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One Battle After Another to Spinal Tap II: 14 of the best films to watch this September

Here are slot dochipthe films to see this month, including Leonardo DiCaprio's new comedy-action-thriller, a sequel to classic music mockumentary Spinal Tap and the last ever Downton Abbey.

Cillian Murphy has followed his Oscar-winning performance in Oppenheimer with two small-scale dramas directed by Tim Mielants, last year's Small Things Like These, and his new film, Steve. Adapted from Max Porter's bestselling novel, Shy, Steve is set during one day in the 1990s in an under-funded reform school, where the titular headteacher (Murphy) has to look after dozens of alienated teenage boys.? Steve has been compared to the Adolescence television series, because both Netflix productions tell tough, conversation-starting stories about violent youths in crisis, but Murphy insists that they have something else in common. "I think neither?Adolescence or our film will succeed unless it's entertaining," he says in Deadline. "You can have a boring polemic and no one's gonna get engaged with it. No one's gonna have a discussion about it. But Adolescence is monstrously entertaining, as well as being soul-crushingly moving, and hopefully our film is as entertaining as it is engaging politically."

Released on 19 September in US and UK cinemas, and on 3 October on Netflix internationally

If you don't have young children, you may not have heard of Gabby's Dollhouse, but the wholesome Netflix series has been wildly popular ever since its debut in January 2021. A live-action / animation hybrid, the programme stars Laila Lockhart Kraner as a crafting enthusiast with a magical doll's house. In the programme's animated segments, she has adventures in the doll's house with her cat toys – while staying positive about her failings. "What sets Gabby's Dollhouse apart is its emphasis on the 'growth mind-set', an outlook that rewards effort over results," says Julian Sancton in The Hollywood Reporter. "Gabby and her feline friends like to say they 'fail fantastically', and celebrate their mistakes as a stepping stone to success." And the programme's creators know a thing or two about success. They have made 10 series of Gabby's Dollhouse, and sold millions of tie-in toys. Now comes a feature film, in which Gabby and her grandmother (Gloria Estefan) visit the city of Cat Francisco (cat puns are a big thing in Gabby's Dollhouse). Kristen Wiig co-stars as the Cruella-like villain who wants the doll's house for herself.

Released internationally from 25 September

Paul Mescal has said that comparisons between his new film and Brokeback Mountain are "lazy and frustrating", but it's hardly surprising that those comparisons have been made. After all, The History of Sound, like Brokeback Mountain, is a handsome period drama about two young men who have a passionate relationship while they are out in the American countryside together, and who can't admit to their feelings when they're back home. Not that the two films are identical. Oliver Hermanus's drama, adapted from Ben Shattack's short story, is about musicologists (Mescal and Josh O'Connor) hiking around Maine in 1920, recording folk songs in the communities they visit. "What's most special about The History of Sound?is how timelessly classical it feels," says Tomris Laffly in Elle. "Its continents-spanning scope and journey through the unique sounds and musical notes of the olden Americana put you inside the pages of a great, lost novel, all the way through the movie's richly earned,?Atonement-like ending."

Released on 12 September in the US and Canada

There's been a run of fact-based dramas about businesspeople developing lucrative products recently: Air, Tetris, Blackberry and Flamin' Hot all came out in 2023. But most of the businesspeople in these films are men. Swiped bucks that trend by telling the true story of Whitney Wolfe Herd, one of the founders of the Tinder dating app. She fell out with her colleagues, partly because of all the unsolicited explicit photos that male Tinder users were sending to women, but she went on to set up a female-friendly app, Bumble, which made her a billionaire. As well as having the lead role, Lily James is one of the film's producers, via her new production company. "Our remit is to find those stories that really champion women with great grit and tenacity who have gone on to achieve things," James said in Who What Wear. "It felt like kismet, beginning my own production company whilst playing such a phenomenal entrepreneur [who was] unafraid of breaking boundaries and pushing forward."

