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    ‘American Fiction,’ ‘Origin’ and the Pressures Black Writers Face

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    The movies explore what happens when authors who focus exclusively on racism in their work push back against political and commercial stresses.“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” a young Langston Hughes proclaimed in an essay nearly 100 years ago. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”Seeking to establish his autonomy as a Black writer, he concluded, “If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”I thought a lot about Hughes’s landmark 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” after watching how Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” and Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” explore the fates of Black writers who push back against political and publishing pressures to focus exclusively on racism in their works.Like Hughes, the protagonists of these movies — the journalist Isabel Wilkerson and the novelist Thelonious Ellison, known as Monk — strive to write as they please. But, by depicting their characters’ struggles, the films offer refreshing commentaries on the social construction of race and its devastating consequences for those at the bottom of the hierarchy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay on the Emotional Journey of ‘Origin’

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      Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor were in the middle of shooting their new drama, “Origin,” when Ellis-Taylor gave the writer-director some last-minute homework.The two were hours away from filming a scene in which the actress’s character, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” gets into an argument with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), after a party. Ellis-Taylor felt the scene required a few extra beats of dialogue and asked DuVernay to write some.“She said, ‘I think we need something here,’” recalled DuVernay, who agreed to write the new material during her lunch break. “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about.”That level of trust, amid the daily high wire act of a modestly budgeted production — filmed at a brisk pace across three continents — was typical of a collaboration that DuVernay called her deepest with an actor since working with David Oyelowo on “Selma,” her breakout film released nearly 10 years ago.Jon Bernthal with Ellis-Taylor in a scene from “Origin.”NeonIn Ellis-Taylor, DuVernay saw an actor of “outsized power,” capable of giving her imaginative take on the making of Wilkerson’s book a vital emotional anchor. Ellis-Taylor, nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for “King Richard,” saw in DuVernay a “director of consequence,” perhaps the only person who could successfully adapt “Caste” — a best-selling, Big Idea book that links systems of oppression in the United States, Nazi Germany and India.“She is a freedom fighter,” Ellis-Taylor said. “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists.”In a joint interview last month in Manhattan, the actor and filmmaker discussed finding the heartbeat of the critically acclaimed drama in personal material not included in the book, the transformative influence of shooting in Berlin and Delhi and the importance of Bernthal’s swagger. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Ava, one of the fascinating things about this film is that it’s not a typical adaptation. It’s part adaptation and part bio-drama, tracking a harrowing period of Wilkerson’s life while she was researching and writing “Caste.” What led you to make that decision?AVA DUVERNAY I needed a character who could personalize the concepts — the psychology and the history and the legacy of caste. I didn’t know [Wilkerson], but I watched interviews with her and thought that she could be the one to take us on this journey. When I pitched her, I told her I would need to hear the stories that are behind the book, none of which are in the book, and she very generously shared them with me. As a writer, I think she instinctively knew that I would need freedom to interpret the story. And she gave me that.With DuVernay’s films, “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists,” Ellis-Taylor said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesAunjanue, you didn’t meet Wilkerson before filming. What did you draw on to create your performance?AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR I watched her famous TED Talk about “The Warmth of Other Suns” [her award-winning 2010 book about the Great Migration] and her interviews with Bryan Stevenson and Michael Eric Dyson. But [“Caste”] was my bible. Her writing is so intimate and personal — you can feel her blood coursing through every sentence. Often, she’ll be talking about a subject, and she’ll say, “This happened to me, too.” I felt like I knew where she was coming from just by reading her words.The film is inventive in the way it turns the book’s ideas into visual entertainment. Scenes of Wilkerson honing her thesis with friends, family and colleagues alternate with dreamlike, historical re-enactments of some of the central stories she is citing. How did you figure out what was enough and what was too much when it came to unpacking the concepts and the history?DUVERNAY One thing that was really important was just to have people to talk about it with. I had a handful of people who were living inside the book with me and who were fluent in its ideas. Aunjanue; my producing partner, Paul Garnes; my cinematographer, Matt Lloyd; and my friend Guillermo del Toro. David Oyelowo read the script and was really helpful, too. They helped me figure out how to turn the book into a springboard to conversations about these things.Wilkerson’s husband, Brett, is mentioned only briefly in the book’s epigraph and acknowledgments, but he is central to the movie’s emotional arc. What made you think of Bernthal?DUVERNAY As soon as Aunjanue said yes, we had the challenge of who could hold the frame with her. Jon not only believed in the project, he was very interested in working with Aunjanue, specifically. [The