Gladiator II to The Day of the Jackal: The best culture to look forward to this autumn

The future is now this autumn, with all manner of dystopian, utopian and apocalyptic culture hurtling our way. In fiction there is Tim Winton’s Juice, a tale of survival in a sun-battered future, and Richard Powers’ Playground, exploring underwater life and AI amid environmental collapse. Meanwhile, Gliff by Ali Smith – with a nod to Kafka – tells the tale of a state turned hostile, and Wayne McGregor’s new ballet MaddAddam is based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam), imagining life beyond a bio-engineered disaster. In fashion, there’s an unmistakably utopian aesthetic about the autumn/winter 2024 collections by designers Rick Owens, Fendi and Iris Van Herpen, and art-wise there is a retro-futuristic feel to Tate Modern’s light-filled Electric Dreams, delving into artists’ imagined futures of the past five decades. Meanwhile, in movies, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s “loopy” sci-fi passion project, is set in a brutal parallel reality, or, for something altogether less portentous there is The Wild Robot, Dreamworks’ heart-warming tale of a wayward droid.

Family dynamics in all their vexed glory are explored across culture this autumn. Two very different brothers grieve for their father in Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated novel Intermezzo, while in Tessa Hadley’s novella The Party, it’s two sisters who are the focus, during a night that changes everything. In Djinns by Fatma Aydemir, a sweeping tale of a family at the end of the 20th Century, suppressed memories are unearthed and secret histories revealed. Art and family collide in a non-fiction Book, Family Romance – John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse, in which the intrigues and tragedies surrounding the artist’s 12 portraits of one family are explored. On screen, the Netflix film His Three Daughters is a portrait of familial dysfunction – starring Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen and Carrie Coon – following three estranged sisters as they converge in a New York apartment to care for their ailing father. Comedy drama A Real Pain, meanwhile, sees two mismatched cousins (Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) reunite for a tense tour through Poland to honour their much-loved grandmother.

Ageing “ain’t for sissies” as Bette Davis famously said. Here to help are several cultural offerings this autumn that either address the joys and conundrums of mid-life, or feature protagonists of a certain age. In the empowering Much More To Come, Gen-Xer Eleanor Mills looks at how to cope with a mid-life crisis, and embrace a new way of living and thinking; A Thousand Threads, the compelling memoir of iconic musical artist Neneh Cherry, reflects on life, mortality and ageing; while Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowth explores the caustic author’s lesser-known middle years spent in Los Angeles. And in fiction, Dear Dickhead by French author Virginie Despentes is the irreverent tale of a famous actress in her fifties and a middle-aged male author who fall into a rage-filled email exchange – and a spiral of mutual antipathy. On the big screen, there’s comedy drama My Old Ass – ostensibly a teen film, but arguably more of a meditation on mid-life.

September marks both the start of “awards season” and the publishing world’s pre-Christmas bounty, with some of literature’s biggest names releasing new work, from Alan Hollinghurst (Our Evenings) and Richard Powers (Playground) to Haruki Murakami (The City and its Uncertain Walls), along with the aforementioned Ms Rooney. Following in the gothic footsteps of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice sequel, this autumn sees the return of more of cinema’s big-name auteurs, like Ridley Scott, with his epic, rhino-baiting Gladiator II, starring Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal. Spain’s beloved melodramatist Pedro Almodóvar makes his English-language feature debut with the Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore two-hander, The Room Next Door, while Roma director Alfonso Cuarón returns with psychological thriller Disclaimer, an Apple TV+ miniseries starring Nicole Kidman, and Steve McQueen opens the London Film Festival with his World War Two drama, Blitz. Art fans can expect a host of big-name exhibitions to look forward to, including Marina Abramovic: Healing Frequency (Moco); Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael (RA); Surrealism (Centre Pompidou) and Nan Goldin: This will not end well (Neue Nationalgalerie)

The early life of Bob Dylan gets the biopic treatment from Walk the Line director James Mangold in A Complete Unknown – with the ubiquitous Timothée Chalamet as the gravelly-voiced artist (yes, he sings). Sebastian Stan stars as the 2024 presidential candidate-to-be in The Apprentice, which focusses on the mysterious lawyer who helped Donald Trump rise to power. Existing IPs getting the origin-story treatment abound this autumn/winter, with the highly-anticipated film version of the hit musical Wicked, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. While over on the small screen, an HBO mini-series starring Colin Farrell charts Oswald Cobblepot’s transformation into Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Penguin. In a fascinating career pivot, Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins directs Mufasa: The Lion King to round off the year. And finally, for fans of autobiography there are enticing new tomes promised from Al Pacino (Sonny Boy) and the first of a two-part memoir from the queen herself, Cher.

