The Most-Anticipated Films of 2026
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This year is shaping up to be an promising one for movies, with big-event releases from titans Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, and Greta Gerwig already generating excitement. We hope this overview will have you looking forward to the full range of cinema slated to premiere in 2026, including fresh discoveries and the latest from our favorite art-house auteurs. Let’s begin with an intriguing development that has caught our attention: even excluding titles already announced for the upcoming Sundance, Rotterdam, and Berlin film festivals, it’s remarkable how many of the most promising are being made in France by directors who are not French.
“My next films will all be shot in France,” Jim Jarmusch told David Cronenberg last year, and he’s already at work on one that he says will be “very female.” With All of a Sudden, Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) aims “to show a Paris that’s a little different from the clichés we might have.” Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto star as a French nursing home manager and a Japanese theater director, friends drawn closer when the former falls ill. Efira, who learned Japanese for the shoot, says that Hamaguchi has made some “astonishing formal choices.”
Efira joins Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Cassel, and Catherine Deneuve in Parallel Tales, the tenth feature from Asghar Farhadi (A Separation). Cassel has mentioned that the story is set against the backdrop of the terrorist attacks that hit Paris in 2015. Huppert will also star in Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess. Cowritten with Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher), this is a comedic take on the legend of Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who was said to have a vampiric taste for the blood of young women—hundreds are believed to have been killed between 1590 and 1610.
Radu Jude has been working on a film that he says is “very loosely in dialogue” with Octave Mirbeau’s 1990 novel The Diary of a Chambermaid. Kirill Serebrennikov (Leto) has cast Ludivine Sagnier, Fanny Ardant, and Louis Garrel in Après, and for Welsh filmmaker Jamie Adams, it’s “always been a dream of mine to shoot an Eric Rohmer-styled picture in Normandy.” Only What We Carry, shot over six days in September, stars Quentin Tarantino, Simon Pegg, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Classic Tales Retold
The Odyssey, the most expensive production of Christopher Nolan’s career, was shot entirely on 70 mm IMAX cameras and stars Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and a cast that includes Tom Holland, Robert Pattison, Lupita Nyong’o, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, Benny Safdie, John Leguizamo, and Mia Goth. Tickets went on sale last summer, and nearly all the opening weekend IMAX screenings sold out within hours.
Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Penélope Cruz star in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! Taking inspiration from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Gyllenhaal sets her version in 1930s Chicago.
Margot Robbie is Catherine and Jacob Elordi is Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s very loose adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Fennell “has somehow managed to become one of our more controversial directors,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, “and the fact that she’s made an adaptation of one of the most beloved (and adapted) literary works of all time has clearly driven everybody insane.”
The latest version of Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman is being cowritten by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and director Chinonye Chukwu (Clemency, Till). Jeffrey Wright and Octavia Spencer will be their Willy and Linda Loman.
Movie Movies
In The Adventures of Cliff Booth, written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher, Brad Pitt reprises his role as the stunt double and sidekick of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Photos snapped on the set of the new film suggest that Cliff’s story will pick up in 1977, by which point he’s become a Hollywood fixer, sorting out delicate situations that might otherwise lead to scandal.
Following The Room Next Door (2024), Pedro Almodóvar returns to Spain for Bitter Christmas. Bárbara Lennie stars as Elsa, an advertising director who throws herself into her work, overdoing it to the point that she decides to take a brief vacation with a good friend. She leaves behind a partner, a filmmaker who is working these events into the screenplay he’s writing.
Behemoth!, written and directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), is billed as “a love letter to the music of the movies and the people who make it,” and Pedro Pascal leads a cast that includes Eva Victor and Olivia Wilde. And Javier Bardem stars in Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved as an acclaimed film director forced to reunite with his estranged daughter (Victoria Luengo), an actor, on the set of a film set in 1930s Western Sahara.
The State of Things
A good handful of this year’s films will take varied approaches to our precarious moment, and The Dreamed Adventure, directed by Valeska Grisebach (Western), is one of them. The story centers on a woman who decides to help out a man she barely knows by taking part in illegal trade in a Bulgarian border town.
Clio Barnard (The Arbor) directs Enda Walsh’s adaptation of Keiran Goddard’s 2024 novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, which tracks the lives of five friends who grow up in a working-class community in Birmingham and then grow apart.
