1 The Card Counter (Opens Friday, September 10) Let’s talk autumnal cinema: Paul Schrader is seventy-five, and in the run-up to publicizing his first film since the career-capper “First Reformed” (2017), he says he’s got at least one up his sleeve after this Oscar Isaac-starring thriller, with Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe.
2 Cry Macho (Opens Friday, September 17) Winter kino: Clint Eastwood is ninety-one. Again he acts, directs, and likely gave WB an earful for releasing his latest picture, an intergenerational rodeo story, on HBO Max simultaneously with its theatrical airing.
3 The Eyes of Tammy Faye (Opens Friday, September 17) A biography of the lives and crimes of the televangelist Bakker family, Tammy Faye and Jim, starring Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield, directed by Michael Showalter (“The State,” “Wet Hot American Summer”) and written by Abe Sylvia (“Dirty Girl”).
4 Venom: Let There be Carnage (Revised opening: Friday, October 16) Wacky “Venom” was an increasingly rare phenomenon: a mangled movie massaged by its financiers into releasable form that not only churned nearly a billion dollars worldwide, but to rock its crude charm despite its origin. The sequel? Who knows!
5 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Music Box, Saturday, September 4) A rare 35mm screening of one of David Lynch’s most tormented pictures, featuring a post-film Q&A with Sheryl Lee and Dana Ashbrook, a meet-and-greet and the chance to buy an autograph.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
Film Top 5: September 2020 Charlie Kaufman thinks, once more, as always, of ending it all; whimsitician Miranda July returns; Chicago Latino Film Festival goes virtual; Gerard Butler may or may not save the planet from a comet; and "Tenet" promises to time-invert over Labor Day in non-pandemic hotspot localities.
