By Yulia Tulegenova
Look closely at the films arriving this September. It is not a random assortment of stories. It is an argument. It is a cinematic landscape haunted by its own past, a month-long séance where the ghosts of former glories are summoned for one last performance. We are being offered resurrections of undisputed classics, reincarnations of cult oddities, and the final, lingering farewells of reliable franchises.
This is more than simple nostalgia. It is a symptom of an industry in conversation with itself, digging through its own archives in search of a reliable spell. This is a month of cinematic archaeology. The question is what we are meant to find in the dust.
The Resurrections
There is a particular kind of magic in seeing an old film returned to the cinema, its colours restored, its soundscape deepened. It is an act of defiance against the endless, scrolling catalogue of the streaming library. This month offers two potent acts of resurrection, each representing a different kind of rebellion.
First, from the pinnacle of 1970s auteur cinema, comes Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Fifty years on, its power has not dimmed. To see it in a pristine 4K restoration is to be reminded of a time when a major studio film could be this angry, this humane, and this profoundly suspicious of authority. Jack Nicholson’s performance as Randle McMurphy is not just acting; it is a force of nature, a glorious life-force raging against the sterile, soul-crushing machinery of the asylum. It is a film that asks the most fundamental questions about sanity and society. Seeing it on a big screen in 2025 feels less like a revival and more like a necessary intervention.
Decades later, but born from a similar spirit of genre defiance, Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead also gets the 4K treatment. It is the film that launched the Cornetto Trilogy and reminded the world that a zombie apocalypse could be funny, sad, and deeply, recognisably English. Its genius lies in its refusal to treat its characters as action heroes. They are ordinary people, trapped in the soul-crushing routine of North London life, who react to the end of the world with a mixture of terror, irritation, and a desperate desire for a pint. It is a love letter to the horror genre and a perfect comedy about the inertia of modern life. To have it finally receive a proper cinematic release in Russia is a cultural event in itself.
The Reincarnations and Reunions
If restoration is an act of reverence, the remake is a far riskier proposition. This month, we have two fascinating, and wildly different, attempts to channel the spirits of past films.
Spike Lee, one of America’s most vital and unpredictable filmmakers, turns his attention to Akira Kurosawa. His new film, Highest 2 Lowest, is a reinterpretation of the Japanese master’s 1963 police procedural High and Low. It is a bold move. Lee reunites with Denzel Washington for the fifth time, casting him as a music industry mogul caught in a brutal extortion plot. Lee is not a director who deals in faithful copies; he is a polemicist who uses genre as a vehicle for social critique. The prospect of him filtering Kurosawa’s tight, moral thriller through the lens of modern class and race politics is thrilling. It is a dialogue between two masters across continents and decades.
On the other end of the cultural spectrum, The Toxic Avenger returns. The 1984 original was a piece of glorious, low-budget schlock from the infamous Troma Studios, a film that revelled in its own bad taste. The reboot has been polished for a new era, armed with an astonishingly good cast: Peter Dinklage takes on the role of the mutated janitor, supported by Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood. The question is whether the gleeful, anarchic spirit of the original can survive the transition to a prestige production. Can you sanitise punk rock and still call it punk?
Perhaps the most potent act of ghost-summoning this month comes from Robert Zemeckis. In Here, he reunites the core creative team of Forrest Gump for the first time in thirty years: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth, and composer Alan Silvestri. The concept is a radical act of minimalism - the story of a single patch of land, and all the lives that have passed through it, from the distant past to the far future. It is an experiment in cinematic time, a story of everything and nothing. But it is also an act of pure, weaponised nostalgia, a film whose very existence is a testament to the enduring power of the one that came before it. It insists that some magic is worth chasing, even three decades later.
The Long Goodbyes
All stories must end. This month sees the final curtain fall on two cinematic institutions, each a comforting presence for its respective audience. The Conjuring: Last Rites promises to be the final chapter in the story of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the paranormal investigators who anchored the most successful horror franchise in history. Based on another of their real-life case files, the film sees Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return to the roles they have made their own. The Conjuring films succeeded because they were never just about the jump scares; they were about the strange, tender, and unwavering partnership at their centre. This is a farewell to them, and to a certain kind of old-fashioned, character-driven horror.
In a very different corner of England, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale also prepares to say goodbye. The television series and its subsequent films became a global phenomenon by offering a vision of the British aristocracy that was elegant, witty, and reassuringly decent. This final instalment, set in the 1930s, promises one last immersion in that world of quiet duty and repressed emotion. It will also be the first chapter without the formidable presence of Maggie Smith, whose Dowager Countess was the series’ acid-tongued soul. Her passing in real life lends the on-screen farewell a particular, poignant finality.
Whispers of the New
Amidst all this looking back, are there any new stories to be told? A few films suggest a way forward. Kogonada, the video essayist turned director, has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices in modern cinema. His films, like Columbus and After Yang, are quiet, contemplative, and exquisitely beautiful. His new film, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, starring Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell, is described as a romantic fantasy about two strangers on an "unimaginable journey." In Kogonada’s hands, one can expect something far stranger and more profound than the description suggests.
Elsewhere, The Man in My Basement offers a chillingly simple premise: a man in desperate financial trouble (Corey Hawkins) agrees to rent his basement for the summer to a mysterious, wealthy stranger (Willem Dafoe). It is a classic Faustian bargain, a set-up ripe for psychological torment and a showcase for two formidable actors. It is proof that sometimes the most effective horrors are the ones that take place not in a haunted house, but in the quiet desperation of an ordinary one.
Even Stephen King, a ghost from the past in his own right, feels new again in The Long Walk. An adaptation of one of his bleakest early novels, written under a pseudonym, it depicts a totalitarian America where a hundred teenage boys compete in a deadly marathon. The last one standing wins a grand prize; the rest are executed. Directed by Francis Lawrence, who understands the mechanics of dystopian spectacle from his work on The Hunger Games, this has the potential to be a brutal, uncompromising piece of social commentary.
This September, the cinema is a house of mirrors, reflecting and distorting the past in fascinating, and sometimes troubling, ways. It invites us to consider what we value in our stories. Do we seek the comfort of the familiar, the thrill of the rediscovered, or the shock of the new? The ghosts are all here. The choice of which ones to listen to is ours.