Released on 19 September on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ internationally

This intriguingly titled fantasy romance stars Margot Robbie, who is back on the big screen for the first time since Barbie, and Colin Farrell, who is back on the big screen for the first time since The Banshees of Inisherin. Directed by Kogonada (After Yang) and written by Seth Reiss (The Menu), A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has two strangers, Sarah (Robbie) and David (Farrell), going on a road trip guided by a sentient GPS. The GPS takes them to mystical doors, which allow them to walk into their own memories, and to see how they have been affected by key moments in their past. The conceit is reminiscent of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, then – not that either character is in as much need of reforming as Ebenezer Scrooge. "It's a little Dickens," Farrell said in Empire. "[David] is just living in a certain degree of apathy. He's moving through life in something of a midlife haze."

Released on 19 September in cinemas internationally

Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, and Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood) is one of the most acclaimed directors, so it's exciting to see what they've come up with together. In One Battle After Another, DiCaprio plays a former revolutionary activist. He thinks he has put that life behind him, but when an old adversary (Sean Penn) tracks him down, he has to go on the run with his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). "One Battle After Another is a big movie," according to a report in Esquire, "an action film with car chases, a spy-craft yarn with a clandestine agent who's drunk and stoned, and a political thriller with reverberations for our interesting times. But at its core, the movie is a story about a father and daughter and what it means to show up for the people you love. It's also very funny."

Released in cinemas internationally on 24, 25 and 26 September

The Lost Bus is directed by Paul Greengrass, and it could be seen as the third part of a trilogy that includes two Greengrass classics, United 93 and Captain Phillips: all three films are true stories of US trauma and heroism in which the breathless action is confined to one vehicle. Set during the 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive wildfire in the history of California, The Lost Bus stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrara as a bus driver and a teacher who drove 22 stranded children away from Ponderosa Elementary School in the city of Paradise as flames consumed the trees and buildings around them. "The film centres on a deeply personal, true story while also capturing the epic nature of the fire," says Rebecca Ford in Vanity Fair. "[It] captures the devastation of a real event in a way that only Greengrass knows how to do, but it also holds onto optimism – a feeling that many, including communities in Los Angeles, could use right now."

Released on 19 September in UK and US cinemas and 3 October on Apple TV+ internationally

Alongside Kristen Stewart and Harris Dickinson, Scarlett Johansson is one of the actors who unveiled their directorial debuts at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Johansson's comedy drama stars the 95-year-old June Squibb (who was Oscar-nominated for her role in Alexander Payne's Nebraska) as Eleanor, a widow who has lived in Florida for years with her best friend Bessie. When Bessie dies, Eleanor moves to New York to be closer to her daughter and grandson. She then bonds with a student journalist, Nina (Erin Kellyman), while sharing her memories of the Holocaust. The snag is, they're not actually Eleanor's memories: Eleanor is passing off Bessie's most painful recollections as her own. "Written by Tory Kamen, Eleanor the Great hinges on the early charm of its relatively feelgood premise, before piling on the ever-darker twists and turns," said?Kate Erbland in IndieWire. "That's not to say the film isn't funny or sweet, but that there is something much more profound and uncomfortable at its heart… It's also an ambitious swing at what movies can still be (and what sort of stars can populate them)."

Released on 26 September in the US and Canada

This is it, then: after six series of the toffs-and-servants drama, and two spin-off films, everyone's favourite country house is closing its doors for good. Written as ever by Julian Fellowes, the third film takes the Crawley family, and its staff, into the 1930s, when they are rocked by financial troubles (relatively speaking, anyway), and a public scandal: Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is a divorcee! Joely Richardson, Alessandro Nivola, Simon Russell Beale join the stalwarts, including Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter and Joanne Froggatt. But it won't be the same without Maggie Smith's Violet Crawley: the character died in the second film in 2022, and Smith herself died last year. "She was greatly missed," Froggatt said in Screen Rant. "For any group scenes, we'd all be together, and there was this huge personality and this huge talent missing from that. So, it was really sad, but also we felt proud to be flying the flag for her one last time."