With La libertad doble, Lisandro Alonso revisits his 2001 debut. “When I made La libertad, Argentina was undergoing a brutal crisis,” says Alonso. “Twenty-five years have passed, and the country is not much better—perhaps worse.” Dominga Sotomayor (Too Late to Die Young) directs an adaptation of Pilar Quintana’s 2017 novel La perra, the story of a lonely middle-aged woman living in a tiny community on a small island off the coast of Chile. She adopts a dog and gives it the name she’s chosen for the daughter she never had.
In Soumsoum, la nuit des astres, directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (A Dry Season), a young woman in a remote village in Chad is haunted by strange visions. Man vs. Flock will be the first fictional feature from Tamara Kotevska, the director of the award-winning documentaries Honeyland (2019) and The Tale of Silyan (2025). An elderly farmer stands up for his village when a Chinese construction company swoops in, and he finds an unexpected ally in a social media influencer.
Riley Keough and F. Murray Abraham lead the cast of Albert Serra’s Out of This World, which tracks an American delegation’s trip to Russia. The goal is to resolve a dispute sparked by the sanctions slapped on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. And with Artificial, Luca Guadagnino will tell the story of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring in 2023. Andrew Garfield stars as Altman, and the cast includes Yura Borisov (Anora), Jason Schwartzman, Zosia Mamet, Mark Rylance, and, as Elon Musk, Ike Barinholtz.
Comedies
In October, Alejandro G. Iñárritu spoke with IndieWire’s Anne Thompson about working with Tom Cruise on Digger, “a comedy of catastrophic proportions.” Cruise “will surprise the world. People will see a new kind of thing.” Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, and Jesse Plemons costar. Kristen Stewart stars in Dylan Meyer’s “girl stoner comedy” The Wrong Girls and in Quentin Dupieux’s Full Phil, playing the daughter of a wealthy industrialist (Woody Harrelson) who tries to reconnect with her on a lavish trip through Paris.
The Entertainment System Is Down is Ruben Östlund’s follow-up to his second Palme d’Or winner, Triangle of Sadness. The premise is simple—it’s right there in the title—and among the airline passengers faced with the prospect of warding off boredom for hours on end are Keanu Reeves, Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Brühl, Samantha Morton, Nicholas Braun, Vincent Lindon, and Julie Delpy.
Jesse Eisenberg’s as-yet-untitled musical comedy stars Julianne Moore as a shy woman surprised to find herself cast in a community theater production. Paul Giamatti and Bernadette Peters costar. At the Film Stage, Nick Newman is looking forward to Frogs, codirected by Robin Schavoir (The Plagiarists) and cinematographer Matthew Schroeder. Frogs is “a day-in-the-life comedy skewering myopias and obsessions plaguing the frightening land of Brooklyn, New York.”
Science Fictions
Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day aims to get us all asking ourselves how we would react to the news that we are not alone in the universe. “It’s like old-school Spielberg,” says Josh O’Connor, who stars along with Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo, who has said he “bawled” when he finished reading the screenplay. “I thought it was one of the most beautiful scripts about our humanity.”
Humanity’s hanging by a thread in Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, based on Peter Heller’s 2012 postapocalyptic novel and starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce. Brad Bird (The Incredibles) dreamed up Ray Gunn, an animated feature about the last human private detective, in the 1990s. It’s now expected to premiere on Netflix some time this year.
Michael Almereyda (Nadja) will likely begin shooting an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2016 novel Zero K early this year in Brazil. Caleb Landry Jones, Peter Sarsgaard, and Andrea Riseborough are slated to star in the story of a billionaire’s search for immortality.
Hope will be Na Hong-jin’s long-awaited follow-up to The Wailing (2016), and it’s set in a remote village near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, where a tiger is terrifying the community. The emergency “soon spirals into a deeper, more terrifying mystery, one that forces the town’s residents to confront the unknown.”
Hirokazu Kore-eda will roll out two new films this year. Set in the near future, Sheep in the Box is the story of a couple who treat a humanoid as they would their own son. And Look Back is a live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s 2021 manga about two girls pursuing their dreams of becoming manga artists.
David and Nathan Zellner’s Alpha Gang is a sci-fi comedy about alien invaders disguised as 1950s bikers. And just look at this cast: Cate Blanchett, Dave Bautista, Steven Yeun, Léa Seydoux, Zoë Kravitz, Riley Keough, and Channing Tatum.
