Shang-Chi, Cry Macho, and 20 more movies coming this September

September usually marks the end of the summer movie season and the beginning of awards season. This year, the month begins with a blockbuster—the second of four Marvel movies headed to theaters by the end of 2021—as well as popcorn-friendly fare like a new Cinderella and a James Wan horror movie. Look beyond those prospective crowdpleasers, though, and you’ll find plenty of films aiming for more than just escapism; the month also brings new movies from Clint Eastwood and Paul Schrader, two adaptations of hit stage musicals, and an omnibus project that collects seven shorts from seven different acclaimed filmmakers. It’s also a good month to be a double (or triple) threat— four of the major films released over the next four weeks star their own directors. Keep reading for everything that’s coming to theaters and a living room near you this September.

Marvel’s first blockbuster with a majority Asian cast stuffs martial-arts tropes into the studio’s usual fool-proof formula, building another origin story for a headliner from the back-issue vaults. star Simu Liu makes the transition from comedy to superheroism as the title character, a carefree San Francisco slacker forced to contend with his secret past as the son of a thousand-year-old supervillain (Hong Star star Tony Leung). The robust supporting cast includes Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, and veteran Michelle Yeoh, all gamely fighting to not be upstaged by the flurry of CG effects slathered over the finely choreographed action.

There have been so many tediously faithful recreations of Disney animated classics that at this point, another company making their own version of Cinderella sounds downright galvanizing, even if it apparently must feature James Corden. This may not be the freshest material for a new spin, but with original songs sung by star Camila Cabello (playing “Ella” as an aspiring fashion designer), and writer/director Kay Cannon (of the very funny) behind the camera, it could distinguish itself from the past live-action versions starring Brandy, Lily James, and Hilary Duff. Then again, apart from a few wisecracks and colorful musical bits, the trailer looks pretty standard, with few discernible hints of Cannon’s usual wit.

We know what you’re thinking: Ugh, not another pandemic movie. This one, which premiered at Cannes in July, at least has an intriguing pedigree: It’s an anthology film, with seven segments—each nominally concerned with life in the age of COVID—directed by the respective likes of Jafar Panahi, Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, David Lowery, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, Anthony Chen, and Malik Vitthal. If word from the festival is to be believed, the result is as uneven as just about any omnibus project. Still, that list of filmmakers inspires plenty of curiosity, which is more than can be said for most movies about How We Lived last year.

There are certain vibes to this drama about how the U.S. government went about allocating relief funds to the family members of those killed in the 9/11 attacks—and not just because the film stars Michael Keaton and Stanley Tucci. Keaton plays the lawyer drafted to run the compensation commission, who discovers that calculating the “economic value” of a lost life is not so simple; Tucci plays a widowed community organizer pushing back against the process. It’s a more sentimental movie than Tom McCarthy’s Oscar-winning procedural, but the earnest attempt to throw a dramatic, uh, spotlight on the behind-the-scenes details of a major news story is comparable.

James Wan trades superheroes for the supernatural, leaving to wade back into the waters of horror. Annabelle Wallis, who previously faced off against one of Wan’s funhouse attractions—the —stars as a woman plagued by visions of an active serial killer’s murder streak. The probable culprit: her seemingly imaginary childhood friend, Gabrielle. Malignant isn’t a part of the that Wan launched, but the trailer suggests that the filmmaker is still up to his old tricks, staging well-timed jump scares and unleashing shadowy specters into darkened domestic spaces.

Although Oscar Isaac could hypothetically launch into a monologue about climate change while seated at a Vegas poker table, The Card Counter appears to be Paul Schrader in his “slick thriller” mode rather than his “existential drama” mode. In the writer-director’s follow-up to , Isaac stars as the evocatively named William Tell, a professional gambler whose past catches up with him in the form of would-be assassin Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a fellow veteran who hatches a plan to murder a mutual enemy. Look for Willem Dafoe and Tiffany Haddish in supporting roles, and probably a lot of intense brooding from everyone involved.

