October movies: What’s worth watching
If you’re heading to the cinema or just your couch, our reviewers have you covered with the new releases you need to know about each week.
And don’t forget to sign up to our Screening Room newsletter for must-see movies, interviews and the latest news from the world of film. Popcorn not included!
Sense and Sensibility ★★★½
(PG) 132 minutes
I was astonished to realise that Ang Lee’s film of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is now more than 30 years old.
It is so fresh in my memory and the performances still seem so perfectly pitched that I approached Georgia Oakley’s new version, with its screenplay by Australian novelist Diana Reid, expecting to find it redundant. But Austen is infinitely adaptable. Like all classic works, her novels offer something new to every generation so they go on re-appearing in film and television, having undergone slight changes of shape each time.
Oakley and Reid’s take on Austen produces an up-market bodice ripper, loosening the novel’s constraints, punching up the emotional temperature and taking the story out of the drawing room whenever it can to roam Devonshire’s forests, fields and beaches.
NAZA ★★★★½
(M) 77 minutes
In a famous scene from Carol Reed’s moody 1949 thriller The Third Man, shot in Allied-occupied Vienna, a war profiteer played by Orson Welles looks down from a ferris wheel at the tiny figures on the ground. “Would you really feel any pity,” he asks rhetorically, “if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”
It’s a chilling speech, but not as chilling as any sequence in NAZA, the forceful new documentary from the Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (both members of the Palestinian-Israeli collective responsible for No Other Land, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2025).
NAZA consists primarily of one-on-one interviews with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, shot at night on rooftops in central Tel Aviv. The anonymous subjects are reduced on screen to silhouettes, freeing them to speak with unusual frankness about their involvement – mainly from afar – in the killing of Palestinian civilians during the ongoing Gaza war (in response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, in which 1200 people were killed).
Other Mommy ★★
(MA) 94 minutes
The outline of a strong idea is visible in Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, enough so to indicate why the star Jessica Chastain wanted to do it. But not enough to make this more than the usual kind of toothless Hollywood horror movie, which backs away from anything too genuinely horrific, and frantically over-explains itself without becoming any less disjointed.
One aspect of the idea strongly recalls Coraline – both the 2002 children’s book by Neil Gaiman, and Henry Selick’s 2009 stop-motion adaptation – and can be traced back further to The New Mother, a genuinely terrifying short story by the 19th-century British writer Lucy Clifford, which Gaiman admitted to plundering freely.
Clifford’s story concerns two misbehaving children who are punished when their affectionate mother is replaced by a horrible substitute with “glass eyes and a wooden tail”. Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), the eight-year-old heroine of Other Mommy, is more fortunate in a way, having two mothers who take turns looking after her.
The Social Reckoning ★★★½
(M) 112 minutes
The Social Reckoning’s writer-director Aaron Sorkin says the film presents Meta’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, as an anti-hero rather than a villain. If so, the actor, Jeremy Strong, didn’t get the message.
As Zuckerberg, he delivers a poker-faced portrait in implacability. Gone is the nervy awkwardness exhibited by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network (2010), Sorkin’s first foray into the life of Facebook’s founder. Strong’s Zuckerberg is bombastic, dictatorial and maniacally convinced of his own infallibility.
His lapses into robotic caricature throw the film off kilter at times. Nonetheless, you can’t look away. Sorkin’s longstanding fascination with the nature of power and those who find its charms irresistible is functioning as effectively as ever, as is his flair for dialogue. He doesn’t completely ignore the screenwriter’s mantra, “show, don’t tell” but his is the kind of skill which allows him to get away with great chunks of uninterrupted conversation. He can translate words into weapons and inject several suspense points into a single sentence while maintaining his sense of humour. Even so, picking your way through the tech jargon which clogs up many scenes is hard work.
The History of Concrete ★★★½
(M) 101 minutes
American director John Wilson is a master in the art of digression. He’s made a career out of going off-piste, which means that the title of his documentary feature, The History of Concrete, is just another of his red herrings.
Coming off the success of his similarly meandering HBO series, How To with John Wilson, the film incorporates a grab bag of observations ranging from Wilson’s abiding preoccupation with his own insecurities to his response to a protest meeting about New York City’s shortage of affordable housing.
