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Hamnet
Jessie Buckley may need to hire a carpenter for the silverware-cabinet she is expected to need for her hugely admired performance in the film based on the Maggie O’Farrell novel. She plays Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, grieving the terrible loss of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet, in 1596, which the story imagines to be a spur to the creation of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare and Emily Watson his mother, Mary.
9 January.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
A docufictional account of the last hours in the life of five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, killed in 2024 by the IDF in Gaza in her uncle’s car, along with six family members and two paramedics, after sole survivor Rajab herself had stayed on the phone for hours to the Palestinian Red Crescent, desperately begging for help. The film uses the real audio recording of Rajab’s voice and fictionally reconstructs the drama in the call-centre office; real people played by actors, responding to the actual voice.
16 January
H Is for Hawk
Can training a goshawk cure grief? Will keeping it indoors – hooded so that it remains calm – and then taking it out hunting allow you to reconnect radically with nature in a way that prissy townies will never understand? Philippa Lowthorpe’s intriguing film, based on Helen Macdonald’s bestselling nature memoir from 2014, stars Claire Foy – who is doing this for real. Foy learned to handle a goshawk and her scenes have a tremendous authenticity.
23 January
No Other Choice
Korean director Park Chan-wook brings us a fascinating, complex movie based on Donald Westlake’s satirical horror-thriller The Ax from 1997. It is a story about a salaryman faced with the humiliation of unemployment who decides that he has no other choice but to commit mass murder. It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis, the state of the nation itself.
23 January
Saipan
Irish footballer Roy Keane is already something of a legend: this film may well cement that status. It is about the “Saipan incident”, which ignited a culture civil war on the subject of rebellion and disobedience. The ferociously opinionated Keane, while training on Japan’s Saipan island in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, was fiercely critical of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy’s methods, and the gaffer sensationally sent Keane home after a tirade from his star player that reportedly included the phrase: “You’re a fucking wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse!” Should sportspeople swallow their objections for the patriotic good of the team or boldly speak up? Éanna Hardwicke plays Keane and Steve Coogan plays McCarthy.
23 January
Is This Thing On?
The formidably versatile Bradley Cooper returns to comedy – or anyway the subject of comedy – with this new movie that he directs and in which he takes a supporting role. The title is, of course, what despairing standup comics say about their microphone when they are not getting any laughs; it could also be a metaphor for non-communication in a relationship. Will Arnett (from BoJack Horseman and Arrested Development) plays Alex, a guy going through a divorce who accidentally discovers that he has a talent for standup comedy; the experience lends a bittersweet new dimension to his single status. The film is inspired by the British comic John Bishop, who blundered into comedy in the middle of his own marital breakup.
30 January
Wuthering Heights
Emerald Fennell, the Oscar-winning creator of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, now takes on her biggest project yet: an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, with Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as the smouldering, saturnine alpha hero himself, Heathcliff. A mild culture war has already begun with Fennell casting a white actor as Heathcliff, a character Brontë described as “dark-skinned”, while Andrea Arnold cast mixed race actor James Howson for her version in 2011. (It wasn’t an issue for William Wyler in 1939 who cast Laurence Olivier.)
13 February
The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film is set in the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s, in which an academic is on the run from the authorities after discovering high-level corruption. The film’s visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery create something special. It’s like Antonioni’s The Passenger with hints of Elmore Leonard, Quentin Tarantino and Meirelles and Lund’s City of God.
20 February
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Rose Byrne has been winning prizes and raves on the festival circuit with this drama from writer-director Mary Bronstein about a therapist whose life appears to be collapsing with far more catastrophic finality than those of her patients. She has a disabled daughter and a useless absentee husband played by Christian Slater – and emotional and behavioural issues of her own which surface when she tries to get therapy from a colleague.
20 February
The Testament of Ann Lee
A vehement, fervent drama from Mona Fastvold, co-written with her partner, the Oscar-winning Brady Corbet. Amanda Seyfried plays the historical figure of Ann Lee, who endured religious persecution in 18th-century England as leader of the fundamentalist Shaker movement. It looks sometimes like a Lars von Trier nightmare, or Robert Eggers’ horror film The Witch, and sometimes like a weird but spectacular Broadway musical melodrama, in which the shaking and shivering of the dancing faithful – ecstatically submitting to divine joy – is shaped into a choreography not unlike the musical Stomp.
20 February
The Bride!
