September 23, 2025, 3:19pm
Fall brings the end of the film festival circuit. It’s a time for cinephiles and film bros to rejoice and reflect. A time for Criterion Closet creeps and midnight movie goers to bust out their best merch, and make award predictions.
Every year the slates at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Telluride, Busan, Sundance, and the (currently running!) New York Film Festival offer a glimpse into the preoccupations guiding our foremost auteurs. But this being Lit Hub, our concern is the books. Here are some literary takeaways from all the indies angling for distribution deals this autumn.
Tessa Thompson in Hedda.
1. Plays get a glow up onscreen.
Literary adaptations have been cinema’s bread and butter as long as the second medium has existed. And to be sure, there are plenty of novels getting the celluloid treatment on screens small and large in 2025. Less common is the spate of plays we have to look forward to.
Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, starring Tessa Thompson, premiered as a special presentation at TIFF this summer. This adaptation of an Ibsen classic reimagines a bored Scandinavian newlywed into a lesbian love triangle and a whole lot of chaos. Bless up!
Riz Ahmed in Hamlet.
In other theatrical news, Riz Ahmed is playing a certain Danish prince in a new Hamlet, directed by Aneil Karia and written by Michael Lesslie. This trendy take, also starring Joe Alwyn, kicked off at Telluride.
And at NYFF, the animator-director Mamoru Hosoda offers a phantasmal riff on the same play. Scarlet is set in an animated Elsinore, and gender-flips the fussy prince. Don’t know about you, but I’m sliding on the opera gloves.
Julio Peña Fernández in The Captive.
2. Old timey author bio-pics are in.
Alejandro Amenábar’s The Captive launched at TIFF. The epic offers a dreamy, dramatic take on Miguel de Cervantes, the fella behind Don Quixote.
And in that same festival, Agnieszka Holland brought us Kafka, a biopic about your favorite clerk. This will be Poland’s entry for Best International Oscar.
Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley in Blue Moon.
3. Making art is tough.
Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon premiered at Berlin earlier this year. The cheeky biopic looks at the famous songwriter Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma! Ethan Hawke embodies the auteur as he frets and paces around Sardi’s in a creative tailspin.
Seems that Linklater’s got the market cornered this year when it comes to period pieces about making art. At Cannes, the director premiered Nouvelle Vague, a film about Jean Luc Godard and the making of his masterpiece, Breathless.
At NYFF, the German director Ulrich Köhler’s Gavagai also goes behind the scenes. The meta-movie is set on a troubled set where a team is struggling to adapt Euripides’ Medea.
And in the utterly invented art-about-art camp, a new indie from Kent Jones and Samy Burch (the screenwriter behind 2023’s perfect May December) stars Willem Dafoe as a has-been poet who falls in with a cool young downtown crowd and has to reap the consequences. Late Fame will also premiere at NYFF.
Benjamin Voisin and Rebecca Marder in L’etranger.
4. Odd adaptations are in.
In addition to the forthcoming Train Dreams, which premiered at Sundance this January, this year’s festival circuit brings a few more unlikely candidates for big screen treatment.
In Venice, François Ozon debuted a take on Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the notoriously philosophical text about a French Algerian settler and the myth of Sisyphus.
“The idea of adapting one of the most famous novels in world literature puts you in a state of anxiety and doubt,” Ozon said in a statement. “It was an immense challenge to adapt a masterpiece that everyone has read and that every reader has already staged in their own mind.” Well sure, I guess.
I’m still curious to see how we’ll be train dreaming. And running up that hill.
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice.
5. As are niche adaptations.
Oliver Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, which premiered in Venice, is adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s Le Mage du Kremlin. The film looks at a mysterious TV producer who fails up with “the czar.”
Cannes also saw several highbrow literary adaptations. Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of the Hills is based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel. And Lynne Ramsay’s intense-looking Die, My Love is an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s eponymous novel.
At TIFF, the 2025 Platform program picked up on an apparent thirst for dark, contempo-literary fare. Tim Mielants’ Steve is a reimagining of Max Porter’s novel, Shy. And Kasia Adamik’s Winter of the Crow is based on “Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw,” a short story by the Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk.
Paul Dano in The Wizard of the Kremlin.
In the TIFF Discovery program, we find Nadia Latif’s The Man in My Basement, based on a Walter Mosley novel of the same name. And Hafsia Herzi’s The Little Sister, an adaptation of Fatima Daas’s 2020 autofictional novel The Last One.
And in the special presentations category, Pablo Trapero and Sarah Polley’s & Sons is an adaptation of a David Gilbert novel by the same name.
Park Chan-Wook’s No Other Choice has been to Venice, and the Busan International Film Festival. The film isn’t a straight adaptation, but the director was inspired by a novel. “Some time ago, I read a novel called The Ax,” he told Italian audiences. “I picked it up because it was written by Donald E. Westlake, who wrote the novel behind Point Blank, one of my all-time favorite films.”
Happily, this tale of obsessive creation comes from a director with proven adaptive chops. Chan-Wook’s exquisite The Handmaiden put an elegant and erotic spin on a Sarah Waters novel.
Jonathan Bailey in Frankenstein.
6. And big, buzzy ones.
Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, based on the Maggie O’Farrell bestseller, won the People’s Choice Award at TIFF, and has been taking names and breaking hearts as it works through the whole circuit.
And the Venice Film Festival introduced Guillermo del Toro’s behemoth Frankenstein. We apparently needn’t fear the dead, good citizens. Screen Slate reports that Jacon Elordi is terrific “as the truly statuesque, initially wordless monster.”
From Orwell: 2+2=5.
7. Iconoclasts take the IRL cake.
Raoul Peck, the documentarian behind the Baldwin love letter I Am Not Your Negro, has turned his gaze to George Orwell. Orwell: 2+2=5, a look at the radical writer’s legacy, premiered at Cannes this May before traveling to TIFF. And as Wired recently observed, the documentary’s cautionary aspects can be read alongside Frankenstein’s to fine effect.
And in the last bit of on the nose news, Laura Poitras’ Cover Up follows the “explosive career of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh,” who went toe to toe with governments to report on massacres.
At least it’s a good year for bookish films, friends. Happy viewing! Don’t lose it at the movies!