Here’s the pitch for Hot Spot, directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska (The Lure) and starring Noomi Rapace: “Set in a near-future society ruled by sentient AI, a private eye investigates a murder case only to discover a rebel group capable of undermining the digital overlord.” Rapace also stars—along with Rebecca Hall, Gael García Bernal, and Beanie Feldstein—in Maria Martinez Bayona’s The End of It,which is set in a world where death has become optional.
Pure Fantasy
After the spectacular success of Barbie (2023), the world was Greta Gerwig’s oyster, and she opted to direct two feature adaptations of books from C. S. Lewis’s classic fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia. Netflix will put the first, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, on one thousand IMAX screens on November 26. Published as the sixth volume in the seven-book series, The Magician’s Nephew is actually a prequel that includes the origin story of the fictional realm of Narnia and its creation by the lion Aslan. Gerwig’s cast features Emma Mackey, Carey Mulligan, and Daniel Craig.
Arthur Harari is best known for cowriting the screenplay for Anatomy of a Fall (2023) with Justin Triet. He’s also cowritten a graphic novel, Le cas David Zimmerman, with his younger brother, Lucas. Now the two have written an adaptation, The Unknown, starring Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider. Zimmerman is a photographer who spots a woman at a party he can’t take his eyes off of, and when he wakes up the next morning, he finds himself in her body.
Immediately after the premiere of The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie and Dwayne Johnson announced that they were reteaming on an adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater’s 2017 novel Lizard Music. The story centers on a kid who befriends the Chicken Man, a colorful character who keeps a clever hen under his hat, and together, they head to a floating island where the lizard musicians play.
Produced by the animation studio Laika, directed by Travis Knight, and written by Chris Butler—this is the team behind Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)—Wildwood is an adaptation of the 2011 novel by Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. It’s the story of young Prue, who set out to find her brother, who has been whisked away by a murder of crows. The voice cast features Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Awkwafina, Angela Bassett, Tom Waits, and Richard E. Grant.
The Scary Ones
The year in horror will begin next week with the release of 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, written by Alex Garland, directed by Nia DaCosta, and shot back-to-back with Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, one of last summer’s big critical and box-office hits. Tying up the terror on Christmas Day, Robert Eggers’s Werwulf, set in thirteenth-century England, stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp, and Willem Dafoe.
“I make movies I wish existed when I was a kid,” said Jane Schoenbrun, announcing their follow-up to I Saw the TV Glow (2024) back in May. “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is my best attempt at the ‘sleepover classic’: an insane yet cozy midnight odyssey that beckons to unsuspecting viewers from the horror section at the local video store.” Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson lead the cast. Further down the road for Schoenbrun is Black Hole, a Netflix series adapted from Charles Burns’s award-winning, twelve-issue comic book series.
Margaret Qualley and Drew Starkey play a couple battling demons on their Arkansas farm in Jeff Nichols’s southern gothic horror film King Snake. Kyle Edward Ball, who shook up the genre in 2022 with Skinamarink, has teamed up with A24 on The Land of Nod, set in a secluded town in northern Canada during a snowstorm. And Zach Cregger (Weapons) will reboot the Resident Evil franchise.
Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) directs Tatiana Maslany, Johnny Knoxville, Heather Graham—and Nicole Kidman—in The Young People, which may be about the disrupted friendship between two students. Zachary Wigon (Sanctuary) is taking on an adaptation of Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho, which centers on a governess at a gothic manor. And with The Face of Horror, Anna Biller (The Love Witch) transposes the nineteenth-century Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan to fourteenth-century England.
Family Dramas
Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act (2012) introduced Tallie Medel as Jackie, a seventeen-year-old in love with her older brother, Matthew (Sky Hirschhorn). For Nick Newman, “few movies, American or otherwise, in even semi-recent memory devote themselves to approaching such subjects so intuitively, gently, humorously.” Sallitt has shot a sequel, What Can’t Be Mentioned, and he tells Newman that, revisiting the screenplay, he’s found that “it still makes me laugh after all these years.”
Up next from Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers) is an adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s A Long Winter. In the Catalan Pyrenees, the mother of two grown sons wanders off into the mountains—and then a blizzard hits.
