Here are the films to see this month, including Dwayne Johnson as an MMA star, the return of Daniel Day-Lewis and Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino's campus drama.

Dwayne Johnson is synonymous with megabudget blockbusters, but he gets to prove himself as a serious actor in The Smashing Machine, a brooding indie biopic written and directed by Benny Safdie (the co-director of Good Time and Uncut Gems). Johnson stars as Mark Kerr, a mixed martial artist who won tournaments in the early days of the sport, before it became the global sensation it is today. As much as he revels in punching and kicking his opponents to a bloody pulp, the bouts take their toll on his physical and mental health, and he is soon fighting addiction as well as fighting other people. Emily Blunt co-stars as Kerr's girlfriend. "It's a film that feels gloriously alive," writes Hannah Strong in Little White Lies, "earnest in its depiction of masculinity that is fragile rather than toxic while still grappling with the question of why anyone would choose to make a living in such a barbaric way."

Released internationally from 2 October

Daniel Day-Lewis hasn't been in a film since Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread in 2017. He announced his retirement from the profession that same year, but, luckily for us, the most-acclaimed screen actor of his generation has been lured back into the film business by the prospect of working with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. Together, the two Day-Lewises have co-written Anemone, which Day-Lewis Jr directs Day-Lewis Sr in the starring role. He plays a former soldier who served in Northern Ireland many years ago, and has been living in isolation in the English countryside ever since. But now his teenage son (Samuel Bottomley) is in trouble, so his estranged brother (Sean Bean) has come to find him. Also starring Samantha Morton, this "intense, joyous, sorrowful, and sometimes absurd" film is "a truly extraordinary drama about brothers, mothers, and, yes, fathers and sons", writes David Fear in Rolling Stone. "And it's as much an introduction to a new talent as it is a reintroduction to a veteran one."

Released on 3 October in the US and on 16 October in Australia

Roofman was the nickname given by the media to Jeffrey Manchester, an army veteran who robbed a string of fast-food restaurants in the late-1990s by climbing on to their roofs and drilling down into the buildings. He was then arrested but later escaped from prison and hid himself in a toy shop, sleeping in its backrooms by day, and wandering around the shop at night. Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) has turned this stranger-than-fiction tale into a comedy drama starring Channing Tatum as Manchester, and Kirsten Dunst as a toy-shop employee he romances. David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter calls Roofman "a true-crime story that's also a tender character study… with a delicate tone that makes room for lightness, comedy, romance and quietly searing melancholy".

Released on 10 October in the US and internationally from 16 October

Tron films don't get made very often. The first one, in which Jeff Bridges' programmer was zapped into a world of sentient video-game characters, was released in 1982. The follow-up, starring Garrett Hedlund and Olivia Wilde, didn't come out until 2010, ie, 28 years later. And it has taken another 15 years for work to finish on Tron: Ares, a sci-fi action adventure that stars Jared Leto as a digital being who materialises in the physical world. Still, maybe it's for the best that this third film has taken so long, as its anxieties about artificial intelligence could hardly be more topical. "The interesting thing is that with each year that has passed, the idea actually becomes more relevant," the film's producer, Justin Springer told Comicbook.com. "This concept for a movie is more in the zeitgeist than it's ever been, and… technologically, we'll be able to do a better job now than we would have 10 years ago."

Released internationally from 8 October

John Candy was in more than 30 films, including Uncle........

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