Cue “Holiday,” because this holiday weekend deserves the full euphoria-pop treat. Why? Because it’s IFFBoston Fall Focus time — that time of year when cinephiles from around the Boston area gather at the Brattle Theater (40 Brattle St. in Cambridge) to sample a tantalizing selection of award-season releases. Compare the average cost of going to see the Pats to what you’d shell out if you bought a ticket to each of the 12 features showing during Week One, and you’d probably come up even. That’s nearly two whole days worth of can’t-miss cinema coming your way, and you don’t even have to deal with Gillette traffic. Or is it still Boston Stadium?
Anyway, as mentioned above, this is just week one of Fall Focus, which kicks off on October 8 and runs through Tuesday, October 13. There are films from all sorts of fantastic directors — Hirokazu Kore-eda, Mike Leigh, Andrey Zvyagintsev, William and David Greaves, Noah Segan, and more — but we’ve picked five titles that we’ve either seen or desperately want to see. For more info about everything in the program, check out the IFFBoston site. Trust us, you won’t be let down by anything you’ll see on that screen this weekend. And stay tuned — we’ll be back before week two (October 29 to November 4) with some more picks.
Anyway, without further ado, here are our picks for five must-see movies at week one of Fall Focus.
Possible Love
Lee Chang-dong’s long-awaited follow up to Burning is, unsurprisingly, one of the best films of 2026. We saw it at TIFF and made the rare decision to hold off on a review until we could see it again — there’s just so much rich detail in this gorgeously human story that we wanted to take a much closer look at it free of the hustle and bustle of festival life. Possible Love concerns the collision of two couples — one working class, suffering in the aftermath of the broken strike that ended the husband’s career; one wealthy, making a documentary about the workers’ plight — and the rocky relationship that forms between the foursome. Sure, it’s moving and occasionally enraging, but did you think Chang-dong would make one of the year’s funniest features as well? Thank god for subtitles. A must-see.
‘POSSIBLE LOVE’ :: Thursday, October 8 @ 7 p.m. :: Advance tickets
All of a Sudden
Look, as much as we like you, we’re bound to have a disagreement every now and then, just like we mildly differed with our peers at TIFF on Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Cannes sensation. We didn’t wind up reviewing it then, as we decided to let it marinate, and “marinating” often means forgetting to write about it until you’ve got eight hundred other pieces to write, most of which are about movies you feel strongly about. That said, we can see why people love this gorgeously-acted film about a friendship that forms between a care home director (Virginie Efira) and a dying theater director (Tao Okamoto), and how their relationship changes their perspectives and enriches their lives. Are there moments of striking beauty? Yes. Is a whiteboard wheeled out for a mid-film illustrated pseudo-lecture? Yes. Is it three hours long? Yes. Are you going to see a lot of elderly people getting cuddle-puddle foot massages? Yes. Should you check it out? That’s for you to decide, but we think you might like it if you stayed rapturously alert through all of Drive My Car.
‘ALL OF A SUDDEN’ :: Saturday, October 10 @ noon :: Advance tickets
Fatherland
It was a major bummer that Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest feature skipped TIFF this year, and it’s even more frustrating that we won’t be able to check it out at this Saturday evening screening. This is a film tailor-made for our specific Dad-Book interests, about the writer Thomas Mann (Hans Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Sandra Huller) embarking on a road trip through the ruins of post-war Germany after their years of exile in the US. As fans of Mann’s novels, the non-fiction of Ian Buruma and Tony Judt, and the gorgeous black-and-white work Pawlikowski’s known for, we’re incredibly excited for this one, and exceptionally jealous of all you out there who get to see it this weekend. We are green with envy.
‘FATHERLAND’ :: Saturday, October 10 at 6 p.m. :: Advance tickets
Club Kid
If you’re the kind of person who wants to brag about seeing the Fall’s NEW, HOT DEBUT early, you should go ahead and buy your ticket to Jordan Firstman’s debut feature, as it’s going to make one hell of a splash when it lands in theaters later this year. It’s a rollicking good time about a club scene legend (Firstman) forced to grow up when he meets the son he unknowingly fathered during a threesome a decade earlier. We were a bit less hot on it than some of our peers, but we know we’re just being a fucking buzzkill. But, seriously, just go to this and lament the fact that the MBTA doesn’t run trains all night.
‘CLUB KID’ :: Saturday, October 10 at 8:30 p.m. :: Advance tickets
Wild Horse Nine
We didn’t go total hoser in our TIFF review of Martin McDonagh’s latest black comedy and spend a good chunk of the review shouting about how absurd it is that the wonderful John Malkovich resides in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, but this is a locally-oriented article and now we can! If you want to see Malkovich turn in one of the best performances of his career, as a CIA agent sent with his partner (Sam Rockwell) on a bizarro trip to Easter Island on the eve of the Chilean coup, you should do so at what might be the only screening of this film in the heart of Cambridge. They’re gonna let that old AMC collect dust for decades, after all. So, go to a local legend and watch another local legend absolutely kill it.
‘WILD HORSE NINE’ :: Tuesday, October 13 at 8 p.m. :: Advance tickets