With its knitted jumpers, corduroy blazers and Central Park walks against a kaleidoscope of yellow and orange leaves, this is the ultimate autumn film. Snuggle up for Nora Ephron’s best jokes and Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal’s famed love story.
This Wes Anderson stop-motion adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic is quite grown-up (your little ones might find Boggis, Bunce and Bean’s antics a bit too scary) but it is also quirky, charming and features an impressive cast, including the voice of Jarvis Cocker.
Ah, the 90s, an era when Hollywood embraced cosy witchcraft. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are sisters living with an ancestral love curse. This a road-trip drama about modern spellcraft for Halloween lovers who don’t actually like being scared.
The whole franchise lends itself to an afternoon in front of the television with a fire going, but this one, with Sirius Black and the Dementors, is probably the best. Director Alfonso Cuarón took over from Chris Columbus with this one, and it shows in the aesthetics (less uniform, more grown-up cinematography) and the plot, with burgeoning adolescence and some real emotional shocks.
This whimsical love story about a lonely young woman in Montmartre, and her penchant for helping eccentric strangers find happiness, remains a real charmer. Audrey Tautou brings unforgettable flair to the main part and Paris has never looked prettier.
The four March sisters become women as they navigate genteel poverty in Massachusetts amid New England’s stunning autumnal landscapes and the various challenges of class, sexism and potential romances with the wrong people. Winona Ryder is brilliantly spirited as Jo in this adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott novel and Kirsten Dunst does a great angry face as young Amy.
Many didn’t think anything could compete with the 1994 classic, but Greta Gerwig’s remake offers something entirely different. Gerwig rejigs the timeline to put a greater emphasiss on Jo’s writing career and toys with our expectations of what might happen and why. It is a clever stab at autofiction as well as a warm, generous film, full of love for the sisterhood.
Robin Williams is the ultimate inspirational teacher as he encourages his privileged and misunderstood students at a Vermont boarding school to pursue their dreams and rebel against authority by reading classic poetry in a cave at night. The expression “carpe diem” has never been the same since.
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s break-out film (writing and starring in it) is another New England classic, with hard-up cleaner and secret maths whizz Will impressing MIT professors by solving their blackboard challenges when no student can. The most memorable scenes are those with Robin Williams (again) as Will’s therapist.
This cosy crime franchise (a sequel is out in December and a third is due, too) is the Richard Osman of cinema. This closed-circle murder mystery in a Massachusetts mansion has a starry line-up of suspects and a strong sense that, even though someone died a brutal death, all is in fact well. Daniel Craig is magnificent as the absurd New Orleans private detective Benoit Blanc.
Brad Pitt in his prime as one of three ranch-owning brothers living in the wilderness in Montana in the early 20th century, against the backdrop of war and Prohibition. It’s an American epic, with a dose of British gravitas: Julia Ormond and Anthony Hopkins also star.
There’s a starry new musical version coming out next month, but this one, directed by Danny DeVito, and starring eight-year-old Mara Wilson as the eponymous bookworm, captures the seditious spirit of Roald Dahl’s book and is a great choice for telly en famille.
A film that actually lost money when it was first released but has since become a cult classic. Bette Middler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy are the 17th-century witches inadvertently resurrected by some trick-or-treating kids. Gloriously camp silliness.
A coming-of-age story and kinda-rom-com, this provided Julia Roberts with one of her earliest roles. It is a sweet story of friends and sisters working out love in their twenties, with an undemanding watchability.
This emotional triumph from Pixar tells the story of Princess Merida, a feisty heir to the throne in medieval Scotland, who accidentally turns her mother into a bear (yes, really). Deserves to be as loved and rewatched as its close animations-do-feminism cousin, Frozen.
Perhaps the greatest movie musical and certainly one of the all-time greatest films, this features Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor dancing, singing and joking away in a story that lampoons Hollywood during the emergence of the “talkies”.
Julia Roberts is the only actual liberal at the liberal arts school Wellesley College in the 50s. She encourages her conservative female students to aspire to more than marriage and babies and teaches modern art instead of Michelangelo, to the outrage of Kirsten Dunst’s stuffy student, Betty.
Perhaps Woody Allen’s best film, this Oscar winner follows intertwined family dramas over a two-year period beginning and ending with Thanksgiving dinner. With a zippy script and a warm heart.
Make yourself a nice clafoutis and settle down to watch this ode to French cuisine penned and directed by Nora Ephron. Meryl Streep plays the American TV chef and author Julia Child before she was well-known; Amy Adams is the blogger who decides to make a Julia Child recipe every day and write about it. Scrumptious.
Harvard in the fall, with a twist. Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is a Californian sorority girl who loves manicures, pink and her boyfriend Warren. So much so that she gets herself into Harvard Law School to win him back after he dumps her for not being serious enough. Bend and snap, ladies!
Russell Crowe is terrific in this biopic of the lauded mathematician John Nash, whose paranoid delusions were eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Brimming with Ivy League splendour; a charismatic turn from Paul Bettany, too.
This fantasy adventure is a go-to comfort watch for many Gen X-ers. The love story of Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) and farmhand Westley (Cary Elwes) is as iconic (“As you wish”) as its many other weird and wonderful characters: Spanish swordsman Iñigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), Sicilian villain Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) and a repugnant Billy Crystal inflicting underwhelming torture devices as Miracle Max.
College graduates navigating real life (badly) while having a pint or two could easily be a yawn fest, but with Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore at the helm, it is anything but. This is a classic of the Brat Pack genre, with a strangely unlikeable ensemble who nonetheless capture something mesmerisingly vital about that transitory stage of life.
This 90s reboot of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has cheeky rebel Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) seducing ballsy Julia Stiles’s Kat with high-school band renditions of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and romantic paintballing.
A cosy horror? You bet. Director and writer Edgar Wright brings his Shaun of the Dead magic – and team, including Simon Pegg and Nick Frost – to the buddy cop genre. This investigation into local am-dram murders will have you guffawing and admiring the spectacular Somerset scenery simultaneously.
A tearjerker about a divorced, dying mum (Susan Sarandon) coming to terms with the woman who will look after her children when she is gone (Julia Roberts). Lots of autumn feels, with the brown and yellow leaves of Central Park and some excellent tweed.
A beautifully restrained adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet on top form trying to find appropriate suitors as sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Alan Rickman is, inexplicably, playing the guy no one thinks of as first choice.
A glorious day of teenage wish fulfilment as high-school charmer Ferris (Matthew Broderick) skips school and takes to the town in a Ferrari with his best bud Cameron (Alan Ruck) and girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara).
A bit syrupy for critics, this nonetheless remains a favourite for many at this time of year. A man (Keanu Reeves) and woman (Charlize Theron) decide to spend a month together, no strings attached. Except one of them is dying and they didn’t count on falling in love.
An exquisitely shot indictment of 50s mores that follows the blossoming romance of a well-off widow (Jane Wyman) and her much younger gardener (Rock Hudson), of whom her country club friends and children don’t approve.
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