Don’t expect many giggles from October movies. It’s spooky season, after all! This month’s new releases include frights like inhumane prison conditions, a zombified man-monster, wrongful incarceration, depression and being a mom. A motley assortment but but each is equivalently terrifying, albeit in very different ways.
‘The Alabama Solution’
Director Andrew Jarecki is known for his hard-hitting exposés, including Emmy-winning “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” a 2015 HBO series investigating the real estate heir suspected of murder. Jarecki now turns his incriminating lens onto the American prison industrial complex with “The Alabama Solution.”
This six-year investigative documentary about the varied injustices of the state’s prison system uses interviews with inmates and video footage taken by prisoners on contraband phones to depict violence, forced labor, overcrowding and shoddy facilities. “The public is already conditioned not to believe a person who is incarcerated,” says Robert Earl “Kinetik Justice” Council, one of the inmates featured in the doc. This movie aims to change that. (on HBO Max now)
‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’
Mothers rarely have it easy, and Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is about that brutal truth. Linda, played “magnificently and unflinchingly by Rose Byrne,” is a woman struggling to “juggle the mysterious illness of her daughter and the sudden collapse of her literal and metaphorical ceiling, leaving her with no pillars to support her,” said Cortlyn Kelly at Roger Ebert. The film ratchets up the theme of parental stress as Linda’s house floods, her husband is away on a work trip and her therapist — played by Conan O’Brien — grows increasingly unhelpful. Byrne is already generating Oscar buzz for this “performance of a lifetime,” said Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair. (in theaters now)
‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’
Musician biopics are a dime a dozen, but this is the first about America’s favorite singer-songwriter, the blue jean-clad “Boss” Bruce Springsteen. Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”) stars as the titular rock icon in a film that narrows the focus to Springsteen’s difficult period in making his 1982 album “Nebraska.” Written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”), “Springsteen” features a “sweat-drenched White belting out ‘Born to Run’ to a roaring arena crowd or jamming before a smaller gang of the Jersey Shore faithful at the Stone Pony.” But it also renders the “depressive breakdown that Springsteen experienced” in the aftermath of the album’s creation, making it a “story about the fragility of mental health and the limits of art alone to sustain it,” said Ben Sisario at The New York Times. (Oct. 24, in theaters)
‘It Was Just an Accident’
Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi (“Taxi,” “This is Not a Film”) took home this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or for “It Was Just An Accident,” a “politically barbed but comedic” film that “follows a group of wrongfully incarcerated working-class people seeking revenge against the prison guard who tortured and terrified them,” said Deadline.
The movie is an “emphatic rebuke of the authoritarian regime by which Panahi himself has been persecuted and censored,” said Interview magazine, referring to Panahi’s 2023 incarceration. He was imprisoned for criticizing the Iranian government and banned from making movies for 14 years — so the new project had to be filmed in secret. Clearly, it’s possible to keep art alive under authoritarianism. (Oct. 15, in theaters)
‘Frankenstein’
One of the world’s foremost horror filmmakers, three-time Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, has been teasing his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece “Frankenstein” for a long time. The Netflix film stars Oscar Isaac as the famed scientist Victor Frankenstein, whose penchant for playing God results in the creation of Frankenstein the monster, portrayed here by Jacob Elordi. Certified scream queen Mia Goth also stars in a picture that promises to eschew computer generated imagery in favor of tangible sets and practical effects. “It’s extremely important for me to keep the reality of film craft alive,” del Toro told Variety. “I want real sets. I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old fashioned craftsmanship.” (Oct. 17, in theaters; Nov. 7, Netflix)
This month’s new releases include ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Alabama Solution’ and ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’
