I cover trails and tailgates, not theaters, but even I know a good season lineup when I see one. Harper's Bazaar just put out its fall 2026 movie guide (via Yahoo Entertainment) and the slate is genuinely all over the map, in the best way.

The big theme seems to be a Jane Austen revival. Multiple adaptations are landing this fall, which means the period-dress budget in Hollywood must be astronomical right now. I have a soft spot for these. When you've spent all day cold and damp on a ridge, a costume drama with indoor scenes and people having feelings in drawing rooms is exactly the counterweight you need.

Then there's the weird stuff, which is what I respect most. Jenna Ortega is playing a robot. I don't have details beyond that, but casting one of the most expressive young actors alive as a machine is either genius or a disaster, and either way I'll watch it. And there is, apparently, a romance involving a wicker basket. I read that line three times. The guide doesn't fully explain it, and I kind of don't want it explained. Some things should just wash over you in a dark theater while you eat questionable popcorn.

The quieter corner of the lineup is a batch of artist documentaries. These tend to be the sleepers of any fall season, the ones critics carry around like a secret until awards season makes everyone else catch up. If one of them is about a landscape painter or a photographer who spent decades outside, I'll be first in line. That's my lane and I know it.

What the guide makes clear is that this fall isn't leaning on one genre. Literary adaptation, sci-fi, documentary, and whatever the basket thing is. Studios usually chase whatever worked last year in one big herd, so a spread this wide is a small miracle.

My practical read, because I can't help treating everything like trip planning: batch your theater trips around your outdoor weekends. Get the cold, blue-sky hiking days on the calendar first, then slot the movies into the evenings when daylight disappears and you'd be cooking dinner by headlamp anyway. Fall gives you both. Shorter days feel like a loss until you realize they're just the schedule shifting you indoors at six.

Anyway. The guide is worth a scroll for the full list and release dates. If you make it to the wicker basket one before I do, write it down, because I'm going to need someone to confirm it actually happened.