With his first feature, Ballast (2008), Lance Hammer won the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance. Now Hammer is at work on Queen at Sea, starring Juliette Binoche as a woman who moves back to London with her teenage daughter (Florence Hunt) to care for her aging mother (Anna Calder-Marshall).
The First Taste of Loneliness will complete the trilogy Gu Xiaogang began with Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2019) and Dwelling by the West Lake (2023). Zhou Xun (Suzhou River) stars as a woman grieving her father when her mother, who has already begun a new romance, discovers a list of her late husband’s final wishes.
Riley Keough, Barry Keoghan, and Harry Melling star in Butterfly Jam, the first feature in English from Kantemir Balagov (Beanpole). The story centers on Pyteh, a fifteen-year-old training to become a wrestler when he isn’t helping out in the Circassian restaurant run by his father and aunt. His dad dreams up a scheme that turns sour, and Pyteh must come to terms with a more brutal side of the man he thought he knew.
Werner Herzog has cast Kate and Rooney Mara in Bucking Fastard as twin sisters Jean and Joan, who start digging through a mountain range in search of a land where true love is possible. Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) is working on an adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1961 novel Diary of a Mad Old Man. Gabriel Byrne, Fan Bingbing, and Lily Franky (Shoplifters) star in the story of an elderly invalid who becomes erotically obsessed with his daughter-in-law.
In Gentle Monster, directed by Marie Kreutzer (Corsage), Léa Seydoux plays Lucy, a renowned pianist who reluctantly agrees to move out to the country with her partner and their son. She finds a friend in Elsa (Jella Haase), who is caring for her ailing father. And somewhere in Gentle Monster, there’s a role for Catherine Deneuve.
Brad Pitt stars in an adaptation of Tim Winton’s 1994 novel The Riders written by David Kajganich (A Bigger Splash) and directed by Edward Berger (Conclave). Pitt plays a man who flies ahead to an Irish cottage he’s just bought. His wife and daughter are to follow, but when the plane lands, his wife isn’t on it, and the seven-year-old girl is too traumatized to tell him why.
Léa Mysius (The Five Devils) directs Hafsia Herzi, Monica Bellucci, and Benoît Magimel in an adaptation of Laurent Mauvignier’s 2020 novel Histoires de la nuit. In a remote French village, a family prepares to celebrate the mother’s fortieth birthday when intruders barge in.
Written by frequent Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Efthimis Filippou and directed by Karim Aïnouz, Rosebush Pruning is an English-language remake of Marco Bellocchio’s debut, Fists in the Pocket (1965). Aïnouz’s cast features Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Tracy Letts, and Pamela Anderson.
Back in Time
Last October, João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata (The Last Time I Saw Macao) presented a work in progress, 13 Alfinetes, an exploration of faith in a secular world. Shot in the IMAX format, 13 Alfinetes moves from medieval Lisbon through eighteenth-century Madrid to the Lisbon of today. As the partners and collaborators put it, the film “mixes experimental horror fiction with a kind of tragicomedy, in the Iberian satirical tradition.” The timeline of Fuxi: Joy in Four Chapters, directed by Qiu Jiongjiong (A New Old Play), stretches even further, blending mythology and fine cuisine in a story that spans four thousand years.
An unlikely collaboration between a Venetian noble and a maestro castrato in eighteenth-century Italy drives Anne Rice’s 1982 novel Cry to Heaven. Tom Ford directs an adaptation starring Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ciarán Hinds, Thandiwe Newton, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Hunter Schafer, George MacKay, Paul Bettany, Owen Cooper, and, in her acting debut, Adele.
Codirected by Małgorzata Szumowska (Body) and cinematographer Michał Englert, The Idiots is based on Andrew D. Kaufman’s The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky. The Idiots stars Aimee Lou Wood as Anna Dostoyevsky and Johnny Flynn as Fyodor, and the cast also features Vicky Krieps and Christian Friedel. All that seems to be known so far about Joel Coen’s Jack of Spades is that it’s a gothic mystery set in 1880s Scotland and that the cast features Josh O’Connor, Lesley Manville, Frances McDormand, and Damien Lewis.