Jonathan Coe, the author of What A Carve Up! and Middle England, specialises in wry explorations of why Britain is in the state it’s in. His latest novel, The Proof Of My Innocence, is a murder mystery covering Liz Truss’s notoriously brief tenure as Prime Minister. But there are plenty of other guides to politics in the UK and beyond coming up. Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Annihilation, is set in France in the near future, when a presidential election overshadows the personal crises of a family of Government officials. Less seriously, Rumours is a Canadian film that mutates from satire to horror comedy as a bumbling group of world leaders (played by Cate Blanchett, Charles Dance and others) is menaced by zombies during a G7 summit. Netflix’s The Diplomat returns for a second series, with Keri Russell as the US Ambassador to the UK who discovers that the transatlantic “special relationship” is not all it seems. And at Tate Britain, The 80s: Photographing Britain chronicles the miners’ strike, the riots, and other flashes of political unrest during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister – which was rather longer than Liz Truss’s.

Trust no one! The world is crawling with spies and riddled with sinister conspiracies – or so the latest cinema, television and literary releases would have us believe. A 10-part Sky adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Day of the Jackal, stars Lashana Lynch and Eddie Redmayne as the assassin played by Edward Fox in the classic film. Also on TV, The Madness is a Netflix series starring Colman Domingo as a media pundit who stumbles upon a murder linked to a political plot. And on the big screen, Conclave, based on Robert Harris’s novel, features Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal who finds skeletons in every closet while overseeing the election of a new Pope. The season’s must-read espionage books include Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd (Any Human Heart), a globe-trotting Cold War thriller about a travel writer who is pulled into MI6 during the 1960s; and Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which sees a seductive spy-for-hire infiltrating a group of eco-activists. But truth is stranger than fiction, especially where spies are concerned. Kingmaker, Sonia Purnell’s biography of Pamela Harriman, argues that Churchill’s daughter-in-law used her feminine wiles as a secret agent during World War Two, and went on to influence global politics.

Everywhere you look, there are smallish names which are about to get a lot bigger. Adam Pearson is a British actor and presenter with neurofibromatosis who had an unforgettable cameo in Under The Skin, and now stars alongside Sebastian Stan in A Different Man. Flowerovlove, a teenage pop prodigy from south London, is taking her sunny self-empowerment tunes on a US tour. Singer-actor Ryan Destiny punches her way to movie stardom in The Fire Inside, an acclaimed biopic of Claressa Shields, the Olympic gold medal-winning boxer (still only 29 herself). An exhibition of Malgorzata Mirga-Tas’s vibrant textile collages is at Tate St Ives; it’s the Romani artist’s first major museum show in Britain. The award-winning Gurnaik Johal is one of the rising stars teamed with more established authors in Duets, a collection of short stories which are written by two writers each. Sculptor Donald Baugh exhibits at Vessel Gallery, London, with his innovative work in wood. And the young designers who will set trends during fashion month are Yaku Stapleton, a playful London-based Afro-Futurist, Pauline Dujancourt, who is reinventing knitwear for women, and Patricio Campillo, whose menswear celebrates his Mexican heritage.

How we look, and our neuroses around that, is under the microscope – or should that be scalpel? – over the next few months with a host of titles exploring, and taking to task, beauty standards and conventions. In film, Netflix’s Uglies is an adaptation of Scott Westerfeld’s dystopian sci-fi thriller about a society where plastic surgery is made mandatory at the age of 16, while two satires about attractiveness, and what that means, arrive in US cinemas: Coralie Fargeat’s body horror The Substance, in which a never-better Demi Moore plays a TV fitness guru who spawns a younger version of herself, and A Different Man, starring Sebastian Stan, in which an actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition that can cause facial tumours, has an experimental medical procedure to turn him into a classically handsome man. In books, two releases will provide insight into the beauty industry: Becoming Elizabeth Arden by Stacey A Cordery, a biography about the legendary make-up and skincare entrepreneur, and Beyond Vanity: The History and Power of Hairdressing by Elizabeth L Block, exploring the cultural significance of good coiffures in 19th-Century America. And finally, for a lighter take on all things cosmetic, head to Broadway, where one of the hottest tickets of the season is set to be Death Becomes Her, a musical adaptation of the beloved 1990s Hollywood comedy about two romantic rivals who drink an elixir for eternal youth.

Is sex on screen making a comeback? After much discussion about creators shunning it in recent years, various releases at the tail end of the year are putting the carnal front and centre. In the movies, Helena Reijn’s Babygirl is bringing the erotic thriller back with a vengeance, with repressed CEO Nicole Kidman falling into a BDSM-inflected affair with her intern, and it is likely to be  joined in awards-season conversation by Anora, Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or-winning raucous comedy-drama about a sex worker’s relationship with a Russian oligarch’s son, while a feminist remake of notorious 1970s softcore film Emanuelle premieres at the San Sebastian film festival next week. And on TV, a long-awaited miniseries adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s non-fiction bestseller Three Women, about the sexual and emotional lives of a diverse trio of female subjects, kicks off in the US today. Actor Gillian Anderson has made the transition from starring as a sex therapist in Netflix’s Sex Education to pondering desire herself with new book Want, an empowering collection of anonymous women’s sexual fantasies that she has edited, while the first in a new trilogy of novels spinning off from hit erotic podcast Dirty Diana should make an impact.

—

   – videos and can’t-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week.

For more Culture stories from the , follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.