Titles with exclamation marks are generally making a tacit claim for comedy or melodrama or craziness over and above what you might expect, so it’s difficult at this stage to judge the tonal register for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. In 1935, it featured Boris Karloff as the monster and Elsa Lanchester as his spouse; now it’s Christian Bale as the creature and Jessie Buckley as his soulmate. Let’s hope Gyllenhaal will avoid the classy solemnity that Guillermo del Toro favoured for his own recent Frankenstein.
6 March
A Private Life
This is a genially preposterous psychological mystery caper from film-maker Rebecca Zlotowski, channelling De Palma or Hitchcock. It’s the tale of an American psychoanalyst in Paris, watchably played by Jodie Foster speaking elegant French, who suspects that a patient who reportedly killed herself was murdered. Things get weirder when a hypnotherapist regresses her into a past-life dream state in which she and this patient were lovers during the Nazi occupation.
6 March
Sound of Falling
A mysterious and uncanny prose-poem of guilt, shame and yearning in Germany in the 20th century – and the 21st. It is a drama of intergenerational trauma, taking place in the same location in four different time frames, on a farm in north-eastern Germany. Gradually connections between the characters reveal themselves, and the film also hints at more characters and more uncanny and foretold events yet to come.
6 March
La Grazia
Paolo Sorrentino has rediscovered his voice, his wan humour and his flair for the surreal and sensational setpiece. This wintry, elegant study of grief and regret, starring veteran Italian actor Toni Servillo, wears its dreamy melancholy and ennui like a well-tailored if fussily old-fashioned suit.
20 March
Project Hail Mary
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, known for wacky comedies like The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, now take on a high-concept sci-fi mystery based on a novel by Andy Weir (whose The Martian was filmed by Ridley Scott). Ryan Gosling plays Ryland, a high-school teacher who some time in the future wakes up on a spaceship called the Hail Mary, cruising through the galaxy, with no memory of how he came to be there and with all his crewmates dead. Now Ryland must piece together what he was supposed to be doing and how to save planet Earth.
20 March
Two Prosecutors (dir. Sergei Loznitsa)
An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie from Sergei Loznitsa, set in Stalin’s Russia in the late 30s. With its slow, extended scenes from single camera positions, it mimics the zombie existence of the Soviet state: there is something of Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead and Kafka’s The Castle.
27 March
The Drama
Zendaya and Robert Pattinson star in what promises to be a fraught romantic dramedy from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, who had a huge hit with Dream Scenario, featuring Nicolas Cage as a boring professor who keeps showing up in people’s dreams. Now this glitzy couple are preparing to get married, but there’s a gobsmacking revelation just before the big day. This is going to test Pattinson’s comedy chops.
3 April
Michael
A musical biopic of Michael Jackson directed by Antoine Fuqua, starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson (son of Jermaine), who is making his acting debut. Like the stage show MJ the Musical, this is expected to stop tactfully short of the King of Pop’s later controversy, taking us from his early years in the Jackson 5 up to his breakthrough to global megastardom.
24 April
The Devil Wears Prada 2
Just about the most anticipated sequel of the decade, this is the follow-up to the sensational fashionista comedy with Meryl Streep breathing fire as fashion-mag editor Miranda Priestly, transparently and cheekily based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour. (It may explain why Streep has never attended Wintour’s New York Met Ball.) It was the film that also made superstars of Anne Hathaway as Miranda’s terrified new intern Andie, Emily Blunt as her haughty senior assistant Emily Charlton and Stanley Tucci as the witty and wise designer Nigel. They all return for more fashion crimes and misdemeanours.
1 May
The Odyssey
No director thinks bigger or films bigger than Christopher Nolan, and it is perhaps not surprising that he should want to take on Homer’s The Odyssey. (What next? the Book of Genesis?) This is his version of the epic poem that has been the template for storytelling in the west for thousands of years. Matt Damon leads an all-star cast as Odysseus, the Greek king of Ithaca condemned to roam the world after the fall of Troy, yearning to be reunited with his wife Penelope.
17 July
No one in the movies did more to warn us about the dysfunctional origins and effects of social media than Aaron Sorkin by writing The Social Network; it was directed by David Fincher with Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. This is not exactly the sequel many were demanding, but more a conceptual follow-up based on a true story – directed as well as written by Sorkin. Jeremy Strong plays the older, more torpidly calm Zuckerberg and Mikey Madison is Frances Haugen, former head of Facebook’s civic integrity team who blew the whistle on the site’s practices.
