Find New Times' movie picks for October below, and check the local listings and showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.
Mobile Suit Gundam Film Trilogy
Mobile Suit Gundam wasn't always one of the most iconic, influential anime franchises of all time. After the original 1979 TV series left the air, it took a re-edit of the show for theatrical audiences for audiences to catch on. The rest is history: Dozens of shows, movies, and a lucrative plastic model business have turned Gundam into a phenomenon, and countless series from Evangelion to Pacific Rim have taken influence from it. American audiences will get to see the original Gundam movie trilogy when Iconic Releasing sends the three films into theaters this month.Our Take: Although I've only seen the series, not the movies, they are basically the same story. In the far future, humanity's Earth-based Federation government enters into a destructive civil war with one of its rebelling space colonies. During an attack, young Amuro Ray stumbles upon Earth's secret weapon, the humanoid fighting robot known as the Gundam, and becomes its pilot, joining a troop of fellow child soldiers caught in the middle of the war. Series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino infused the series with much more depth than might have been expected for a children's cartoon. Well aware of Japanese war crimes in China, he made sure to depict the complexities and tragedies of war, with humans on the other side and significant character deaths. Even the villains were deeper than they needed to be, with primary antagonist Char Aznable becoming a breakout character thanks to his charisma and tragic backstory — not to mention his intense rivalry with Amuro. Check for screening times and locations at iconicreleasing.com.
Joker: Folie à Deux
Five years ago, Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix managed to turn a very silly idea for a movie into an Oscar-winning hit. Joker took the Clown Prince of Crime and placed him into a realistic, gritty context inspired by 1970s New Hollywood, in which the Joker is a social outcast and aspiring comedian driven mad by society's indifference and cruelty. Now, they're back for another round, and this time, it's a musical, with Lady Gaga playing the Joker's right-hand lady, Harley Quinn. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival to mixed reviews, where it was somewhat overshadowed by the news that Phoenix had abandoned a movie by queer cinema icon Todd Haynes days before it was supposed to start production. Opens Friday, October 4.
German actor Max Schreck plays the vampire Count Orlo in the 1922 silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
Photo by Frederic Lewis/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Nosferatu at Coral Gables Art Cinema
Later this year, Robert Eggers will release his adaptation of the silent horror classic Nosferatu, starring Bill Skarsgård as the iconic vampire. If you've got vampire fever already, Coral Gables Art Cinema is showing the original film as a part of their spooktacular After Hours lineup.Our Take: If you're of a certain age, you probably know Nosferatu better from his appearances on SpongeBob than from this groundbreaking German expressionist film. F.W. Murnau's sneaky Dracula adaptation, which renamed the monster to Count Orlok (Max Schreck) to avoid legal issues from Bram Stoker's family, is often regarded as the first true horror film, and while it's maybe a bit quaint by modern standards, much of its striking imagery still holds up. This is a must-see for any self-respecting cinephile, and where better to check it off the list than in the theater? 9:30 p.m. Friday, October 4 at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.
Look Back
One of our most anticipated films of the year is this 58-minute anime adaptation of a short story by one of the most popular manga artists of our time. In 2021, Chainsaw Man writer Tatsuki Fujimoto released Look Back, a one-shot story about two elementary school girls who turn an artistic rivalry into a manga-making partnership before tragically falling apart. Studio Durian has now animated that film under the direction of Kiyotaka Oshiyama, and powerhouse animation distributor GKids is giving it a limited release here in the States after it became a hit in Japan. As a manga, Look Back is a powerful story about what motivates us to create; as an anime, it has the potential to be even greater. Let me put it this way: I have cried at the trailer for this movie every time I've watched it, and I've watched it many times. Do not miss this. Screens October 6 and 7. Check for screening times and locations at gkids.com.
Jason Reitman's Saturday Night looks at the evening of the very first airing of NBC's Saturday Night Live.
Photo by Hopper Stone
Saturday Night
As Saturday Night Live celebrates its 50th anniversary, cinema audiences will get to go back in time to the fateful, chaotic night of its premiere. Director Jason Reitman, son of Ivan Reitman, who directed many original SNL cast members in the likes of Animal House, Ghostbusters, and other comedy classics, has assembled an all-star cast of Hollywood up-and-comers to play the Not Ready for Primetime Players. To name just a few: Gabrielle LaBelle of The Fablemans heads up the crew as Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sennott plays writer Rosie Shuster, Nicholas Braun of Succession plays Andy Kaufman, Cooper Hoffman of Licorice Pizza plays NBC exec Dick Ebersol, and Matthew Rhys plays the legendary George Carlin, the very first host of SNL. Will modern audiences understand every nerdy reference to a night that will forever live in pop-cultural infamy? Who knows. Will the Saturday Night crew manage to steer their sinking ship to fame and fortune? There is literally no way to know unless you see this film. (It's not like they, I dunno, filmed the original show or anything, right?) Opens Friday, October 11.
In the Mouth of Madness at Coral Gables Art Cinema
You can't celebrate Halloween without the Master of Horror, and this year, Coral Gables Art Cinema is celebrating John Carpenter by screening one of his most underrated films, a tale of literary horror in which people are driven mad by reading.Our Take: Imagine if Stephen King was evil. No, not just evil. Imagine if New England's most famous genre novelist was literally bewitching people to do the work of an ancient evil on Earth. That's exactly what happens in John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, where hapless insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) finds himself roped into a demonic conspiracy. Sutter Cane, the author in question, is writing best-selling books that drive people to murder and worse, and when Trent visits the writer's suspiciously picturesque hometown, he finds the truth is stranger than fiction. Inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft, In the Mouth of Madness is one of Carpenter's most cosmically disturbing visions. 10 p.m. Saturday, October 12 at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.
Anora
Channeling Scorsese, the Safdies, and Pretty Woman, The Florida Project director Sean Baker has returned with what may be his greatest triumph — an anarchic, dizzying romance about a stripper (Mikey Madison) who falls in love with a Russian oligarch's spoiled son (Mark Eydelshteyn). Already the first American film to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival since The Tree of Life in 2011, the film is a guaranteed Oscar contender thanks largely in part to the powerhouse performance of Mikey Madison as the titular sex worker.Our Take: I'll have much more to say about the film, which I previewed at the New York Film Festival last month, in a full review. For now, I'll say this: Run, don't walk to see Anora. It's not simply one of the most outrageously entertaining films of the year. It's also a powerful statement by a filmmaker at the height of his talents about the American Dream and how it can frequently become a nightmare. Opens Friday, September 18.
Possession at Coral Gables Art Cinema
The grand finale of Coral Gables Art Cinema's October After Hours programming is this utterly bizarre paranoia thriller from 1981, rarely screened in Miami. In Possession, a spy in Berlin (Sam Neill) deals with his wife's (Isabelle Adjani) sinister secret as the two undergo a volatile breakup.Our Take: Mark and Anna are ending their marriage. Anna says there's someone else, but is it another man or something less than human? Produced against the backdrop of director Andrzej Żuławski's divorce and shot in a Berlin still divided by the infamous wall, Possession is a uniquely pitched-up, extreme depiction of a relationship in total crisis. Neill and Adjani, far removed from more familiar roles in costume dramas and Hollywood blockbusters, deliver two of the most outrageous, insane performances in cinema history, screaming, fighting, and mutating their way through this fever dream of a film. The purposely hysterical tone of the film can make it hard for modern audiences to take the film seriously at times, but between the disturbing sci-fi elements and an ending in which everything comes together with powerful, shocking clarity, this is a film that demands our complete and undivided attention and adulation. 10 p.m. Thursday, October 31 at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75.
