October's Cinema Feast: Fielder and Oppenheim Top a Packed Slate

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's "You Can See Everything" leads The Film Stage's ranked list of 13 films to see in October, a month the site calls the strongest of the year for new releases. The documentary opens October 16 and centers on a stranger-than-fiction premise: a small crew, including the directors, was invited to the home of Elizabeth Holmes weeks before she began her prison sentence. What begins there, the site writes, "evolves into a thoroughly riveting study of the thin line between fact and fiction, public versus private personas, and perverse family dynamics hitherto never quite captured on screen before."

Documentaries dominate the top of the list. At No. 2, "No Other Land" directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor return with "NAZA." Luke Hicks called it "urgent, an essential film, a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world right now," adding that it is "the new foremost authority on what's happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel's crusade against Gaza."

At No. 4, William and David Greaves' "Once Upon a Time in Harlem" (October 16) is the only film this year to screen at Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, TIFF, NYFF and London. Built around footage shot at a 1972 party in Duke Ellington's townhouse, it captures key figures of the Harlem Renaissance in conversation. Kent M. Wilhelm wrote that watching it "feels like unearthing treasure."

Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile" (October 9) follows Russian journalists forced abroad, tracking them through Turkey, Georgia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Poland and the United States. Savina Petkova, in a Critic's Pick review out of Venice, wrote that "what in any other film could be a chronicle of homes and places becomes a cartography of grief and displacement."

Fiction titles carry weight of their own. Eight years after "Burning," Lee Chang-dong returns with "Possible Love" (October 23 in theaters, November 6 on Netflix), following two couples through questions of class, labor and the ethics of filmmaking. Rory O'Connor called it "another novelistic gem" and "easily amongst the best of the year so far."

Paweł Pawlikowski's "Fatherland" (October 23), which earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes, stars Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler and runs a tight 82 minutes in a squarish 1.37:1 frame, shot in black and white by regular collaborator Łukasz Żal. Luke Hicks noted that "the subject, flow, and approachability combine for the coming of a new Pawlikowski in heady academic form."

Lance Hammer premieres his first feature since 2008's "Ballast" with "Queen at Sea" (October 30), led by Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay and shot by Adolpho Veloso. And Laika returns after years in production with the fantasy "Wildwood" (October 23), based on a novel co-written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy, with a voice cast spanning Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant.

John Turturro, never Oscar-nominated despite a decades-long career, may change that with Noah Segan's "The Only Living Pickpocket in New York" (October 16). Wilhelm described it as "'The Wild Bunch' meets 'Gloria' in an engrossing tale of coming to terms with the imbalance of the good and bad of a life."

Rounding out the list: Los Javis' Palme d'Or contender "La Bola Negra" (October 16 in theaters, December 2 on Netflix), which Netflix will give its longest theatrical window yet; Michal Marczak's Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner "Closure" (October 28), about a father searching for his missing son; the Sundance Audience Award and Directing Award winner "One in a Million" (October 21), which follows a Syrian family across a decade of exile and return; and Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson's "Wicker" (October 23), a fable starring Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki, shot by "The Brutalist" cinematographer Lol Crawley.

The month is crowded enough that a Palme d'Or winner and a major action star's return to drama, per the site, did not make the main cut — a sign of how demanding the fall corridor has become for distributors and awards campaigns alike.