two co-starred in “King Richard.”] He flew out to Savannah, where I was working, just to meet with me, on his own dime, which is something that doesn’t happen to me very often. Plus he had the appropriate swagger — that was important. I had to be able to look at this guy and think, “He can pull her.”ELLIS-TAYLOR He is just a lovely and generous human being. He supported me in a way that our performances felt lived in — they didn’t feel performed.Did filming on location — in Berlin and Delhi — influence the way you told the story, or even your understanding of the text?ELLIS-TAYLOR In every way. Because Isabel going to India, smelling things that she had never smelled before, learning things that she had only heard about, all of that stuff was happening to Aunjanue, to me personally. I’m not a scholar, but I was able to get a sense of what that experience was like. I’m so grateful to Ava for insisting that we go to these places.When Ellis-Taylor asked for a scene rewritten, “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about,” DuVernay said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesDUVERNAY Paul Garnes and I, we always knew that, even though we were on this very finite independent budget, we needed to get to the real places. We needed to be in the real square of Bebelplatz [in Berlin], where the books were burned. [In 1933, a Nazi group and supporters burned more than 20,000 blacklisted books in the square.]Could I have found a square in Georgia to do it and enjoyed the tax credit? Probably. Would it have felt as emotionally resonant as it was for everyone when we were actually standing there in the place where it happened? Certainly not. Or to go to Delhi, in a country that is closely associated with caste, and to be there as an African American and just fall into a sea of beautiful Brown people. To understand that even as I look at them all and see them as one, they don’t see each other that way? That these divisions have been ingrained in their faith, culture and society?For me, coming from a society where it’s all about skin color, it helped me understand that we as human beings will always figure out how to bifurcate and categorize and create hierarchy. That’s the core of so many of our problems. If you don’t know that, then you’re treating the symptoms and not the disease.Ava, there’s a way in which this movie feels like a synthesis of all the work you’ve made since your narrative feature debut more than a decade ago. There’s a meditation on grief à la “I Will Follow,” an intimate love story like in “Middle of Nowhere,” and historical figures involved in the struggle for racial justice as in “Selma” and “13TH.” Were you conscious of that while you were making it?DUVERNAY I wasn’t. But my editor, Spencer Averick, who I’ve worked with since my first movie, said that to me at one point. I feel like everything I’ve done before, even shooting internationally for “A Wrinkle in Time,” which is a whole different discipline, prepared me for this film. I felt really in the pocket. There was nothing on set that was like, “I don’t know how to do this scene,” or, “I don’t know what’s next.” It was, “I got this,” which was an overwhelmingly fulfilling experience.I felt like, if tomorrow I decided I just was going to be a painter or, I don’t know, go back to being a publicist, I could, because making this movie was so satisfying. In the past, I would finish a movie and feel like, “I hope they like it!” But this time was different. I think a lot of that feeling comes from using their money — the Hollywood machine. This was made outside of the machine, and it felt very free and very liberating. More

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      The Great Experiment That Is ‘The Color Purple’

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      A new adaptation shows how rich Alice Walker’s novel is and how the source material can lend itself to unconventional storytelling.Last month, I saw something I hadn’t seen in two decades of moviegoing: three Black-directed films in one week.I watched Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of “The Color Purple,” a musical about a female survivor overcoming sexual assault and domestic abuse; the concert film “Renaissance,” directed by and starring Beyoncé; and “Origin,” Ava DuVernay’s dramatization of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book “Caste.” Though each is starkly different in everything from story to aesthetic vision, my happenstance of seeing all three so close together revealed their shared interest in telling stories about African American history in new ways.Beyoncé remembers the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s; DuVernay recognizes early African American researchers of race relations, like Allison Davis, Elizabeth Stubbs Davis and Alfred L. Bright; and Bazawule looks at a 40-year period in the life of a Black woman living through Jim Crow and the Jazz Age.That chance week of movies also allowed me to reflect on the unprecedented journey and ultimate cinematic triumph of “The Color Purple.” Starting in rural Georgia in the early 20th century, the story follows Celie, an orphaned girl who is repeatedly violated and twice impregnated by her Pa, a man she considers her father. She is forced to leave her younger sister, Nettie, when Pa marries her off to a much older widow, Albert, whom she knows only as Mister.Beyoncé on a Toronto tour stop. “Renaissance,” which she also directed, arrives in an ecosystem partly created by the first adaptation of “The Color Purple.”The New York TimesCentered on Celie’s finding her voice, discovering her sexuality in her relationship with the blues singer, Shug Avery and journeying to forgiveness, selfhood and community with other women, like her daughter-in-law, Sofia, Walker’s novel earned her the National Book Award and made her the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The movie earned 11 Oscar nominations; then came a Tony Award for the 2005 Broadway show and two for the 2015 revival, making this one of the most prized narratives in American history.Nowadays, it is hard to believe that when Steven Spielberg released his adaptation in 1985, he and Walker had to cross a picket