The best movies, autumn 2023: Martin Scorsese, Ken Loach and Joanna Hogg flood the season

Luca Guadagnino was meant to release his anticipated ménage-à-trois drama Challengers in September, but the strikes in the US have forced its postponement to next year. No need to fret: Ira Sachs’s new film Passages fills that erotic, triangular gap. And unlike many movies with a similar premise, the one who engages both parties is not a woman but a man.

Ben Whishaw and Franz Rogowski play Parisian couple Martin and Tomas, whose marriage is thrown into crisis mode. Tomas begins a passionate affair with schoolteacher Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), causing a furious blend of jealousy, love and intimacy – especially as Martin follows suit and embarks on his own affair.

Time doesn’t kill our former selves, it merely separates them. Depending on their significance, retrospective stages of our lives communicate with the present. You feel that nostalgic reverberation in the premise of Celine Song’s debut Past Lives, which, like Davy Chou’s remarkable Return to Seoul, fixates on different periods of a character’s life in relation to their sense of identity.

The film starts with Moon Seung-ah as a kid in South Korea, developing a crush on her schoolmate Hae Sung. Suddenly, those feelings are ripped apart when Seung-ah’s family moves to Toronto; her name changing to Nora in the process. Several years later, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reconnect via Skype. And several years after that – when she becomes a successful playwright in New York – they meet face to face. The eerieness of Nora's shapeshifting life manifests and augments in this one man, this reminder of her lost lives.

Whenever filmmakers announce their retirement, don’t take them too seriously. Octogenarian director Ken Loach made such a claim after his last film Sorry We Missed You, but four years later he’s back with another politically resonant Northern-based drama.

Set in a former mining village in County Durham, The Old Oak sees the declining community struggling after its old values crumble in favour of anger and resentment. This bubbles to the surface when a group of Syrian refugees arrive to occupy the cheap houses. But when pub owner TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) makes friends with refugee and aspiring photographer Yara (Ebla Mari), they hope to assuage the local prejudices.

You will probably know Mary Harron best for directing American Psycho, a fascinating adaptation of the gross and controversial novel by Bret Easton Ellis. Harron’s latest film Dalíland tackles another problematic though much less sinister man: Salvador Dalí, the defining surrealist of the 20^th century.

Sir Ben Kingsley plays Dalí in this latter stage of his life and career, navigating the art and social scenes of the 1970s, in particular: his tempestuous but essential marriage to Gala Dalí (Barbara Sukowa), who’s in charge of the business side. Viewed from the perspective of young assistant James (Christopher Briney), the film drops into Dalí’s preparations for a big gallery show in 1974.

Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, together at last. They’re an ideal Irish pairing, a dream cast for Lion director Garth Davis’s latest project. A claustrophobic adaptation of the novel by Iain Reid (I’m Thinking of Ending Things), Foe follows a disrupted marriage in a dystopian future.

In 2065, the mysterious G-man Terrance (Aaron Pierre) visits a secluded farmland belonging to married couple Junior (Mescal) and Henrietta (Ronan). He's armed with a divisive proposal: offering Junior the chance to join a new space program, the purpose of which is to ease the transition away from a dying Earth. The film squeezes into the couple's conversations around whether Junior should leave behind his family farm with the hope of finding some kind of future.

Melding the theatrics of Sergio Leone, the oil-drenched capitalism of There Will Be Blood and the Native American antagonism of Hostiles, Martin Scorsese’s first Western looks to provide a scathing, bullet-ridden experience.

Stretching to three-and-a-half hours, Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the non-fiction book by David Grann – investigating a series of murders in Osage County, Oklahoma in the 1920s. After the local Native Americans become rich from the oil they’ve found in the area, white interlopers swarm in to take advantage. The film also reunites Scorsese with his classic leading man Robert De Niro (Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Irishman) as well as his more recent star Leonardo DiCaprio (The Aviator, The Wolf of Wall Street).

Photo: Mubi

Shortly after shooting Charlotte Regan’s brilliant British film Scrapper, cinematographer Molly Manning Walker now upgrades to directing. Blessed with a decent opening at this year's Cannes Film Festival, her feature debut How to Have Sex won the Un Certain Regard award.

Treading that dark and vulnerable threshold of virginity and its loss as a young woman, the film shows a gaggle of teenage girls diving into clubs, parties and youthful hedonism in the Mediterranean. Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce) aims to lose her virginity on this trip, but her complete lack of experience enhances the pressure. The journey spirals into deep questions about sexual consent, societal expectations and female friendships.

In-depth analysis of ambiguous crimes is now a cultural industry, inspiring battalions of armchair detectives to concoct their own theories. Like the HBO true-crime drama The Staircase (and many others of its kind), Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winning drama Anatomy of a Fall thoroughly examines a bloody incident in the French Alps. Thankfully, this is a fictional affair, so you can enjoy the story without a guilty conscience.

German novelist Sandra (Sandra Hüller), her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) and their 11-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado Graner) live in the snow-swept seclusion of the mountains. But when Samuel topples over the edge of their chalet, and is killed on impact, Sandra is arrested for suspected murder – though suicide is also possible. When the visually impaired Daniel is called to the witness stand, the court is given a complex, psychological view of his parents’ relationship.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon Bonaparte, starring alongside Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman) as the emperor’s great love Josephine. The film traces Napoleon's origins and swift ascension to power via his toxic and passionate relationship with Josephine. All the Money in the World screenwriter David Scarpa tackles the script.

It’s safe to assume that a ghost story directed by Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir) won’t be your bog-standard bump in the night. The Eternal Daughter possesses a classic gothic vibe, but maintains the director’s familiar staples like memory, self-reflection and autobiography within a mother-daughter drama.

Tilda Swinton is no stranger to playing multiple characters in one movie – as with Luca Guadagnino’s underrated remake of Suspiria – and The Eternal Daughter sees her playing both parent and child. Filmmaker Julie (Swinton) takes her mother Rosalind (also Swinton) to stay at the Flintshire hotel Moel Famau, intending to talk about her latest project. In their conversations, under the roof of an eerie and foggy residence haunted by its past, buried secrets between mother and daughter rise to the surface.