movies Time for the high-toned flicks hoping to rake in Oscars.

When the leaves turn color, so do the offerings at the multiplex, with blockbuster green giving way to Oscar-hopeful gold. This season promises that autumn award bait, the biopic, a new breed of political thriller, and titles as suitable to the book club as the movie group.

Respectively playing mob and Tudor royalty, Denzel Washington and Cate Blanchett are likely contenders in the biopics American Gangster and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (see below).

This is the season of the political thriller, with characters sifting through the fallout of Middle East wars and Islamic terrorism. Grace Is Gone (Oct. 5) stars John Cusack as a dad struggling to tell his young daughters that Mommy died in Iraq. Rendition (Oct. 19), headlined by Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, is the story of an American woman married to an Egyptian who is covertly seized by the United States for questioning.

The Kingdom (Sept. 28) costars Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper and Jennifer Garner as FBI ops hunting the terrorists behind an attack in Saudi Arabia. In the Valley of Elah (Sept. 21) sees Charlize Theron investigate the whereabouts of a U.S. soldier in Iraq who has gone AWOL. Robert Redford directs and stars in Lions for Lambs (Nov. 9) as a professor who dissuades students from serving in Afghanistan, a war supported by a conservative senator (Tom Cruise).

Come Christmas, Charlie Wilson's War (Dec. 25) with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts is about the real-life '80s politician who arms Afghan mujaheddin to fight occupying Soviet Communists.

The coming literary adaptations include The Jane Austen Book Club (Sept. 28), based on the Karen Joy Fowler novel and starring Maria Bello; Gone Baby Gone and The Kite Runner (see below); and Gabriel Garca Mrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (Nov. 16), starring Javier Bardem.

- Carrie Rickey, Inquirer movie critic.

The Brave One Death Wish in a skirt? It's got Jodie Foster as a New York radio host who turns vigilante after surviving an attack in Central Park, and Terrence Howard as the detective who doesn't know whether to assist or arrest her. Third and most prominent of this year's films (Red Road, Descent) in which women seek vengeance against their assailants. (Sept. 14) - C.R.