line of protesters to attend the premiere. But his drama was met with great controversy. While researching my book “In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece,” I discovered that many critics, the majority of whom were Black male writers or political leaders, had accused the filmmakers of reinforcing stereotypes of Black men as hyperviolent through the characterizations of Pa, Albert and Harpo (Albert’s oldest son) and the abuse they inflicted on Celie and Sofia. Other critics took umbrage at Celie’s lesbian relationship as undermining traditional Black family values.Led by Black organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., the Nation of Islam and the now defunct Coalition Against Black Exploitation, the campaign against that movie was bitter and divisive. In turn, its defenders, including many Black women who saw themselves in Walker’s characters, felt pitted against others in their own community. The pushback was so effective that the film won no Academy Awards. (It lost the top Oscar to “Out of Africa.”)“Without a doubt the controversy is the reason we didn’t take home a single award that night,” Oprah Winfrey, who starred as Sofia in the original and later served as a producer of both the stage and movie musicals, told me in an interview in 2018. “I was puzzled and frustrated by the N.A.A.C.P.”And yet the film was groundbreaking, changing our understanding of what was possible for Black actors and stories in Hollywood. Ultimately, it paved the way for these new works by Beyoncé, DuVernay and Bazawule. And unlike its predecessor, Bazawule’s musical version, opening in theaters on Christmas Day, premieres alongside other films with predominantly Black casts, and so his “Color Purple” is free to reimagine and experiment with form and conventional musical conceit.Through Celie’s vivid inner life, the dynamic songs and choreography, and playful cinematic references, this version honors its literary, Broadway and Hollywood forerunners while successfully updating how we see Alice Walker’s characters and, even more surprisingly, innovating how we can experience the movie musical genre itself.Arriving in a different feminist moment, Bazawule is not bedeviled by the sexist and homophobic concerns that plagued the first movie. And yet, his most memorable scenes subtly take on those past critiques while adding new cinematic layers to Celie’s story. Early in the film, Celie’s active imagination — depicted in the novel through her letter-writing — is shown as both a coping mechanism and a surrealistic narrative detour. When the teenage Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) discovers that her children are alive after Pa convinced her that they had died, she dreams of avoiding the drudgery of her life.In the number “She Be Mine,” Celie imagines that she has left Pa’s store and walks through a Southern landscape that is paradoxically lush and marred by the exploitation of Black laborers. As she passes a group of Black men working on a chain gang and Black laundry women washing clothes by a waterfall, we recognize that her escape is limited and illusory and that she is as oppressed in her home as they are in their work.But when adult Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor) tends to the bodacious blues singer Shug (Taraji P. Henson), her interiority takes over even more. As Shug falls asleep in the bathtub while listening to a record, Celie suddenly imagines a gramophone that’s larger than life, and standing on a spinning vinyl album that doubles as a concert stage, she belts an empowering song.Later, Bazawule expands his surreal aesthetic when Celie and Shug go to the movies. Sitting in the segregated balcony section as they watch “The Flying Ace,” Richard E. Norman’s 1926 silent with an all-Black cast, Celie imagines them in a different movie — one in color in which they are dressed in ball gowns and singing to each other in front a Duke Ellington-like jazz band. When we return to the present, they kiss, cementing their relationship and finally enabling Celie’s fantasy to come true. In 1985, that kiss was brief and the cause of much public debate. With access to her inner thoughts in 2023, Celie’s hopes and desires become our own: We recognize that her intimacy with Shug is long-awaited and fulfilling.Taraji P. Henson and Barrino-Taylor working on “The Color Purple” with Blitz Bazawule. Eli Ade/Warner Bros. PicturesAs Celie finds her voice, rejects the abuse from Albert and gains more and more agency, her flights of fancy seem to disappear. But, by the time we reach the showstopper “Miss Celie’s Pants,” in which she, Shug and other women celebrate Celie’s separation from Albert and her newfound entrepreneurialism, the bold color palette, uplifting music and lively dancing associated with her dreamlike sequences dominate.Unlike other movie musicals in which the songs distract from the dramatic action, the numbers and the composer Kris Bowers’s score are woven together in a way that makes the soundscape feel like the film’s true setting. This might be because Bazawule was one of several filmmakers who collaborated with Beyoncé on “Black Is King,” the visual companion to the soundtrack for the live-action “Lion King” (2021); he understands how to make an entire film sing rather than string together a series of scenes.And yet the original song Bazawule co-wrote for the movie, “Workin’,” for Celie’s stepson, Harpo (Corey Hawkins), stands apart for giving this man more multidimensionality than he had in the previous adaptations.In this scene, Harpo rejects Albert’s authority by building his own house, and it’s a harbinger of his evolution. He goes from being a sensitive young adult to an abusive husband to a man who finally breaks his family’s intergenerational cycle of violence against women. Walker’s novel partly shows this metamorphosis, but Bazawule fully realizes it here, nullifying any lingering controversies about Harpo’s fate or flaws in his representation.Growth, I suspect, was always the point. It took a while for Winfrey and Scott Sanders to convince their fellow producer Spielberg that the Broadway musical could lead to a new adaptation. “I didn’t really know if ‘Color Purple’ had another movie in it,” he told Variety. That Bazawule breathes new life into these characters reminds us of what a masterpiece Celie’s story remains for us today. More

