You can go home again, at least in this fall's movies. Just don't expect the home you return to or the family you end up with to resemble the traditional kind. Instead, look for the nightmare homestead of Jim Sheridan's Dream House, or the weird and awkward situation of having a twin sister played by Adam Sandler in drag, as happens in Dennis Dugan's Jack and Jill.
Similarly, as movie characters redefine themselves in terms of the family, the basic social unit, they also must come to grips with the more pervasive and powerful institutions of society at large. That includes governments, corporations, covert spy networks, and other systems of control, ranging from presidential campaigns in George Clooney's The Ides of March, to Wall Street in J.C. Chandor's Margin Call, to the genetically engineered dystopia of Andrew Niccol's In Time, and, most ominously, Major League Baseball in Bennett Miller's Moneyball.
These, then, are the fall's family films, not all them suitable for the whole family.
SEPTEMBER
Let's face it, when you think of Billy Beane, the nerdy number cruncher who revolutionized baseball and propelled the financially anemic Oakland A's to a championship with his statistical approach to strategy, the actor who first comes to mind is not Brad Pitt. Then again, if Pitt wasn't involved, Bennett Miller's MONEYBALL (September 23), an adaptation of Michael Lewis's bestseller of the same title, probably wouldn't have gotten made. Be that as it may, expect this film to be in the Oscar playoffs with a cast including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jonah Hill, and Robin Wright, not to mention the cameo appearance of Fenway Park.
