Wicked to Gladiator II: 12 of the best films to watch this November

BBC Culture, November 2 — From the big-screen debut of a musical theatre classic to the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott's Roman epic, these are the films to see this month.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The story behind The Seed of the Sacred Fig is almost as remarkable as what's on screen. Its writer-director, Mohammad Rasoulof, had served time in prison in Iran for speaking out against the regime, and so he shot the film in secret. Shortly after it was chosen to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight more years in prison, but he managed to flee the country, and made it to Cannes in time for the red-carpet premiere. The Seed of the Sacred Fig went on to be one of the festival's most acclaimed films. Its central characters, Iman (Misagh Zare) and Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), are determined to stay out of trouble after Iman is promoted to a well-paid government job, so tensions rise when their two daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), show signs of rebelling. "This searing domestic thriller deserves the widest audience possible," says Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. "Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect."

The Piano Lesson

The Piano Lesson is a family affair. Adapted from August Wilson's Pulitzer prize-winning play, this supernatural drama is produced by Denzel Washington, directed by one of his sons, Malcolm Washington, and stars another of them, John David Washington. The story is a family affair, too. John David Washington and Danielle Deadwyler play a brother and sister, Boy Willie and Berniece. When Boy Willie returns home to Pittsburgh in 1936 after a stint in prison, he argues that they should sell a prized heirloom, a 100-year-old piano which is carved with the faces of their enslaved forebears. The siblings' uncle, meanwhile, is played by Samuel L Jackson – who had the role of Boy Willie when Wilson's play opened in 1987. "With performances that will resonate and a directorial debut that will not soon be forgotten, The Piano Lesson is a lesson in love, friendship and family," says Carla Renata in The Wrap, "it serves as a reminder that generational wealth is not just monetary, but emotionally and genetically tied to our ancestors."

Emilia Pérez

Jacques Audiard is known for such hard-edged contemporary thrillers as The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and Dheepan, and the plot of his latest film, Emilia Pérez, suggests that it's more of the same: Zoe Saldaña stars as a lawyer who agrees to help a Mexican gangster (Karla Sofía Gascón) have gender reassignment surgery, so that she can start a new life as Emilia. The twist is that the film is a musical, which means that Saldaña and her co-stars, including Selena Gomez, keep belting out songs written by Camille, a French pop star. "Emilia Pérez is a hip-swaggering, trigger-clicking, scalpel-wielding work of weird brilliance," says Nick Howells in the Evening Standard. "It's a gloriously original tribute to anyone who truly dares to go their own way, but particularly the amazing women who do it under extreme fire."

Here

Robert Zemeckis is the director, Eric Roth is the screenwriter, Tom Hanks plays the hero and Robin Wright plays the heroine. The last time you could say that about a film it was Forrest Gump, 30 years ago, but the four old colleagues have reunited at last – and it's for a project that is similarly ambitious in the way it hops through time and breaks technical boundaries. Based on Richard McGuire's graphic novel, Here tells the story of a couple's marriage, but it does so by focusing on one room, as seen from one angle, throughout the decades. It even shows how that same view would have appeared in the distant past and the far future. "The single perspective never changes, but everything around it does," Zemeckis told Anthony Breznican in Vanity Fair. "It's actually never been done before. There are similar scenes in very early silent movies, before the language of montage was invented. But other than that, yeah, it was a risky venture."

Juror #2

Ridley Scott may have directed Gladiator II when he was 86, but he's a whippersnapper compared to Clint Eastwood, who has just completed his fortieth film as director at the age of 94. "You know, honestly, I thought he would have stopped by now," said Eastwood's friend and collaborator, producer Robert Lorenz. "I talked to him just before Juror #2, [and] he said, 'No, I don't think I'm going to do any more.' So, I wouldn't be surprised if that is the last movie. But never say never. He's always full of surprises, that guy." Juror #2 may have a few surprises, as well. Written by Jonathan A Abrams, it's a courtroom thriller starring Nicholas Hoult as Justin Kemp, a family man who is selected for the jury in a high-profile murder trial. The defendant is accused of ramming his car into his girlfriend, but Justin remembers crashing his own car into something or someone on the dark and stormy night in question. Can he stop an innocent man being jailed without incriminating himself in the process?

Moana 2

Moana was an ocean-sized hit in 2016, so you can hardly blame Disney for taking us on further seafaring adventures with the Polynesian princess (Auli'i Cravalho) and her demigod buddy, Maui (Dwayne Johnson). The plan was, though, that there would be a live-action remake, featuring most of the same actors as the cartoon, plus an animated television series that would stream on Disney+. It was only in February of this year that the studio announced that it was changing course: the live-action Moana would be delayed, and the series would be repurposed as a feature film. Again, you can hardly blame Disney: the company's last two big-screen cartoons – Strange World in 2022 and Wish in 2023 – were notorious flops. Disney's CEO, Bob Iger, conceded that Disney would be: "leaning a little bit more into sequels and franchises" as a result, but he had high hopes for Moana 2: "This was originally developed as a series, but we were impressed with what we saw, and we knew it deserved a theatrical release."

