13 Films to See in October

Jordan Raup October 1, 2026 10 min read

As we go deeper into fall, the most impressive month of the year for new releases is here. Featuring no shortage of staggering, essential documentaries, as well as a few of the best international films of the year, it’s an embarrassment of cinematic riches. So much so that a Palme d’Or winner and certain action star’s return to drama didn’t even make the main cut.

13. La Bola Negra (Los Javis, Oct. 16 in theaters and Dec. 2 on Netflix)

A jolt to the Cannes Film Festival when it premiered later in the lineup, Los Javis’ La Bola Negra was snapped up by Netflix, which will roll it out in their longest theatrical window yet. Jan Tracz said in his review, “The film also joins a lineage of contemporary cinema that aspires to novelistic storytelling through audiovisual means. Last year’s Sound of Falling had a similar premise, echoing influential modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner to create a provocative stream of consciousness through images rather than literature. Here, the ‘cinema of attractions’ resembles the style of Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1969 novel Conversation in the Cathedral, each sequence adding another layer of meaning to the equation. It is for the spectator to decide when and how they will decode this impressive jigsaw.”

12. Closure (Michal Marczak; Oct. 28)

After first landing on my radar with the wondrous All These Sleepless Nights, Michal Marczak returned this year with another film blending the realms of fact and fiction. Closure, a documentary that is better shot than most narrative films this year, follows a father trying to track down his missing son. A Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance and top winner at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2026, it’ll now arrive before the end of October.

11. Wicker (Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Oct. 23)

A love story unlike any this year, Alex Huston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson’s Wicker tells a fable in which a woman (Olivia Colman) commissions a wicker husband (Alexander Skarsgård) to be made by the local basketmaker (Peter Dinklage). As Kent M. Wilhelm said in his Sundance review of the film also starring Elizabeth Debicki and shot by Lol Crawley (The Brutalist), “This sophomore feature is a lighthearted period piece set in a time and place that never existed. Their screenplay, based on Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story The Wicker Husband, is a skewering of patriarchal relationship dynamics and traditions. The world they construct is a fun house mirror’s reflection of reality, allowing for a heightened world that feels believable despite its anachronous qualities.”

10. One in a Million (Jack MacInnes and Itab Azzam, Oct. 21)

A winner of Sundance’s Audience Award and Directing Award in the World Cinema Documentary section, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes’ One in a Million captures a family’s journey from Syria to Germany and back again across the span of a decade. I said in my Sundance review, “We’re first introduced to Israa at age 11, circa 2015, and witness her family’s harrowing journey by sea from Syria to Greece, then through multiple countries to the ultimate haven of Germany. Before they leave, children note how they are not scared to die while we see the unforgettable image of small toddlers putting on orange life vests. But during the voyage, two kids succumb to the cold, traumatizing Israa as her normally bubbly personality is shaken. Eventually arriving in Germany less than a third into the film, the rest of the journey is not one of physical distance but emotional obstacles, as the next ten years of assimilation deeply affect every fabric of their family unit. One in a Million opens to new perspectives: we start hearing more from Israa’s father Tarek and, eventually, her mother Nisreen as conflicted feelings of adhering to Syrian tradition start clashing with popular culture, growing up, and romance.”

9. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (Noah Segan, Oct. 16)

Despite his legendary career over many decades, John Turturro has never received an Oscar nomination. Hopefully that will change with Noah Segan’s Sundance premiere The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Kent M. Wilhelm said in our review, “Segan’s fizzy trip around the five boroughs is an elegiac punctuation to the gritty crime dramas of a city that’s kept the crime but scrubbed off the grit. Segan endeavors to reconcile the changing times for an aging pickpocket with a heart of gold whose place in the city has gone the way of the payphone. It’s The Wild Bunch meets Gloria in an engrossing tale of coming to terms with the imbalance of the good and bad of a life, and if that even matters in the end.”

8. Wildwood (Travis Knight, Oct. 23)

After being in production for the better part of this decade, Laika finally returns with the fantasy feature Wildwood, based on a novel co-written by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy and with a cast including Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Jake Johnson, Charlie Day, Amandla Stenberg, Jemaine Clement, Maya Erskine, Tantoo Cardinal, Tom Waits, and Richard E. Grant. We’re curious to see how Fathom Entertainment handles the roll-out for one of their biggest solo releases.

