A guide to the most exciting fall 2025 movies

Stars: Tyriq Withers, Marlon Wayans
Opens: September 19

Anything Jordan Peele is involved in arrives with an instant seal of quality. Peele produced Him, a sports movie that goes deep into the psyche of elite athletes and asks tough questions about what it takes to succeed. Deploying comic actor Marlon Wayans in a darker and more challenging role as an NFL player that torments a rookie prospect at an isolated training facility, feels like an inspired piece of casting.

Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor
Opens: September 26

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie since 2021’s Licorice Pizza is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the leader of a group of ex-revolutionaries forced to reunite to save his young daughter. Teyana Taylor also stars in a cast that includes Regina Hall, Benicio Del Toro, Alana Haim, and newcomer Chase Infiniti.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie since 2021’s Licorice Pizza is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the leader of a group of ex-revolutionaries forced to reunite to save his young daughter. Teyana Taylor also stars in a cast that includes Regina Hall, Benicio Del Toro, Alana Haim, and newcomer Chase Infiniti.

Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt
Opens: October 3

While Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has been in a lot of big movies, it’s fair to say he hasn’t been in many good ones. The Smashing Machine might just be the title that gives him the critical acclaim that eluded him in Baywatch and Black Adam. He plays MMA fighter Mark Kerr in the A24 sports drama directed by Benny Safdie. The movie recently screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a 15-minute standing ovation.

Stars: Ayo Edeberi, Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield
Opens: October 10

Director Luca Guadagnino’s latest movie follows Alma (Roberts), a college professor who gets caught up in a sexual abuse accusation made by one of her students (Edeberi) and a colleague (Garfield). After last year’s Challengers and Queer, Guadagnino is on a roll with this movie seemingly custom-built to ensure everyone is talking about it.

Stars: Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky
Opens: October 10

Mary Bronstein’s new movie isn’t about a life-altering incident but rather the hundreds of small irritations and inconveniences that slowly push therapist and mother Linda (Byrne) to the edge of a psychological break. A bold and unflinching depiction of the often unbearable load placed on women, the movie is already generating Oscar buzz for Rose Byrne.

Stars: Rebecca Ferguson, Greta Lee, Idris Elba
Opens: In Select theaters October 10. On Netflix October 24

Netflix has a bunch of big movies on its slate this year (Jay Kelly and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein among them) but A House Of Dynamite is its most intriguing. Director Katheryn Bigelow returns after eight years with a story that tackles the U.S. government’s response to a nuclear missile attack. The excruciatingly tense action plays out basically in real time and is split between the reaction in the White House Situation Room, a military air base, and a third section telling the story from the President’s perspective. Part disaster movie, part political thriller, Bigelow is back with a movie where the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Stars: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari
Opens: October 15

In a time when artists across the world of entertainment contort themselves to complain about censorship, Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been routinely arrested, imprisoned, and banned from working by his country’s government. His latest film is about a chance reunion of a former prisoner and the intelligence officer who tortured him in prison.

Stars: Josh O’Connor, Alana Haim
Opens: October 17

Kelly Reichardt’s patient cinema often tells her stories with a quiet urgency so it will be interesting to see how she captures the rush of emotions brought on when a suburban family man (O’Connor) begins living a double life as an art thief in the 1970s. The Mastermind/i> received the Palme D’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and stars Alana Haim alongside Reichardt regular John Magaro.

Stars: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong
Opens: October 24

There have been a lot of musician biopics in recent years but the box office success of Bohemian Rhapsody and A Complete Unknown mean more and more keep going into production. Latest off the shelf is The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White swapping chef whites for a guitar as he takes on the challenge of bringing Bruce Springsteen to life. These movies tend to work best when they focus on a specific era, with Deliver Me From Nowhere taking a detailed look at The Boss as he worked on his 1982 classic, Nebraska.

Stars: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemmons
Opens: October 24

There are few cinematic pairings more rewarding in recent history than Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos. The actor-director combo have had great success with both The Favorite and Poor Things and reunite once more for Bugonia. This remake of the cult South Korean sci-fi movie Save the Green Planet! stars a shaven-headed Stone as a CEO kidnapped by two men who suspect she is an alien.

Stars: Renata Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning
Opens: November 7

If The Worst Woman In The World had you longing to run through the streets of Oslo then get ready for Sentimental Value to be your new obsession. Norwegian director Joachim Trier reunites with Renata Reinsve for a story about a pair of estranged sisters forced to confront the father (Skarsgård) who abandoned them as children.

Stars: Jennifer Lawrence
Opens: November 7

Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar-winner at just 22, has excelled in movies that make the most of her willingness to commit and present her characters with the handbrakes off. Perhaps Die, My Love, in which she plays a mother experienced a psychological break following the birth of her first child, will join the likes of Winter’s Bone and Mother! in the Lawrence canon. The harrowing and raw story also marks the return of the excellent Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, whose 2002 movie Morvern Callar counts among the best of the century so far.

Stars: Tatiana Maslaney, Rossif Sutherland
Opens: November 14

It can’t all be arthouse heavyweights on the big screen. Arriving just after Halloween, Keeper looks like it could be the scary movie that will set the spooky season off right. The one-two hit of Longlegs and The Monkey has established Osgood Perkins as a director who can deliver original stories with unsettling vibes and plenty of gore. As has become standard, little is known about his latest effort but it’s sure to be appointment viewing.

Stars: Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Charli XCX
Opens: December 5

Charli XCX has a lot of movie projects in the pipeline with 100 Nights of Hero being one of the first to arrive in theaters. The historical fantasy film is based on Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel about a diabolical bet made between two men and the forbidden relationship neither of them know about.

Stars: Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley
Opens: December 12

Hamnet is a fictionalized story about the playwright William Shakespeare, his wife, and the death of their 11-year-old son from filmmaker Chloé Zhao. Critics who viewed the movie at the Venice Film Festival described it as “emotionally shattering” and a film that “rips your soul out of your chest.” Remember to bring tissues.

Stars: Zoe Saldaña, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Worthington
Opens: December 19

The biggest hit of 2025 so far at the box office has been the Minecraft movie. It’ll likely face stiff competition from Avatar: Fire and Ash when it Opens in December. The previous two installments in James Cameron’s 3D animated sci-fi saga have brought millions of moviegoers into theaters and there is no reason to assume history won’t repeat itself when the doors to Pandora are opened once more.

Stars: Lee Byung-hun
Opens: December 25

Work is a killer in South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s latest effort. The black comedy captures the state of the world in sensationalist fashion with a story about a man who, frustrated in his efforts at landing a new job, begins murdering those applying for the same roles as him.

Stars: Timothée Chalamet
Opens: December 25

Marty Supreme might just have the wildest cast of any movie in 2025. There is Timothée Chalamet, sure, but then Tyler, The Creator is in this thing alongside Canadian billionaire Kevin O’Leary and Gwyneth Paltrow? Josh Safdie (the second of the Safdie bros with a movie out this fall) will look to perform some kind of alchemy as he brings a story inspired by 1950s professional ping-pong player Marty Reisman onto the screen.