In just a few short weeks, we’ll be taking first looks at several of the intriguing films premiering at Sundance. Here, though, we’ll begin with movies about movies, their making and their makers.
French animator Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) paid understated homage to Jacques Tati in The Illusionist (2010). His new project is The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol, a portrait of “a true auteur” (Ginette Vincendeau) whose films were, as Michael Atkinson has pointed out, “terrific hits at home, at once scrupulously local and, it turns out, fabulously universal.”
Luca Guadagnino—who will be directing Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny in After the Hunt, a thriller set at a university—is completing a documentary about Bernardo Bertolucci, “a very personal movie. I am the protagonist of the movie. It could be called Bertolucci and I, which it’s not going to be.” And for The Ozu Diaries, Daniel Raim has delved into the family archives and spoken with Kyoko Kagawa (Tokyo Story) and directors Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Tsai Ming-liang, Wim Wenders, and Luc Dardenne.
The most intriguing and perhaps riskiest of these cinephilic projects is Nouvelle Vague. Richard Linklater will take us back to the offices of Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s, when Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), and Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) were beginning to focus more on making films than writing about them.
Shot in Paris—and in French—Nouvelle Vague will hinge on the making of Godard’s Breathless (1960) with Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). There have been whispers that Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest), a director and writer who collaborated in various capacities with just about everyone in the Cahiers crowd—the assistant director played by Nathalie Baye in Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) was modeled on Schiffman—will be a more-than-minor character.
Just as Dylanologists have been airing their quibbles with James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown—which stars Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan launching his career during the same period—Godardians may already be relishing an opportunity to pounce on Nouvelle Vague, though perhaps not as harshly as they did when Louis Garrel played Godard at work on La chinoise (1967) in Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable (2017). In May, Linklater told IndieWire that Godard and his associates saw cinema as “an elevated, all-encompassing, devote-your-life-to art form. That’s what I’m trying to conjure . . . Just to show the absolute love of cineastes. They invented the [idea of] cineastes, so you’re hanging with all of them. And it reminded me a lot about making my first film. It’s about a guy making his first film.”
Nouvelle Vague will be Linklater’s twenty-second feature, and he wrapped production on his twenty-third last fall. Blue Moon stars Ethan Hawke as lyricist Lorenz Hart; Bobby Cannavale as his songwriting partner, Richard Rodgers; and Andrew Scott as Oscar Hammerstein II. Written by novelist Robert Kaplow (Me and Orson Welles), Blue Moon also stars Margaret Qualley.
Indie Elders
The groundwork that allowed Linklater’s independently produced Slacker (1991) to become a cultural sensation was laid in the 1980s by such filmmakers as Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), and Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape). Shot in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris and featuring Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Tom Waits, and Charlotte Rampling as estranged family members, Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother will be “a very subtle film,” says the director. “It’s very quiet.”
Highest 2 Lowest is “not a remake,” says Spike Lee, but is instead “a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s great film,” High and Low (1963), starring Toshiro Mifune as a wealthy industrialist being extorted by a cold-blooded kidnapper. In Lee’s version, Denzel Washington plays “a music mogul with his own label and [a] reputation as the best ears in the business,” but “the main role” will be played by A$AP Rocky. Lee’s cast also features Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, and Ice Spice.
Written by David Koepp, Soderbergh’s Black Bag stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married spies. When suspicions arise that she’s a traitor, he has to choose between her and his country. Black Bag will be out in March, just two months after Soderbergh’s Presence, a hit at Sundance last year, finally opens in theaters.
Gregg Araki broke through at Sundance in 1992 with his third feature, The Living End, a “mix of punk attitude, bold stylization, and exuberant nihilism,” as Nathan Lee describes it. In I Want Your Sex, Cooper Hoffman (Licorice Pizza) plays a young innocent hired by a provocative artist (Olivia Wilde) to become her sexual muse. The eclectic cast features Charli XCX, Daveed Diggs, Mason Gooding, Chase Sui Wonders, Johnny Knoxville, Margaret Cho, and Roxane Mesquida.
In 1996, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson presented their first features, Hard Eight and Bottle Rocket, both of them expanded from shorts that had screened at Sundance. The directors return this year with typically dynamic ensemble casts. PTA’s tenth feature may or may not be called The Battle of Baktan Cross—Licorice Pizza was referred to for a good while as Soggy Bottom—and may or may not draw from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. What we do know is that PTA has been working with his biggest budget yet, that the film will likely screen in IMAX theaters, and that the cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio features Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Alana Haim, Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, Benicio del Toro, Shayna McHayle, and Chase Infiniti.
