time adapting a 1982 young-adult novel by Michael Morpurgo about a horse named Joey sent with other steeds into the bloody battlefields of World War I. The Tony-winning stage version of the story, featuring puppets as the horses, is still running. Spielberg uses real horses and Jeremy Irvine plays the farm boy who enlists in the army to find Joey. Those puppets are magic onstage. But the emotional pull of the tale cannot be denied.
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Five to Miss: ‘Footloose’
Opening: October 14th
A remake for the cell-phone age of the 1984 musical about a closed-off religious community that outlaws dancing. Does this sound like a good idea to you?
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Five to Miss: ‘Three Musketeers’
Opening: October 21st
Again? Seriously? How many times can they remake this swashbuckling swill? Oh, this one's in 3D. Kill me now!
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Five to Miss: ‘Jack and Jill’
Opening: November 11th
Not just one Adam Sandler. This time he's playing twins. And one's a girl. And Al Pacino is hot for her. I am not making this up. I wish I was. But I'm not.
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Five to MIss: ‘Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’
Opening: December 16th
I know the first one was a hit. Who didn't want to see Robert Downey, Jr. as a junkie Sherlock? But it sucked. If you're honest, you'll admit it sucked. So my hopes are not high for this sequel.
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Five to Miss: ‘New Year’s Eve’
Opening: December 9th
Just like he did for the heinous Valentine's Day, director Garry Marshall has gatherecd a cast of paycheck hogs (stop it, Robert DeNiro, you're better than this) to exploit a holiday for a fast buck at the box office. No sale.