Gladiator II

Ever since Gladiator came out in 2000, people have been trying to work out how to make a sequel – not an easy task, given that the hero of the original film, Russell Crowe's Maximus Decimus Meridius, was killed at the end. Crowe even commissioned a screenplay from Nick Cave, the rock star, in which Maximus meets the Roman gods in the underworld before being reincarnated. Still, enough time has passed now that there's a simpler way of carrying on Ridley Scott's Roman saga. Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal as Lucius, son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) – and, perhaps, the son of Maximus, too. After his family is killed by the soldiers of General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), Lucius is trained in combat by Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave who is plotting to overthrow the Emperor (Joseph Quinn). "Gladiator II is much bigger, rawer, and more violent than the original," says Gabriella Paiella in GQ. "The sprawling battle sequences, yes, but also the man-to-man scrappy combat. You will spend much of the film mid-wince."

Wicked

This film of the Wizard of Oz spin-off musical is directed by John M Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights), and it stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, alongside Ariana Grande as Galinda Upland, the future Glinda the Good. At first, they are roommates at the magical Shiz University, so how do they become enemies? Audiences won't get the answer to that question for another year. Wicked may be 160 minutes long, but it only covers half of the show: for the first time ever, a Hollywood musical is being released in two parts, and the second instalment isn't coming out until November 2025. "As we prepared the production over the last year," explained Chu, "it became impossible to wrestle the story of Wicked into a single film without doing some real damage to it… With more space, we can tell the story as it was meant to be told while bringing even more depth and surprise to the journeys for these beloved characters."

A Real Pain

Anyone who has seen Kieran Culkin in Succession and Jesse Eisenberg in, well, anything will know how far apart their usual screen personas are. Eisenberg tends to play uptight and anxious characters, whereas Culkin, says Peter Howell in the Toronto Star, "is like a human exclamation mark, eager to be seen and to make a scene". This gulf between the two is filled with hilarious and poignant disagreements in A Real Pain, a highly acclaimed, heartfelt comedy drama written, directed and produced by Eisenberg. He and Culkin play cousins who have grown apart, but who reunite for a road trip through Poland in honour of their late grandmother. "Cue the comic clashing, accented by an artful Chopin piano score," says Howell, "but Eisenberg doesn't force the laughs as he subtly explores the double meaning of the title. He's developing a humanistic style in the vein of Hal Ashby and Alexander Payne and it's a joy to watch."

Blitz

British films about World War Two tend to revolve around the combatants (Dunkirk), the spies (Operation Mincemeat) and the leaders (Darkest Hour), but Steve McQueen's Blitz shows what life was like for the ordinary citizens, the people of London who endured nightly Luftwaffe bombings. Central among these are two East Enders, a single mother (Saoirse Ronan) and her nine-year-old son, George (Elliott Heffernan). Along with thousands of other London children, George is packed off on a train to the countryside for his own safety, but he is determined to go home, so he sneaks back into the war-blasted metropolis. McQueen, the maker of the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, has written and directed an adventure film "that feels new and revelatory", says Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, "purely because it's being viewed through the eyes of its singular director – expressionist yet rarely sentimental, disquieting in its terrors yet tender in its hope, and profoundly interested in the ordinary lives of

Queer

Luca Guadagnino – the director of Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers – has made another of his lavish dramas about intensely passionate, but not necessarily happy relationships. This one is a steamy adaptation of William Burroughs' autobiographical novel, Queer. Daniel Craig stars as William Lee, a dissolute US ex-pat who drifts from bar to bar in Mexico City in the 1950s. He is besotted by a handsome younger man (Drew Starkey), and fixated on finding a herb in a South American jungle that could grant him telepathic powers. "It's not just the explicit love scenes [that] leave little to the imagination," says David Fear in Rolling Stone. "What's shocking is the vulnerability that the actor shows… Embodying Burroughs' alter ego and cycling through Lee's lust, jealousy, world-weariness, neediness and bliss, Craig cracks this smitten, doomed romantic wide open."

September 5

On 5 September 1972, a Palestinian terrorist group took several Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics, which ended with the deaths of 11 athletes and five of the terrorists. The incident was the subject of Kevin Macdonald's Oscar-winning Storyville documentary, One Day in September, and its aftermath was the subject of Steven Spielberg's thriller, Munich. Now a new docudrama directed by Tim Fehlbaum tells the story from the perspective of a US news crew that was on the spot. Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin and Leonie Benesch play the ABC Sports broadcasters who assumed that they would be reporting on nothing more important than swimming, but who are now faced with staggering technical and ethical challenges. Is it justifiable to put the potentially horrific events on live television? And if it is, how can they do so with the limited equipment they have available? "Editor Hansjorg Weissbrich keeps this intimate drama rocketing along, harnessing the frantic energy of different individuals," says Tim Grierson in Screen Daily. "Operating in a stripped-down docufiction manner that emphasises the tense circumstances… September 5 recounts that tragic day with a combination of electricity and dread, drawing on strong performances for a meditation on the media's responsibilities during such a volatile situation."