,drenched in neon, blood, and more neon. This time, it’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s turn to cut an imposing figure, as an assassin who’s poisoned and must use her remaining day to live to exact revenge. Sounds y, though the trailer shows off way more hot-pink lighting than the average Statham vehicle, as well as a weightless, cartoonish car crash. Hopefully, the fights and shootouts staged by director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan () are convincing enough to match the trademark commitment of the erstwhile .

Two best friends (Kristen Bell and Kirby Howell-Baptiste), dissatisfied with their dead-end suburban lives and inability to get ahead financially, take matters into their own hands, parlaying their extreme couponing skills into a full-on scam. This STX crime comedy from married couple Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet feels a bit like lite. But it does offer plum roles for Paul Walter Hauser, as a stickler of a “loss prevention” specialist, and Vince Vaughn, as an uncharacteristically relaxed postal inspector who puts some authority into the investigation.

Just a couple years after raked in (relatively) big bucks at the box office and won an Academy Award, here’s another nonfiction portrait of a climber whose daredevil, ropeless scaling of treacherous peaks suggests an almost pathological disregard for his own safety. In this case, the alpinist of the title, Marc-André Leclerc, is also a camera-shy loner with no special desire to be the center of attention–a challenge for documentarian and climbing enthusiast Peter Mortimer that’s perhaps only a little less daunting than the obstacles the Free Solo team faced in safely filming their subject.

If Dating & New York wasn’t shot during the initial days of the pandemic last year, it certainly feels like it was. Truly, New York is like another character in the story who walked off the set during the first week of shooting and never returned. Milo (Jaboukie Young-White) and Wendy (Francesca Reale) navigate the foibles of modern urban romance in front of a series of green screens and also Turtle from Entourage. Frustrated by misleading dating profiles and incompatible swipes, the pair attempts a form of convenience dating. In other words, they want to be. No prizes for guessing whether they succeed.

Just four months after the release of her directorial debut, the teen sex comedy , actor-turned-director Natalie Morales steps behind and in front of the camera for this COVID-era two-hander. Made up entirely of webcam dialogue scenes, the film follows an idle upper-class househusband (Mark Duplass, who cowrote the script) who’s gifted two years’ worth of online Spanish lessons with expat Cariño (Morales). The bonding that follows blurs the lines between professional and personal, but not in the way you might expect. Language Lessons is intelligently written and resourcefully shot, but what really makes it work is the chemistry between Morales and Duplass, who give this slight movie some real emotional depth.

Clint Eastwood is back in cowboy kit for the first time in decades, casting himself as a former rodeo star fallen on hard times. (Is there any other kind?) Working with a script adapted from N. Richard Nash’s 1975 novel, the director-star sends his alter-ego Mike Milo down to Mexico to retrieve a wayward son (Eduardo Minett) on behalf of former employer Dwight Yoakam. A chicken is also involved. Cry Macho seems to promise the softer side of Clint, offering up coming-of-age bonding and intergenerational friendship, with just a light smattering of cockfighting around the edges.

A TV documentary about a 16-year-old drag queen inspired a West End musical in 2017, and now it’s been funneled back to screens as an Amazon Prime adaptation of the stage show. This coming-of-age story concerns Jamie (Max Harwood), a teenager in England who doesn’t fit in with his classmates, and dreams of standing out even more, as he realizes that he wants to try his hand at drag performance. Richard E. Grant and Sharon Horgan, among others, show their support. First-time film director Jonathan Butterell helped develop the original show, which could be a mixed blessing: He obviously knows the material inside and out, but storied theatre directors don’t always make a smooth transition to the cinema.

If the title of The Eyes Of Tammy Faye sounds familiar, it’s because a came out about 20 years ago. Now Michael Showalter, stepping up in ambition after, has made it into a fictionalized feature with presumed showcase roles for Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, respectively. The televangelist couple grabbed headlines in the 1980s with their opulent lives—but so did the accusations of rape brought against Jim, followed by his attempt to buy off his accuser, Jessica Hahn. Based on the trailer, Chastain is doing one of those (and her own singing!) to tell the scandalous story from Tammy Faye’s point of view.

