Taylor Swift to Hamnet: The best culture to look forward to this autumn

From returning pop superstars to Oscar-ready films and big-time celebrity memoirs, here are our recommendations for what to watch, listen to and read for the rest of the year.

Focus Features

Film

Wave goodbye to summer blockbusters, and say hello to prestige pictures. Awards season is upon us, which means that most of the films which will win 2026's Oscars are about to be released. And most of these films involve people who have won Oscars already. Julia Roberts could well bag another best actress trophy for starring as a steely philosophy professor in Luca Guadagnino's issue-driven campus drama, After the Hunt (October). Nuremberg (November) examines the international military tribunal that followed World War Two; one Oscar winner (Russell Crowe) plays Hermann Goering, the Nazi officer, and another Oscar winner (Rami Malek) plays the American psychiatrist interviewing him. Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win the Oscar for best director, has made A House of Dynamite (October), a chilling thriller exploring the US's potential responses to an inbound nuclear missile. And Chloe Zhao, the second woman to win the Oscar for best director, has made Hamnet (November), adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's bestselling novel about a grief-stricken William Shakespeare – Paul Mescal plays the Bard, with Jessie Buckley as his wife Agnes. In the best international film category, likely nominees include Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident (October), a dark Iranian farce which won the top prize at Cannes in May; and another Cannes favourite, Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent (December), starring Wagner Moura as a fugitive in 1970s Brazil.

Moving on to science-fiction and fantasy blockbusters, there is Wicked: For Good (November), the second part of the musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, there is Avatar: Fire and Ice (December), the third of James Cameron's extra-terrestrial epics; and there is The Running Man (November), Edgar Wright's take on Stephen King's dystopian novel, starring Glen Powell as a contestant being hunted down on a television game show. None of these three blockbusters is the kind of stately heavyweight drama which is usually thought of as "Oscar bait", but judging by the talent involved, they could well win a few awards themselves. (NB)

Peacock

TV

Thought autumn was a time to get cosy? Well, that's not what Netflix will be offering with its new period epic House of Guinness (September), written by Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight, which will explore the history of the brewing dynasty, and promises to contain plenty of sex, violence and dark secrets. More soothing, however, will be the return of Netflix's hit rom-com Nobody Wants This (October), starring Adam Brody and Kristen Bell as a rabbi and the gentile object of his affection. And another of its big hitters, political thriller The Diplomat (October), is back for a third series, with Keri Russell's US ambassador to the UK set to butt heads with Allison Janney's nefarious new POTUS. 

Expect more skulduggery in the returning Slow Horses (September), the brilliant London-set spy drama based on Mick Herron's Slough House books. And Apple TV+ can't get enough of Herron, as it's also got an adaptation of his detective novel Down Cemetery Road (October), starring Emma Thompson as an Oxford-based private investigator. In fact, the streamer's autumn line-up is looking like the best of the bunch, with two other big-hitters on their way: sci-fi Pluribus (November), which is the latest project from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, and Mr Scorsese (October), a five-part documentary about the great film director.

Elsewhere, if you're a fan of domestic thrillers featuring expensive furnishings, then two shows should be for you: Netflix's The Beast in Me (November), in which Claire Danes becomes suspicious of her new neighbour, and Peacock's All Her Fault (November), in which Succession's Sarah Snook plays a woman going through every mother's worst nightmare. The ever-prolific super-producer Ryan Murphy has two shows coming up: the latest in his Monster franchise (October), focusing on serial killer Ed Gein, and legal drama All's Fair (November), starring Kim Kardashian. And to top things off, the final season of Stranger Things is set to be the TV event of not just the season, but the year; its first four episodes drop in November, before it wraps up with three episodes on Christmas Day and a feature-length finale on New Year's Eve. Now that's a way to end 2025 with a bang. (HM)

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Books

There's a veritable glut of legendary names with new releases this autumn. Atonement author Ian McEwan's What Can We Know (September) is a speculative novel set in the Britain of 2119. Out in October, Shadow Ticket, about a private eye in Prohibition-era Milwaukee, looks set to be another wild escapade from the mysterious American master Thomas Pynchon. In the same month, The Rose Field by Philip Pullman is the final chapter in his Book of Dust trilogy, and the last book to feature his famous heroine Lyra Silvertongue. In November, The Eleventh Hour sees Salman Rushdie grapple with mortality in a collection of short stories set in England, India and the US.