For The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson has once again loaded up on star power: Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Bill Murray, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mathieu Amalric, Rupert Friend, Willem Dafoe, and Bryan Cranston. The Phoenician Scheme will likely be a tale of espionage hinging on a father-daughter relationship.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, a project for Netflix cowritten with Emily Mortimer, has been described as a “funny and emotional coming-of-age film about adults.” Those adults are to be played by Mortimer, George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent, Greta Gerwig, and Alba Rohrwacher. Set in New York’s criminal underworld in the 1990s, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing will star Austin Butler as a former baseball player as well as Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Bad Bunny, Griffin Dunne, Vincent D’Onofrio, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Action Bronson, and Carol Kane.
Scary Monsters
Way back in 2016, Guillermo del Toro called Frankenstein “the pinnacle of everything, and part of me wants to do a version of it, [but] part of me has for more than twenty-five years chickened out of making it.” As a child, del Toro was mesmerized by Boris Karloff’s portrayal of the monster in James Whale’s 1931 classic, but when he read Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel, he realized that “nobody has made the book.” Shooting wrapped last fall, and the movie del Toro was practically born to make stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the monster as well as Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz.
Whale drew on a subplot in Shelley’s novel when he made Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is “punk, and it’s fast and really emotional,” says her husband, Peter Sarsgaard. There will be “big dance numbers.” Jessie Buckley is the bride, Christian Bale is the monster, and along with Sarsgaard, the film also stars Penélope Cruz, Annette Bening, John Magaro, Jeannie Berlin, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Speaking of Shelley, by the way, Mia Hansen-Løve is currently preparing to shoot If Love Should Die, a film based on the life of Shelley’s mother, the philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
Romanian director Radu Jude promises to get playful with the iconography of another Hollywood monster in Dracula Park. Tourists and a restaurant owner lead a chaotic chase after an actor portraying the Transylvanian count, trailing storylines spun from AI and social media. Leigh Whannell, whose 2020 reboot of James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) was a box-office smash, is at it again with Wolf Man, based on Curt Siodmak’s 1941 showcase for Lon Chaney Jr.
This year’s zombie movie—though director Danny Boyle wouldn’t call it that—will be 28 Years Later, which sees the return of Boyle, Cillian Murphy, writer Alex Garland, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to the series they launched with 28 Days Later (2002). Years was shot on iPhones back-to-back with its sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, written by Garland but directed by Nia DaCosta—whose Hedda, a reimagining of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler starring Tessa Thompson, Imogen Poots, Tom Bateman, and Nina Hoss, will be out in February. “All the things that are in it,” says DaCosta, “the humor, the sexiness, the thrillerish tension of it, that’s all amplified.”
Back to horror for a moment, though. The Woman in the Yard will reteam director Jaume Collet-Serra with Danielle Deadwyler, and brothers Danny and Michael Philippou (Talk to Me) will direct Sally Hawkins in Bring Her Back. Plot details are, as they say, under wraps. In the summer of 2021, Kyle Edward Ball spent a week and fifteen thousand dollars shooting what would become one of the most talked-about scary movies of the following year, Skinamarink. Ball has now teamed up with A24 for The Land of Nod, whose producers include Josh Safdie, Ronald Bernstein, and Elijah Wood.
Slippery Worlds
Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey into Night) was still shooting Resurrection late last year, but it’s not impossible that we’ll see it before this year is out. Shu Qi plays a woman whose consciousness falls into an “eternal time zone,” where she finds an android corpse she tries to revive by telling it stories. Carlos Reygadas’s Wake of Umbra comes to mind, as it “revolves around four friends traversing time and space, encountering one another in various incarnations.”
Bong Joon Ho’s long-delayed Mickey 17 will finally be out in March. The adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7 stars Robert Pattinson as a lowly earthling who signs up to become an “expendable” employed to take on missions that are all but guaranteed to kill him as humans attempt to colonize an ice world. Each time he does indeed die, he’s replaced by a replica of himself with most of his memories intact. Mickey 17 also features Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo.
