1. Muckraking documentary filmmaker Michael Moore tackles the global financial crisis in his latest non-fiction fusillade with Capitalism: A Love Story (Oct. 2). Look for Wall Street fat cats to take it on the chin just like G.W. Bush did in Fahrenheit 9/11.
2. The early reviews haven't been kind and its release was delayed for an entire year, but it will still be interesting to see what Australian visionary John Hillcoat (The Proposition) does with The Road (Oct. 16), Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic best-seller. Viggo Mortensen plays "The Man."
3. Where the Wild Things Are (Oct. 16), Maurice Sendak's 1963 kid-lit classic finally makes it to the big screen in Spike Jonze's (Being John Malkovich) CGI-lite live-action adaptation. Jonze's indie cred helped him cast a bunch of cool actors (Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, James Gandolfini) not normally associated with family entertainment.
4. Don't let the Oprah or Tyler Perry imprimatur scare you off, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (Nov. 20), a magical realist-inflected urban melodrama about a put-upon Harlem teen (Gabourney Sidibe) won both the Grand Jury and Audience awards at Sundance this January. As the girl's unstable mother, plus-sized sitcom diva Mo'Nique gives a performance that's already generating beaucoup Oscar talk. So is the film itself.
5. George Clooney and Meryl Streep provide the voices for Mr. and Mrs. Fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox (Nov. 25), fabulist extraordinaire Wes Anderson's stop-motion-animated film based on Roald Dahl's 1970 children's novel. The early buzz has been, no pun intended, fantastic indeed.
