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3 days ago
5
We Live In Time
We’re overdue a genuinely good romantic-comedy with a few drops of weepie thrown in. This could be it. Screenwriter Nick Payne and director John Crowley give us a non-smooth-running love story in nonlinear form, in which Florence Pugh’s chef Almut and Andrew Garfield’s breakfast cereal executive Tobias meet cute when Almut runs Tobias over in her car on the day his divorce comes through.
1 January
Nosferatu
It’s the great cinephile passion-project remake – last undertaken by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the title role. Now Robert Eggers has revived FW Murnau’s 1922 silent horror classic as a huge movie event. This time it’s Bill Skarsgård as creepy, emulsion-white Count Orlok – the vampire (based on Dracula) who preys on a delicate Englishwoman played by Lily-Rose Depp.
1 January
Nickel Boys
This amazingly moving and occasionally scary film, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel, is about two black American boys sent to a racist and abusive segregated reform school during the Jim Crow 60s (and based on a real institution). The intense and immersive film is shot using first-person point-of-view shots, and its tragedy is at odds with these ecstatic images.
3 January
A Real Pain
Succession fans in need of a new Kieran Culkin fix will want to see this smart, funny film in which he co-stars with its writer-director, Jesse Eisenberg. They play Benji and David, two American Jewish guys who take a trip to Poland, home of their forebears, and visit the grim sites of the Holocaust – with their relationship under increasing strain.
8 January
Babygirl
Nicole Kidman has form when it comes to representing transgressive age-gap relationships. Here she plays a high-flying CEO who has a thrilling affair with a much younger male intern played by Harris Dickinson. The drama promises to provoke progressive assumptions and question ideas about corporate power dynamics and sexual politics.
10 January
Maria
Screenwriter Steven Knight and director Pablo Larraín have confected this intense biopic about the final years of the OG diva herself, Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie. We begin with her haughty and secluded existence in retirement in Paris, a haunted figure in dark glasses, before flashing back to a childhood in Nazi-occupied Athens and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis
10 January
A Complete Unknown
A biopic about Bob Dylan is not necessarily going to please all the purists, vinyl connoisseurs and superfans – nor indeed the great Nobel laureate himself. But Timothée Chalamet brings to this role such amazing chutzpah, vivacity, stamina and fun – he sings all the tracks himself – and there’s great stuff from Edward Norton as Pete Seeger.
17 January
Vermiglio
A gorgeous Italian movie in the manner of Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers, set in a remote wartime village – rich, compassionate, detailed. In the Alpine community of Vermiglio, a schoolteacher has to decide how to react when his eldest daughter falls in love with an army deserter that the villagers are protecting. A lovely film.
17 January
Emmanuelle
Here is a high-risk movie brand reboot, and Audrey Diwan is the formidable director who has taken it on, as well as co-writing with Rebecca Zlotowski. It’s a remake of the once controversial softcore 70s erotic classic Emmanuelle, reinvented for a sex-positive age. Noémie Merlant plays the title character, who goes on a voyage of steamy erotic discovery in Hong Kong.
17 January
Here
Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel Here is adapted by Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth. We see the family history of Richard and Margaret (played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright) in a nonlinear style, as the film ranges over everything that has taken place in the part of America where they live – beginning with the dinosaurs.
17 January
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet’s stunning new film is a brilliant, mysterious epic with something of Orson Welles, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ayn Rand. An architect and Hungarian Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody arrives in the US penniless after the war, and is taken under the wing of an impulsive plutocrat played by Guy Pearce, who asks him to design a huge modernist building in tribute to his late mother.
24 January
Presence
That remarkable and restless movie creator Steven Soderbergh returns with a lo-fi psycho-supernatural thriller shot in a single location: a haunted house, where we see things from the point of view of the ghost. A family move into a recently renovated house (Chris Sullivan and Lucy Liu play the mum and dad) and we see their problems from this uncanny standpoint.
24 January
Hard Truths
Mike Leigh gives us an uncompromising late-career classic: a fierce study of depression performed by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who last worked with Leigh in Secrets and Lies in 1996. She plays Pansy, a middle-aged woman whose melancholy manifests in a nonstop aria of anger – an uncompromising stream of rage against anyone and anything and everything. It’s a fascinating performance.
31 January
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
The fugitive Iranian director and pro-democracy activist Mohammad Rasoulof (who is wanted by the police in his home country) was unlucky not to win a major award in Cannes for this movie – a drama revolving around a lost gun that spans the real and the surreal. It is about the anguish of its dissenting citizens in a country where women can by judicially beaten and bullied for not wearing the hijab in public.
7 February
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
She’s back. Bridge returns for a fourth film in what can only be called the Bridget Jones franchise, which also plugs into the current movie craze for toyboy shenanigans. Renée Zellweger is once again Bridget, whose circumstances are changed and she has a new love: a pert young man played by Leo “One Day” Woodall. Excitingly, Hugh Grant returns in the role of super-cad Daniel Cleaver.
13 February
On Falling
This outstanding debut feature from Scotland-based Portuguese film-maker Laura Carreira takes a close look at something that really hasn’t been properly addressed in any art form: the human cost of the online shopping revolution. Joana Santos gives a great performance as a woman who works at a vast fulfilment centre in Scotland, a job that undermines her sanity and humanity.
7 March
Julie Keeps Quiet
First-time feature director Leonardo Van Dijl made an impact in Cannes with this very disturbing drama about abuse. Tessa Van den Broeck plays young tennis player Julie, who is poised to become a star. But she and all her contemporaries are stunned by news that her coach is under investigation for something unspecified, and a previous pupil has taken her own life. Should Julie keep quiet?
7 March
Sister Midnight
Bollywood star Radhika Apte is tearing it up with her deadpan black-comic performance in Karan Kandhari’s much-admired movie. She plays Uma, a young woman from the provinces who arrives in Mumbai to get married, but discovers her husband is a drunk no-hoper and her home is a chaotic mess.
14 March
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Can it really be true that this is the final Mission: Impossible film? Well, the pressure will be on to go out with a real bang, given that, as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise has consistently delivered solid gold action thrills with his own gasp-inducing stunts – and incidentally established himself as an Anglophile supporter of the UK’s movie industry.
21 May
