Oh, it’s you again! So happy you’re here. 

It’s the last Monday in September, which means we will soon be fully immersed in the ancient druid holiday of Spooky Season, a month of feasts and merriment culminating in a bunch of guys dressed in slutty hockey player costumes at some party at Le Bain. (There will be Heated Rivalry costumes, right?) I’ll admit that I have not really been into Halloween since, well, I went to a party in college dressed in a not even half-assed Harry Potter costume—it was at best third-assed, but most likely quarter-assed; eighth-assed, even—and then the handsomest boy in the theater department showed up in a much more considered Harry Potter ensemble and I thought to myself, “Yeah this holiday isn’t for me anymore.” But that’s just me! I’m not trying to yuck anyone’s yum here. If you like Halloween, enjoy the next few weeks. Just maybe don’t dress up like J.K. Rowling’s objectivist boy hero.

The last Monday in September also means that just a few days ago it was the opening night of the New York Film Festival (which is typically the last Friday of the month). Braving the first gusts and mists of the Nor’Easter that would grip the city all weekend, many movers, shakers, nerds, and hangers-on of the film world headed to Tavern on the Green in Central Park on Friday evening for the festival’s annual kick-off soiree. It was a fun time, despite long bar lines and some film-based tensions.

Okay, the tensions mostly existed between me and a few people who told me they hated Elsinore, to which I bristled as I braced myself for the further backlash to come. It’s gonna be a bumpy season with that movie, divisive as it seems to be. Something about the criticism thus has far really gotten my hackles up, which is not typically how I react to such things, so I am prepared to be annoyed for the next five months. Which doesn’t sound fun at all. But, I will try not to pass that onto you, dear reader. I will be civil, and will not whinge on and on about why everyone—or, at least, some people—are totally wrong about that movie. I have similar concerns about La Bola Negra, but I have really only heard a few voices of dissent on that one to date. Maybe it can survive the gay internal audit while everyone’s busy picking apart Elsinore. One shall die so the other can live, or something.

People also seemed pretty mixed on the NYFF opening night film, James Gray’s Paper Tiger, which is sadly par for the course for the filmmaker. I love most of his work, and think Paper Tiger is really strong where it counts, but it was never going to please everyone. It’s too earnest, too straightforward, too traditional (in a sense). There was talk of its Oscar chances on Friday night—maybe Scarlett Johansson gets a supporting nomination, or maybe it’s Adam Driver—but people didn’t seem terribly sold on any of that. Still, I hope the movie finds its ardent supporters, as Gray has long been denied a the level of recognition he deserves. (The Lost City of Z getting zero Oscar attention will forever be a crime.)

Overall, I expected a little more doom and gloom at the party, more grumbling or fretting about the state of the industry. That seemed to be the conversation that dominated parties at Cannes, Venice, and Toronto. But most people seemed to set those concerns aside for this one evening, choosing instead to enjoy the company of fellow travelers and to be protected from the weather by an elaborate tent covering the restaurant’s spacious courtyard. Once the bar closed, some of us headed to an unofficial after-party downtown, and I didn’t get home until 4 in the morning. Which I paid for handsomely for the duration of the soggy weekend. 

But many Americans weren’t shut up in their homes like an invalid over the past few days. The box office was bumping this weekend, seeing huge returns for movies old and new. The old entry was none other than Avengers: Endgame, the 2019 art house film that Marvel is desperately hoping everyone falls in love with again so they’ll get excited for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday (after a long run of Marvel disappointments). I guess it didn’t take much, because the so-called Endgame “Encore” (with footage from the new movie attached) was the second highest-grossing rerelease of all time, pulling in $26 million in North America since Friday. 

It’s risky to want any theatrical release to fail these days, but honestly I was sort of hoping that the return of the Avengers would prove a letdown, and thus we might finally move on from the non-Spider-Man superhero age. (Peter Parker is likely utterly unstoppable and unavoidable at this point.) But that was not meant to be, as it seems there are still plenty of freaks (and lovely, hardworking people) out there who gotta get their Marvel fix.

One thing to note, though, is that Endgame is actually pretty good (as those things go). So it makes sense that people would want to relive the experience of seeing it in a theater. Do we think Doomsday is going to be of similar quality? The first trailers or teasers or whatever are really not promising in that regard; they make the movie look like another tedious multiverse mishmash with ugly special effects. It’s possible that this Endgame resurgence doesn’t actually mean much for Doomsday, beyond its opening weekend, which will be massive no matter what. That doesn’t guarantee a legacy, though, which is really what Disney is trying to cultivate and sustain after badly losing the plot in the post-Endgame years. 

