September's final week belonged to the red carpets. As the fall festival circuit hit full stride, the 2026 New York Film Festival opened on September 25 with James Gray's crime drama Paper Tiger, while the Zurich Film Festival countered with two of the season's most talked-about premieres: the romantic fantasy comedy Wicker and the Rocky origin story I Play Rocky. Together, the premieres sketched an early map of the awards season to come.
'Paper Tiger' opens New York
Gray's crime drama served as the opening-night film for the 2026 New York Film Festival on September 25, and its stars turned out in force: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, and Miles Teller walked the red carpet at Alice Tully Hall for the premiere. An opening-night slot at NYFF is one of the most closely watched launchpads in American cinema — a placement that signals a distributor's confidence and puts a film immediately into the awards conversation.
For Johansson, Driver, and Teller — three actors who move comfortably between franchise work and auteur cinema — the premiere doubled as a statement of intent for the season. The festival's opening weekend traditionally sets the tone for the months of campaigning ahead, and Paper Tiger now has the spotlight entirely to itself.
Zurich: a wicker husband and a young Stallone
Across the Atlantic, the Zurich Film Festival staged its own high-profile premieres. On September 25, I Play Rocky premiered on the festival's green carpet, with 27-year-old Anthony Ippolito front and center as a young Sylvester Stallone. The film dramatizes the making of the 1976 Oscar-winning Rocky — the electrifying true story of an unknown actor who believed he was not just meant to write Rocky but to be Rocky Balboa, holding the line on playing the lead against seemingly impossible odds.
The supporting cast reads like a character actor's hall of fame: Matt Dillon, AnnaSophia Robb, P.J. Byrne, Toby Kebbell, Tracy Letts, Jay Duplass, Stephan James, and Kiki Seto. Early coverage is already attaching the words "Oscars buzz" to the project — a plausible trajectory, given how reliably Hollywood loves stories about itself, and how completely the underdog mythology of Rocky maps onto awards-season narratives.
Three days later, on September 28, Zurich premiered Wicker, and the pairing of its leads was the story: 52-year-old Oscar winner Olivia Colman and 50-year-old Emmy winner Alexander Skarsgard walked the green carpet together for the romantic fantasy comedy directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. The official synopsis promises "an audacious comedic fable about sex, marriage, and the absurdities of social convention": an ostracized fisherwoman (Colman) commissions the local basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) to build her a husband — and the resulting wicker man (Skarsgard) proves more spectacular than she imagined, setting off jealousy, fascination, and upheaval through village life.
It is the kind of high-concept, star-driven oddity that festivals exist to launch — and Colman's presence guarantees it will be watched closely.
The season's shape: TIFF aftershocks
The premieres land in the slipstream of the Toronto International Film Festival earlier in September, whose discoveries are already generating momentum. Among them: Elsinore, whose trailer arrived on September 28 to immediate awards chatter. The film stars Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, the gifted actor whose greatest challenge became his greatest triumph — "facing his own mortality with unflinching honesty, wit, and grace," per the official synopsis — in a true story directed by Simon Stone and written by Stephen Beresford from an idea by Ethan Silverman.
Scott, who also produces, headlines an ensemble including Olivia Colman (her second appearance on this list), Billie Piper, Johnny Flynn, Luke Thompson, David Dawson, Matthew Beard, Joe Locke, Monica Dolan, and Peter Mullan. The film opens in theatres on November 20 — squarely in the awards corridor.
TIFF also premiered The Debut, the A24 film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and starring Julianne Moore, Eisenberg himself, and Paul Giamatti. The synopsis — a shy housewife cast in a bit part at a community theatre who transforms into a zealous method actor waging war against a domineering director — suggests the deadpan comedy Eisenberg has been honing as a filmmaker. It reaches theatres on December 11.
Why this week matters
Festival premieres are, in part, elaborate marketing — but they are also the moments when a film's awards identity gets fixed. An opening-night slot, a green-carpet premiere, a trailer drop timed to festival buzz: each is a bid to be remembered when voting begins.
This week's slate is unusually rich in the raw materials of awards campaigns: beloved actors taking big swings (Colman, Scott), Hollywood mythologizing itself (I Play Rocky), a crime drama with an auteur's pedigree opening America's most prestigious festival (Paper Tiger), and a director-actor double act in Eisenberg and Moore. Not all of them will survive the season. But the map of the next four months is now drawn — and it runs through New York and Zurich.
Beyond the big two festivals
The festival map extended well beyond New York and Zurich. The 16th annual Catalina Film Festival took over the historic Avalon Theatre from September 25–27 for a three-day coastal celebration, headlined by an opening-night career tribute to filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke and the West Coast premiere of her latest film, Street Smart. Meanwhile, the documentary Superhuman 2: The Rebirth — featuring scientists, physicians, and consciousness researchers — premiered at the DaVinci International Film Festival on September 26 ahead of a red-carpet theatrical event at Beverly Hills' Saban Theatre on October 4. The breadth of the calendar, from studio crime dramas to independent documentaries, is the point: September has become the month when the entire industry, at every budget level, makes its case for the year ahead.
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