The 5 Best New Movies of September 2024

September! Historically, it has always meant back to school, but it also means back to movies. With the big three early-autumn movie festivals—Venice, Telluride, and Toronto—now behind us, we'll be seeing more and more awards hopefuls rolling out in the coming months. This is the perfect time to take stock of anything you might have missed in September. Here are five that are worth your time.

His Three Daughters

Death can both tear family members apart and bind them closer—often simultaneously. That’s the Mysterious dynamic writer-director Azazel Jacobs mines in His Three Daughters (now streaming on Netflix), a story of three mismatched sisters—played, superbly, by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne—who have gathered in their childhood home, a modest, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, to usher their dying father into the whatever-it-is-that-comes-next. Jacobs gives these three crackling, perceptive actors plenty to work with and then steps back to capture their workaday magic. There are shades of Chekov and Shakespeare in His Three Daughters; both of those writers knew a thing or two about the fractiousness, and the durability, of father-daughter connections. And the ending, peaceful but in no way resolute, offers each of its characters a graceful path forward. The death of a parent, devastating as it can be, always opens a door. But everyone can use a little help as they fumble toward it. [Read the full review here.]

My Old Ass

It’s one of those interview questions asked of confident, accomplished women time and again: What advice would you give your younger self? Megan Park’s My Old Ass riffs on that stock question, but with a smart, perceptive twist: instead of treating the younger self as a clueless naif, it recognizes that teenagers often have more emotional resilience than even they recognize. Freewheeling, mildly reckless Elliott (Maisy Stella) can’t wait for her life to start: in just a few weeks, she’ll leave her family’s Ontario farm for college in Toronto. She’s making the most of her last days at home, hanging out with her best friends and seducing the cute girl she’s long had a crush on. Then she sips some dubious-looking ’shroom tea, and a Mysterious sage appears in her midst, a woman who claims to be her 39-year-old self (played by the luminously sardonic Aubrey Plaza). Older Elliott has some wisdom to impart; younger Elliott doesn’t want to hear it. This a pleasingly casual little movie that asks big questions in loopy, unfinished sentences. What teenager doesn’t want to race toward the future? My Old Ass urges us to look back at the people we used to be, blurry and impatient, people who just couldn’t wait to become—us. [Read the full review here.]

Megalopolis

By now anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows that Francis Ford Coppola spent a truckload of his own money to bring a long-germinating dream to life with Megalopolis, the story of a futuristic America on the brink of the same fate that befell the Roman Empire. Now that’s an idea sure to pack ’em in. But Megalopolis—in which Adam Driver stars as an architect, inventor, and fervent believer in building a bright new world—is so weird, so ungainly, and yet in some places so glorious that anyone who squints at it and says, “I don’t get it” is playing right into its wiggy strategy. Coppola’s picture is a lot of things at once: a wail of despair, a rallying cry to save the principles of our wobbly republic, a trumPet blast of reassurance that we humans can re-learn to live with thought and intention, and to dare one another into ever-more-dazzling intellectual endeavors and feats of creativity. It’s clear that Coppola is feeling some anguish over the way certain honorable American ideals—essentially human ideals—have become distorted and warped. With Megalopolis, he might be feeling his way toward a new definition of patriotism, a view that has nothing to do with mindless flag waving and everything to do with preserving, and building on, our compassion and creativity as citizens of Planet Earth. He’s put his money where his heart is. And there’s no better way to spend it than that. [Read the full review here.]

Look Into My Eyes

You don’t have to believe in the supernatural to feel the emotional pull of Lana Wilson’s whisperingly intimate documentary, a glimpse into the not-always-so mystical world of a handful of New York City psychics. Wilson—who co-directed the superb 2013 After Tiller—takes an empathetic approach not just to the people who do this work, but also to the people who seek their help. You might come away thinking Wilson’s subjects aren’t necessarily psychically gifted, but just extremely good listeners. You might also come away convinced that’s enough. [Read the story behind the movie here.]

The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a French horror movie in English and featuring American stars, is an over-the-top piece of filMMAking—and not in the good way. Its lumbering, gross-out finale, in particular, is a problem, not so much blasting past the limits of good taste as grinding away at achieving bad taste. But The Substance does feature a fine performance from Demi Moore, as an aging actress who gets a chance to morph into a younger, “better” version of herself—with a catch, of course. A scene in which Moore’s character, Elisabeth Sparkle, gets ready for a date only to confront a formidable enemy in the form of her own insecurities, is one of the best depictions of just-past-middle-age anxiety I’ve ever seen. It seems that Fargeat, into middle age herself, is already reckoning with some of those insecurities, and she’s turned them into a brilliant, bitter joke. It hurts to laugh—until it doesn’t. [Read the full review here.]