The Cine Files: from Demi Moore in The Substance to Strange Darling, here are September's best films

New month, new films. And there’s plenty to choose from. If you don’t like buckets of blood and horror , or courtroom tension, fear not: gentle Iranian drama My Favourite Cake, just out, is one of the films of the year.

If you do like it scary (appropriately, for the run-up to Hallowe’en), September is stuffed with some shockingly good arthouse treats. Here’s our pick of the best.

Film of the month: The Substance

Forget film of the month, this is the best of the year (so far). That’s as long as you love body horror and are happy to indulge in screen after screen of blood and mutant severed limbs.

A self-confessed fan of David Cronenberg , Coralie Fargeat has taken that master’s gory-gooey aesthetic and amped it up to the delirious max. And just when you think she can’t possibly go any further, along comes an even bigger tsunami of twitching, writhing flesh. It’s Cronenberg on crack.

Demi Moore (brilliant and bold, showing off her 61-year-old ass) plays ageing Elisabeth Sparkle, one-time Hollywood starlet now holding on for grim death to her Jane Fonda-esque workout goddess TV glory. About to crush any faint hope she has is Dennis Quaid’s gloriously OTT producer, who’s ready to hurl her onto the trash heap in favour of a fresh, nubile sex bomb.

Then chance leads Elisabeth to the secretive, mysterious “Substance”, a treatment which promises to renew her to her best, youthful self – but better. It’s a spine-splitting, eye-popping “birthing” of this wonder version of Elisabeth, who appears in the form of Sue ( Margaret Qualley ). The only catch: Elisabeth and Sue have to alternate, spending one week alive, the next seven days as a carcass in Elisabeth’s bathroom. Any divergence from this routine and things may well get bloody.

Naturally, Sue is going to revel in being the young, adored Elisabeth to the power of 10. And, of course, Elisabeth will absolutely rage with jealousy seeing Sue in the spotlight. And, oh boy oh boy, do things go wrong.

As a satire on the fate of older women among the horny Tinseltown patriarchy, it’s fairly basic. And there’s little in the way of complexity or cerebral, erm, substance (if you want that, look elsewhere). But as a pulsing, pumping blitzkrieg of pure entertainment, this is a never-ending blast.

Fargeat does grotesque deliciously, and in every way. Besides the gore, her extreme close-ups of Quaid chowing hideously through a plate of prawns is equally disturbing. And everything is delivered with hyper-vivid chutzpah and a grinding, twisted head-storm of a techno soundtrack.

It all ends way beyond where you could dare imagine it might end, in a riotously insane (and hilarious) torrent of blood the likes of which you might never have witnessed before. A sledgehammer parable for the Ozempic generation, this, with all confidence, is an instant classic.

In cinemas September 20

The movies you should see this month

Red Rooms

The darkest corners of the dark web? In urban myth (thankfully they most likely don’t exist*), these are so-called “red rooms”, where customers pay to watch live-streamed torture and murder. Hence the title of this film.

However, instead of a blood-spattered dungeon of horror, Canadian Pascal Plante sets much of this constantly edgy psychological chiller in an ice-white courtroom, where a man is on trial for three such atrocities against teenage girls.

The remainder plays out in the equally clinical apartment of Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a bitingly aloof model who, when not obsessively attending the trial, is deep in the entrails of the dark web. It’s whatever the hell Kelly-Anne is up to that keeps this guessing game toe-curlingly tense. Recalling the antiseptic aloofness of great Canadian directors like David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, this is surgery-sharp film-making.

September 6

My Favourite Cake

Iranian directing duo Maryam Moqadam and Behtash Sanaeeha have created one of the sweetest, most touching confections of the year. However, baked in is a sorrowful twist: strap in.

Seventy-year-old widow Mahin (wonderfully, endearingly played by Lili Farhadpour) has lived alone in Tehran for decades. After a delightfully, lightly hilarious rare dinner party at her home with elderly female friends (one of whom roars about her huge bowel polyps, while another offers to show her colonoscopy video), Mahin feels spurred on to remedy her romantic void.

Immediately she’s in the park on a manhunt, asking “where do the elderly men exercise?”, before showing her unorthodox mettle by confronting the morality police over arresting a girl who’s not wearing her hijab properly.

Soon, she’s inviting the first single pensioner she comes across (a taxi driver played by Esmail Mehrabi) into her home to share a colossal bottle of wine. What follows is an evening of pure, loving, ribald joy, including a shower scene to absolutely treasure. And even if that sour cookie hidden in the mix leaves a dissatisfied aftertaste in the mouth, this is still one of 2024’s loveliest films.

September 13

Strange Darling

In an overworked genre that’s overcrowded with hackneyed also-rans, JT Mollner has sliced, diced and trussed up one of the most unexpected, tightly wound serial killer thrillers of recent years.