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      Ava DuVernay and Other Directors Rethink Holocaust Films

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      Tragic tellings of the Shoah are all too common. The directors of “The Zone of Interest,” “Origin” and “Occupied City” refuse to let it live in the past.In the British comedy “Extras,” Kate Winslet, who appears as a version of herself, is playing as a nun in a film about the Holocaust. When commended for using her platform to bring attention to the atrocities, she replies callously, “I’m not doing it for that. I mean, I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” She explains that she took the role because if you do a movie about the Holocaust, you’re “guaranteed an Oscar.”The fictional Winslet’s perspective on movies about the Holocaust, though obviously a joke in the context of that 2005 episode, has become something of a prevailing opinion. Since Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) won best picture and six other Academy Awards nearly 30 years ago, Holocaust films from “Life Is Beautiful” (1998) to “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) have been seen as Oscar bait. Well intentioned or not, they are considered the kind of cinema you should but don’t necessarily want to see, meant to tug at heartstrings and win their creators prizes.In fact, Winslet herself proved that theory correct when she won the best actress Oscar in 2009 for “The Reader,” in which she played a woman who served as an SS guard at Auschwitz. At the ceremony, the host, Hugh Jackman, built a musical moment around the fact that he hadn’t seen “The Reader,” a gag that got a roar of knowing laughter from the audience: Movies about the Holocaust are important, yes, but skippable.But maybe the notion of the Holocaust movie is changing. This year in particular, three films seek to challenge the idea of what it can and should be. All of them turn an analytical eye on their subject matter, linking the horrors of the past to the present, in that way making the subject feel as upsettingly resonant as ever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Film Explores the Roots of Our Racism

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      Ava DuVernay’s new feature film, adapted from the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste,” turns the journalist into a character who examines oppression.Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” is as audacious as it is ambitious. At its core, it concerns an intellectual argument about history and hierarchies of power, but it’s also about the fraught process of making this argument. It’s a daunting conceit that DuVernay has shaped into an eventful narrative that is, by turns, specific and far-ranging, diagnostic and aspirational. It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.The inspiration for “Origin,” which DuVernay both wrote and directed, is Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed, best-selling 2020 book “Caste.” In it, Wilkerson argues that to fully understand the United States and its divisive history, you need to look past race and grasp the role played by caste, which she sees as an artificial and static structural “ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” Caste, she writes, separates people — including into racially ranked groups — and keeps them divided. These separations, as the subtitle puts it, are “The Origins of Our Discontents.”For the film, DuVernay has turned Wilkerson into a dramatic, at times melodramatic character of the same name — a moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor — who develops her thesis while traversing history and continents on a journey from inspiration to publication. The movie also includes segments of varying effectiveness that dramatize Wilkerson’s understanding of specific caste systems: One is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, another in Depression-era Mississippi and a third in India over different time periods. This last interlude focuses on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), who helped draft India’s Constitution and championed the rights of Dalits, people once deemed “untouchables.”Isabel’s intellectual quest is bold, sweeping and determinedly personal — a handful of close relatives have decisive roles — and DuVernay’s version of that venture is equally expansive. She gives it tension, tears, visual poetry, shocks of tragedy, moments of grace and many interlocking parts. “Origin” opens in 2012 with a re-enactment of the last night in the life of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), the unarmed 17-year-old who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. The killing becomes the catalyst for her thesis about caste because, the more she considers it, the more she believes that racism alone can’t explain it. Racism, she says at one point, has become “the default” explanation.Isabel’s process unfolds rapidly and is framed by her resistance to the default. Her resistance surfaces in a discussion that she has with her husband, Brett (a sympathetic Jon Bernthal), and mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), as they watch President Obama address Martin’s death on TV. It also informs Isabel’s talks with an acquaintance (Blair Underwood), who early on urges her to write about the case, pushing her to listen to the 911 calls that were made the night Martin was killed. (Wilkerson is a former bureau chief for The New York Times; her first book is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”)Isabel does listen to the 911 calls one quiet evening at home. Steeling herself, she begins the recordings, at which point the scene shifts to the night of the killing; it’s as if she had hit play on a grotesque movie. As DuVernay cuts back and forth between Isabel and that night, you hear George Zimmerman, a largely offscreen presence, talking to a dispatcher as he follows the worried teenager in his car. (“He’s running.”) You also watch as a terrified Martin struggles for his life. DuVernay’s staging here is blunt, visceral and harrowingly intimate. Isabel is shaken and so are you, in part because the 911 calls in the re-enactment are real.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Movies to See This Winter: ‘Hunger Games,’ ‘Maestro’ and More

