12 of the best films to watch this November
Here are the films to see this month, including the second instalment of Wicked, a new Knives Out mystery and several potential Oscar contenders.
1. The Running Man
The Running Man is one of the dystopian novels that Stephen King wrote under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Another of those novels, The Long Walk, was made into a film earlier this year, and The Running Man itself was turned into a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1987. But the dark new version, directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Last Night in Soho), is far more faithful to the King/ Bachman book. Its hero, played by Glen Powell, is an ordinary family man who is so desperate for money that he agrees to participate in a deadly television game show. The deal is that he will win a fortune if he survives for 30 days, but in the meantime he will be chased all over the US by highly trained killers. Wright told Entertainment Weekly that he hopes his film “is both entertaining and powerful in equal measure. I think, as science fiction, it’s disturbingly relevant to where we’re at today. Maybe more timely than we’d like, or that we could even imagine.”
Released internationally from 6 to 14 November
2. Nuremberg
When the Nuremberg war crime trials began after World War Two, the Nazi defendants were interviewed by US psychiatrists to determine whether they were mentally fit to take the stand. The most significant of these defendants was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. In James Vanderbilt’s historical drama, adapted from a novel by Jack El-Hai, Rami Malek plays Douglas Kelley, the chief psychiatrist, and Russell Crowe plays the unrepentant Göring, who hopes to bluff his way out of the death penalty. Michael Shannon and Richard E Grant co-star as the US and British officers who ensured that the trials went ahead, but Malek and Crowe are the film’s magnetic centre. Nuremberg is “a remarkable feat of film-making and acting”, says Pete Hammond in Deadline. “This is a fascinating and urgently important story that has not been told on film before… [and] these two Oscar-winning actors go toe to toe in a thrilling chess match.”
Released on 7 November in the US, 14 November in the UK and Ireland, and 27 November in New Zealand
3. Sentimental Value
The Worst Person in the World (2021) was one of the most adored films of recent years. Chronicling several years in a young woman’s life in Oslo, it was a sparkling Norwegian comedy drama starring Renate Reinsve and directed by Joachim Trier. Now the team has reunited for Sentimental Value. Reinsve plays a successful actress, and Stellan Skarsgård plays her father, an egotistical director who hopes to revive his ailing career by signing her up for his next film. When she refuses, he hires a Hollywood star (Elle Fanning) to take her place, which complicates their fraught relationship even further. “Trier has once again crafted a film that is graceful and limber, thoughtful and surprising,” says Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. “Sentimental Value is another rich and humane look at existence from a film-maker wise to the endless nuance of being a person in the world.”
Released on 7 November in the US
4. Die, My Love
In Die, My Love, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson play Grace and Jackson, a passionately devoted young couple who move to a secluded house in the countryside, not far from where Jackson’s parents live. When they’re not tearing each other’s clothes off, Grace and Jackson have the time to focus on their writing and their music without any distractions, so it sounds like a dream scenario. But beware, the film is directed by Lynne Ramsay, the maker of We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here, which means that the dream could well become a nightmare. Sure enough, once Grace has a baby, and Jackson starts working away from home for days at a time, Grace spirals into frustrated fury. “Working with co-writers Alice Birch and Enda Walsh, Ramsay has crafted a work that is both intimate and unsettling – a portrait of a woman unravelling beneath the weight of expectation” says Linda Marric in HeyUGuys.
Released on 7 November in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland
5. Jay Kelly
George Clooney’s latest role isn’t much of a stretch: he’s playing a handsome and charming Hollywood superstar who has been in a stack of much-loved films. There are a few differences between the actor and the character of Jay Kelly, though. Clooney himself always seems content with his career and life choices, whereas in this bittersweet comedy drama from Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale), Jay has a crisis of confidence when his mentor dies. Adam Sandler is Oscar-worthy as Jay’s long-suffering manager, who accompanies him on a train journey through Europe, while Clooney himself “gives one of his finest performances”, says Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. “A very cleverly crafted screenplay, co-written by Baumbach and British actor-writer Emily Mortimer, balances the in-jokes with perceptive observations about status anxiety, the vapidity of celebrity culture, and the fragility of family ties.”
Released on 14 November in US and UK cinemas, and on 5 December on Netflix internationally
6. Left-Handed Girl
Sean Baker made Anora, the winner of this year’s Academy Award for best feature film. So far, he hasn’t revealed what he’ll be directing next, but he has co-written, produced and edited Left-Handed Girl, which is directed and co-written by his regular producer, Shih-Ching Tsou. Like their earlier collaboration, Tangerine, the whole film was shot on iPhones. It’s a vibrant family drama about a single mother (Janel Tsai) who moves back to buzzing Taipei with her two daughters (Shih-Yuan Ma, Nina Ye) after years of living in the countryside. Left-Handed Girl is “an assured and lovely portrait of difficult motherhood and painful daughterhood”, says Jessica Kiang in Variety. “It takes quite some skilful direction to keep each strand as propulsive and engaging as the next, but Tsou toggles between the different perspectives with a juggler’s grace, showing deep compassion for her characters even when they have none for each other.”
