Staying Fit
(Left to right) Eddie Murphy in "Candy Cane Lane," Timothée Chalamet in "Wonka" and Fantasia Barrino in "The Color Purple."
Claudette Barius/Prime Video; Jaap Buittendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures; Warner Bros. Pictures
Holiday season means movie season as much as it means balsam firs and hot chocolate. Hollywood rolls out the big flicks it’s betting the ranch on, so there’s more than a Santa’s sackful of promising films with great stars and directors between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, including Eddie Murphy’s first Christmas comedy, Julia Roberts’ tech-apocalypse epic, George Clooney’s heroic 1936 Olympics biopic and the haunting Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. Mark your calendars and settle in!
Maestro (In select theaters Nov. 22, on Netflix Dec. 20)
Bradley Cooper dazzlingly embodies conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein, and Carey Mulligan is even better as his Broadway star wife. From their first magical flirtation to their big fight scene (as a giant Snoopy from the Thanksgiving parade passes by their fab Manhattan apartment window), they capture two lives well — if tumultuously — lived.
AARP Membership— $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal
Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine.
May December (in select theaters, on Netflix Dec. 1)
Gracie (Julianne Moore, 62), was jailed for sex with young Joe (Charles Melton, 32). Now they’re married and about to send their teens off to college, and TV star Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) is going to play Gracie in a movie, so they let her live with and study them way too intimately.
Leave the World Behind (in limited theaters, on Netflix Dec. 8)
Producers Barack and Michelle Obama present a thriller about a couple (Julia Roberts, 57, and Ethan Hawke, 53), their ritzy Airbnb host (Mahershala Ali) and a doomsday prepper (Kevin Bacon, 65) whose paranoia seems appropriate as a cyberattack devastates America. They’re on their own — but will they turn on each other?
Candy Cane Lane (on Prime Video Dec. 1)
Eddie Murphy, 62, plays a Southern California dad so determined to win his neighborhood’s holiday home decoration contest, he makes a deal with an elf whose magic spell brings the 12 days of Christmas to life. Result? Chaos and comedy.
Poor Things (in theaters Dec. 8)
In a bizarre update of Frankenstein, a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe, 68) reanimates a dead woman (Emma Stone), at first with a grownup’s body and the brain of a baby.
The Zone of Interest (in theaters Dec. 8)
The year’s most-buzzed-about foreign actress, Sandra Hüller, plays the “Queen of Auschwitz,” the wife of Nazi commander Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who tends to her kids in an Edenic garden lit by the crematoria yards away.
American Fiction (in theaters Dec. 15)
In a barbed comedy that’s also a heartwarming drama, curmudgeonly professor and author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright, 58) writes a book satirizing every urban gangsta stereotype he hates. He’s aghast when it becomes a bestseller with a zillion-dollar movie deal, as he struggles to find a nursing home for his mom (Leslie Uggams, 80), who has dementia.
More From AARP
The Ultimate Winter Movie Preview Guide
See the best films coming to screens big and small
Welcome Back to Rom-Coms, Meg Ryan!
Her directing debut, ‘What Happens Later,’ is great for grownupsWhat You Need to Know to Watch ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
Find out the facts behind Martin Scorsese’s must-see movie