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The summer box office season is now officially over.
With a handful of mediocre movies in release the past couple of weeks — and, overall, a perfectly dreadful summer movie season — all that die-hard movie lovers can do is await the end of Hollywood’s silly season in anticipation of the start of autumn’s rollout of potential Oscar contenders.
If you’re in the mood for dramatized biographies, the coming autumn movie season has a bumper crop, covering a wide range of subjects. Singers Bobby Darin and Ray Charles, Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, sex expert Alfred Kinsey, “Peter Pan’s” author J.M. Barrie, mogul Howard Hughes and world conqueror Alexander the Great have their own biopics. Want to go the other way? There’s also a bumper crop of fantasies.
Jack Mathews, in today’s New York Daily News, provides a full autumn season movie guide, as he writes about films ranging from Reese Witherspoon’s Vanity Fair (opening Sept. 1), surefire Oscar contender Jamie Foxx in Ray, director Oliver Stone’s much anticipated Alexander, right through to the Christmas Day opening of The Phantom of the Opera.
Beyond the mainstream fare, as Elizabeth Weitman writes, there’s a raft of star-driven independent and foreign import films (have a look at The Motorcycle Diaries) that will not only dominate the art-house lineup this fall season, but will likely find favour with the Academy come Oscar time.
For the documentary lover, the late summer and fall promises a flurry of political documentaries, ranging from Born into Brothels, set in Calcutta’s red-light district and featuring a lively group of children whose mothers are prostitutes, to Bush’s Brain, which sets its sights not on the President’s grey matter but on that of Karl Rove’s, Bush’s uber-advisor.
Families can look forward to some awfully big adventures, from Jim Carrey in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, through to Disney’s The Incredibles, Shark Tale from Dreamworks, The Polar Express from Warner Bros., and Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, from Miramax, among a host of films that will keep children and adults equally entertained.