9 October
Focker In-Law
Here is the latest in the imperishable Meet the Parents series, with its sublime belief in the overwhelming comedy power of the “Focker” surname, but it has to be said the name “Martha Focker” on its own grants this franchise entry to the Hall of Fame. Robert De Niro and Blythe Danner are reprising their roles as the oldsters who disapprove of a certain prospective son-in-law and Ben Stiller, Teri Polo and Owen Wilson reprise their roles, though are in danger of themselves becoming the senior generation. Beanie Feldstein and Ariana Grande are part of the new intake.
25 November
Dune: Part Three
Denis Villeneuve’s mighty Dune franchise, based on the Frank Herbert sci-fi classic, began way back in 2021; it was precisely the kind of big-screen showstopper that the cinema industry needed for its post-Covid fightback. Part Two arrived last year, and now here is the final swirling sandstorm episode; Timothée Chalamet is back as Paul Atreides with Zendaya as Chani – and Rebecca Ferguson is, of course, Paul’s demanding mother, Lady Jessica. We shall see if Anya Taylor-Joy (as Paul’s sister, Alia) and Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan have roles that last more than a few moments on screen.
18 December
Bitter Christmas
Pedro Almodóvar’s new film is a comedy, returning him to his home turf, with Spanish star Bárbara Lennie. She is Elsa, an ad exec who suffers from a panic attack after the death of her mother during a long weekend in December. She takes off on holiday to Lanzarote, while her partner stays behind in Madrid and this story – in classic Almodóvar style – runs alongside a parallel strand to that of a director and screenwriter.
Release date tbc
Digger
Hollywood has been pondering the question of when and whether Tom Cruise was going to pivot away from action spectaculars like the humongous Mission: Impossible franchise and back towards the challenging indie fare with which he had once associated himself, in films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia and Michael Mann’s Collateral. Well, this could be the moment. Cruise plays the lead in the new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, which describes itself as “a comedy of catastrophic proportions”.
Date tbc
I Love Boosters
Demi Moore had a career-redefining smash with the sci-fi horror The Substance, and now she’s back in another futurist adventure, from satirist Boots Riley. At some stage in the world still to come, a group of young people make a living stealing high-end garments from couture stores; but they might have taken on too much when they take aim at Moore’s formidable fashion CEO.
Date tbc
Ink
Malcolm McDowell, James Cromwell and Ben Mendelsohn have all taken on the demon-king role of Rupert Murdoch in the past; now it’s the turn of Guy Pearce in this new film from director Danny Boyle, based on the award-winning stage play by James Graham. It’s about the traumatised rebirth of the Sun newspaper in the late 1960s, with Jack O’Connell as the paper’s launch editor Larry Lamb. A truly British national institution was born from a new exploitation of sex and crime.
Date tbc
Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew
Fifteen years ago, the Narnia films had looked like a slam-dunk franchise – but nothing happened after the third episode, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010. Now things look like being back on track, with stars Emma Mackey and Carey Mulligan, and director Greta Gerwig. They now take on The Magician’s Nephew (the prequel which was in fact the sixth of CS Lewis’s published seven-novel series, and the first in narrative order), about the creation of Narnia by Aslan a millennium before the events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Date tbc
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
After six series on BBC TV, Tommy Shelby is back in a feature-length movie adventure from screenwriter Steven Knight. Shelby is the gang boss, played by Cillian Murphy, who ruled Birmingham’s crime world between the wars and whose choice of headgear popularised and yet also stigmatised flat caps for an entire generation of British television viewers. Will this be a shark-jumping moment for Tommy, or his finest hour?
Date tbc
The President’s Cake
This Iraqi-set film from feature first-timer Hasan Hadi has been a heartwarming festival hit, having been nurtured by producers Chris Columbus, Marielle Heller and Hollywood veteran Eric Roth. Lamia, played by nonprofessional Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, is a little girl who lives with her grandmother in Saddam’s Iraq in the 90s and is tasked with getting the rare ingredients for a special cake to celebrate the president’s birthday. To buy these, she will have to sell her late father’s watch. In classic neorealist style, she has all sorts of hair-raising encounters along the way.
Date tbc
Untitled Jesse Eisenberg Musical Comedy
Jesse Eisenberg has graduated from fast-talking acting roles like Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Luthor to director status, and his comedy A Real Pain was last year’s indie smash. Now he’s written and directed a (still untitled) musical comedy – composer still unknown – featuring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti. A shy woman finds herself cast in a local theatre’s production of a musical and gets swept up in smalltown showbusiness.
Date tbc