Hope will be Na Hong-jin’s first feature since The Wailing (2016). Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, HoYeon Jung, Alicia Vikander, and Michael Fassbender star in the story of a harbor town fighting for survival against some mysterious something discovered on the outskirts.
Yorgos Lanthimos is reimagining Jang Joon-hwan’s cult favorite Save the Green Planet! (2003) as Bugonia. Emma Stone stars as the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company who is kidnapped by a conspiracy-obsessed beekeeper who believes she’s an alien. Jesse Plemons is the beekeeper, and Alicia Silverstone will play his mom.
“This will be a crazy one,” announced Boots Riley last fall. I Love Boosters will star Keke Palmer as Corvette, the leader of the Velvet Gang, a ring of female shoplifters who face off against a fashion maven. Also featured are Demi Moore, LaKeith Stanfield, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Will Poulter.
Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell star in the romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, the third feature from Kogonada. Also featuring Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Billy Magnussen, Sarah Gadon, Brandon Perea, and Hamish Linklater, the film is being described as “an imaginative tale of two strangers and the emotional journey that connects them.”
Farrell also leads The Ballad of a Small Player as Lord Doyle, a British gambler in Macau. “Trapped in the casino with all the other hungry ghosts, Doyle begins to confront the possibility that he is more than just metaphorically haunted,” wrote Tom Shone in his review of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel. Ballad costars Tilda Swinton and Fala Chen and is directed by Edward Berger, fresh off the critical and box-office success of Conclave.
Directed by Romain Gavras (Athena), Sacrifice stars Anya Taylor-Joy as Joan, a crusader out to save the world. Driven by a prophecy only she can hear, Joan kidnaps a movie star (Chris Evans), the world’s richest man (Vincent Cassel), and a random woman (Ambika Mod). Costars include Salma Hayek, John Malkovich, Charli XCX, and Jeremy O. Harris.
Reviewing Walter Mosley’s “creepily gripping, confidently resonant” 2004 novel The Man in My Basement for the Guardian,Nicholas Lezard noted that Mosley “has always, obviously, been finely attuned to matters of race; but he has also been interested in evil, or warped morality.” In Nadia Latif’s adaptation, a mysterious white man (Willem Dafoe) asks to be imprisoned by a down-on-his-luck Black man (Corey Hawkins).
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, featured in last year’s most-anticipated list, looks ready to roll out. Marion Cotillard plays Cristina, the star of an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. She spots a runaway orphan (Clara Pacini) spying on the set and takes her under her wing. In Dry Leaf, directed by Alexandre Koberidze (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?), a photographer goes missing, her father starts searching for her all over Georgia, and her invisible friend decides to help.
Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays a renowned neuroscientist who has arrived in the German university town of Marburg from Hong Kong in Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, which also features Léa Seydoux. There’s an old tree in the botanical garden brought long ago from South America, and Enyedi interweaves three stories around it, highlighting “the volatile nature of reality.” Seydoux will also star in The Unknown, directed by Arthur Harari, who remains best known, fairly or not, for cowriting Anatomy of a Fall with Justine Triet. The Unknown is officially described as “a mix of realistic urban chronicle, fantasy film, investigation, melodrama, and daydream.”
Edgar Wright has said that he will be sticking much more closely to Stephen King’s 1982 vision of the U.S. in 2025 in his adaptation of The Running Man than Arnold Schwarzenegger and director Paul Michael Glaser did with theirs in 1987. Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, a reality show contestant who scores dollars by evading a team of hit men.
Strange Houses
After Transit (2018), Undine (2020), and Afire (2023), Christian Petzold and Paula Beer are reteaming for Miroirs No. 3. Beer plays an aspiring pianist who has survived a car crash that took the life of her boyfriend. She’s taken in by a family she doesn’t know, and they begin acting in ways that have her questioning their motives.
Jennifer Lawrence will play a mother struggling with psychosis in an isolated house in the countryside in Die, My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation—cowritten with playwright Enda Walsh—of Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel. Robert Pattinson costars as the husband, LaKeith Stanfield plays the lover, and Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte joined the cast just before the shoot that wrapped last fall.
Love Stories
Pattinson and Zendaya headline The Drama, directed by Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario) and described as “a romance that takes an unexpected turn before a couple’s big day.” A matchmaker, her ex, and a wealthy businessman become entangled in Materialists, playwright Celine Song’s follow-up to her lauded debut feature, Past Lives (2023). Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal lead the cast.
