20 Movies We’re Excited to See at the 2026 Fall Festivals

Fall festival season is here, which means three whole months of movies, movies, movies. Many are jockeying for awards positioning, many are seeking a buyer, and others might not travel behind their festival berths. But with the hundreds of titles — literally, as TIFF has almost 300 when you count the shorts — coming down the pipe, more than a few of these will certainly find their way to the Oscar stage or at least onto critics best-of-the-year lists. Maybe even the box office Top 10.

We tried our best not to repeat too much from our recent fall preview of confirmed theatrical new releases, but inevitably, some overlap is expected, as movies from Lance Oppenheim’s “To Catch a Predator” drama “Primetime” to Martin McDonagh’s Oscar-eyeing “Wild Horse Nine” are already the talk of the town for festival attendees and regular moviegoers. And neither has even screened publicly yet.

The fall festival season kicks off in earnest on Wednesday, September 2 with the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” a Netflix-headed bio-drama about the early days of Rupert Burdoch’s The Sun tabloid newspaper. Meanwhile, the Telluride Film Festival launches this Friday with its annually secret lineup of new movies in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. You can use the powers of deductive reasoning to calculate which of the below films is definitely going to screen in Telluride, but per usual, we won’t know the slate until Thursday.

Then, the Toronto International Film Festival starts up in Canada on September 10 with its enormous slate of movies, opening with the world premiere of the stage-based #MeToo drama “Prima Facie,” followed by the New York Film Festival on September 25, which hosts the North American premiere of James Gray’s acclaimed Cannes entry “Paper Tiger.”

Also, to note: We eschewed including movies below that previously premiered at other festivals.

Kate Erbland, Brent Lang, Marcus Jones, Brian Welk, and Christian Zilko contributed to this story.