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      “The Color Purple” and “Poor Things” and Beyoncé lead a list packed with goodies. Mark your calendars.The leaves are falling, and at least one of the strikes looming over the film season has been resolved. From Wiseman to Wonka, Beyoncé to Ferrari, here is a select list of the films you need to know about this winter. Release dates and platforms are subject to change.NovemberDREAM SCENARIO An evolutionary biologist (Nicolas Cage) begins turning up in random people’s dreams, an inexplicable phenomenon that first intrigues the dreamers, then freaks them out. Julianne Nicholson also stars. Kristoffer Borgli wrote, directed and edited. (Nov. 10 in theaters)Brie Larson, front left, as Captain Marvel and Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel in, yes, “The Marvels.”Laura Radford/MarvelTHE KILLER Michael Fassbender plays a hyper-punctilious hit man who is forever checking his pulse and who soothes his nerves by listening to the Smiths. But his careful plans are upended when a job goes awry. The film reunites the director David Fincher and the screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who together gave us “Seven” (1995), and here adapt the graphic-novel series by Matz and Luc Jacamon. (Nov. 10 on Netflix)THE MARVELS Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) and Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) join forces to take down whoever is threatening the Marvel Cinematic Universe these days. Nia DaCosta (the 2021 “Candyman” remake) directed. (Nov. 10 in theaters)ORLANDO, MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY In this nonfiction feature, the philosopher Paul B. Preciado uses Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” as a lens for exploring issues of gender identity, enlisting transgender and nonbinary people to play the character and reflect on their lives. (Nov. 10 in theaters)STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING The academic and activist Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” becomes a documentary film with commentary from Kendi and others, including Angela Davis and the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Roger Ross Williams directed. (Nov. 10 in theaters, Nov. 20 on Netflix)Rachel Zegler and Tom Blyth in the prequel “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.” Murray Close/LionsgateA STILL SMALL VOICE A nonfiction highlight at Sundance, this documentary from Luke Lorentzen (“Midnight Family”) follows a hospital chaplain during a residency as she discovers whether she has the fortitude for the job. (Nov. 10 in theaters)YOUTH (SPRING) Known for documentaries with lengthy running times and an unobtrusive style, the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing (“Dead Souls”) chronicles the lives of migrants toiling in the textile workshops of Zhili, China. (Nov. 10 in theaters)THE LADY BIRD DIARIES The latest nonfiction feature from Dawn Porter (“John Lewis: Good Trouble”) draws on archival audio of the first lady Lady Bird Johnson and assesses the part she played in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. (Nov. 13 on Hulu)Natalie Portman as an actress studying her subject in “May December.”Francois Duhamel/NetflixBEST. CHRISTMAS. EVER! Mary Lambert (the original “Pet Sematary”) directed this holiday movie about a woman who tries to puncture her friend’s carefully cultivated aura of good cheer. Heather Graham and Brandy star. (Nov. 16 on Netflix)DASHING THROUGH THE SNOW Magic helps restore the Yuletide spirit for a social worker (Chris Bridges, a.k.a. Ludacris) and his 9-year-old (Madison Skye). Lil Rel Howery and Teyonah Parris also star; Tim Story directed. (Nov. 17 on Disney+)THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE Nicole Newnham (a director of “Crip Camp”) made this documentary on the work of Shere Hite, who in 1976 published “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality,” which advanced the then-radical notion that women could achieve sexual satisfaction without intercourse. (Nov. 17 in theaters)FALLEN LEAVES The latest from the Finnish treasure Aki Kaurismaki won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival; the award scanned as an affectionate third place. It’s a love story — in an unusually bittersweet and low-key register — between lonesome members of the working class (Alma Poysti and Jussi Vatanen), and between Kaurismaki and cinema. (Nov. 17 in theaters)Michael Potts, third from left, Aml Ameen, Chris Rock, Glynn Turman and Kevin Mambo as civil rights leaders in “Rustin.”David Lee/NetflixTHE HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS & SNAKES Set before the events of the Jennifer Lawrence films, this screen installment from Suzanne Collins’s books casts Tom Blyth as a teenage tyrant in the making and Rachel Zegler as the tribute he tries to prepare for the deadly games. Francis Lawrence returns to direct. (Nov. 17 in theaters)MAXINE’S BABY: THE TYLER PERRY STORY Normally, Perry projects begin with “Tyler Perry’s” this or that in their titles. But this biographical documentary bears his mother’s name, and traces how Perry built his universe of film and TV shows. Gelila Bekele and Armani Ortiz directed. (Nov. 17 on Amazon Prime Video)MAY DECEMBER Todd Haynes investigates what constitutes realistic acting — and what attracts viewers to tabloid sensationalism — in this drama, which casts Natalie Portman as a TV star shadowing her latest role’s infamous real-life inspiration (Julianne Moore), a woman whose past is not dissimilar from Mary Kay Letourneau’s. With Charles Melton. (Nov. 17 in theaters, Dec. 1 on Netflix)John Dory (left, voiced by Eric André) joins Poppy (Anna Kendrick) in “Trolls Band Together.”Universal PicturesNEXT GOAL WINS Smarting from a record-breaking loss, American Samoa’s soccer team braces for another try at the World Cup qualifying matches, this time with a new, curmudgeonly coach (Michael Fassbender). Taika Waititi directed. The team’s story was also told in a documentary with the same title. (Nov. 17 in theaters)RUSTIN Colman Domingo plays the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, who was a principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and whose legacy has received renewed attention. (In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California granted him a posthumous pardon for a 1953 conviction on a charge that had been used to criminalize homosexual activity.) George C. Wolfe directed. Chris Rock, Glynn Turman and Audra McDonald co-star. (Nov. 17 on Netflix)SALTBURN The writer-director Emerald Fennell’s first feature behind the camera since “Promising Young Woman” centers on a student at Oxford (Barry Keoghan) who becomes taken with the lifestyle of a classmate (Jacob Elordi) and accepts an invitation to his lavish home. (Nov. 17 in theaters)The animation master Hayao Miyazaki returns to theaters with “The Boy and the Heron.” GkidsTHANKSGIVING Sixteen years is a long time from trailer to release. But the tongue-in-cheek coming attraction that Eli Roth made for the midpoint of “Grindhouse” (2007) is now a feature film in its own right. Patrick Dempsey stars. (Nov. 17 in theaters)TROLLS BAND TOGETHER The Troll universe expands again as Poppy (voiced by Anna Kendrick) and Branch (Justin Timberlake) seek out Branch’s brothers, with whom he previously formed a boy band. Who knew the Trolls universe had one? (Nov. 17 in theaters)LEO Adam Sandler lends his inimitable vocal stylings to a lizard in an elementary school classroom; it only has a year to live. Bill Burr and Cecily Strong also star. (Nov. 21 on Netflix)THE BOY AND THE HERON Ten years after “The Wind Rises,” which had been billed as a final feature, the master animator Hayao Miyazaki gives us this story of a boy who moves from Tokyo after his mother’s death during World War II. An enigmatic tower that stands near his new home becomes a gateway to a parallel world — a quintessentially Miyazakian realm. (Nov. 22 in theaters)Eddie Murphy and Tracee Ellis Ross deal with holiday woes in “Candy Cane Lane.”Amazon Prime VideoLEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND Julia Roberts plays a misanthropic New Yorker who ropes her husband (Ethan Hawke) and children into an impromptu getaway on Long Island. But after strange things start to happen, and the family who owns the rental house (Mahershala Ali and Myha’la play father and daughter) turns up, the atmosphere gets tense. Barack and Michelle Obama are among the executive producers. Sam Esmail directed. (Nov. 22 in theaters, Dec. 8 on Netflix)MAESTRO In the director’s chair again after “A Star Is Born” (2018), Bradley Cooper also stars as the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, in a biopic that focuses in particular on his marriage. A top-billed Carey Mulligan plays the actress Felicia Montealegre Bernstein, his wife for nearly three decades until her death. (Nov. 22 in theaters, Dec. 20 on Netflix)MENUS-PLAISIRS — LES TROISGROS The 93-year-old Frederick Wiseman has made more than 40 feature documentaries, but never one as culinarily tantalizing as this four-hour look at a three-star restaurant (per Michelin) in France. You’ll see how the food is sourced, how dishes are devised, how patrons react and much more. (Nov. 22 in theaters)Joaquin Phoenix as the title character in Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon.”Sony Pictures/Apple OriginalNAPOLEON Stanley Kubrick’s Bonaparte biography will, alas, always be one of cinema’s great what-ifs. But we are getting Ridley Scott’s version of the life of the French military leader, with Joaquin Phoenix donning the bicorn. Vanessa Kirby also stars. (Nov. 22 in theaters)WISH Will Ariana DeBose belt out a hit as big as “Let It Go”? Disney’s latest animated offering, advertising its affinities with “Frozen,” among other movies, casts the “West Side Story” Oscar winner as a heroine who takes on a king with the help of a cosmic force and a goat. Alan Tudyk and Chris Pine lend their voices as well. (Nov. 22 in theaters)AMERICAN SYMPHONY While the musician Jon Batiste is planning a symphony, his partner, the writer Suleika Jaouad, has a recurrence of cancer. Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land”) documented their experiences. (Jaouad had previously written for The New York Times about having cancer in her 20s.) (Nov. 24 in theaters, Nov. 29 on Netflix)Beyoncé at the Toronto stop on her Renaissance tour, the subject of her new movie.The New York TimesSMOKE SAUNA SISTERHOOD The director Anna Hints documents the lives of women sweating things out in an Estonian sauna. The movie won a directing prize at Sundance. (Nov. 24 in theaters)THEY SHOT THE PIANO PLAYER Jeff Goldblum provides the voice of a journalist investigating the disappearance of a Brazilian pianist in this animated documentary. Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal directed. (Nov. 24 in theaters)SOUTH TO BLACK POWER In his book “The Devil You Know,” the New York Times Opinion columnist Charles M. Blow argued that Black Americans should reverse-migrate to the South. This documentary, directed by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) and Llewellyn M. Smith, explores that idea. (Nov. 28 on Max)FAMILY SWITCH In the tradition of “Freaky Friday” and “Vice Versa,” this movie casts Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms as parents in a family that gets scrambled in a body swap before a big day. McG directed. (Nov. 30 on Netflix)Emma Stone in “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.Searchlight PicturesDecemberBAD PRESS In 2018, officials in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation repealed an act guaranteeing freedom of the press. This documentary concerns a reporter’s efforts to fight back. (Dec. 1 in theaters and on demand)CANDY CANE LANE A spell cast by an elf (Jillian Bell) causes Christmastime trouble for a man (Eddie Murphy) and his family. With Tracee Ellis Ross. Reginald Hudlin directed. (Dec. 1 on Amazon Prime Video)EILEEN A sophisticated new counselor at a Massachusetts prison (Anne Hathaway) piques the curiosity of a younger woman who works there (Thomasin