The two leads in a film being shot in West Africa—played by Maren Eggert and Jean-Christophe Folly—fall in love in Ulrich Köhler’s Gavagai. And in Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure, a woman agrees to help an old friend in the border region between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. When the adventure becomes dangerous, she’s confronted with her desires.
In Arnaud Desplechin’s Une affaire, a virtuoso pianist (François Civil) returns from a tour of Asia to his hometown, Lyon, where he’s swept up in “an impossible love story.” The cast features Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Charlotte Rampling, and Hippolyte Girardot. Based on a 2018 short story by Ben Shattuck, Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound stars Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal as two men who set out to record the folk songs sung in rural New England.
High Crimes
Josh O’Connor again. He’s the title character in Kelly Reichardt’s art-heist movie The Mastermind, set in 1970s New England. The cast includes John Magaro, Alana Haim, Hope Davis, Bill Camp, Gaby Hoffmann, and Amanda Plummer.
James Gray will soon begin shooting his ninth feature, Paper Tiger, the story of two brothers who, in their pursuit of the American dream, become entangled with the Russian mafia. Adam Driver, Jeremy Strong, and Anne Hathaway lead the cast.
Isabel Sandoval says she drew inspiration from Casablanca and In a Lonely Place while making Moonglow, a noir set in 1960s Manila. Sandoval plays a detective partnered with an investigator looking into a crime that she orchestrated herself.
Robert De Niro will play two rival mob bosses, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, in Barry Levinson’s Alto Knights. The screenplay comes from Nicholas Pileggi, who cowrote Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and wrote the book it was based on, Wiseguy (1985).
Genre Workouts
Joaquin Phoenix plays a sheriff who aims to unseat the mayor of a small town in New Mexico in Ari Aster’s contemporary western Eddington. The cast also features Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler. Once Upon a Time in Gaza, directed by twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser, has also been described as a western of sorts, though it’s set in 2007 and was shot in Jordan. A student and a dealer selling drugs out of a restaurant face off against a corrupt cop.
Honey Don’t! will be the second film in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” which was launched last year with Drive-Away Dolls. Margaret Qualley is Honey, a private investigator, and her costars include Chris Evans as a cult leader and Aubrey Plaza as a “mystery woman.”
Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe) returns with his first feature in nearly eight years with the revenge thriller Morte Cucina. Shot by Christopher Doyle, the story centers on a talented young female chef who happens across the man who sexually abused her years ago. Along with newcomer Thanatphon Boonsang, the cast includes Tadanobu Asano, Nopachai Chaiyanam, and Kris Srepoomseth.
Biopics
Both Josh and Benny Safdie are wrapping up solo projects. Timothée Chalamet plays champion table-tennis player Marty Reisman in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, costarring Gwyneth Paltrow, Tyler the Creator, Penn Jillette, Abel Ferrara, Fran Drescher, and Sandra Bernhard. And Dwayne Johnson plays wrestler and mixed martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, costarring Emily Blunt.
Kristen Stewart’s debut feature as a director will be based on The Chronology of Water, a 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who left her abusive household on a swimming scholarship, which she then lost due to her drinking problem. So it was off to Oregon, where she worked with Ken Kesey and experimented sexually and chemically before settling down and starting a family. Imogen Poots plays Yuknavitch, and the cast includes Thora Birch, Kim Gordon, and Jim Belushi.
Duse, directed by Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden), stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi as the renowned Italian stage actor Eleonora Duse and Noémie Merlant as her daughter, Enrichetta Checchi. The story is set between the end of the First World War and the rise of fascism in Europe.
Literary Giants
Bernard Rose calls his Lear Rex a “radical but accessible adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play.” Al Pacino stars as the aging and raging king, and the supporting cast includes Jessica Chastain as Goneril, Ariana DeBose as Cordelia, Rachel Brosnahan as Regan, LaKeith Stanfield as Edmund, and Peter Dinklage as the Fool. Aneil Karia, whose The Long Goodbye (2020) won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short, is working on a contemporary take on Hamlet. His cast: Riz Ahmed as the Prince, Morfydd Clark as Ophelia, Joe Alwyn as Laertes, Timothy Spall as Polonius, and Art Malik as King Claudius.
