MOVIES
FALL PREVIEW
As the year’s prestigious releases roll in with an eye toward Oscar season, historical reconstructions—whether based on true stories or on classic fiction—will dominate screens.
Carol [NYFF} (opening Nov. 20), directed by Todd Haynes, is set in 1952 New York. Rooney Mara plays a sales clerk who falls in love with a married woman (Cate Blanchett). It’s based on a novel,
The Price of Salt, that Patricia Highsmith originally published under a pseudonym.
Black Mass (Sept. 18) is a bio-pic about the Boston mobster Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp), who, in the nineteen-seventies, became an informant for the F.B.I. Scott Cooper directed; Dakota Johnson co-stars.
Pawn Sacrifice (Sept. 18), directed by Edward Zwick, depicts the Cold War machinations behind the 1972 world-championship chess match between Brooklyn’s own Bobby Fischer (played by Tobey Maguire) and the reigning champion at the time, Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber), of the Soviet Union. Steven Spielberg’s
Bridge of Spies] [NYFF] (Oct. 16), based on the so-called U-2 incident of 1960, tells the story of secret efforts to free the American pilot Francis Gary Powers from Soviet captivity. Tom Hanks plays James B. Donovan, the attorney who negotiated for his release; Amy Ryan plays the attorney’s wife, Mary McKenna Donovan; and Austin Stowell plays Powers. .
Brooklyn (Nov. 6), directed by John Crowley and adapted by Nick Hornby from a novel by Colm Tóibín, stars Saoirse Ronan as an Irish immigrant in New York in the nineteen-fifties. Michael Almereyda directed
Experimenter (Oct. 16), a dramatization of a 1961 psychology experiment by Stanley Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard), in which subjects were induced to administer electric shocks to a designated victim. Angelina Jolie directed, wrote, and stars in
By the Sea (Nov. 13), a drama set in France in the nineteen-seventies, about a couple—a retired dancer, played by Jolie, and a blocked writer, played by Brad Pitt—who are struggling to save their marriage.
--Richard Brody in
The New Yorker, 31 Aug. 2015.