As Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder return to an 80s classic and Brad Pitt and George Clooney pair up again in a comedy thriller, here are the unmissable movies to see this month.

Apollo 13: Survival

In April 1970, an oxygen tank exploded on Nasa's Apollo 13 moon rocket. The incredible story of how the three astronauts made it back to Earth has already been told in the Ron Howard film starring Tom Hanks as Commander Jim Lovell. (Incidentally, the film's screenplay changed Lovell's understated comment from "Houston, we've had a problem," to "Houston, we have a problem.") Now a Netflix documentary tells the story in more detail, from the perspectives of the astronauts, their families and the mission controllers. 

According to Wendy Ide in Screen Daily, the documentary is a "white-knuckle viewing experience [that] benefits from access to a wealth of previously little-seen material, including the home videos of the Lovell family". The director, Peter Middleton, "uses a combination of archive audio, film footage and photography, blended with later interviews of key figures and some new footage to create a gripping, edge-of-the-cockpit reconstruction of the eventful mission".

Released on 5 September on Netflix internationally

Speak No Evil

As the summer holidays come to an end, this sadistic Blumhouse chiller suggests that that might be for the best. Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy play an American couple who are travelling around Europe when they are befriended by a British couple played by James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi.

The Americans accept the Brits' invitation to stay with them in their remote country cottage, but the visit becomes very uncomfortable very quickly. The trouble is that the Americans may be too polite to complain about their hosts' intimidating behaviour until it's too late. Speak No Evil is a remake of a Danish film from 2022, which Tomris Laffly described in Harper's Bazaar as a "grueling (but in a good way), lean and mean genre outing [that] will drive you into madness". Could the new version be even nastier?

Released from 13 September internationally

The Goldman Case

This is a golden age of French courtroom dramas, with Anatomy of A Fall and Saint Omer winning awards all around the world. The latest example is based on the true story of Pierre Goldman, a far-left militant who was convicted of a double murder in 1974. In 1975, Goldman (Arieh Worthalter) is back in court to appeal against his conviction, but this time he turns his trial into a campaign against the state's racism, antisemitism and corruption.

Directed by Cédric Kahn, The Goldman Case was nominated for eight Cesars (France's equivalent of the Oscars), and Worthalter won the best actor prize. The film is defined by his "galvanizing, near-feral lead performance," says Guy Lodge in Variety. "Once Goldman's blood is up in the courtroom, the drama kicks into high gear, as the trial extends beyond the question of his innocence and toward a scathing inquiry into institutional corruption and injustice."

Released on 20 September in the UK and Ireland

The Wild Robot

There's a live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch due out next year, but the director of the original film, Chris Sanders, has been busy with another sci-fi cartoon about a space-age visitor to a verdant beauty spot. Adapted from the children's books by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot tells the tale of Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), a robot who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island - or uninhabited by humans, anyway. The denizens of this unspoilt wilderness are animals voiced by Pedro Pascal, Catherine O'Hara, Mark Hamill and Bill Nighy, who teach Roz how to function with no technology around her.

"It's much more complex than simply a machine that gains emotion," Sanders said in The Wrap. "It is much more interesting and complex and emotionally resonant. Roz understands a lot, but she doesn't really understand it dimensionally. She knows what the definition of things are. But she has no experience of those things. And the gaining of that experience makes her more dimensional."

Released on 27 September in the US, Canada and Finland, and on 18 October in the UK and Ireland

His Three Daughters

Azazel Jacobs' sharp and sensitive comedy drama currently has a rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes – i.e. every review is positive – partly because Jacobs has given such multi-layered roles to actresses who thoroughly deserve them: Carrie Coon from The Leftovers and Gone Girl; Elizabeth Olsen, who is best known as the Scarlet Witch in the Avengers films; and Natasha Lyonne, who currently stars in Poker Face. They play a trio of estranged sisters who are forced to spend time in the same New York apartment to care for their terminally ill father.

His Three Daughters is "a ruthless, humane and darkly funny story... that grapples with the ugliness of grief and comes out with as happy an ending as a shattering death might bring," says Katy Puchko in Mashable. "It's chaotic, charismatic and ultimately cathartic. Don't miss it."

Released on 6 September in the US, and on 20 September on Netflix internationally

The Substance

A snazzy Hollywood satire spliced with a gleefully icky body-horror movie, The Substance gives Demi Moore her best role in decades. Boldly parodying her own public image, she plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an erstwhile Hollywood A-lister who now hosts a daytime aerobics TV show. When her sexist boss (Dennis Quaid) fires her so that he can bring in a younger presenter, Elizabeth pays a mysterious company to manufacture a clone (Margaret Qualley) of herself as she was in her twenties.