Set in 1916, Coward, the third feature from Lukas Dhont (Girl, Close) hunkers down in the trenches with soldiers fighting in the First World War. Lav Diaz’s Kawalan sees an isolated Philippine community move deep into the forest for safety as the Japanese approach during the Second World War. László Nemes’s Moulin stars Gilles Lellouche as Jean Moulin, a hero of the French Resistance, and Lars Eidinger as Klaus Barbie, the infamous Butcher of Lyon.
Following Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), Paweł Pawlikowski is working once again with cinematographer Łukasz Żal on a black-and-white feature. 1949 is based on Colm Tóibín’s 2021 novel The Magician and stars Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller as Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, who set out on a road trip from Frankfurt to Weimar.
In Elegance Bratton’s By Any Means, a Mafia hit man and a Black FBI agent team up to investigate the murder of a civil rights leader in the 1960s. The cast features Mark Wahlberg, Giancarlo Esposito, Josh Lucas, and David Strathairn.
On August 15, 1974, South Korean president Park Chung-hee was delivering a speech in Seoul when shots rang out. Starring Yoo Hae-jin, Park Hae-il, and Lee Min-ho and directed by Hur Jin-ho (A Normal Family), Assassins revisits one of the most turbulent days in modern Korean history.
Ira Sachs describes The Man I Love, set in 1980s New York, as a “musical fantasia of a city under duress.” In the late 1990s, AIDS was hitting the impoverished communities in Nairobi hard. In Emily Atef’s Call Me Queen, one woman from the city’s largest slum teams up with an Irish journalist to take on the pharmaceutical companies who were denying Kenyans access to treatment.
Set in 1990s Tunisia, Mimesis, Kaouther Ben Hania’s follow-up to The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), sees a woman determined to stop an imam from turning her family mausoleum into a mosque. When she begins making a film about the patron of the mausoleum, she finds her beliefs shaken to the core. Bertrand Bonello has cast Mark Ruffalo as Father Joseph Murolo, a priest who also experiences a crisis of faith. After the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, there was immediate talk of sainthood. In Santo Subito!, the Vatican summons Murolo to look into the late pontiff’s life and seek out any potential roadblocks.
Biopics
Patrick Wang (A Bread Factory) has called directing Blake Draper (Clickbait) in A. Rimbaud, a film about the nineteenth-century French poet, “the experience of a lifetime.” Théo Christine will head a cast that includes Omar Sy, Vincent Cassel, and François Civil in Dumas: Black Devil, directed by Ladj Ly (Les misérables). Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the father of the future writer of The Three Musketeers, was the first person of color in the French military to become a brigadier general, divisional general, and general-in-chief.
Dominic Sessa, who broke through in The Holdovers (2023), will play Anthony Bourdain in Tony, directed by Matt Johnson (BlackBerry) and costarring Antonio Banderas as the restaurant owner who hires the promising young chef. David O. Russell’s Madden, starring Nicolas Cage as the NFL commentator John Madden, also features Christian Bale, Kathryn Hahn, John Mulaney, and Sienna Miller. Russell, in the meantime, is already lining up his next project, Shutout, starring Jenna Ortega and Robert De Niro as pool hustlers.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Producer Rodrigo Teixeira (Frances Ha) tells Deadline’s Melanie Goodfellow that Paper Tigeris “the best James Gray movie ever. I’ve made three James Gray movies, and this is for sure the best.” Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, and Miles Teller star in the story of two brothers embroiled in a Russian mafia scheme that terrorizes their family.
Talking to Abel Ferrara for Gagosian Quarterly, Carlos Valladares asks about American Nails, starring Asia Argento and Willem Dafoe. “We’re taking the Phaedra myth and putting it in a modern gangster story,” says Ferrara. “It’s about addiction: an independent successful woman gangster has lost her mind for her underage nephew, and she’s ready to give up her whole world for him.”
Fernando Meirelles (City of God) is currently shooting Here Comes the Flood, the story of a bank guard, a teller, and a master thief caught up in “a deadly game of cons and double crosses,” with Denzel Washington, Robert Pattison, and Daisy Edgar-Jones. Pattison will also star in Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, an A24 production about the impact of To Catch a Predator, the reality TV series in which adult males soliciting sex from minors are caught in on-camera sting operations.
Takashi Miike is in postproduction on Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, starring Shun Oguri as a corrupt cop drawn into the investigation of a missing politician’s daughter (Liv Morgan) by a mysterious FBI agent (Lily James). Meanwhile, there’s a yakuza killer on the loose. Next up for Miike is an as-yet-untitled project with Charli XCX.
