This month’s a houseful of dynamite with new films from Nia DaCosta and Kathryn Bigelow plus the new show from the team behind I Think You Should Leave and a series inspired by a notorious cover-up.
Check out the super-trailer above for a wide view of all the big films and shows hitting streaming services this October. See below for the six big highlights of the month.
Hedda
Writer-director Nia DaCosta, who’s helming next year’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, presents a new take on Henrik Ibsen’s classic play Hedda Gabler. Tessa Thompson, who led DaCosta’s 2018 feature debut Little Woods, plays the titular character, a role considered to be as meaty as Hamlet in the theatre world, as she wriggles and writhes through one party-fuelled night of romantic entanglements, pent-up desires, and brutal betrayals.
A House of Dynamite
You know you’re in for a winning Netflix film when the streaming giant chooses to give it a cinema release. Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director behind certified stress-inducers The Hurt Locker and Detroit, helms this war room thriller centred on the unfortunate souls who must respond quickly to an incoming, unattributed missile launched at the United States. Think Fail-Safe, or the second-to-last episode of Paradise: Season 1.
The Chair Company
2025 is the year of the Tim Robinson, it seems. After making audiences cringe into a ball of flesh and bones a few months ago with Friendship, he and the team behind I Think You Should Leave conjure this new HBO comedy series that stars Robinson as an everyday, shirt-n-tie office man who takes it upon himself to investigate a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top (maybe).
Murdaugh: Death in the Family
Whether you’ve seen one of the many documentaries on the Murdaugh murder scandal or have no clue about this wealthy South Carolina family, this dramatised account of a devious dynasty will likely put its hooks into you from episode one. Patricia Arquette and Jason Clarke play the mother and father central to a story about tragedy, cover-ups, entitlement, and deception triggered by their teenage son’s reckless acts.
The Lost Bus
Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera lead this no-time-to-waste thriller from Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips) loosely based on a true story of a bus driver’s harrowing mission to get a vehicle full of kids away from a devastating wildfire. Flicks’ Luke Buckmaster felt the heat, relaying how “some of the visuals reminded me of jaw-dropping footage from the 2019 Australian bushfires, captured from inside a fire truck whooshing through walls of red and orange: a sight so dramatic and terrible, so outside most of our lived experiences, it looks almost unreal.”
Burden of Dreams (4K remaster)
If you’ve never heard Werner Herzog pontificating about the cacophony of murder that the birds bellow from the jungles he shot his jaw-droppingly ambitious 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, you simply haven’t experienced life. Filmmaking legend Les Blank captured the miracles and the madness of Herzog’s creation as it happened, and now you can experience it in 4K thanks to DocPlay.