But, like Doctor Jekyll, she soon learns that splitting yourself into two people can have gruesome consequences. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a "genuinely disgusting, but wildly entertaining and even thoughtful... horror movie," says Phil de Semlyen in Time Out. "The final reel, in particular, is here for anyone who felt that The Fly's skin-crawlingly gory climax was a little restrained."

Released on 19 September in Australia and 20 September in the UK and US

Lee

Lee Miller was celebrated as a fashion model and photographer in New York, a muse and collaborator of Picasso and Man Ray in Paris and a war photographer during World War Two, so it's no wonder that when her son wrote Miller's biography, he used a plural in the title, The Lives of Lee Miller. Now that biography has been turned into a biopic, produced by its Miller-lookalike star, Kate Winslet. "In a lifetime of well-chosen roles, this may be her richest," says the BBC's Caryn James.

"She gives us a restless, fierce, independent woman who found her voice as a witness to war, and paid the psychological price... Ellen Kuras [the director], who worked with her on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, shapes the film with supreme authority and intelligent choices at every turn." Winslet's co-stars include Marion Cotillard, Andrea Riseborough, Josh O'Connor and Andy Samberg.

Released on 13 September in the UK and Ireland, and on 27 September in the US, Norway and Sweden

Wolfs

A must-see for fans of middle-aged male handsomeness, Wolfs is a vehicle for George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who previously teamed up in Ocean's Eleven and its sequels. In their new comedy thriller, Clooney plays a super-cool mercenary who specialises in cleaning up grisly crime scenes before the authorities get wind of them. He likes to think that he's uniquely qualified to do this specific job – he's a lone wolf, if you will – but then Pitt's character is booked for the same assignment as he is, and the two of them are forced to work together.

Wolfs is written and directed by Jon Watts, who made the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, and he is apparently preparing a sequel already. "It was a great shoot and Jon is an extraordinarily talented guy who's also really joyful," Clooney said in Deadline. "We had a blast doing it and we've seen it. It's an off-the-charts great film."

Released on 20 September in the US, the UK, Ireland, Canada and Spain, and on 27 September on AppleTV+

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

It's been 36 years since Michael Keaton starred in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice as a troublemaking "bio-exorcist" from beyond the grave. Since then, Betelgeuse (to give him his proper name) has popped up in video games, a musical and an animated TV series, but Keaton and Burton kept putting off making a sequel. "We thought, 'You got to get this right," Keaton told People Magazine. "'Otherwise, just don't do it.

Let's just go on with our lives and do other things.' So I was hesitant and cautious, and [Burton] was probably equally as hesitant and cautious over all these years." Now at last Betelgeuse is back in another zany supernatural comedy, along with his human frenemies, Lydia and Delia Deetz, played by Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara. Jenna Ortega joins the cast as Lydia's teenage daughter, Astrid, who accidentally brings the tricky demon back to our world from the afterlife.

Released from 6 September internationally

Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola first started telling journalists about Megalopolis more than 40 years ago, but, as the decades went by, most of us assumed that his philosophical science-fiction saga would never actually get made. Kudos to the 85-year-old writer-director, then, for proving us wrong. By funding the production with a reported $120m of his own money, he has finally completed his long-planned fable of political intrigue and radical architecture in the city of New Rome, with a cast that includes Adam Driver, Shia LaBeouf, Aubrey Plaza and Dustin Hoffman. But was Megalopolis worth the long wait and the eye-watering expense? Personally, I thought it was a disaster, but some critics loved it.

"It's a work of art that actively practises what it preaches," says David Jenkins in Little White Lies, "a celebration of unfettered creativity and farsightedness that offers a volcanic fusion of hand-crafted neo-classicism while running through a script of toe-tapping word-jazz that merrily dances between the raindrops of logic and coherence."

Released on 27 September in the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Spain and Sweden

The Front Room

Robert Eggers is one of the most revered names in contemporary horror thanks to such distinctively disturbing period dramas as The Witch and The Lighthouse. He sometimes works with his brothers, Max and Sam – Max co-wrote The Lighthouse – and now those brothers have written and directed a horror film of their own.

Adapted from a short story by Susan Hill (The Woman in Black), The Front Room stars Brandy Norwood as a pregnant woman who hopes that she and her husband (Andrew Burnap) will inherit some money from his aged and infirm stepmother (Kathryn Hunter). They invite the old woman to live with them, and they try to ignore the small fact that their new houseguest is a racist religious fanatic. But it's possible that the wicked stepmother is even more dangerous and sinister than that suggests...

Released on 6 September in the US and Canada, 20 September in Spain and 25 October in the UK