Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreaderinas,
As promised, we’re back with Part 2 of our Fall Culture Preview: Cinemaaaah! You may recall that last week we delivered all the TV you need to survive. Next week: books. Readers, with these lists—plus a 10,000-lux light therapy lamp and a cannily timed Wellbutrin Rx—you will be well on your way to sailing through S.A.D. season in style. Not to mention to winning the golden jello mold award at the Spread Fantasy Oscars League playoffs come March.
Like last week, paid readers will find a link to a handy-dandy printable/downloadable version of our movie list at the bottom of this issue. Which makes this a great time to upgrade to a paid subscription, no?
And of course we have your reads of the week, served piping hot.
Rachel & Maggie
The Spreadiest Movies of Fall 2026!
Primetime (Sept. 25): Edward Cullen plays a different kind of nocturnal creature: To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen. Early reviews are stellar.
Digger (Oct. 2): This is the oil-tycoon movie Tom Cruise is promoting on the cover of GQ. Directed by controversial Birdman helmer Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Verity (Oct. 2): Annie Hathaway’s fifth major motion picture of 2026 is a Colleen Hoover adaptation also starring Rachel’s first husband Josh Hartnett, with nary a whiff of that Lively/Baldoni mishegoss.
Clarissa (Oct. 4): Set in Lagos, Nigeria, a modern update to Mrs. Dalloway starring Tony winner Sophie Okonedo.
Animals (Oct. 9): An L.A. mayoral candidate’s (Ben Affleck) son is kidnapped. Begs the question: Can we still find it in our hearts to pay money to go watch Ben Affleck in a movie theater?
Fjord (Oct. 9): Sebastian Stan—a legitimate actor’s actor and Marvel property whom Rachel still thinks she “discovered”—and Renate Reinsve are parents who come under intense scrutiny in this Norway-set family legal thriller.
Other Mommy (Oct. 9): Jessica Chastain—who has already led movies called Mama and Mothers’ Instinct—stars in the basis for the most terrifying trailer we’ve seen since the Elizabeth Holmes doc.
The Social Reckoning (Oct. 9): In the Social Network follow-up, Aaron Sorkin slides into the director chair for a shiny cast: Jeremy Strong as Zuck, Mikey Madison (in glasses!) as a whistleblower, and Yes Chef as a Wall Street Journal reporter.
La Bola Negra (Oct. 16): The Spanish drama, which knits together the stories of three gay men in three different time periods (1932, 1937, 2017), got a 20-minute standing O at Cannes.
Sense and Sensibility (Oct. 16): We were happy to let Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation starring Emma Thompson ride forever, but British filmmaker Georgia Oakley had other ideas, namely casting Daisy Edgar-Jones—perhaps not the most exciting actor of her generation—as Elinor Dashwood. We’re taking a wait-and-see approach.
Fatherland (Oct. 23): Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War follow-up features Sandra Hüller playing an actress on a heavy-duty road trip through post-World War II Germany alongside her Nobel Prize-winning father. (Hüller is also said to be generating awards buzz for her role in Maggie’s favorite family movie of 2026, Project Hail Mary, which as Hüller fans we’re good with even though: really, that role?)
Klara and the Sun (Oct. 23): Taika Waititi takes on the formidable task of turning Kazuo Ishiguro’s book about AI, family, and cute robot “friends” into a movie, with Jenna Ortega as the lead ’bot.
Possible Love (Oct. 23): This Korean marital drama was the toast of the Venice Film Festival.
Gentle Monster (Oct 30): Léa Seydoux leads this family nightmare in which her husband is charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. (Is he a member of the “burnerverse”? Keep reading.) About this we say: good grief.
Wicker (Oct. 30): We’re here for this absolutely bonkers-looking tale in which a fishmonger (Olivia Colman) commissions a basketmaker to weave her a husband (Alexander Skarsgård.) A good excuse for a Fiddler-inspired jingle: Basketmaker, basketmaker, weave me a match…
Club Kid (Nov. 4): The magnetic Jordan Firstman—whom you probably know from I Love LA but we fell in love with on The English Teacher—wrote, directed, and stars as a party promoter who learns he has a 10-year-old son in this Cannes hit.
