Primetime to Practical Magic 2: 10 of the best films to watch this September

From Robert Pattinson in a grim drama about a reality TV show, to witchy sequel Practical Magic 2, starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, here are the films to watch at the cinema this month.

Zach Cregger's Weapons was one of 2025's most acclaimed films, so in some ways it's a surprise that he's followed it up with a video game spin-off. But the writer-director told Empire that he has made "a Zach Cregger movie that just happens to be a Resident Evil movie". Far spookier-looking than the previous Resident Evil films, most of which were directed by Paul WS Anderson, this blood-drenched reboot focuses on a medical courier, Bryan (Austin Abrams). He has the job of delivering an organ to a hospital in the game's main location, Raccoon City – but the city's inhabitants are turning into ravenous zombies. "Bryan is very much an everyman who happens to be burdened with this sacred mission that's going to take him into the heart of everything," says Cregger. "It's kind of like Frodo [from The Lord of the Rings] going into Mordor."

Released internationally on 16, 17 and 18 September

The year of Robert Pattinson continues. As well as appearing in The Odyssey, The Drama and the forthcoming Dune: Part Three, the British actor is starring in Primetime, a fact-based drama about a controversial reality television show, To Catch a Predator. From 2004 to 2007, each episode of the programme revolved around sting operations in which men were tricked into thinking that they were meeting children for sexual encounters. They would then be confronted by the journalist behind the sting, Chris Hansen. Pattinson plays Hansen, and he is already being tipped as an Oscar contender – even if Hansen himself would have chosen a different actor for the role. "Years ago I had crafted a screenplay and thought Denis Leary would be a good guy to play me," he said on the Serialously podcast.

Released on 25 September in the US and Canada

Ethan Hawke follows his Oscar-nominated turn in Blue Moon with a very different kind of period drama. Set in Oregon during the Great Depression, The Weight stars Hawke as a single father who is unfairly sent to a labour camp. If he doesn't get home soon, he will lose custody of his young daughter, but the devilish warden (Russell Crowe) promises to free him on one condition: he and a team of other prisoners have to carry knapsacks full of stolen gold bricks across the country. "Hawke is mesmerising," says Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap. "The action scenes are tense and well-executed, though it's the way he grounds it that makes you feel every setback. Hawke makes you buy into every beat, whether haunting or thrilling as the film grows more violent… You can't look away for even a second."

Released on 18 September in the US and Canada

Back in 1998, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock starred in Practical Magic as Gillian and Sally, two sisters who were also witches. When the film came out, audiences weren't exactly spellbound, but the dark supernatural romance gradually built a cult following. "I don't know any woman who's watched the movie and not wanted Gillian's red hair, Sally's cosy yet witchy outfits, or the beautiful Victorian house by the ocean that the family lives in," wrote Tove Danovich in Country Living recently. Now, 28 years after the first film, a sequel is finally here. Once again, it's adapted from a novel by Alice Hoffman, and once again Kidman and Bullock have the lead roles. Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest are back as their aunts, and Joey King and Maisie Williams join the cast as Sally's daughters, two young women who learn about the family curse: any man they fall in love with will die soon afterwards.

Released on 11 September in the US, the UK and Ireland, and on 18 September in Canada and Australia

The latest cartoon from DreamWorks Animation (The Wild Robot, Dog Man) is a psychedelic fantasy adventure – but it's also the first major Hollywood film to draw on Filipino folklore. Grammy-winning singer H.E.R. and Liza Soberano provide the voices of Jo and Raissa, two schoolgirls who become best friends in the Philippines in the 1990s. Years later, Raissa is about to emigrate to the US, but before she can go, the two girls fall through a portal into a magical world of demons, witches and monsters. And if they stay there too long, their memories of each other will fade away. "So many times, young girls in movies and TV are portrayed as always talking about boys, or they're princesses," the film's co-director, Joel Crawford, said in Variety. "I want my [Filipina] daughters to see themselves up on the screen, whether it's in terms of culture, in terms of ethnicity, but also how they are as people.”

