Good morning. Hurricane Isaias made landfall last night as a Category 2 storm, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. We’ve got details on that below, but we’re starting with a look at fall movie season. Let’s dive in.
Screen timeThat moment in a movie theater when the lights go down is such a sacred threshold. When the chattering and fidgeting fade and the crowd goes silent, there’s a feeling of shared anticipation, like we’re all embarking on an exciting trip. That experience was amplified last week when I was in an audience of more than 1,000 people for a screening of the new documentary “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall.” The film features Winter, the dazzlingly talented 24-year-old singer-songwriter and frontman of the band Geese, alone at the piano and singing. The performance was, as my colleague Lindsay Zoladz wrote, “utterly magical.” But equally magical for me was the experience of seeing a movie with that many people, in this case at Lincoln Center during the New York Film Festival. A bunch of strangers agreeing to be silent and focused on a screen as a communal activity — so rare in an age when we’re so frequently staring at our own personal screens. Fall always lures me to the theater, a combination of the awards-season deluge of exciting films and a formative adolescent memory of emerging from a matinee of “Stand by Me” and noticing the changing October light. As I do each year, I’ve made a list of what I want to see, a sort of cinematic advent calendar. October alone could sate even the most insatiable cinephile. This weekend, one could do a technology double feature, with Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” his follow-up to the 2010 Facebook thriller “The Social Network,” and the four-hour documentary “Musk,” about the world’s richest man. I’m also interested in the Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as a conservative couple who are accused of abusing their children. Our critic Alissa Wilkinson told me it’s great and “provocative on purpose.” If you’d prefer not to be provoked, or provoked in a different way, next weekend brings the arrival of a new adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” starring Daisy Edgar-Jones. There are also two exciting nonfiction films coming Oct. 16: “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” about a 1972 party at Duke Ellington’s apartment that reunited leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and “You Can See Everything,” the buzzy, three-hour documentary about the founder of the fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos, from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. On Oct. 23, “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” opens, a thriller starring John Turturro as an aging thief who gets mixed up with a dangerous crime family. “Small New York films don’t always get made anymore,” Alissa noted, praising this one’s fidelity to the geography of the city. There’s also Taika Waititi’s “Klara and the Sun,” based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, whose trailer is creepily compelling. It’s about an A.I. companion, played by Jenna Ortega. If you prefer your fantasies more fantastical, “Wicker” stars Olivia Colman as a medieval fisherwoman who commissions a local basket-maker to weave her a husband. The husband is played by Alexander Skarsgard; as soon as I learned this, I could not conceive of anyone more perfect to play a person made from woven plant fibers. And there are more films to look forward to later in the year — “Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall” opens on Nov. 20.
The storm’s eye came ashore about 8:30 p.m. Central time on Friday near Destin, Fla., lashing the Gulf Coast with heavy rains and howling winds that toppled trees and flooded highways. Follow our live coverage here. It landed with maximum sustained winds of 105 miles per hour as a Category 2 hurricane, but dropped quickly over the next half-hour to a Category 1, with winds of 85 m.p.h. By early this morning, it had downgraded further to a post-tropical cyclone. At one point on Friday, the storm had reached Category 3 status. Read about the science behind its rapid intensification. Isaias is the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2026 season, which has been relatively quiet partly because of a powerful El Niño. And it is the first hurricane in two years to strike the mainland United States. More on the storm:
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Chicago White Sox vs. Cleveland Guardians, Game 5: There’s probably no Major League Baseball team having more fun than the White Sox. They have one player who swears that ice cream cones are good luck, another who wears a wizard hat in the dugout, and the whole team dances before games. It’s strange, but apparently effective: No other team in baseball history has emerged as a playoff contender after three straight 100-loss seasons. (The South Side squad really was the laughingstock of baseball a few short years ago.) Now, the White Sox are on the road for a do-or-die American League division series game against the Cleveland Guardians, whose offense proved dominant earlier this week. The winner will head to the semifinals; the loser will be done for the year. First pitch is tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern. — Matthew Cullen
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