In and Out of Love
Drawing inspiration from Romeo and Juliet, Bruno Dumont pits two rival gangs of cliff jumpers against each other in Red Rocks. “The setting,” Dumont tells Screen’s Rebecca Leffler, “on the ancient shores of the Mediterranean, is a backdrop for the heat of the acts and the extreme passions.”
Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene) will direct Cailee Spaeny and Drew Starkey in Deep Cuts, based on Holly Brickley’s novel about a Berkeley student who falls for a songwriter in the fall of 2000 and sets him on the path to indie-rock stardom.
Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, who codirected The Eight Mountains (2022), have reteamed on Let Love In, costarring Vandermeersch and Luca Marinelli (Martin Eden) as a couple in crisis once the truth of an affair comes to light. And this may be the year that we finally see Carlos Reygadas’s Wake of Umbra, the story of two couples, all young painters, who write their own moral codes.
Marriage Stories
In Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine) and Sul Kyung-gu (Peppermint Candy) play one married couple and Cho Yeo-jeong (Parasite) and Zo In-sung (Escape from Mogadishu) play another. Leading utterly opposite lives, the couples find their worlds colliding.
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve star in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord as Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu—he’s Romanian, she’s Norwegian—who move to the village in Norway where Lisbet was born. They befriend a neighboring family but soon become the object of scrutiny when questions are raised about the way they behave with their children.
Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, married since 2010, play a couple in Bunker, directed by Florian Zeller (The Father). He’s an architect, and when he accepts a commission to design a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire, she begins to question their seventeen-year bond. Paul Dano joined the cast last month.
In Angela Schanelec’s Thomas der Starke, a man learns that his wife has been having an affair with another man who has died in an accident. Before it’s all over between them, the two try to talk it out. Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) returns with Minotaur, which explores the emotional collapse of a businessman who discovers that his wife is having an affair.
Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario) directs Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama, which A24 will release on April 3. Just days before Emma, a bookstore clerk, and Charlie, a museum director, are to be married, one of them learns something deeply disturbing about the other.
Personal Crises
Lulu Wang (The Farewell) is writing and will direct an adaptation of Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a novel narrated by an actor rehearsing for a play when she meets a young man who claims to be her son. Lucy Liu and Charles Melton are set to star.
The Basics of Philosophy will be another of Paul Schrader’s “man in a room” movies. Jack Huston stars as a philosophy professor wrestling with guilt over a decision he made in the past when the victim reenters his life. In Dao, directed by Alain Gomis (Rewind & Play), Gloria finds herself at her daughter’s wedding not long after attending a ceremony which consecrated her dead father as an ancestor. She also finds herself coming to terms with her past, present, and future.
Alice Birch, who wrote William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016), will make her directorial debut with Sweetsick. Cate Blanchett stars as a woman with “a strange and piercing gift—the ability to see what others most intimately need, often at great personal cost.” Director Kornél Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber, the team behind Pieces of a Woman (2020), are in postproduction on At the Sea, starring Amy Adams as Laura, who returns to her family’s beach home after a time spent in rehab.
Tim Heidecker stars as Bernard Wayland, an ad salesman bumbling through dive bars and strip malls in search of forbidden pleasures during a three-day dental convention in Michael Basta’s Raccoon. As part of the Omnes Films collective, Basta has worked on Tyler Taormina’s Ham on Rye (2019) and Carson Lund’s Eephus (2025).
Straight-Up Thrillers
Jaume Collet-Serra, the director of brisk thrillers such as Unknown (2011) and Non-Stop (2014), has “leveraged the scarcity of his skill set into a cottage industry,” writes Adam Nayman in a Notebook piece on Carry-On (2024). Collet-Serra’s next gig is Cliffhanger, a remake of the 1993 Sylvester Stallone vehicle. The new one stars Lily James as a mountaineer out to save her kidnapped father (Pierce Brosnan) and sister (Nell Tiger Free).
Jennifer Lopez stars in Robert Zemeckis’s psychological thriller The Last Mrs. Parrish, based on Lynne and Valerie Constantine’s novel about a con artist who worms her way into the lives of a well-to-do couple with the aim of becoming the husband’s new wife. Chloe Domont (Fair Play) directs Michelle Williams, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Andrew Scott in A Place in Hell, which tracks hijinks at a high-profile criminal law firm.
