September's Most Anticipated Films
by Brian Eggert
September is a busy month filled with a lot of titles, many of them disposable releases; but there seems to be two or three gems among them. As a result, not every major release is included below, just some selections that you should keep on your radar. The below list of films includes this site’s most anticipated releases of September. The choices—based on the quality of actors, director, story, and trailers—are pure guesswork and have no bearing on the inevitable review. For a complete list of upcoming releases and their respective movie trailers, visit the Calendar.
September 2:
Apollo 18
Here’s the pitch: “It’s The Blair Witch Project… in space!” Another entry in the beaten-to-death “found footage” horror subgenre reveals film stock taken during NASA’s top-secret Apollo 18 mission, hence the title. Two astronauts visit the moon and discover an alien presence has infiltrated their craft and space suits. Producer Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) sold The Weinstein Company on this basic concept and viral marketing went into effect within veritable minutes. The production values looks top-notch, rendering the images as though they were shot with subpar equipment from decades past. But September is a busy month, and this release seems better placed in October against another “found footage” movie, the third entry in the Paranormal Activity series. If it’s successful, my guess is next year The Weinstein Company will have found footage for Apollo 19, NASA’s rescue mission. Click here for the trailer.
September 9:
Contagion
Steven Soderbergh has bounded through genres over the years, from arthouse drama (Sex, Lies, and Videotape) to crime-comedy (the Ocean’s trilogy) to existential sci-fi (Solaris remake) to political biopic (Che). And that he’s calling his latest, Contagion, a horror film makes me think of when P.T. Anderson called There Will Be Blood a horror film. In other words, expect much more than just a horror film. Soderbergh has assembled an incredible cast once again for an Outbreak-esque story on a global scale. Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Bryan Cranston star. An airborne disease threatens to wipe out humanity, and members of the medical field attempt to prevent it from spreading. By the looks of the trailer, they’re not too successful. Click here for the trailer.
Warrior
Writer-director Gavin O'Connor (Miracle) enters into familiar, inspiring sports territory, this time centering on a fictional story. Two good-hearted American brothers (played by the British Tom Hardy and the Australian Joel Edgerton) join a best-in-the-world MMA competition and each rise to the top, the former fighting for country, the latter fighting for family. Whether or not O’Connor refuses to choose a winner and doesn’t cop out with a tie remains to be seen. For now, here’s hoping the film further launches Hardy’s career, which began simmering with Inception and should reach a full-on sear by next summer’s The Dark Knight Rises, in which he plays the villain Bane. Expect all your usual sports movie clichés here, all avoided by David Mamet’s undoubtedly superior MMA-themed film Redbelt. Click here for the trailer.
September 16:
Drive
Drive is about a Hollywood stuntman (Ryan Gosling) who drives getaway cars for crooks by night. He and his neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her child are forced on the run after he flubs a job for her estranged, just-out-of-jail husband. This basic setup may sound like any number of mindless action movies, but here’s the difference: director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose wildly artistic Bronson and Valhalla Rising suggest a concentration on images more than words. Gosling reportedly hand-picked the director, who won the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his work here. Just watch the trailer and you can see there’s something unique going on here, far more brooding and borderline Lynchian than your typical action movie. After all, how typical can it be with Albert Brooks as the resident villain? Click here for the trailer.
Straw Dogs
How does a film like Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs get remade, and why? The confronting, hard-to-watch original from forty years ago still challenges the viewer’s allegiance to Peckinpah’s masculine ideals. It certainly tests mine. What could a Hollywoodized version have to offer, except reestablishing our inherent rape fears associated with the Deep South, long since ingrained after Deliverance. Indeed, the remake relocates the story from the English countryside to below the American Bible Belt, where as cinema has taught us, you’ll get attacked and probably raped by a gang of hillbillies if you step out of line. James Marsden and Kate Bosworth star as the yuppie couple harassed by said hillbillies. At first, the passive Marsden character refuses to fight back, while the Bosworth character encourages their tormentors. We can only guess how far political filmmaker Rod Lurie (Nothing But the Truth) will take the original’s unrelenting graphic violence. Click here for the trailer.
September 23:
Killer Elite
For audiences unimpressed with Drive’s blend of artistry and action, here’s something less demanding and a lot more standardized. Killer Elite stars Jason Statham as a good guy whose father (Robert De Niro) is kidnapped by Clive Owen’s bad guy. Action ensues. Supposedly based on a true story, the scenario has less potential than its stars, all performers capable of greatness, although none have delivered on their possibility for years. Could this be the first good Statham action movie since the first Transporter? Could Owen finally place himself in a memorable role after his long stint of forgettable appearances that followed Sin City and Children of Men? Will De Niro rekindle his cool action-man status from Ronin? Find out September 23. Click here for the trailer.
September 30:
Dream House
When My Left Foot and Brothers director Jim Sheridan settles down to a creepy, Gothic haunted house tale, you can bet there are greater dramatic implications than your average ghost movie. Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, whose on-set love affair has become tabloid fodder, play a husband and wife who move into a New England home with their two children, and soon they discover a murder of a mother and her two children took place in the same home. The trailers reveal a twist that Craig’s character actually murdered his wife and child, which suggests this isn’t a twist at all, just an early narrative development with plenty more to come. Naomi Watts costars as a neighbor who helps Craig’s character put the pieces of his broken life back together. Click here for the trailer.
Take Shelter (Limited)
Powerhouse actor and weirdo Michael Shannon (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?) brings his signature intensity to Take Shelter, a paranoid thriller which rocked the Sundance Film Festival this year. Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ reteams with his Shotgun Stories star, who plays a man plagued by apocalyptic visions of the future. Convinced the world is on the brink, he begins preparing his family (including wife Jessica Chastain, from The Tree of Life) for the worst. His family stands by as he builds a bomb shelter and takes other drastic precautions, all the time wondering, as the audience does, if he’s just crazy or if his visions are true. If this drama has the kind of integrity I hope it does, it won’t confirm either way. But find out for yourself sometime in September, as the film opens in limited release and should trickle down into a theater near you over the subsequent weeks. Click here for the trailer.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
My wife saw Tucker & Dale vs. Evil at the Minneapolis International Film Festival earlier this year and just can’t stop talking about it, offering comparisons to Shaun of the Dead-style humor in the horror-comedy realm. She knows my tastes, and she’s convinced I’ll love it. The scenario involves a couple of hillbillies at their forest retreat who run into some college kids, resulting in misconceptions that purvey bloody misunderstandings. The film first debuted at Sundance in 2010, and usually after more than a year of sitting on shelves a genre flick like this would just disappear into obscurity. But the folks at Magnet dug up the release for distribution, no doubt because costar Alan Tudyk (from Firefly and Transformers 3) has earned some notoriety for his comic range. It opens on September 30 in limited release, but it’s available on various video-on-demand markets a month earlier. Click here for the trailer.
One Film You Shouldn't See
September 30:
What's Your Number?
This has Anna Faris in it. Need I say more? Click here for the trailer.