Nicolas Cage is a grizzled desperado with bombs strapped to his testicles. If that doesn’t perk your interest, you’re probably not the target audience for this cult-thirsty sci-fi samurai Western, the first film in English from Japanese merchant of lunacy Sion Sono. Prisoners Of The Ghostland, which vaguely recalls Mad Max, Escape From New York, and a dozen other genre milestones, got the midnight crowd at this year’s Sundance Film Festival hooting and hollering (or whatever the Twitter, post-virtual-screening version of hooting and hollering is). Our own correspondent was less enthused, “more entertaining to describe than it is to actually watch.”

For his latest plunge into the trenches of American machismo, writer-director Joe Carnahan pits two paradigms of grimacing testosterone against each other. DTV action idol (and ) Frank Grillo stars as an outlaw who gets himself deliberately arrested in a one-horse Nevada town in hopes of slipping out of the crosshairs of a pursuing assassin played by Gerard Butler, who’s sort of the multiplex’s answer to Frank Grillo. The mayhem that follows sounds like a steroidal variation on ; in Carnahan terms, let’s hope it skews closer to (or even ) than the filmmaker’s last Grillo vehicle, .

Mélanie Laurent got famous for her work as an actor, in films like and , but she’s carved out an increasingly interesting career behind the camera, too. The French multi-hyphenate wrote, directed, and costars in this adaptation of a Victoria Mas novel about a young woman (Lou de Laâge) whose apparently genuine ability to communicate with the dead gets her institutionalized by her family; sentenced to a lifetime of captivity, she plots an escape from the asylum, with help from the nurse Laurent plays. Here’s hoping the dynamic between them is as spiky as the one that drives the actor-turned-filmmaker’s prior team-up with de Laâge, the underseen .

For his latest indie drama, writer-director Justin Chon (Gook, Ms. Purple) casts himself as a Louisiana family man, born in Korea but adopted and brought to America when he was just 3 years old, who finds himself facing the threat of deportation after a run-in with racist police officers. Alicia Vikander plays his wife and the mother of his stepdaughter. Blue Bayou caught mostly glowing reviews at Cannes, where it premiered earlier this summer, with critics calling the film an impassioned (if slightly overstuffed) polemic on the infuriating, merciless injustice of U.S. immigration policy.

Carrie Brownstein and Annie “St. Vincent” Clark get metafictional in this scripted making-of film for a faux rock doc that no one was ever actually going to make. Working with director Bill Benz (who worked with Brownstein on ), the two rockers play themselves, with Brownstein settling in to make a movie about Clark, and inadvertently pushing her deeper and deeper into the inescapable grip of the St. Vincent persona. The Nowhere Inn drew modestly positive reviews when it debuted at Sundance, with critics praising Brownstein and Clark’s commitment to the bit and their meditations on the paradox of being yourself when your job is all about being “yourself.”

Speaking of stage musicals that may or may not translate to the big screen, the Broadway smash (and unofficial ripoff) Dear Evan Hansen is coming to movie theaters, with its Tony-winning star Ben Platt sticking with the role he originated, no matter how many decades he’s since the show’s original run. Platt, who isn’t far from 30 IRL, plays the title character, a teenage loner who is mistaken for the only friend of a classmate who recently committed suicide. Let’s hope director Stephen Chbosky (who has plenty of young-adult experience, having written the novel and then adapted it into a film) knows what he’s doing here—and/or that Platt’s advanced age will be mitigated by supporting turns from Kaitlyn Dever, Julianne Moore, and Amy Adams.

Diana Silvers and Kristine Froseth play friends in competition in this adaptation of the 2019 novel Bright Burning Stars, set at a prestigious Paris ballet school where one student will be selected to join the Parisian Opera’s national ballet company. Don’t necessarily expect a straightforward approach to dance-school drama, though: Writer/director Sarah Adina Smith previously made the enigmatic ghost story The Midnight Swim and the time-jumping—and the book, at least, includes the discovery of a dead body early in the school year.