Old favourites Shaun the Sheep, Dune, Jane Austen and Godzilla join Charles de Gaulle, the Peasants’ Revolt and queer identity in Spain

• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here
• Big tech goes to Hollywood: is Silicon Valley ready for a silver-screen reckoning?

All release dates are UK and subject to change

Willem Dafoe is typically grizzled and poetic for this study of a near-retirement postal worker who, it turns out, was a beatnik rhymester of cachet – but no lasting renown – back in the day, and who has now been rediscovered by a new generation of literary hipsters. Director Kent Jones, adapting a novella by Arthur “La Ronde” Schnitzler, was the longtime head of the New York film festival; he might be in for a spot of late fame himself. AP
• 4 September

Its moguls are ripe subjects for drama, and there is huge anticipation for forthcoming features The Social Reckoning and Artificial. But other projects have failed as the film industry is increasingly colonised by IT empires

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‘I know there are easier enemies to make,” tech reporter Jeremy Allen White tells his colleague in a recent trailer for The Social Reckoning. “The mafia would be an easier enemy to make,” comes the reply. They’re talking about Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, but they might as well be discussing big tech as a whole. As The Social Reckoning promises to underline, it’s become clear that these people are not on our side – “us” being the whole of humanity except billionaire tech overlords and their mates. But for an industry that loves a clear-cut baddie, Hollywood has barely landed a blow on the tech industry. Now it finds itself in mortal danger of being absorbed by it. Is it too late to fight back?

The Social Reckoning’s predecessor, The Social Network, showed how this kind of thing is done. It was pacy, buzzy and full of weirder-than-life characters – not least the young Zuckerberg, portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg as an obnoxiously smart mogul-in-the-making, whose mission to connect the world stood in stark contrast to his own social deficiencies. Directed by David Fincher and co-written by Aaron Sorkin, it was also a commercial and critical hit, winning three Oscars. But a big part of what made The Social Network work, and makes its sequel such a threat, is that it was about the actual, real-world Silicon Valley, which is where a lot of recent entertainment has gone wrong.

Jake says his parents ‘never stopped helping’ his brother Nick, who has pleaded not guilty to murdering both of them at their Los Angeles home

Jake Reiner has given his first interview since the killing of his parents, the film-maker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, saying: “I will never understand why this happened.”

Reiner, who directed films including The Princess Bride, This Is Spinal Tap and Stand By Me, was found dead alongside Singer Reiner from apparent stab wounds in their home in Los Angeles in December.

The star has long been French cinema’s favourite tousle-haired Adonis, which makes his latest performance – as a schlubby, stay-at-home dad – all the more surprising. ‘I appreciate people laughing at me,’ he says

‘Even though I’ve been working in film for over 20 years, I still have this desire to look beautiful on screen,” says Louis Garrel, on a video call from his bed inside a boat off the coast of Corsica. The French film star is lying on his stomach, occasionally kicking up his bare legs, ruffling his curls and running the nail of his thumb over his moustache. I think the person he sees on the laptop screen in front of him is me, but I am pretty certain he is flirting with his own reflection.

The attraction between the Paris-born 43-year-old and the camera tends to be reciprocal. Long of limb, tousled of hair and chiselled of nose, Garrel has spent a career on screen as French cinema’s favourite Adonis – the man film-makers turn to when they need an erotic wrecking ball to smash up bourgeois twosomes and turn them into quivering menages a trois.

News that Scott is working on a follow-up to his maligned 2017 film leaves me worried the franchise has run out of shocks

If any science-fiction saga looked beyond recovery, it was the Alien franchise. For the 38 years that followed James Cameron’s Aliens, film-makers contrived to find every imaginable way of not making a good Alien film. They tried killing everyone the audience cared about before the opening credits, marooning Sigourney Weaver on a planet populated entirely by bald British character actors, cloning Ripley, pitting xenomorphs against Predators, and sending scientists across the universe to ask an enormous, hairless space bodybuilder why he made them. They even ponied up the thick end of $100m for a film in which Michael Fassbender teaches himself to play the flute.

And then in 2024, we got Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, in which actual xenomorphs chase actual human beings down actual corridors for the clearly defined purposes of either killing them or putting smaller xenomorphs inside them. Better still, a year later we got Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth, which reminded us that giant, murderous space insects are in fact less awful than tech trillionaires.

A father and son must team up to find a serial killer in a cheaply made and increasingly uninteresting thriller

It’s not as if Robert De Niro’s choices have improved all that much since the nadir of the mid-2000s (last year did see him crop up in a Scott Eastwood-led actioner and The Alto Knights) but there’s something specifically rubbishy about his latest that transports us back to that particularly cursed time. The Whisper Man, a film as openly stupid as its title would suggest, could have been released in between the evil clone horror Godsend and imaginary friend thriller Hide and Seek, the kind of bottom-tier project that offers the actor a nice big cheque and the audience a nice little nap.

It’s a familiar pile of B-movie schlock – serial killers, missing children, bumps in the night, more imaginary friends – and there is some initial junky fun to be had as we wonder just where it all might be headed. I was hoping for a destination a little more deranged or vaguely surprising, the film making a silent promise that we’re hurtling toward somewhere wildly unexpected before dumping us in a ditch instead.

In spite of capable performances and deployment of hygge, gothic and Nordic noir elements, you’ll search for a feasible plot or a character insight in vain

Adapted from the 2017 novel by Anna Ekberg (actually a male writing duo), this thriller from Denmark chucks in a bit of everything into the mix: hygge lakeside melodrama, manor-house gothic, and Nordic-noir corruption. But this franticness can’t disguise that it’s a dopey and facile thriller that, despite capable performances, plumbs neither its characters’ depths nor hits thematic pay dirt. It also merits a stiff investigation from the plotting police.

Despite amnesia that leaves her unable to remember her life prior to running an idyllic Norwegian rural cafe, Louise (Natalie Wolfsberg Madueño) is gearing up to get hitched to crime writer Joachim (Pål Sverre Hagen). When a tourist approaches and calls her by another name, she is sufficiently shaken to take a DNA test; it confirms she is actually Helene Söderberg, a Danish shipping heiress presumed dead, with a husband and son back home. Originally found stowed away on a cargo ship, she handed over an ID card – for Louise Anderson – which the authorities accepted. Now wanting to reclaim her identity, she pitches up on the capacious doorstep of company executive Edmund (Claes Bang), her former partner.

Paul Greengrass drama The Uprising was supposed to be a historical epic about the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 – but a strange new campaign has inserted a surprising figure

Nobody likes to have the full plot of a movie spoiled before they’ve even seen it. However, sometimes this can be taken to the extreme. Take the new Paul Greengrass movie, The Uprising, for example. It is two weeks away from its US release and not only does nobody know the plot, but nobody seems to know what it is even about. Seriously, nobody at all. The film’s distributors just spent yesterday squabbling in public about whether Robin Hood was in it or not.

Here’s what we know so far. Initially, all the trailers and promotional materials made The Uprising look like a film about the Peasants’ Revolt that tore through England in 1381. And this was very exciting, since the revolt was a thrilling moment in history that has been bizarrely underserved by Hollywood over the years. Most exciting of all, though, it sounded like it fit exactly into Greengrass’s wheelhouse: full of action and realism and political awareness.