Father, Mother, Sister, Brother
Jim Jarmusch prefers to work at an unhurried pace, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that his longest inter-picture hiatus has followed the most tepidly reviewed release of his career. Soon, it will have been six years since his low-key zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die was met with a resounding shrug at Cannes, and it would seem that the coolest cucumber in American independent cinema will respond by paring down to basics. No more fun and games with genre, just a “very subtle”, “very quiet”, “funny”, and “sad” family affair gathering Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Adam Driver, Tom Waits and a pink-haired Vicky Krieps around the dinner table. But if it’s going to be anything like his last film dealing with parents and children – the hangdog, allegorical Broken Flowers – then we can still expect the rhyming repetitions, eclectic grab bag of allusions, and other eccentricities typical of the Jarmuschian style. Marrying open-heart emotionality with his wry brand of well-read erudition, he’s putting the “home” in “homage”. Charles Bramesco
Untitled Noah Baumbach comedy
No matter how much open hostility Netflix has toward the theatrical experience, it has worked at least a few cinematic miracles in its quest to dominate the film industry. For my money, the greatest may be the regular allocation of money to the writer-director Noah Baumbach, one of the sharpest, funniest and most perceptive American film-makers working. For most studios, making a movie as strange and faithful as Baumbach’s big-budget adaptation of White Noise would be a one-way ticket the hell out the door, Oscar-nominated co-writing credit on Barbie be damned. For Netflix, it was apparently just another opportunity to prove itself, as Baumbach is returning to the streamer with an as-yet-untitled comedy-drama, shot in multiple cities, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Emily Mortimer (who also co-wrote!), Riley Keough, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Isla Fisher and the frequent Baumbach player Josh Hamilton. Clooney and Sandler are a particular draw: Baumbach helped kick off the recent Sandlerenaissance with his wonderful work in The Meyerowitz Stories, and Clooney could sure use the rebound following the flaccid Wolfs. The real challenge will be finding a way to see it in a movie theater; for Baumbach, I’ll gladly accept it. Jesse Hassenger
Materialists
The director Celine Song’s debut feature, Past Lives, was one of the most distilled, powerful and emotionally complex films that I’ve seen in some time, so of course I am looking forward to her follow up, titled Materialists. Precious little information is available about the film, but it looks that Song is once again returning to New York City and building out another plot around an unconventional love triangle – this time with a high-end matchmaker who is torn between a high-powered businessman and a penniless actor. Notably, it’s billed as a romantic comedy, which would be a fascinating change of mood for Song, as Past Lives was extremely understated, methodically paced and highly cerebral. The film will also be powered by the A-listers Dakota Johnson and Chris Evans, another big change from the relative unknowns that acted in Past Lives. Time will tell if this director is able to re-envision her craft and elevate a genre that is generally not known for cinematic brilliance – I’ll be eager to find out. Veronica Esposito
The Bride!
Mary Shelley is having a moment in 2025. Guillermo del Toro is adapting her classic novel Frankenstein and Mia Hansen-Løve is working on a biopic of her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, If Love Should Die. Stir both of those up together, add some 1930s cinema nostalgia and you get Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new project, apparently a loose remake of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. The Bride! is promised to be a sci-fi monster musical, which stars Jessie Buckley as the bride and Christian Bale as the creature. Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter was stunning, although early images of this film promise something a little more edgy, with a tattooed Bale and an ink-splattered Buckley in a wiry white wig that Elsa Lanchester herself might well covet. But, in all honesty, the exclamation mark at the end of the title is enough to put this one on my most-wanted list. Horror in the key of camp, with songs – monstrously tempting. Pamela Hutchinson
Untitled Trey Parker/Matt Stone comedy
Twenty-one years after Team America: World Police, and 26 since South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut, Trey Parker and Matt Stone return with their third big-screen effort – and, presumably, another of the best films of all time. It currently has the working title of Slave Comedy, about a Black man interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum who learns that his white girlfriend’s forebears once owned his ancestors. So far, so Get Out – no bad thing – but also bear in mind it stars Kendrick Lamar and is scripted by Vernon Chatman, the veteran South Park writer and the voice of Towelie. It’s released on … Independence Day. Catherine Shoard
F1
From the moment Brad Pitt crossed the Hollywood actors’ picket line to turn hot laps at the British Grand Prix, I’ve been waiting expectantly along with Formula 1 fans for the film F1: a federation-approved, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced love letter to the sport scheduled for a June 2025 release. In it, Pitt stars as an over-the-hill great who comes out of retirement to mentor a rookie played by Damson Idris – the Lewis Hamilton to Pitt’s Michael Schumacher, ostensibly. If the production’s embedded presence at F1 events and with the sport’s leading personalities is a guide, the film shouldn’t lack for authenticity, and the film-makers have proved especially keen to head off F1 nerds before they can pick nits. Among other expert consultants, Hamilton, the seven-time world champion driver, was brought in to accurately relate the feeling of driving an F1 car – down to what going around a curve should sound like. In one such scene from the British GP, Hamilton spotted a car in second gear, but could hear that the driver was actually in third gear. It’s exactly the kind of detail that F1 nerds will make mincemeat of – which is why this film, at least from a purely racing standpoint, shouldn’t disappoint. Andrew Lawrence
Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson movie
Warner Bros reportedly cut a $140m cheque for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, a head-turning figure for a director whose thorny, strange and seductive masterpieces like The Master and Phantom Thread typically cost just a fraction of that. The budget for the untitled movie – with co-conspirators Leonardo DiCaprio and Regina Hall among its to-die-for ensemble – is especially surprising given WB’s anti-film-maker reputation of late. Film fans are still sore after the studio buried completed films such as Batgirl and Coyote vs Acme for a tax write-off and bungled the North American theatrical release of Clint Eastwood’s fantastic Juror #2 to prioritize its streaming debut on Max. Backing Film Twitter’s favourite auteur, with a promised Imax release, could be the start of WB’s redemption arc. I say that knowing next to nothing about the project. Internet rumours speculate that the film is called The Battle of Baktan Cross and that it’s loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s Reagan-era satire Vineland. If true, that would make this an encore Pynchon adaptation for Anderson, arriving just over a decade after his hazy, groovy, paranoid and achingly melancholic look back at the dying days of the counter-culture in Inherent Vice. That film, as borderline impenetrable as it was masterful, was also made with Warner Bros; a money-losing venture that was totally worth it. Radheyan Simonpillai
Mother Mary
As a fan of female pop icons generally and Charli xcx specifically, there is no movie I am more excited for – and, given the subject matter and reported reshoots, nervous about – than Mother Mary. The Green Knight film-maker David Lowery’s pop melodrama for A24 has the elements of excellence: Anne Hathaway as a world-famous singer who, at least according to a first look in Vanity Fair, is styled as Beyoncé’s Virgin Mary at the 2017 Grammys; the elusive and charismatic Michaela Coel as an iconic fashion designer with whom Hathaway’s singer has a long-running relationship; and original songs from Charli (exciting) and the producer Jack Antonoff (concerning). I am, once again, anxious about how this will all come together – it is notoriously tricky to simulate supposedly beloved pop music and iconography. But best believe I will be seated to see whether this ambition goes the way of A Star Is Born or Vox Lux – as in, plausible or provocatively ambiguous – or the egoist mess that was HBO’s The Idol. Adrian Horton
Untitled I Know What You Did Last Summer sequel
There are far, far surer things in the next 12 months – new films from Noah Baumbach, Paul Thomas Anderson, Celine Song, Ryan Coogler, Ari Aster, Lynne Ramsay and Danny Boyle – and I would bet that any one would ultimately place higher on my year-end list. But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I was most genuinely excited to see the return of the 90s pin-ups Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr in the I Know What You Did Last Summer legacy sequel, as if my stashed away teenage fan-fic was finally coming to life. Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream effort was a great deal more throwaway but it was still slickly made and smartly cast, and like his more respected slasher franchise, deeply embedded in absurd family soap (given the era, it was also made with more craftsmanship than 99% of horror films released today). After a surprisingly successful revisit to Woodsboro (Scream 7 will be out in 2026) and an unsurprisingly unsuccessful attempt at a TV remake on Amazon, a green light was then given to Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, the sharp, self-aware writer-director of the wonderfully dark teen comedy Do Revenge, who had pitched to Sony a new way to hook us back in. I know what I will be doing this summer. Benjamin Lee
Mickey 17
For his follow-up to Parasite, the first foreign-language film ever to win best picture, the director Bong Joon-ho has pivoted into the sort of zany genre mash-up on which he built his reputation, when he slipped slapstick comedy into a monster movie (The Host) or a serial killer procedural (Memories of Murder). With his sci-fi comedy Mickey 17, his biggest Hollywood swing to date, Bong gives Robert Pattinson the role of a space age doofus who’s so desperate to leave Earth that he signs on to be an “expendable”, allowing himself to be killed and regenerated repeatedly as part of a colonization project. His existential problem becomes a metaphysical one when he accidentally survives an intended death and has to contend with his own clone. It sounds like Adaptation on an ice planet. Scott Tobias
The Mastermind
There’s going to be a lot of auteur action in 2025, with everyone from Wes Anderson to Claire Denis to Terrence Malick queueing up to deliver new product. I have to say though, my eye has been somewhat distracted by the new one from Kelly Reichardt – possibly a slightly less starry name than the aforementioned, but a director whose low-key, quietist work has always been rewarding. What makes The Mastermind so intriguing, though, is that it isn’t a hardscrabble frontier drama (like Meek’s Cutoff or First Cow), or even a meaty, female-centred drama (Certain Women, Showing Up); it’s about a period art heist. Whether Reichardt is willing or able go the full Thomas Crown is yet to be ascertained, but it does feature Josh O’Connor, whose showing in La Chimera has made him the art-film actor du jour, and a backdrop freighted with 60s/70s political radicalism. Sounds great. Andrew Pulver
Source: theguardian.com