McKenzie). William Oldroyd (“Lady Macbeth”) directed this adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel. (Dec. 1 in theaters)IN WATER It’s not uncommon for the prolific South Korean director Hong Sangsoo to turn out two films per year, with a high consistency of style and subject. The gimmick in this one is that, for most of the movie, the picture is out of focus. (Dec. 1 in theaters)Jeffrey Wright, left, Leslie Uggams and Tracee Ellis Ross in “American Fiction,” directed by Cord Jefferson.Orion ReleasingLA SYNDICALISTE Isabelle Huppert plays a whistleblower who reveals secrets about France’s nuclear sector. But when she is sexually assaulted, the investigation calls into question her veracity. (Dec. 1 in theaters)RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ Last month, Taylor Swift conquered theaters with a cinematic document of her Eras Tour. Now it’s Beyoncé’s turn, in a movie that goes behind the scenes of the artist’s Renaissance World Tour, which ended Oct. 1. (Dec. 1 in theaters)SHAYDA Zar Amir Ebrahimi plays a woman from Iran residing in a shelter in Australia who is desperate to prevent her estranged husband from taking their child back with him. Noora Niasari wrote and directed. (Dec. 1 in theaters)Rocky (voiced by Zachary Levi) and Ginger (Thandiwe Newton) return to action in “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.”Aardman/NetflixSILENT NIGHT A father (Joel Kinnaman) seeks revenge for the Christmas Eve killing of his son. No, it’s not another “Death Wish” reboot — the director, in fact, is John Woo. (Dec. 1 in theaters)THE SWEET EAST After getting away from an attack by a PizzaGate-style conspiracy theorist, a high schooler (Talia Ryder) has a series of outlandish adventures as she travels from place to place. Ayo Edebiri, Jeremy O. Harris and Simon Rex also star. The cinematographer Sean Price Williams directed from a script by the film critic Nick Pinkerton. (Dec. 1 in theaters)THE APOCALYPTIC IS THE MOTHER OF ALL CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY The experimental filmmaker Jim Finn examines the ideas of the apostle Paul using oddball cultural detritus, including board games and sponsored films. (Dec. 6 in theaters)WAITRESS: THE MUSICAL Sara Bareilles plays the lead role in the movie version of the stage musical for which she wrote the music and lyrics. The show was itself adapted from Adrienne Shelly’s posthumously released 2007 film. (Dec. 7 in theaters)Timothée Chalamet takes over as the title character in “Wonka.” Hugh Grant is an Oompa Loompa, of course.Warner Bros.ANSELM Similarly to what he did in “Pina,” his 2011 documentary tribute to the choreographer Pina Bausch, Wim Wenders uses 3-D and high-resolution digital camerawork to give viewers a sense of the monumentality of Anselm Kiefer’s art. (Dec. 8 in theaters)FAST CHARLIE Michael Fassbender’s character in “The Killer” isn’t the only assassin with a problem this season. There’s also the hit man in this movie (Pierce Brosnan), who has trouble proving that the headless person he has killed was the intended mark. James Caan, who died last year, plays the hit man’s mentor. Phillip Noyce directed. (Dec. 8 in theaters and on demand)MERRY LITTLE BATMAN Bruce Wayne’s son has to become a mini-Batman to thwart what sound like “Home Alone”-style shenanigans in this animated feature. Luke Wilson is in the voice cast. (Dec. 8 on Amazon Prime Video)ORIGIN Reviewing “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” the 2020 book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, Dwight Garner of The New York Times called it “an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.” With Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson, Ava DuVernay dramatizes the period of the book’s writing. (Dec. 8 in theaters)Jason Momoa dives back into “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.”Warner Bros./DC ComicsPOOR THINGS Yorgos Lanthimos combines the costume drama of “The Favourite” with the social satire of “Dogtooth” to follow the odyssey of Bella Baxter (a wildly dexterous Emma Stone), who, thanks to a Frankensteining by a mad-scientist father figure (Willem Dafoe), begins the movie as a grown woman with a child’s brain. Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef also star. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, it won the top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival. (Dec. 8 in theaters)TOTAL TRUST In this documentary, the director Jialing Zhang looks at the nature of the surveillance state in China. (Dec. 8 in theaters)THE TASTE OF THINGS Tran Anh Hung won the directing prize at Cannes for a film that, along with Frederick Wiseman’s “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” boasts the most mouthwatering display of cuisine in any movie this year. Inspired by the French novel known in English as “The Passionate Epicure,” it concerns the relationship between that epicure (Benoît Magimel) and his longtime cook and companion (Juliette Binoche). (Dec. 13 in theaters)CHRISTMAS RESCUE Kidnapping the bride from a wedding in an effort to win her love sounds like a horrifying thing to do, but maybe it works out for these two crazy kids in this movie? With Robin Givens, Raven Goodwin and Mario Van Peebles. (Dec. 14 on BET+)AMERICAN FICTION Adapting a 2001 satirical novel by Percival Everett, the TV writer and former Gawker editor Cord Jefferson directed Jeffrey Wright as a Black author who, in frustration and jest, writes a book that plays into stereotypes — and suddenly finds the success that has eluded him. Erika Alexander plays a potential love interest; Sterling K. Brown and Issa Rae also star. It won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. (Dec. 15 in theaters)Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are absolutely not interested in each other in “Anyone but You.”Brook Rushton/Sony PicturesCHICKEN RUN: DAWN OF THE NUGGET To counter the existential threat posed by exceptionally delicious chicken nuggets, Ginger, Rocky and their daughter break into a poultry-processing plant. Thandiwe Newton, Zachary Levi and Bella Ramsey provide some of the voices. (Dec. 15 on Netflix)THE FAMILY PLAN When his past catches up with him, a government