Olde Hornet
Well-Known Member
The Best and Biggest Movies to See This Fall
Cats, Frozen II, Little Women, and more.
www.vulture.com
What We Think Will Be Great
By David Edelstein
September
Ad Astra (9/20)
I rarely plunder studio synopses, but this one seems unusually pithy: “An astronaut travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. He uncovers secrets which challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos.” The weird thing is that the director is James Gray (The Yards, The Immigrant, The Lost City of Z), one of American cinema’s more earthbound directors. But Brad Pitt is a space cadet (in real life and on film), and the otherworldly cast includes Donald Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, and Liv Tyler. The title could be a nod to the Latin phrase per aspera ad astra, which means, roughly, “Through hardships to the stars,” so let’s hope the hardships are the characters’.
October
Joker (10/4)
Despite the use of wild man to denote daringly unhinged (or just unhinged) actors, an actor without a hinge is only sporadically effective. An exception is the slurring, tottering, often galvanic Joaquin Phoenix, who gives you the sense that there’s an emotional cost to what he does. His Joker origin story might be godawful, but I’m thrilled by someone giving Phoenix license to test the limits as the mad clown. And a Joker origin story is one of the few DC enterprises I’m excited about, especially since the studio made a mess of The Killing Joke.