Released in cinemas internationally on 10, 11 and 12 September

Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap, a spoof documentary about a numbskulled British heavy metal band, is one of cinema's greatest and most influential comedies: all subsequent mockumentaries, from The Office to What We Do in the Shadows, are in its debt. And now, four decades after the film was released in 1984, Reiner has reunited with Spinal Tap's key members – Christoper Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer – for a sequel. The idea is that the band is contractually obliged to put on one more concert, despite having been estranged for 15 years. "We've had screenings with just a regular audience, and we purposely had half the audience who had seen the first film and half the audience who had not seen the first film," Reiner told Collider.?"It just blew me away that the people who hadn't seen it liked the second film as much as the people who had… They just looked at it and said, 'Oh, it's about an old band. Old guys still on tour,' and they got the jokes from that."

Released on 12 September in the US, the UK, Ireland and Mexico, and on 25 September in Australia

The Conjuring films are a phenomenon. The first one, released in 2013, was directed by James Wan (Saw, Aquaman), and starred Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as Ed and Lorraine Warren, a real-life married couple who worked as paranormal investigators. It wasn't expected to be a massive hit, but it was so successful that two sequels about the Warrens followed, and even the series' demonic villains got their own spin-offs: there have been three films about Annabelle the creepy doll and two about The Nun. But now Farmiga and Wilson are playing the Warrens for a final time, in a dramatisation of the so-called Smurl haunting in Pennsylvania in 1986. In The Conjuring: Last Rites, audiences are "going to witness a moment in the Warrens' lives – and a pretty profound moment", Farmiga said in Entertainment Weekly. "It's a moment that makes time stand still. This [film] is different than the others. The other three were about hauntings, and this one is about reckoning."

Released in cinemas internationally on 4 and 5 September

This ingenious and outrageous comedy drama was showered with rave reviews when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. But all of those reviews were careful not to give too much away, because the twists in Twinless are what make it so remarkable. The premise is that Roman (Dylan O'Brien) has an identical twin who dies in a car crash. Roman goes to a twin bereavement support group, where he meets Dennis (the film's writer-director, James Sweeney), and the two become close friends. But "the initial premise is merely a small fraction of what this film has in store as it upends expectations and runs with them as far as it can", said Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap. "It's a juggling act of tones that manages to be funny, chaotic, dark and even unexpectedly poignant… what fun Sweeney has contorting his characters into a whole host of hilarious, yet still uncomfortable, situations."

Released on 5 September in the US and Canada

There's no sign yet of the next horror film directed by Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, Nope), but in the meantime we have Him, which Peele produced, and which seems to have his signature blend of shocks, mystery and sly social commentary. It's the twisted story of a rising American football star, Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), who needs some extra help to fulfil his potential. His hero is Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), a legendary quarterback, so Cade is thrilled to be invited to White's isolated training compound. Once he's there, though, he discovers that the training involves gory violence and hallucinatory weirdness. But if that's what it takes to be a sporting superstar, could the ordeal be worth it? Written by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, Him is a "mash-up where sports meet horror", says its director, Justin Tipping. "I guarantee, this film does not play it safe."

Released on 19 September in the US and Canada and 25 September in Australia

Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl's documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia are Nazi propaganda, though Riefenstahl argued that she cared only about art and beauty, not politics. She spent plenty of time with Hitler, and her claims that she was unaware of his crimes against humanity were never wholly convincing. Andres Veiel's documentary goes further: it argues that Riefenstahl was a Nazi throughout her life, however much she protested otherwise. The film is an "extraordinary deep-dive documentary about the original cancelled artist", said The Guardian. "Veiel gained unprecedented access to Riefenstahl's personal archive and combed through film footage, audio, photos and writing… He paints a textured, complex portrait that feels close to definitive; a slice of dark history that speaks (eloquently, implicitly) to present-day tensions."

Released on 5 September in the US

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