7. Queen at Sea (Lance Hammer, Oct. 30)

Returning with his first feature since 2008’s Ballast, Lance Hammer premiered Queen at Sea at Berlinale earlier this year. The film—led by Juliette Binoche and Tom Courtenay, with cinematography by Academy Award nominee Adolpho Veloso (Train Dreams)—will now arrive this month. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Eleven years ago, Tom Courtenay arrived at the Berlinale with Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, an exquisitely observed study of emotional dilemma in which the British actor played a doddery romantic whose selfish tendencies threatened to get the better of him. He returns to the German festival with a performance of similar weight and resonance in Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a film that centers on an even more challenging moral dilemma—albeit with results that are slightly less delightfully ambiguous than those Haigh managed in 2015.”

6. Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski, Oct. 23)

Following Ida and Cold War, Paweł Pawlikowski returned to Cannes with Fatherland, a drama starring Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler, and which earned him a Best Director prize. Luke Hicks said in his Cannes review, “For how accessible Pawlikowski’s previous two features were, Fatherland feels like it’s made by someone else. The trademark black-and-white cinematography (so elegant it almost feels marbled) from regular collaborator Łukasz Żal points to Pawlikowski, as does the tight 82-minute runtime and squarish, 1.37:1 aspect ratio. In a way, Fatherland is also the third in what amounts to a World War II trilogy. But the subject, flow, and approachability combine for the coming of a new Pawlikowski in heady academic form—an auteur in the shape of a wizened professor, much like Mann.”

5. My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile (Julia Loktev, Oct. 9)

With My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow winning the 2025 Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award, the most-anticipated sequel of the year may be Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, which expands its scope by tracking the journalists who were forced out of Russia and now continue their work across the globe. As Savina Petkova said in our Critic’s Pick review out of Venice, “As Julia Loktev follows her protagonists in exile to Turkey, Georgia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United States, what in any other film could be a chronicle of homes and places becomes a cartography of grief and displacement. Exile tastes as bitter as the collective responsibility of its protagonists, whose acute sense of accountability (‘we let this happen’ are words uttered by several people) clashes with the ambivalence of being Russian today. Still, the strength of their convictions is the driving force behind My Undesirable Friends, the urge to never forget that history is made here and now.”

4. Once Upon a Time in Harlem (William and David Greaves, Oct. 16)

The only film to screen at Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, TIFF, NYFF, and London this year, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is among the best documentaries of 2026. An extraordinary time capsule featuring footage the late William Greaves (Symbiopsychotaxiplasm) and his son David Greaves shot of a 1972 party taking place in Duke Ellington’s party, the film features key figures in the Harlem Renaissance taking part in a lively, sprawling conversation reflecting on the individual personalities and artistic interests that gave way to a historic movement. Kent M. Wilhelm said in his Sundance review, “Picture this: it’s an overcast day in August 1972. You’re at a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. As you awkwardly hold your glass of punch, you’re drowned in cacophonous conversation about art, politics, and society during one of the most vibrant intellectual and creative movements of the modern era. This is the experience of William and David Greaves’ Once Upon a Time in Harlem, an immersive and masterfully rendered documentary that presents a living, breathing oral history of the Harlem Renaissance. Watching it feels like unearthing treasure.”

3. Possible Love (Lee Chang-dong, Oct. 23 in theaters and Nov. 6 on Netflix)

Eight years after his masterful Burning, Lee Chang-dong returns with another towering work, this time following a pair of couples as he explores class divides, labor issues, and the ethics of filmmaking. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Lee’s first feature since Burning, a modern masterpiece that blew away the competition in Cannes eight years ago, is another novelistic gem, the kind of richly detailed and intricately scripted yarn in which alluring themes like class, sex, and sociology are always on the table to be picked at. It also bears a much-wider and more-specific political purview than its predecessor, which comes at a cost for its dramatic pull from time to time. Lee’s nevertheless returned with the most substantial film I’ve seen in this year’s competition and one that is easily amongst the best of the year so far.”

2. NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)

In a sobering wake-up call to anyone somehow not paying attention to the genocide Israel is enacting, as well as the most essential documentary of the year, No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have returned with NAZA. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Very, very few films, no matter how great or important, are actually urgent. You’ll get around to it eventually; it’ll be stuck in time waiting for you. But NAZA is urgent, an essential film, a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world right now. And it’s the new foremost authority on what’s happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel’s crusade against Gaza. It’s much harder to question or deny a genocide that’s happening when the people perpetrating it in real time call it genocide themselves.”

1. You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim; Oct. 16)

Capping off an astounding month for documentaries, another one that will go down in the annals of non-fiction history is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s jaw-dropping, enigmatic character(s) study You Can See Everything. What begins as a stranger-than-fiction scenario in which a small crew, including the directors, were invited to the home of Elizabeth Holmes mere weeks before she began her prison sentence evolves into a thoroughly riveting study of the thin line between fact and fiction, public versus private personas, and perverse family dynamics hitherto never quite captured on screen before.

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