Billed as “a thriller in six chapters”, we open with a female voice whispering, “Are you aserial killer?”, before bursting wildly into… chapter five, as a coke-snorting, shotgun-toting man (Kyle Gallner) speeds after a terrified woman (Willa Fitzgerald) in her car. The non-linear structure isn’t a Tarantino or Rashamon style gimmick, but a means to cleverly concealing the superbly meaty plot reveals.

There’s darkly deviant sex, plenty of seriously edgy cat and mouse games, but this is a film where the less you know beforehand, the better, because the uncoiling tension is a knuckle-clenching pleasure. Everything here is hair-trigger tight (the performances, the pared-back, noirish dialogue, the stabbing slabs of sound), with Giovanni Ribisi swapping acting for a debut director of photography role and shooting like an old-school master entirely in gorgeous 35mm. If morbid, icky serial killers aren’t your thing, this hard-boiled, ballsy refresh is the rush of blood you’ve been screaming out for.

September 20

The Goldman Case

The French radical intellectual Left! Antisemitism! Institutional racism! South American guerilla revolutionaries! It’s all here within the four walls of this massively engrossing and entertaining courtroom drama. Then there’s the larger-than-life personality and considerable insouciant wit of Pierre Goldman, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1974 for a series of armed robberies in Paris, including one in which two pharmacists were killed. In 1975 Goldman published a book pleading his innocence of the murders, leading to a retrial a year later, which is recreated here by Cédric Kahn.

Besides the hefty aforementioned subject matter, and hugely enthralling and riotous courtroom machinations, the star here is Goldman himself (played by Arieh Worthalter). Son of Polish-Jewish partisans who went on to fight for the French resistance, Goldman always wanted to be a revolutionary like them. He kind of did so, but ended up high-mindedly dismissing the far-Left Parisian uprising of 1968 and falling into a life of crime (“I was generous buying drinks. I liked nice shirts, but didn’t like washing them,” he says of needing the money).

Enormously charismatic, Goldman brazenly admits to being an armed robber, but refutes the murder charges. It was a cause célèbre for the French Left at the time, and now worldwide audiences get to relish a fascinating slice of history.

September 20

The films you might want to see this month

Starve Acre

The drab, well-worn corduroy fuzz of the Seventies is all over this, as are the unsettlingly occult proclivities of British yokels à la The Wicker Man. And like that other eerie classic of the era, Don’t Look Now, Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark experience tragedy with their young child. Only here the mist of Venice’s canals is replaced with the fog of the Yorkshire moors. A strange woman (who else?) comes to meddle with Clark’s grief, while archaeology professor Smith can’t stop digging in the mud at the roots of a remarkable oak tree on their remote farm. And then there’s a re-composing dead hare (very effective, actually).

Daniel Kokotajlo’s film (based on Andrew Michael Hurley’s book) feels like it was made 50 years ago and takes you right back to the bubbling cauldron of British folk horror’s heyday. While its tropes reek of déjà vu, it’s atmospherically unnerving at every turn. And if you forget the sense that you’ve seen it all before, a woman doing that particular thing (let’s say no more) with an animal is still quite the stomach-rippling scene.

September 6

In Camera

A striking, auteurial British directorial debut is always a welcome thing. Mancunian Naqqash Khalid (who also wrote the screenplay) even has the brass to namecheck himself early on. Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan, currently in Netflix’s Kaos ) is an “auditioning” actor, endlessly lining up with dozens of other Asian young men in surreal, soul-crushing castings for shit parts in brands campaigns.

While Aden’s journey through his specific identity (leading to increasingly disturbing assignments just so he can cover the rent) is the primary focus, Khalid also ranges his lens on the strange lot of modern twentysomething men in general. One of Aden’s flatmates is an exhausted, dislocated junior doctor with visions of bleeding hospitals, while the other is a super-calm yet equally displaced men’s style guru. Filmed with cold precision, proceedings enter the realm of very strange indeed, but this just might be too aloof and measured for some.

September 13

Also out this month

Tim Burton’s long-awaited sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (September 6) is finally here, but word from Venice is it ain’t that juicy.

An idyllic country house family holiday turns to psychological nightmare in Speak No Evil (September 12). The presence of James McAvoy is the big draw here.

Kate Winslet takes on the role of model turned war photographer Lee Miller in Lee (September 13). Alexander Skarsgård as her artist husband Roland Penrose adds extra appeal.

Patrick Marber wrote The Critic (September 13). That’s good. Even better, national tresh Sir Ian McKellen plays a London theatre critic caught up in a web of deceit, not least being gay when that was a crime.

“Lifeless, lumbered”, “Messy, self-indulgent”… Slammed at Cannes, yet because Megalopolis (September 27) is a Francis Ford Coppola film, fans might just feel a duty to go see.

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