15 fall movies you need to see: from La La Land to Moonlight to The Handmaiden

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s lesbian romance slash crime drama The Handmaiden proved one of the biggest surprises at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the buzz has only built since then. Set in the 1930s, the film is loosely based on novelist Sarah Waters’s modern classic Fingersmith. In it, a young Korean woman and a con man conspire to bilk a young Japanese heiress out of her considerable fortune by having the young woman pose as the heiress’s new handmaiden — so she can assist in the con man’s seduction of the heiress. Things get trickier when the heiress and the young woman begin to fall in love — and then there are 50 more twists.

Director Barry Jenkins's trembling, beautiful breakthrough just might be the best-looking film of the year. Following a young black man as he grows from boy to adolescent to adult, Jenkins’s camera and script dig deep into what it means to grow up amid inner-city poverty while also trying to come to terms with your sexuality. As protagonist Chiron first learns of and then tries to deny his homosexuality, he becomes an aching symbol of repression itself, and just how harmful it can be. There are few sequences as moving in film this year as the final 15 minutes of Moonlight.

It’s surprising that Richard and Mildred Loving — the couple whose Supreme Court case legalized interracial marriage throughout the United States in the late 1960s — haven’t had a movie made about them before. They’re the very best sort of movie protagonists: ordinary people who discover that the system doesn’t want them to exist, and, as such, they’re going to have to change that system. Loving is perhaps a little padded — director Jeff Nichols never met a shot of the two gazing lovingly at each other he didn’t like — but in its stripped-down simplicity and intense focus on the Lovings, it becomes deeply moving in the end.

The best movie I saw in Toronto was this intricate sci-fi puzzle, directed by Denis Villeneuve (of Sicario fame), about what happens when aliens land all over the planet — and then wait for humanity to come to them. Amy Adams plays a languages expert who attempts to figure out how to communicate with the aliens, all the while having piercing memories of her dead daughter. That the film works both as a satisfying sci-fi story and as an emotional tale of moving through loss — and that it avoids the usual pitfalls of using a dead child as a plot device — is sort of remarkable. That it ties those two stories together as skillfully as it does in the end feels like a miracle.

A downright risible blast of misanthropic dark comedy from Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, Elle begins with Michele (Isabelle Huppert) being raped by an intruder in her home. After he leaves, she calmly and quietly cleans herself and her house up, and later scolds her cat for not even clawing her attacker. But otherwise, she goes on with her life as normal, not reporting the attack to the police. And then things get even weirder. This movie has a few too many plots to work as well as it could, and it seems guaranteed to piss off everybody who watches it at least once. But it’s also a provocative film that reflects the conversations we have about rape in reality, and a tremendous showcase for Huppert, who gives one of the performances of the year.

TIFF closed with this incredibly charming teen comedy written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig. But when I say "teen comedy," think Say Anything, not American Pie. Hailee Steinfeld stars as Nadine, a high school junior whose life is torn apart when her best friend begins dating Nadine’s popular older brother and seemingly switches cliques overnight. Hollywood has struggled to know what to do with Steinfeld since her breakthrough, Oscar-nominated work in 2010’s True Grit, since she’s a little bit more taciturn and weirder than the usual roles the industry offers for teen girls. But she and Craig make a terrific team, and Seventeen has far more emotional depth than the genre usually offers.

It’s rare for a movie this sad to actually earn that sadness. But Kenneth Lonergan's story of a man (Casey Affleck) who returns to the hometown that whispers suspiciously about him behind his back to bury his brother builds intricately and patiently to a shattering revelation about why he simply can’t live in that town any longer. Lonergan’s perfectly calibrated script interrupts the sorrow with humor and even romance, and when the movie reaches its final catharsis — which arrives in beautifully understated fashion — you might leave thinking (as I did) that it’s just about perfect.

I saw many better films in Toronto, but I didn’t see one as fun to argue about as this film, which, depending on your point of view, is either a hilariously successful blend of camp comedy and dark revenge thriller, with a healthy dash of metafiction, or a complete boondoggle that bites off far more than it can chew. To my mind, it’s director Tom Ford's gigantic bites — few of which he can swallow — that make this film as successful as it is. We’ve seen lots of stories of people trying to get revenge for the horrors done to them, but few have structured that revenge tale as a novel within the film, being read by a different protagonist entirely.

Been waiting for a gigantic movie musical to call your own? Damien Chazelle has you covered with his follow-up to 2014’s Whiplash. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone play a guy and girl who fall in love and sing about it. And then, as so often happens, life starts to get in the way. But they keep singing. La La Land seems to have enchanted every audience that has seen it, and even if you could quibble with some of its creative decisions, the film’s too much fun to really care. Of all the movies on this list that could become legitimate national sensations, this seems the most likely.

Natalie Portman stars as Jackie Kennedy in Chilean director Pablo Larraín's abstract take on the days immediately following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Jackie attempts to find a way to keep her husband’s legacy alive by giving him the best presidential funeral she can, all while staving off her grief and fears about her own obsolescence now that she’s no longer first lady. Those looking for a straightforward Kennedy take will be disappointed. Those looking for a creative rumination on who Jackie Kennedy was will be very pleased indeed.

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is known for his wild flights of fancy, for films that soar into the sky and don’t stop until they’ve headed into deep space. That’s what makes him a bit of an odd choice to adapt a series of short stories by the Canadian master Alice Munro. But Munro’s subdued tales prove the perfect match for Almodóvar’s excess, and this film proves to be the director’s best since 2006’s Volver. A woman, reminded abruptly of an adult daughter she hasn’t seen in decades by an old friend, reflects on everything that’s brought her to this point, all leading to a climax that seems at once sweetly surprising and unexpectedly inevitable.

Jim Jarmusch is one of America’s most idiosyncratic directors. His films — which often unspool as long series of conversations that don’t seem to have an underlying structure until one sneaks up on you — capture very specific worlds and characters. Paterson introduces viewers to a bus driver named Paterson (Adam Driver) from Paterson, New Jersey, who writes poetry on the side. The poems (from poet Ron Padgett) are a great way to break up this slice-of-life story, the dialogue is crisp and funny, and Driver will remind you why he’s such an in-demand actor. This is a film filled with warmth, kindness, and wisdom.

A young man, stranded on a desert island, attempts to escape by building a raft. But every time he sets sail, his boat is broken up by a gigantic red sea turtle, which seems intent on confining him to his island prison. And that’s just the first 15 minutes of Michael Dudok de Wit's animated fairy tale, produced by Studio Ghibli, the Japanese studio that’s brought film fans some of the best animated movies ever made (including Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro). Red Turtle’s story — such as it is — will prove too slight for some, but the gorgeous animation should be easy to love.