Paul Mescal will play Shakespeare himself in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. Cowritten with Maggie O’Farrell—whose 2020 novel centers the dramatist’s son, who died in 1596 when he was only eleven—Hamnet’s costars include Jessie Buckley as Anne Hathaway as well as Joe Alwyn and Emily Watson.
Idan Weiss is Franz Kafka in Agnieszka Holland’s Franz, which she describes as “a sort of collage of scenes and stories from the life and books . . . We are building the blueprint of a whimsical fictional docudrama, in which nothing is impossible.” Producer Šárka Cimbalová, who has worked with Holland on Charlatan (2020) and Green Border (2023), calls Franz a “very personal impression of one of literature’s greatest figures, as both hero and antihero.”
Patrick Wang (In the Family, A Bread Factory) directs Blake Draper in A. Rimbaud, a portrait of the poet that stretches from his days as a student in France to his final years in Africa. “The only way to keep up with Rimbaud is to be as playful and as inventive as Rimbaud,” says Wang. “We have the team of rogues ready to do this. At the center of it all is a young actor who is lightning in a bottle.”
In Late Fame, written by Samy Burch (May December) and directed by Kent Jones (Diane), Willem Dafoe plays a forgotten poet whose work is rediscovered by a group of young artists, including a mercurial stage actor played by Greta Lee. And Alejandro Amenábar (The Others) directs Julio Peña as Miguel de Cervantes in The Captive. In 1575, long before he wrote Don Quixote, Cervantes served in the Spanish Navy and was captured by Barbary pirates, who whisked him off to Algiers, where he remained a prisoner for five years.
Family Dramas
Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who has worked as a screenwriter with Paweł Pawlikowski (Ida), Sebastián Lelio (Disobedience), Maria Schrader (She Said), and Steve McQueen (Small Axe), will make her directorial debut with Hot Milk, an adaptation of Deborah Levy’s 2016 novel. A mother (Fiona Shaw) and daughter (Emma Mackey) travel to Spain in the hopes of finding a cure for the mother’s illness. There, the daughter becomes entranced by an enigmatic traveler (Vicky Krieps).
Renate Reinsve, director Joachim Trier, and screenwriter Eskil Vogt—the team behind The Worst Person in the World (2021)—will return with Sentimental Value. Reinsve plays an acclaimed stage actor whose father (Stellan Skarsgård), a film director, aims to make up for his long absence by casting his daughter in his next project. She won’t be playing along.
Alpha, the third feature from Julia Ducournau (Titane), might be set in 1980s Le Havre and might center on a girl shunned at school because the other kids think she’s got some strange new disease. All that’s confirmed is that the cast includes Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim, who might be playing the girl’s parents.
Director Kornél Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber have collaborated on White God (2014), Jupiter's Moon (2017), and Pieces of a Woman (2020), and their newest project, At the Sea, stars Amy Adams as a mother reuniting with her family at their holiday home on the beach following a long rehabilitation. Adams’s costars include Murray Bartlett, Brett Goldstein, Chloe East, Dan Levy, Jenny Slate, and Rainn Wilson.
Ilker Çatak (The Teacher’s Lounge) shot Yellow Letters in secret because of the “sensitive nature” of his story of a famous performer and her husband, a drama professor, who live in Ankara with their thirteen-year-old daughter. When both parents lose their jobs due to “state arbitrariness,” they move in with his family in Istanbul. Producer Ingo Fliess calls Yellow Letters “a universal story about how to cope with the situation where you are under pressure and have to redefine your values and your morals.”
Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) is completing the trilogy inspired by her family history with Romería, the story of a teen seeking to learn more about her biological father, who died from AIDS. None of his relatives, though, are eager to delve into the past. In Dao, directed by Alain Gomis (Rewind & Play), Béatrice Mendy plays a woman who has just consecrated her dead father as an ancestor in Guinea-Bissau and is now preparing her daughter’s wedding in the Parisian banlieue.
Directed by Karim Aïnouz (Motel Destino) and written by Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth), Rosebush Pruning is an adaptation of Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (1965), which Michael Koresky has called “a gasp-inducing, mouth-frothing, black-comic attack on bourgeois values.” The new cast features Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Tracy Letts, Elena Anaya, and Pamela Anderson.
In Ella McCay, the first feature from James L. Brooks (Broadcast News) in thirteen years, Emma Mackey plays a woman balancing work and family just as she’s stepping up to become the new governor of her state. Brooks’s cast includes Jamie Lee Curtis, Woody Harrelson, Ayo Edebiri, Albert Brooks, Kumail Nanjiani, and Rebecca Hall.