Released on 25 September in the US and Canada and 16 October in the UK and Ireland

Michael Biehn co-starred in The Terminator and Aliens, two classic science-fiction thrillers in which a rugged heroine fought an almost indestructible foe. And now he's appearing in a film which he says deserves to be compared to them. Released by A24, and directed by Adam Wingard (The Guest, Godzilla vs Kong), Onslaught stars Adria Arjona as a single mother who lives in a desert trailer park with her daughter. When three genetically modified super soldiers escape from a local secret research facility, her experience as an army sniper comes in handy. "I'm telling you without a doubt, this is the best movie I've been in since Aliens," said Biehn in Daily Dead. "This is going to blow the doors off of any expectations of what anybody has seen on the big screen in a long time. This is like pedal-to-the-metal action, horror, violence... It is very, very exciting, and it's fast and furious."

Released on 4 September in the US and Canada

Good news for fans of wilderness survival adventures: there are two of them in cinemas this September. As well as The Weight, there is Heart of the Beast, starring Brad Pitt and directed by David Ayer. Pitt plays a wounded Special Forces veteran who has to trek back to civilisation after a plane crash in a remote Alaskan forest. Luckily for him, he is accompanied by his faithful military dog, Odin. Ayer said in GQ that Pitt is on career-best form: "A constant theme from people who have seen the film is just how raw and believable and profound his performance is." But Uber, the mountain-rescue dog who plays Odin, may be even better. "The one spoiler I'll forward right now is, don't worry, the dog lives," reveals Ayer. Regardless, he says "I've shown the film to a few of my roughneck, tough-guy friends, and they're crying at the end of this. I've never had a film move an audience so powerfully."

Released internationally on 24 and 25 September

On 12 August 2022, the author Sir Salman Rushdie was giving a talk in New York state, when someone in the audience leapt on stage and stabbed him 15 times. But Sir Salman wouldn't be silenced. He wrote a memoir about the horrific attack and his recovery, and now the book has been turned into a documentary by Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side). Using intimate footage shot by Sir Salman's wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Gibney looks back at the ordeal, explores the author's life and philosophy, and recalls how the publication of his 1988 novel, Satanic Verses, led to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini calling on him to be killed. "Throughout the film, three things stand out," says Amber Wilkinson in Screen International, "the love between Rushdie and Griffiths; the resilience they had in the face of his catastrophic injuries; and the author's humanistic attitude and sly sense of humour, which have categorically survived intact."

Released on 17 September in the US and 30 September in the UK

Step aside, Robin Hood. The Uprising is a medieval epic about English rebels fighting back against the greedy aristocracy, but rather than rehashing old myths and legends, Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips, The Bourne Supremacy) has dramatised the English Peasant's Revolt of 1381. Andrew Garfield plays the Robin Hood-alike hero, a poverty-stricken farmer known only as Ploughman. After his family is wiped out by the plague, he leads a resistance movement against the soldiers of the teenage King Richard II (Woody Norman). "It was sort of the first moment in our history when the common man and woman took centre stage," said Greengrass in People, "and history was no longer going to be about kings and queens and the rich and powerful. It was going to be about what ordinary folk wanted and their grievances and their dreams and hopes."

Released on 11 September in the US and Canada

Hope is this year's must-see monster movie – although it's also a gritty western, a grisly horror film, a gonzo action comedy, and a cosmic science-fiction saga. Written and directed by Na Hong-jin, it features Hwang Jung-min as the tough sheriff of a small Korean coastal town. Within minutes of the opening scene, he is on the trail of a giant ogre which is laying waste to everything in its path. And the chaos doesn't let up for another two and a half hours. Hope is "a full-on, unapologetic action movie packed with breathtaking and breathless car chases, horse chases, foot-chases and monster chases", says John Bleasdale in Sight and Sound. "Brilliantly crafted and beautifully shot, we can only hope this wild film gets the follow-up it so richly deserves."

Released on 9 September in the US, 10 September in Australia and 25 September in the UK

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