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\u2019Farrell 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\u2019s play Hamlet. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare and Emily Watson his mother, Mary.
9 January.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s voice and fictionally reconstructs the drama in the call-centre office; real people played by actors, responding to the actual voice.
16 January<\/p>\n
Can training a goshawk cure grief? Will keeping it indoors \u2013 hooded so that it remains calm \u2013 and then taking it out hunting allow you to reconnect radically with nature in a way that prissy townies will never understand? Philippa Lowthorpe\u2019s intriguing film, based on Helen Macdonald\u2019s bestselling nature memoir from 2014, stars Claire Foy \u2013 who is doing this for real. Foy learned to handle a goshawk and her scenes have a tremendous authenticity.
23 January<\/p>\n
In crisis \u2026 Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice. Photograph: Courtesy: Venice Film festival<\/p>\n
Korean director Park Chan-wook<\/a> brings us a fascinating, complex movie based on Donald Westlake\u2019s 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. Irish footballer Roy Keane is already something of a legend: this film may well cement that status. It is about the \u201cSaipan incident\u201d, which ignited a culture civil war on the subject of rebellion and disobedience. The ferociously opinionated Keane, while training on the Pacific island of Saipan in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, was fiercely critical of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy\u2019s methods, and the gaffer sensationally sent Keane home after a tirade from his star player that reportedly included the phrase: \u201cYou\u2019re a fucking wanker and you can stick your World Cup up your arse!\u201d Should sportspeople swallow their objections for the patriotic good of the team or boldly speak up? \u00c9anna Hardwicke plays Keane and Steve Coogan plays McCarthy. The formidably versatile Bradley Cooper<\/a> returns to comedy \u2013 or anyway the subject of comedy \u2013 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. Wuthering HeightsHere comes the bride \u2026 Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights. Photograph: Landmark Media\/Alamy<\/p>\n Emerald Fennell, the Oscar-winning creator of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, now takes on her biggest project yet: an adaptation of Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s 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 Bront\u00eb described as \u201cdark-skinned\u201d, while Andrea Arnold cast mixed race actor James Howson for her version in 2011. (It wasn\u2019t an issue for William Wyler in 1939 who cast Laurence Olivier.) Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s 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\u2019s visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery create something special. It\u2019s like Antonioni\u2019s The Passenger with hints of Elmore Leonard, Quentin Tarantino and Meirelles and Lund\u2019s City of God. If I Had Legs I\u2019d Kick You<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 and emotional and behavioural issues of her own which surface when she tries to get therapy from a colleague. Persecuted \u2026 Ann Lee, played by Amanda Seyfried, in The Testament of Ann Lee. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n 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\u2019 horror film The Witch, and sometimes like a weird but spectacular Broadway musical melodrama, in which the shaking and shivering of the dancing faithful \u2013 ecstatically submitting to divine joy \u2013 is shaped into a choreography not unlike the musical Stomp. The Bride!<\/p>\n 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\u2019s difficult at this stage to judge the tonal register for Maggie Gyllenhaal\u2019s remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. In 1935, it featured Boris Karloff as the monster and Elsa Lanchester as his spouse; now it\u2019s Christian Bale as the creature and Jessie Buckley as his soulmate. Let\u2019s hope Gyllenhaal will avoid the classy solemnity that Guillermo del Toro favoured for his own recent Frankenstein. This is a genially preposterous psychological mystery caper from film-maker Rebecca Zlotowski, channelling De Palma or Hitchcock. It\u2019s 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. Guilt, shame and yearning \u2026 Sound of Falling. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n A mysterious and uncanny prose-poem of guilt, shame and yearning in Germany in the 20th century \u2013 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. 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. Project Hail Mary<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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. An icy chill of fear and justified paranoia radiates from this starkly austere and gripping movie from Sergei Loznitsa, set in Stalin\u2019s 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\u2019s The House of the Dead and Kafka\u2019s The Castle. The Drama<\/p>\n 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\u2019s dreams. Now this glitzy couple are preparing to get married, but there\u2019s a gobsmacking revelation just before the big day. This is going to test Pattinson\u2019s comedy chops. Michael<\/p>\n A musical biopic of Michael Jackson directed by Antoine Fuqua, starring Jackson\u2019s 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\u2019s later controversy, taking us from his early years in the Jackson 5 up to his breakthrough to global megastardom. The Devil Wears Prada 2<\/p>\n Just about the most anticipated sequel of the decade, this is the follow-up to the sensational fashionista comedy with Meryl Streep<\/a> 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\u2019s New York Met Ball.) It was the film that also made superstars of Anne Hathaway as Miranda\u2019s 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. The Odyssey<\/p>\n No director thinks bigger or films bigger than Christopher Nolan<\/a>, and it is perhaps not surprising that he should want to take on Homer\u2019s 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. The Social Reckoning<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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 \u2013 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\u2019s civic integrity team who blew the whistle on the site\u2019s practices. Focker In-Law<\/p>\n Here is the latest in the imperishable Meet the Parents series, with its sublime belief in the overwhelming comedy power of the \u201cFocker\u201d surname, but it has to be said the name \u201cMartha Focker\u201d 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. Dune: Part Three<\/p>\n Denis Villeneuve\u2019s 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; Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet is back as Paul Atreides with Zendaya as Chani \u2013 and Rebecca Ferguson is, of course, Paul\u2019s demanding mother, Lady Jessica. We shall see if Anya Taylor-Joy (as Paul\u2019s sister, Alia) and Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan have roles that last more than a few moments on screen. Bitter Christmas<\/p>\n Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s new film is a comedy, returning him to his home turf, with Spanish star B\u00e1rbara 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 \u2013 in classic Almod\u00f3var style \u2013 runs alongside a parallel strand to that of a director and screenwriter. Digger<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Magnolia and Michael Mann\u2019s Collateral. Well, this could be the moment. Cruise plays the lead in the new film from Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu<\/a>, which describes itself as \u201ca comedy of catastrophic proportions\u201d. I Love BoostersFuturist adventure \u2026 from left, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige and Keke Palmer in I Love Boosters. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n Demi Moore had a career-redefining smash with the sci-fi horror The Substance, and now she\u2019s 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\u2019s formidable fashion CEO. Ink<\/p>\n Malcolm McDowell, James Cromwell and Ben Mendelsohn have all taken on the demon-king role of Rupert Murdoch in the past; now it\u2019s the turn of Guy Pearce in this new film from director Danny Boyle<\/a>, based on the award-winning stage play by James Graham. It\u2019s about the traumatised rebirth of the Sun newspaper in the late 1960s, with Jack O\u2019Connell as the paper\u2019s launch editor Larry Lamb. A truly British national institution was born from a new exploitation of sex and crime. Narnia: The Magician\u2019s Nephew<\/p>\n Fifteen years ago, the Narnia films had looked like a slam-dunk franchise \u2013 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<\/a>. They now take on The Magician\u2019s Nephew (the prequel which was in fact the sixth of CS Lewis\u2019s 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. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man<\/p>\n
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