Jeremy Thomas, Ewa Piaskowska, and Jerzy Skolimowski are producing Jan Komasa’s Good Boy, starring Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough as a married couple who kidnap a nineteen-year-old criminal (Anson Boon) in order to forcibly rehabilitate him. Set in 1957 Budapest, Orphan is the story of a Jewish twelve-year-old who learns the painful truth of his mother’s past when a stranger arrives demanding his family back. Orphan will be the third feature from László Nemes (Son of Saul, Sunset).
Daniel Day-Lewis is coming out of retirement to star in his son’s debut feature. Ronan Day-Lewis’s Anemone, cowritten with his father, is a story about family bonds, particularly among men. Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, and Safia Oakley-Green round out the cast. In After, directed by Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come), a father wanders into a rave in the mountains of southern Morocco with his son in search of his missing daughter.
Political Intrigue
Paul Dano will play Vadim Baranov, a spin doctor working for the Kremlin in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin. Baranov “blurs truth with lies, the news with propaganda, directing the entire society like one great reality show.” Assayas’s cast includes Alicia Vikander, Jude Law, Zach Galifianakis, Tom Sturridge, and Jeffrey Wright.
It’s 1977, and the military dictatorship still has its grip on Brazil in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. Marcelo (Wagner Moura), sought after for his technical expertise, leaves São Paulo for Recife, hoping to reunite with his son. But he soon discovers that he’s being tailed.
Without an official title or plot synopsis, it’s hard to know just how political Kathryn Bigelow’s next thriller will be, but most are assuming that it takes place in the White House as an emergency threatens the country. Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, and Greta Lee lead the cast.
Murder and Mystery
Jodie Foster plays a renowned psychiatrist convinced that one of her patients has been murdered in Vie privée, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children) and costarring Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, and Mathieu Amalric.
In Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, a laid-off manager spends a year and a half looking for work before he decides to start killing off potential competitors. Costa-Gavras directed an adaptation in 2005, and he’s helped Park Chan-wook realize his. Lee Byung-hun (Joint Security Area) stars in No Other Choice. Speaking of Westlake, Shane Black’s Play Dirty, starring Mark Wahlberg and LaKeith Stanfield, will be the third adaptation of the 1962 thriller The Hunter. The two before it were Point Blank (1967) and Payback (1999).
Rian Johnson’s first two Knives Out mysteries with Daniel Craig as private investigator Benoit Blanc have been terrific fun, and there’s no reason to believe that Wake Up Dead Man won’t be as well. This time around, Craig will be joined by Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, and Thomas Haden Church.
Music!
After wrapping Peter Pan & Wendy (2023), David Lowery set out to “do a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart to heart,” he said last summer, “a really gentle filmmaking experience. But then I thought, ‘What if one of those characters is a pop star? And what if we started at a stadium? Then it got bigger. And again, it wound up being the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” Anne Hathaway is the pop star and Michaela Coel is a fashion designer in Mother Mary, which also features FKA Twigs and Hunter Schafer and original music from Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX.
Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, who cowrote The Brutalist, have written a musical biopic, Ann Lee, based on the eighteenth-century life of the founding leader of the Shakers, a millenarian Christian sect. Fastvold (The World to Come) directs Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Christopher Abbott, Tim Blake Nelson, Stacy Martin, and Matthew Beard, and shooting wrapped at the end of last year.
Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas face off in John Carney’s Power Ballad, a musical comedy about a wedding singer, a rock star, and the song that comes between them. Jesse Eisenberg will soon begin production on an untitled musical comedy starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti. The story will center on a shy woman who blooms when she’s cast in a musical being staged by a local community theater. And Geremy Jasper (Patti Cake$) directs Sadie Sink, Regina Hall, and Kelly Macdonald in O’Dessa, a postapocalyptic rock opera about a farm girl on an epic quest.
Inspired by the mass demonstrations protesting violence against women that swept Chile in 2018, Sebastián Lelio’s The Wave features a cast of newcomers and songs by seventeen female Chilean musicians working in collaboration with composer Matthew Herbert. Lelio says that the film “explores the collision between the urgency for change and the status quo through the intoxicating power of dance, music, and a band of masked women who are determined to change the world.”
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