Your Fall Guide to Movies and Film Festivals

Be sure to check out our full 2025 Fall Arts Guide to live music, movies, art, theater, festivals and more in the Bay Area.

With respect for differing tastes, I sincerely hope the final chapter of Downton Abbey isn’t the movie you’re most looking forward to as the calendar flips from Summer to Serious. I feel the same way about Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (both resurrections open Sept. 12), though I understand the need for comedy now. (Paging Jordan Peele with my pitch for Downton Abbey: This Old House.)

Seriously, entertainment is all well and good up to the point where escape becomes evasion. Fall — and perhaps this is a remnant of back-to-school days — is the time to challenge ourselves, to grapple with unfamiliar perspectives and foreign ideas and uncomfortable histories. Streaming (which is to say television) can make us forget that film is an especially effective medium for opening the mind. Hide the remote and pick a theater, a festival, a film and go!

Crossroads 2025

Aug. 29–31, 2025
Gray Area, San Francisco

Where does the avant-garde survive in our TikTok-blasted, ad-infested, moving-image maelstrom? Shapeshifters Cinema (Oakland), BAMPFA (Berkeley), Artists’ Television Access (San Francisco) and San Francisco Cinematheque, whose energy is increasingly focused on its annual compendium of artist-made films and videos from around the globe. The 47 evocative works that curator Steve Polta has carefully sequenced into eight programs include Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu’s I Carry the Universe With Me and Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones—To Bunya. Shake off the cobwebs at Crossroads.

‘The Lost Bus’

Opens Sept. 19, 2025
Debuts Oct. 3, 2025 on Apple TV+

Hyperkinetic English director Paul Greengrass (United 93, a fistful of Jason Bourne movies) steers school bus driver Matthew McConaughey, teacher America Ferrera and 22 children through the Camp Fire that claimed 85 lives and torched Paradise in 2018. Think Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear with less testosterone and a cargo of kids instead of nitroglycerin. Climate change may have dampened our desire for real-life disaster flicks, but feats of individual heroism will always have a home on the silver/flat screen.

‘Eleanor the Great’

Opens Sept. 26, 2025

Scarlet Johansson makes her narrative feature directing debut with this sentimental contribution to the undervalued genre of actors directing actors in actors’ showcases. Nonagenarian June Squibb (Nebraska) plays a Jewish widow who returns to New York from Florida after the death of her old friend and roommate, a Holocaust survivor whose story Eleanor adopts in a pinch as her own. Complications ensue but hard truths are largely avoided, leaving Squibb’s performance as the film’s raison d’être.

Mill Valley Film Festival

Oct. 2–12, 2025
Various locations

In its 48th year, Marin County’s little festival that could balances the inviting bonhomie of a small-town event with the star power of an L.A. dinner party.

Cinema — film as art and films with purpose — remains front and center, even as the woodsy surroundings and short-sleeve vestiges of our late-start summer engage the senses. Along with the world premieres of a few local documentaries, the lineup always includes several arthouse tempters with potential Oscar nominees.

Possible selections include After the Hunt (Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield), Blue Moon (Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott), Bugonia (Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons) and Hamnet (Paul Mescal, Jesse Buckley).

Drunken Film Festival Oakland

Oct. 4–10, 2025
Various locations

Popcorn is still the favorite movie-theater nosh (with a nostalgic nod to the Jujubes of my youth), though I get the full-service appeal of Alamo Drafthouse’s in-seat dining. But it’s hard to beat watching a movie with a cold pint. Ringleader Arlin Golden’s eighth mashup of independent shorts and welcoming pubs includes original stalwarts Stay Gold Deli (Oct. 6), Beeryland (Oct. 7) and Eli’s Mile High Club (Oct. 9). All shows are free except for the opening night kickoff at Craig Baldwin’s venerable Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco.

‘Mistress Dispeller’

Opens Oct. 29, 2025 at the Roxie Theater, San Francisco

A graduate of Stanford’s vaunted master’s program in documentary, Elizabeth Lo scored with her debut, Stray (2020) a street-level portrait of Istanbul dogs. Her intimate follow-up, Mistress Dispeller, screened at dozens of festivals around the world (including SFFILM’s Doc Stories and CAAMFest) since its premiere at Venice a year ago. With astonishing access to all parties, Lo follows the professional “dispeller” whom a Chinese wife hires to subvert and end the relationship between her husband and his lover. (Divorce isn’t the best option in every culture and situation.) An excellent choice to get the conversation started on a first date, or any date.

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’

Opens Oct. 24, 2025

Nebraska, the bleak lo-fi home recording that the Boss released between The River and Born in the U.S.A., is a rarity: A hit album (it peaked at #3) that most buyers never tossed on their turntable again after the first, depressing listen. While Springsteen’s breakthrough Born to Run was populated by aspirational alley cats and freeway rebels yearning to breathe free, Nebraska was strewn with killer loners howling along a desolate prairie highway. Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart, The Pale Blue Eye) adapts Warren Zanes’ nonfiction book about the making of Nebraska with Brooklyn-born Jeremy Allen White (The Bear, Shameless) playing the Bard of Asbury Park in his blue period.

Doc Stories

Nov. 6–9, 2025
Vogue Theater, San Francisco

SFFILM’s annual buffet of biting reality covers a ton of ground in a compressed amount of time. The lineup, announced later in the fall, includes gutsy immersions in global trouble zones, unfettered portraits of creative giants, and pithy short works commissioned by online magazines and newspapers. Doc Stories is well-attended by local documentary makers, needless to say, along with anyone else who recognizes the urgent necessity of independent journalists at the present moment.

‘Train Dreams’

Opens Nov. 7, 2025
Debuts Nov. 21, 2025 on Netflix

Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella provides the source material for Clint Bentley’s episodic, gorgeous and profound saga of a working man’s life in the Pacific Northwest in the 1900s. Richly allusive, the film depicts the journey of railroad man and logger Joel Edgerton (a likely Oscar nominee, I’ll venture a guess), whose encounters with Felicity Jones, William H. Macy, Kerry Condon and various unnamed strangers illuminate, among other things, our relationship with nature, capital’s attitude toward labor and America’s obsession with progress at all costs.

‘Nuremberg’

Opens Nov. 7, 2025

Perhaps you’ve been thinking recently about human rights abuses, concentration camps and genocide. And which “special qualities” the perpetrators possess. The U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to the highest-ranking defendants at Nuremberg had the same question 80 years ago. Screenwriter (Zodiac) and producer James Vanderbilt adapts Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII for his directorial debut.

Rami Malek faces off against Russell Crowe with Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant providing backup. A parallel foray into the heart of darkness, Riefenstahl (playing Sept. 14–25 at the Smith Rafael Film Center, with German director Andres Veiel on hand opening day) probes the mental and artistic machinations of ruthless ambition by mining the estate of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Nov. 12–16, 2025
Orinda Theatre

Give thanks, East Bay, that the ongoing “improvements” to the Castro Theatre push the Silent Film Festival temporarily across the Bay Bridge. Every program is a spirit-raising marriage of pristine prints and inspired (live) musicians; don’t miss the centennial celebrations of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (opening night) and Buster Keaton’s Go West (closing night). Glistening restorations of Herbert Brenon’s action frolic Beau Geste (starring heartthrob Ronald Colman) and Joe May’s Weimar melodrama Asphalt (featuring the luminous Else Heller) are guaranteed to quicken the heart. There’s more: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s rarely screened Master of the House emerges from the vault on its 100th anniversary to accompany the presentation of the SFSFF Award to Thomas Christiansen of the Danish Film Institute. Just go, already!