At one point, he embarks on an expensive flirtation with concrete’s history, blowing his budget on a trip to Rome, where the Emperor Augustus’ general, Agrippa, discovered the properties of concrete while re-engineering the city’s infrastructure in the first century BC. But Wilson suddenly veers away from that topic after spotting something more to his taste – a bizarre waxworks museum where the patently phony-looking sculptures are voiced by AI.
The Weight ★★★
(MA) 113 minutes
If you miss the days of no-nonsense westerns, Padraic McKinley’s first feature The Weight scratches that itch as well as anything in a while. The Oregon setting is greener and damper than the usual idea of the West, and the characters wear flat caps rather than Stetsons. But at heart, it’s the same type of story: about rugged men moving through a rugged landscape, under mounting pressure but seldom visibly in a hurry.
Ethan Hawke stars as Samuel Murphy, a hard-up widower who fought in World War I and is incarcerated during the Depression through no fault of his own (whether he has any kind of criminal past isn’t absolutely clear, though he knows how to use his fists). Sent to a convict labour camp, he crosses paths with the deceptively friendly Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe), who quickly spots his mechanical abilities and his leadership potential.
In secrecy, Clancy proposes a deal: in exchange for early release, Murphy and three other men will set out from a nearby mine in a six-day journey on foot through the woods, each carrying a stash of gold bricks slated to be seized by the government under the newly elected President Roosevelt. Accompanying them will be two armed guards, just to make sure no one gets lost.
Digger ★★½
(MA) 128 minutes
If you’re stuck in a hole and somebody hands you a shovel, what do you do with it? The obvious if reckless answer is “keep digging” – and there in two words you have the philosophy of Digger Rockwell, the swaggering Texan oil tycoon played by Tom Cruise in Alejandro González Inarritu’s bombastic satire Digger.
Grey-haired, pot-bellied, pale as a corpse, Digger is outwardly the opposite of the eternally youthful version of Cruise seen leaping between rooftops in the Mission Impossible films. But both versions embody the can-do American spirit, refusing under any circumstances to concede defeat.
That attitude has its downside, as we learn when one of Digger’s technicians calls from an oil rig in Greenland to inform him of a methane leak that’s opened up a crack in the ice.
Verity ★★★
(MA15+) 114 minutes
I’ll say this for Verity, the latest film adaptation of a Colleen Hoover novel (after It Ends With Us, Regretting You and Reminders of Him): it lays its cards on the table, right from the title.
Verity means truth (from the Latin veritas). It also happens to be the name of a bestselling crime fiction author, Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), whose novels tap into her own thoughts and longings and anti-social impulses to such a degree that her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) stopped reading them after the first one, because he didn’t want his perception of the woman he loves to be tainted. Is the book version of her the truth, or the version he knows?
The story isn’t Verity’s, though; its narrator and central character is Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), also a novelist, but very much at the other end of the publishing mountain. We first meet her as she’s doing an apologetically hushed-voice reading in a sparsely attended book store, interrupted when one of the attendees gets a phone call. “Sorry,” the woman says. “Sorry,” responds the timorous Lowen.
The Great Arch ★★★★
(PG) 107 minutes
There’s an unmistakable echo of The Brutalist about The Great Arch, another riveting tale about a brilliant architect who feels (with good reason) misunderstood and underappreciated by those who pay for his visions to be made, literally, concrete. The similarities extend to a trip to the quarry in Italy from whence Carrara marble is sourced, a visual centrepiece for both movies.
The big difference, though, is that while Brady Corbet’s film – which won three Oscars, including best actor for Adrien Brody in 2025 – is fiction (albeit one that draws heavily on real characters), the French movie is firmly anchored in fact.
Written and directed by Stéphane Demoustier, The Great Arch stars Claes Bang (The Square, Bad Sisters) as Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, the Danish architect selected in 1982 as winner of a competition to design a major new building as the centrepiece of the La Defense business park in Paris.
October movies: What’s worth watching
If you’re heading to the cinema or just your couch, our reviewers have you covered with the new releases you need to know about each week.
And don’t forget to sign up to our Screening Room newsletter for must-see movies, interviews and the latest news from the world of film. Popcorn not included!
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
