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

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.