20 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY ALVA SKOG
Family life is at the center of Eliza
Hittman’s third feature, “Never Rarely
Sometimes Always” (March 13), about
Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a seven-
teen-year-old high-school student
from a small Pennsylvania town who
discovers that she’s pregnant and, un-
able to get an abortion in the state
without parental consent, travels to
New York with a cousin (Talia Ryder)
for the procedure. The French drama
“The Truth” (March 20), the director
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature out-
side Japan, stars Catherine Deneuve
as an actress who writes a memoir and
Juliette Binoche as her daughter, who
returns to Paris for the book’s publi-
cation and disputes its claims. Ethan
Hawke co-stars.
Among the season’s most prom-
inent releases are adaptations from
earlier works, both literary and cine-
matic, including “Charm City Kings”
(April 10), a drama about Baltimore’s
dirt-bike culture, starring Teyonah
Parris, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, and the
musician Meek Mill. Ángel Manuel
Soto directed; Barry Jenkins co-wrote
the story, which is based on Lotfy Na-
than’s 2013 documentary “12 O’Clock
Boys.” Luca Marinelli stars in “Martin
Eden” (April 17), the Italian director
Pietro Marcello’s adaptation of Jack
London’s 1909 novel, about a poor
sailor and aspiring writer who falls
in love with a bourgeois woman and,
after becoming a socialist, comes into
conflict with her. Dev Patel stars in
“The Personal History of David Cop-
perfield” (May 8), an adaptation of
Charles Dickens’s novel, directed by
Armando Iannucci, who wrote the
script with Simon Blackwell. Peter
Capaldi co-stars as Mr. Micawber.
A wide range of historical subjects
will be spotlighted this spring in a va-
riety of genres. The journalist Andrea
Chalupa wrote “Mr. Jones” (April 3),
directed by Agnieszka Holland, based
on the true story of a Welsh journalist
(played by James Norton) who, in the
early nineteen-thirties, discovers the
Soviet Union’s extermination by famine
of Ukrainians—and finds his reports
denied by the regime’s American and
European sympathizers. Joseph Mawle
co-stars as George Orwell. Marjane Sa-
trapi directed “Radioactive” (April 24),
a bio-pic about Marie Curie, starring
Rosamund Pike, based on a graphic
novel by Lauren Redniss; Sam Riley
plays Pierre Curie. In “Antebellum”
(April 24), the first feature directed by
Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz
(who also co-wrote the script), Janelle
Monáe plays a writer who gets trapped
in an imaginary world of horror. Eric
Lange, Jena Malone, Kiersey Clemons,
and Gabourey Sidibe co-star.
Classic franchises will be getting
new workouts, as in “No Time to Die”
(April 8), the twenty-fifth film in the
James Bond franchise, starring Daniel
Craig in his final performance as 007.
It’s directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga,
who co-wrote the script with Phoebe
Waller-Bridge, Neal Purvis, and Robert
Wade; the cast includes Rami Malek,
Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Nao-
mie Harris, Christoph Waltz, Jeffrey
Wright, and Ralph Fiennes. Reese
Witherspoon returns as Elle Woods
in “Legally Blonde 3” (May 8), directed
by Jamie Suk and co-starring Alanna
Ubach and Jessica Cauffiel.
—Richard Brody
MOVIES
SPRING PREVIEW
Personal Problems, Political Crises