Rising stars also make a return this season: No One is Talking About This author Patricia Lockwood's Will There Be Another You (September) is a novel about a young woman disorientated by a mysterious illness. Twisted dark academia comes in the form of We Love You Bunny, Mona Awad's follow-up to her 2019 hit, Bunny. Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite, also due in September, follows her 2018 bestseller, My Sister, the Serial Killer. Acclaimed British writer Olivia Laing's second novel is The Silver Book (November), a queer love story set in post-war Italy, amid the thrilling cinematic worlds of Fellini and Pasolini.

In non-fiction, Dead and Alive (October) is a new collection of essays from Zadie Smith, covering cultural subjects including Stormzy and the 2022 film Tár. Notable among the expected crop of celebrity memoirs – including Lionel Richie's Truly (September), Anthony Hopkins's We Did Ok, Kid (October) and Dolly Parton's Star of the Show (November) – is Bread of Angels (November) from Patti Smith, rock legend and already the author of one award-winning autobiography, Just Kids. Also in November comes Book of Lives, the long-awaited memoir from The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood. (RL)

Atlantic Records

Music 

We are about to be treated to a bumper harvest of new music. New York rapper (and Wapper) Cardi B returns with more not-safe-for-work bangers on the presumably rhetorically titled Am I The Drama? (September), featuring a guest turn from Janet Jackson among others. Lipstick-eating pop princess Doja Cat is also back with her fifth album, Vie (September), and given the presence of Jack Antonoff on production, it is certain to be a cornucopia of catchy, retro-flavoured bops. For anyone wanting some real drama, baroque singer-songwriter Florence Welch is releasing a new Florence and the Machine album, Everybody Scream (October); only the witchy title track has been released so far, but the rest arrives, fittingly, on Halloween. And the internet is frothing with excitement over Taylor Swift's twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl (October) – out in a matter of weeks, but still shrouded in secrecy. 

Onto the elder statesmen and women of rock and pop. Robert Plant's Saving Grace (September) promises to serve up some elemental folk, featuring copious banjo-plucking and portentous chanting. Legendary soul singer and civil rights activist, Mavis Staples brings us Sad and Beautiful World (November), an album of covers ranging from Frank Ocean to Tom Waits, while art-pop auteurs Sparks are back with their Madder EP (October). Then it's back to the 90s, as an indie icon of that era, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, releases his monster 30-track triple album, Twilight Override (September), and Evan Dando's slacker rock band The Lemonheads return with Love Chant (October). With lead single Deep End featuring guitar work from Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, prepare yourself for licks galore. (RF)

Succession Picasso DACS, London 2025

Art 

It's the season of the art trailblazer this autumn. Surrealist innovator Man Ray is the subject of When Objects Dream at New York's Met Museum (September), while Ray's collaborator and fellow groundbreaker Lee Miller – together they pioneered the solarisation photographic technique – is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern, London (October). Other shows celebrating art's vanguard include Van Gogh and the Roulins (October) at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Helen Frankenthaler: A Grand Sweep (October) at MoMA, New York, exploring the artist's role in the US Abstract Expressionism movement; and in Paris, master of reinvention Gerhard Richter's six-decade career is the focus of a major retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (October). Meanwhile, modern art's original trailblazer Pablo Picasso is the subject of three exhibitions this autumn: the National Gallery of Ireland's Picasso: From the Studio (October), Tate Modern's Theatre Picasso (September), and Picasso: Memory and Desire (November) at Malaga's Picasso Museum, which features the work of him and contemporaries including Jean Cocteau, Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger. 

Elsewhere, themes of history and identity run through this season's offerings, including The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (October). The largest exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art ever presented internationally, the show explores a rich history of creativity that pre-dates the arrival of Europeans. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940 (October) focuses on the wave of female artists who left Australia to pursue their careers at the turn of the 20th Century. Spanning art history, civil-rights history and the artist's own memories, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories (September) at London's Royal Academy not only comments on the past but envisions optimistic futures. And as the nights draw in, what could be more fitting than Winter Count: Embracing the Cold (November) at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, which reflects on how wintertime inspires art across diverse cultures. (LB)

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