Nicolas Winding Refn has shot Her Private Hell, his first feature since The Neon Demon (2016), in Tokyo with Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton. Distributor Neon promises “something groovy.” Up next for Jeremy Saulnier (Rebel Ridge) is October, which Deadline describes as a “Halloween fugitive thriller for A24.”
Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel are caught up in a psychosexual affair in David Lowery’s Mother Mary, and Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a New York architect mourning his late sister in M. Night Shyamalan’s Remain. Alejandro Landes Echavarría, whose Monos won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award at Sundance in 2019, has Mikey Madison and Kirsten Dunst on board for Reptilia, the story of “a dental hygienist seduced by a mysterious mermaid into the dark and wet underworld of Florida’s exotic animal trade.”
Known Unknowns
As is typical for a new Mike Leigh movie, we won’t know a thing about what the director is calling Untitled 2025 until he and his distributor—Bleecker Street, in this case—are good and ready. Other tantalizing films coming our way this year have announced titles but little more, including Ancient History from Annie Baker (Janet Planet), System of Colors from Stephen Cone (Princess Cyd), and At the Middle of Life, the thirty-fourth feature from Hong Sangsoo.
We do know that Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich, Parker Posey, Steve Buscemi, and Tom Waits will star in Wild Horse Nine, a movie Martin McDonagh shot on Easter Island; that Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life will star Margaret Qualley and Catherine Keener; and that Michael Cera has written his directorial debut, Love Is Not the Answer, and cast Pamela Anderson, Steve Coogan, Jamie Dornan, and Lucas Hedges.
2027
Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence will star as an American couple staying in a snowy European city while they wait to learn whether they will be able to adopt a baby—despite the wife’s illness—in What Happens at Night, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Peter Cameron’s 2021 novel. Production should fire up this month, so it’s likely that What Happens at Night will be on next year’s most-anticipated list.
Michael Mann’s Heat 2, the prequel and sequel to Heat (1995) that first appeared in 2022 as a novel, should be high on that list as well. Ang Lee will start shooting Old Gold Mountain, an adaptation of a 2021 novel by C. Pam Zhang, in the spring. Set against the backdrop of the California gold rush, the story focuses on two newly orphaned children of Chinese immigrants.
Jia Zhangke is quietly working on a “road movie without cars,” and Apichatpong Weerasethakul plans to start shooting Jenjira’s Magnificent Dream in February with Connor Jessup, Sakda Kaewbuadee, and Tilda Swinton. Payal Kapadia has told the Hollywood Reporter that she has “two new films in mind. Together with All We Imagine as Light, they will form a triptych,” three separate stories, “all set in Mumbai.”
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Children of Blood and Bone, cowritten with Tomi Adeyemi, the author of the 2018 novel, has a release date: January 15, 2027. Netflix plans to release Lena Dunham’s Good Sex, starring Natalie Portman, Mark Ruffalo, Meg Ryan, and Rashida Jones, next year. And Brady Corbet is working on a project about American mysticism that spans three centuries, runs four hours, and will be shot on 70 mm. It’s also, he says, “an X-rated movie.”
Open Ends
It’s become an annual tradition to include The Way of the Wind in each year’s most-anticipated roundup. Terrence Malick has been editing his film about the life of Jesus of Nazareth since 2019, and someday, he will likely settle on a final cut. But no one, perhaps not even Malick himself, can predict when that day will come.
Other projects to pencil in lightly include Glimpses of the Moon, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1922 novel that Francis Ford Coppola is setting up in Italy, and a period piece Kirsten Dunst says she might make with Sofia Coppola this year. Todd Haynes may be able to revive De Noche with Pedro Pascal, and Hari Nef will hopefully be able to pull off her Candy Darling biopic.
Mia Hansen-Løve has been fighting for three years to secure financing for If Love Should Die, a film based on the life of the eighteenth-century philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. “Every film I start is like a battle,” said Hansen-Løve when she accepted an award at the Valladolid International Film Festival in October. “And there are moments when I’ve felt as if I were hitting an impenetrable wall; I’ve cursed my job, my script, cinema, and myself. I share this simply to say that what we call a filmmaker’s body of work, which might seem a solid and serene structure, can also become something fragile and turbulent.”
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