A Marvel movie making money is not really news, I guess. What I found most interesting about this weekend’s box office is that Primetime—the moody oddity about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator—made $19 million this weekend. That’s enormous! I had no idea the movie would have that kind of draw, but I guess the shadowy, elusive marketing campaign was pretty effective. And apparently nearly 70 percent of the audience was under 30, which means that Robert Pattinson (or Skyler Gisondo!) is a genuine bankable movie star for that age cohort and/or Zillennials are just really interested in the media and cultural landscape of the time right before their adolescence. (Their fashion choices would suggest as much.) The movie only scored a B in exit polling, which means a fair amount of the audience was not thrilled with what they saw. But it’s still heartening that so many people went out to support a film that does not do much to endear the viewer to it, and features exactly zero sticky-palmed boys swinging around Manhattan. 

The Brad Pitt dog-survival picture Heart of the Beast did slightly better than Primetime, which is good in terms of box office health, even if the movie’s star is not exactly someone to root for, and its director, David Ayer, is a purveyor of a certain kind of macho dreck that really gets under my skin. (He made the first Suicide Squad movie, plus a lot of really aggro cop and soldier movies.) Seeing Heart of the Beast and Primetime—two standalone, low-to-mid-budget features for grownups—perform so well brings to mind the heady box office days of an era long past, when theatergoers had a wealth of options to choose from and did indeed tend to choose something every weekend. I won’t get ahead of myself and declare that this whole fall will see a rebound of such fare, but I am encouraged at the moment. 

Spurred on by a friend—whose new book is out this week! Buy it!—I watched all of the HBO docu-series A Killer Story (it concluded its three-episode run on Sunday night) and was pleasantly surprised by its tone. It’s about grim things: a double homicide in Kansas, a woman maybe falsely accused of the crime. And sad, troubling, enraging things do happen on the show. But there’s a weary, humane air about the series that we don’t typically see in this often lurid, overwrought genre.

Much of that is owed to the guy both behind and in front of the camera, journalist Joe Sexton, a lushly maned straight-shooter who curses a blue streak and puts a lot of speculation and citizen sleuthery into more rational context. He’s mostly interviewing a couple, Eileen and Keen Umbehr, who have became monomaniacally fixated on exonerating one Dana Chandler, a woman accused (and convicted) of killing her ex-husband and his partner in a jealous rage. The Umbehrs make some great points, and correctly assess (as did the Kansas Supreme Court at one time) that the state’s case against Chandler has always been pretty weak. But there’s undeniably something a little off about them, too, as there maybe is with anyone possessed of a life-changing obsession. 

And yet the series isn’t a dark, mordant character study. It’s lighter than that, a more gentle sort of series—perhaps partly because the ending is a bit of a whiff. (By no fault of anyone involved in the show’s making; it’s just how the real-life story went.) I have seen some true-crime miniseries that have been more rattling, more probing, more revelatory, but I like this simpler approach as well. And we do at least get a little dart of suspense in an interview with another suspect (in the Umbehrs’ minds, at least) who comes across more than a bit frightening and suspicious. 

A Killer Story likely won’t be a sensation, as it doesn’t have the shock value of more leering series—or even some of HBO’s other glossy, high-brow true crime. But it’s an engaging sit, and a blessedly brief one: the episodes are around 40 minutes long. You might not get all the answers one typically seeks from such a program, but you will get to know a few interesting, odd people for a little while, and there’s certainly merit in that. 

You may have recently read in these pages that Sandra Hüller—the wrong answer to the question, “What if Carrie Coon was German?”—is in the best actress mix for a movie called Rose. And you may have wondered, what is Rose? Well, it’s a movie that premiered in Berlin this past winter, where Hüller sailed to a best actress victory. She plays a 17th-century farmer who was born a woman but lives as a man, claiming ownership of a farm after assuming the name of a soldier killed in the Thirty Years’ War. It’s a compelling and suspenseful drama, a piercing social inquest into gender identity, and a fascinating look at time and place. (I haven’t seen a ton of movies set in German-speaking Europe in the 1600s, but maybe you have!) 

Director Markus Schleinzer rose (heh) to prominence with the seriously bleak 2010 Cannes entry Michael (which I can’t really recommend) but here he’s slightly more sparing with the misery and a lot more generous in terms of artistic flair. The film’s elegant but austere black-and-white photography nicely offsets the fairytale quality of the script; we are meant to see this as something of a fable, but not one with friendly forest creatures and a happy ending. The real selling point, though, is Hüller, who does not sacrifice her character’s gruffness and rough handling of the world in order to make them more sympathetic. It’s a tough film (laced with a little comedy) that is an altogether different kind of showcase for its star, who is so memorably modern and voluble in Anatomy of a Fall. Is it too tough, too terse, too black-and-white, and too in-German to get Oscar attention? In a normal year, probably. But this year, all bets are off. (Or most bets, anyway. Julianne Moore is still gonna win.) 

Okay, that’s it for today! I’ll be back to you on Wednesday with a writeup of HBO’s splashy new lawyer drama War, starring Sienna Miller, Dominic West, and a guy hot enough to be on Industry. See you then!