Wild Horse Nine (Nov. 6): It’s kind of a boy movie—John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell star—but Spready types who’ve already seen the action-thriller give it two thumbs up and say it’s nothing like director Martin McDonagh’s last film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (complimentary).
Elsinore (Nov. 20): “Oscar lock” is being bandied about for Andrew Scott, who is said to really become Scottish actor Ian Charleson, performing Hamlet at the National Theater while dying from AIDS. Asecond movie about a performance of Hamlet in as many years: huh.
Josephine (Nov. 20): Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan—two actors who are very nice to look at—play the parents of an eight-year-old who witnesses a visceral act of violence in Golden Gate Park.
Paper Tiger (Nov. 20): The Pearl family (Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson—last seen together in Marriage Story—plus Miles Teller) gets mixed up with the Russian mob. Anybody else curious to see how they feel about Driver now that they’ve read Famesick?
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth (Nov. 25): Brad Pitt takes a second crack at his Oscar-winning Once Upon a Time In Hollywood character. Let’s see what off-the-cuff shit we get out of Quentin Tarantino in the press run-up!
14th (Nov. 27): Ava DuVernay’s spiritual follow-up to her 2016 prison-injustice documentary 13th, this one tackles immigration and will burn you up.
Behemoth! (Dec. 4): Pedro Pascal’s prodigy cellist moves home to L.A., where his musical family of origin works in the Hollywood-score biz.
Tender Loving Care (Dec. 4): Kate O’Flynn, who just won the Emmy for Widow’s Bay (!), leads a family dramedy about grief from beloved director Mike Leigh.
The Debut (Dec. 11): If we had to choose one movie to see this season, it might be Jesse Eisenberg’s community-theater dramedy, wherein Julianne Moore goes from housewife to method actor despite having to work under the thumb of local artiste Paul Giamatti.
Ink (Dec. 11): Catnip for media obsessives (hi), this 1969-set film by Danny Boyle traces the rise of Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun under gossip-permissive editor Larry Lamb. Cheers to the return of Claire Foy!
Dune: Part Three (Dec. 18): Robert Pattinson (DRINK!) joins Timmy Chalamet, Zendaya, and Florence Pugh in what we’ve been promised is the final installment of Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic.
Werwulf (Dec. 25): In director Robert Eggers’s latest freakshow, Sam Taylor Johnson’s husband transforms into a violent canine in 13th-century England. Lily Rose Depp is also there.
The Spreadiest Reads of the Week!
The Both/And of Surrogacy
We got a poignant one-two punch about women who make other people’s babies this week. Mere hours ago, Lena Dunham announced that, thanks to a surrogate, she and husband Luis Felber are parents to a baby girl—a fate that anyone with half a heart who read Famesick will have hoped for. In an essay in Vogue that is ostensibly (and winningly) about the joy of shopping for a baby before she arrives, Dunham writes that she wasn’t jealous of her surrogate for being able to carry the baby that she couldn’t. “Instead, I felt a different kind of jealousy—toward said baby, for the chance to be tucked into someone who radiated such safety. I could just tell she knew how to steer an SUV in the snow.”
Meanwhile from the Atlantic comes the other side of the story: On the heels of one mindbending surrogacy case after another, Spread Dame—we’re kneeling—Helen Lewis’s “Mothers For Sale” puts the United States’ commercial surrogacy industry into a global context, and honestly, our minds are blown. Get this: As surrogacy becomes more commonplace in our society—with seemingly every celebrity (except wanton fornicator Claire Danes) using one to procreate—Lewis (a Brit) writes that Europeans believe this is one more reason we’re nuts: “Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable.” She gets into the ethical contradictions around what turns out to be a much thornier practice than we as good our-bodies-our-choice feminists had previously understood, especially given that regulations in this country are practically nonexistent, and surrogacy tourism is booming. Remember the New Yorker story from February about the Los Angeles mansion housing dozens of surrogate-born children and their nannies? Mmhmm.
Read Dunham’s Vogue essay here.
Read Lewis’s piece in the Atlantic here.
