November is a prime month for moviegoing. The Thanksgiving holiday offers a great opportunity for studios to release their fall tentpole pictures and for audiences to watch as many films as possible. This year is no different as blockbusters-to-be like Gladiator 2 and Wicked are waiting in the wings to dazzle eyeballs and gobble some dollars.
It’s not all big movies in November, though. Oscar hopefuls and under-the-radar movies populate the release schedule, and the following three films have the potential to be not only entertaining, but also some of the year’s best in cinema.
Juror No. 2 (November 1)
It’s hard to believe a Clint Eastwood movie from Warner Bros. is an “under-the-radar” movie, but that’s the current climate we’re living in right now. The studio is releasing the film in only 30 theaters nationwide and devoting only minimal resources to marketing it. Chances are, you probably won’t be able to watch this in a theater. That’s a damn shame, as Juror No. 2 is likely Eastwood’s last film as a director, and he deserves to go out on the big screen.
The movie’s premise is intriguing: a young husband and father-to-be (Nosferatu‘s Nicholas Hoult) is called for jury duty to hear a case about an abusive man charged with the murder of his girlfriend. As he hears the facts about the case, he realizes that it was he who accidentally killed the woman in a car accident. Now, he faces a moral dilemma: Does he confess his role in the woman’s death and jeopardize his growing family or does he let an awful, but innocent man go to jail for a crime he didn’t commit?
Meanwhile on Earth (November 9)
Sci-fi has had a banner year in 2024 with big screen productions like Dune: Part Two and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, as well as streaming releases like Netflix’s The Signal, and that hot streak continues with Meanwhile on Earth. Jérémy Clapin’s meditative movie stars Megan Northam as Elsa, a young woman who still mourns her brother, Franck, who disappeared on a space mission three years earlier.
One day, she hears his voice emitting from a radio antenna, which directs her to pluck a strange clear seed from the ground and place it in her ear like an Apple AirPod. It turns out, Franck is alive, somewhere, and is being held captive by a mysterious group of beings who direct Elsa to do their bidding. If she complies, she’ll get her brother back. But who, or what, are these beings? Do they want to invade Earth? Or is something more inexplicable at play here?
Meanwhile on Earth‘s trailer is suitably spooky, but the film also promises to be as intelligent and spiritual as Denis Villeneuve‘s The Arrival, which also dealt with a woman’s personal trauma and how her contact with aliens forces her to confront her past. Clapin made the wonderful, idiosyncratic animated movie I Lost My Body five years ago, so if anyone can pull this off, it’s him.
Flow (November 22)
The fall season is usually the time for high-profile animation projects to debut. September’s The Wild Robot is still a hit, and Disney is set to release two movies, Moana 2 and Mufasa, that are sure to rake in the dough from parents eager to offload their kids in a theater. But there’s another animated movie that’s worth your time, and it could be the best one this year.
A weird cross between the video game Stray and the Biblical tale of Noah’s Ark, Flow concerns the epic journey of a cat who barely survives an epic flood that wipes out most of the world’s population. To survive this dangerous new world filled with water and unseen enemies, the cat must ride a boat and work with other animals to forge a path toward an uncertain future.
This movie sounds like a downer, but Flow is too gorgeous to be depressing. Flow played at this year’s prestigious Cannes Film Festival and already has a 93% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It will almost certainly be nominated for Best Animated Feature at next year’s Oscars, so see what all the fuss is about and submit to the colorful pleasures of Flow.