assassin turned car salesman (Mark Wahlberg) tries to save his family while keeping his previous occupation secret. Michelle Monaghan also stars. (Dec. 15 on Apple TV+)GODARD CINEMA The legacy of Jean-Luc Godard, who died last year, is impossible to distill almost by design; he reinvented film with his first feature, “Breathless,” and never stopped reinventing. Still, the documentarian Cyril Leuthy gives a survey a try, interviewing people who worked with Godard. In New York, Film Forum will show this feature with a final short Godard work, “Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars.’” (Dec. 15 in theaters)WONKA While “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and Roald Dahl’s book left many questions, how Wonka defeated a chocolate cartel to found his factory was not exactly foremost among them. Will the movie at least explain how Timothée Chalamet, who plays Wonka in this prequel, could grow into Gene Wilder? (Dec. 15 in theaters)THE ZONE OF INTEREST Loosely based on Martin Amis’s 2014 Holocaust novel, the director Jonathan Glazer’s first feature since “Under the Skin” a decade ago is an intensely formal exercise that tries to immerse viewers in the perspective of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, as he carried on with his life next to the camp. With Sandra Hüller as Höss’s wife. (Dec. 15 in theaters)Kumail Nanjiani provides the voice for one of the Mallards in “Migration.”IlluminationALL OF US STRANGERS A run-in with a neighbor (Paul Mescal) somehow causes a rupture in the life of a screenwriter (Andrew Scott), who visits the home where he grew up and encounters his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) — who died years earlier, but who now have a chance to get to know him as an adult. Andrew Haigh (“45 Years”) directed. (Dec. 22 in theaters)ANYONE BUT YOU Advance word suggests that this film, starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell as two wedding guests who pretend to be together but aren’t, is unusually racy by the standards of comedies faintly inspired by “Much Ado About Nothing.” Will Gluck directed. (Dec. 22 in theaters)AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM Jason Momoa has to form an alliance with his brother (Patrick Wilson) to save Atlantis. Amber Heard and Nicole Kidman return for this DC sequel, along with the director James Wan. (Dec. 22 in theaters)THE IRON CLAW Sean Durkin (“The Nest”) directed this dramatization of what happened to the real-life Von Erich brothers, who beginning in the 1970s made a name for themselves wrestling and who almost all died young. Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White star. (Dec. 22 in theaters)MIGRATION A family of ducks — the Mallards — do what a lot of American families do: fly south for a winter getaway. Not surprisingly, travel proves to be a hassle. Mike White, a long way from “The White Lotus,” wrote the screenplay for this animated feature, which has the voices of Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key, among others. (Dec. 22 in theaters)Sofia Boutella is trying to save the galaxy in “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire.”Clay Enos/NetflixREBEL MOON — PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE Sofia Boutella bands together misfit warriors to save the galaxy. Untethered from DC Comics characters and the zombies of his “Dawn of the Dead” and “Army of the Dead,” this could be the most unfiltered dose of Zack Snyder since “Sucker Punch” (2011). This is the first of two installments, with the next one due in April. (Dec. 22 on Netflix)THE BOYS IN THE BOAT In 1936, the United States’s eight-man rowing team bested Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the Berlin Olympics. How the American team did it, and how its members got to that point from the University of Washington, is chronicled in this drama, directed by George Clooney and starring Joel Edgerton and Callum Turner. (Dec. 25 in theaters)THE COLOR PURPLE The Broadway musical version of Alice Walker’s novel, which itself was already adapted into a movie by Steven Spielberg in 1985, hits the big screen. The singer Fantasia, a.k.a. Fantasia Barrino, plays Celie, the role Whoopi Goldberg embodied in the original film. With Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, Colman Domingo and Halle Bailey. Blitz Bazawule directed. (Dec. 25 in theaters)THE CRIME IS MINE A stage actress (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is accused of murdering a lecherous producer in this 1930s-set film from François Ozon. It also features Rebecca Marder and, as a Sarah Bernhardt-like star, Isabelle Huppert. (Dec. 25 in theaters)Adam Driver is playing another figure synonymous with Italy in “Ferrari.”Eros Hoagland/NeonFERRARI Michael Mann and the sleek Italian auto brand go way back. (See also “Miami Vice” in its TV and movie versions.) Adam Driver plays the sports car maker Enzo Ferrari in 1957, as he grieves the death of one son, tries to keep the existence of a mistress (Shailene Woodley) and an out-of-wedlock child from his wife (Penélope Cruz) and braces for the Mille Miglia race across Italy. (Dec. 25 in theaters)OCCUPIED CITY Working from a book by his wife, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter, the director Steve McQueen combines documentary footage from present-day Amsterdam with narration that recounts events in the city throughout World War II. “With formal rigor and adamant focus, it maps — street by street, address by address — the catastrophe that befell Amsterdam’s Jewish population,” Manohla Dargis wrote when the film played at Cannes. (Dec. 25 in theaters)THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE A schoolteacher (Leonie Benesch) winds up in an awkward professional position — and a deepening ethical quagmire — after leveling an accusation against one of the school’s staff members. İlker Çatak directed this festival favorite. (Dec. 25 in theaters)GOOD GRIEF Dan Levy (“Schitt’s Creek”) casts himself — in his first directorial feature — as a man who takes a trip to Paris with two friends (Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel) while grieving his husband’s death. (Dec. 29 in theaters, Jan. 5 on Netflix) More