Released on 14 November in US and UK cinemas, and on 28 November on Netflix internationally
7. Wicked: For Good
Initially, it seemed like a strange idea to split the Wicked musical into two separate films, but it turned out to be a stroke of genius. The first Wicked was the fifth biggest cinema hit of 2024, so the second part, Wicked: For Good, should cast a spell on the box office, too. A revisionist prequel to The Wizard of Oz, the film includes the origin stories of Dorothy’s companions, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion, but the main attraction is that Elphaba and Glinda, the two witches played by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, both have new songs which weren’t in the Broadway show. “I’m so grateful for that [new] song, because she deserves it as a character,” Grande said in Empire. “We get to see [Glinda] decide, ‘I’m going to change the course of Oz. I’m going to become deeply, truly good and make a safe space for people’.”
Released from 17 to 21 November internationally
8. The Secret Agent
Like the Oscar-winning I’m Still Here, The Secret Agent depicts life under Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship in the 1970s. But while Walter Salles’s film was a restrained and sensitive drama, Kleber Mendonça Filho has made a sprawling, stylish and sometimes surreal thriller. Wagner Moura stars as a mild-mannered academic who makes the mistake of standing up to a greedy politician. Two hitmen are on his trail, but before he can flee the country, he has to hide in the city of Recife during the chaos of Carnival week. “A film which brilliantly captures the fear and sheer ridiculousness of a lawless state, The Secret Agent is vicious and vivid in its sense of place and danger,” says Dave Calhoun in Time Out. “But it also has a streak of weirdness and offers a very human take on the political-crime thriller genre.”
Released on 26 November in the US
9. Zootopia/ Zootropolis 2
Nine years on from Disney’s Zootopia (or Zootropolis, as it was renamed in the UK), it’s time to return to a world populated by talking animals, where a sly fox (Jason Bateman) and an eager rabbit (Ginnifer Goodwin) work together as police detectives. The first film was one of Disney’s cleverest comedies, both in its social commentary and its jokes (the driving licence centre is staffed by infuriatingly slow sloths, of course), so hopes are high for a sequel which answers an intriguing question: why were there no reptiles in Zootopia? “The only real way to tell that story is historically,” the film’s writer and co-director, Jared Bush, says in The Wrap. “The idea of going into history was something that we were always excited about, even while building the first film. We have literally thousands of years of history that we figured out to make the first movie that’s all super compelling and fun. You just didn’t see it.”
Released on 26 November internationally
10. Eternity
Eternity is a romantic comedy with a heavenly high concept. When an old woman named Joan dies, she becomes her younger self (Elizabeth Olsen) in the afterlife. She then learns that she has to choose which kind of paradise to exist in until the end of time – a beachside resort, perhaps, or a decadent nightclub. More importantly, she has to choose whether to spend eternity with her dependable husband Larry (Miles Teller), who was married to her for decades, or her dashing first love, Luke (Callum Turner), who was killed 60 years earlier, and has been waiting for her in the afterlife ever since. Eternity is “a chaotic and winsome comedy that’s heartwarming fun”, says Kristy Puchko in Mashable. “The conflicts between two kinds of romantic love, and the two robust love interests on offer, make for exciting tension. The wild spin of their stories leads to moments silly, sexy, and warm… The result is a romcom that’s smart, sensational, and swoon-worthy.”
Released on 26 November in the US, 28 November in Turkey and Taiwan, and 12 December in the UK and Ireland
11. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Daniel Craig puts on his tailored suit and his extravagant Southern accent once again for the third of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out whodunnits. The setting this time is a country church in upstate New York. The new deputy priest (Josh O’Connor) clashes with a fire-and-brimstone preacher (Josh Brolin) and various hostile parishioners, including a church warden (Glenn Close), a loyal groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church) and a struggling author (Andrew Scott). When their disagreements culminate in a mysterious locked-room murder, it’s clearly a job for the world’s best detective, Benoit Blanc. But will Blanc’s staunch rationalism be challenged by the story’s miraculous mysteries? “With its Gothic atmosphere and deeper themes, Wake Up Dead Man has a darker tone than the previous Knives Out films,” says the BBC’s Caryn James. “Yet it is also the funniest and most playful so far… With more assurance than ever, [Johnson] walks a perfectly balanced line as he borrows old tropes and adapts them.”
Released on 26 November in US cinemas, 28 November in UK cinemas, and on 12 December on Netflix internationally
12. Hamnet
William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596. Shortly afterwards, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, a powerful exploration of grief with a title that echoes his son’s name. Did the Bard pour his own deepest feelings into the play? This is the premise of Maggie O’Farrell’s extraordinary novel, Hamnet, which has now been made into a drama by Chloe Zhao, the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland. Jess Buckley plays Agnes – as Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway is addressed in the film – and Paul Mescal plays the ambitious Will. Hamnet is an “emotionally pulverising drama”, says David Ehrlich in IndieWire. “And yet the violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.”
Released on 26 November in the US