From Jonathan Glazer’s first feature in over a decade to Bong Joon-ho’s third English-language film, here are the best titles to look out for in the year ahead
Poor Things
Greek weird-wave director Yorgos Lanthimos has found a real partner-in-crime in Emma Stone, whose performance here as a sex-crazed Frankenstein’s monster is a masterclass in unhinged physical comedy. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel of the same name, Lanthimos’ film won the Golden Lion at Venice and is absolutely the best time you’ll have in a cinema this year – unless he succeeds in topping it with Kinds of Kindness, also starring Stone and set for release later in 2024.
Evil Does Not Exist
We spoke to Ryusuke Hamaguchi about his Silver Lion-winning follow-up to Drive My Car in Venice, where he took great delight in our confusion about its ending. The film gets a wide release in March, and we’re looking forward to poring over its existential conundrums once more; the deceptively small-scale plot concerns a Japanese talent agency’s attempts to steamroller a rural community into accepting its proposals for a new glamping site, despite concerns it will contaminate the environment.
Nosferatu
Robert Eggers had his sights set on remaking FW Murnau’s expressionist horror after filming The Witch, but the project fell apart so many times he began to suspect he was being cursed by the German silent-era filmmaker. After regular Eggers muse Anya Taylor-Joy and Harry Styles (!) exited an earlier iteration of the project, the historical-horror maven finally got his show on the road with Bill Skarsgård in the titular role, Lily-Rose Depp as his mistress and Willem Defoe and Nicholas Hoult in supporting roles. Nothing less than a masterpiece will do.
Megalopolis
Francis Ford Coppola had to flog the family silverware to get Megalopolis made, selling off part of his wine empire for his sci-fi passion project starring Adam Driver, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman among others. Plot particulars are mostly under wraps for now, but director Mike Figgis, who is making a documentary about the film’s production, calls it “Julius Caesar meets Blade Runner”: we’re excited for this last swing at cinematic immortality from the Godfather of the Hollywood New Wave, whose late-career works have not, putting it mildly, been up there with his best.
The Outrun
Amy Liptrot helped kickstart a new wave of nature writing with her bestselling memoir of 2016, detailing her life as an alcoholic in mid-00s London and subsequent recovery in her native Orkney Islands. Nearly ten years on, the nation’s rivers are filled with wild swimmers clamouring for book deals – but few can claim to have Saoirse Ronan playing them on the big screen at Sundance, as in Nora Fingscheidt’s intriguing take on the story, adapted for the screen with Liptrot.
Mickey 17
How do you follow an all-conquering phenomenon like Parasite? Possibly, by casting Robert Pattinson as an astronaut on a mission to colonise a distant ice world, whose body regenerates after he dies with most of his memories intact. (Should he be worried by the *most* part? Probably not, hey!) Problems arise when said astronaut, having lost more lives than a cat in the line of duty, starts to question the nature and purpose of his mission. Bong Joon-ho’s third English-language feature to date sounds like Groundhog Day in space, with a stacked supporting cast including Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo.
The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer’s first feature in over a decade is a bravura piece of filmmaking that is troubling to its core; set in the summer of 1943, it tells the story of a Nazi prison camp commandant and his family as they do normal family stuff at their idyllic home in the country, which also happens to be right next door to Auschwitz. By confining the horrors of the Holocaust to the edges of the frame, the British auteur devises new ways to confront us with the banality of evil, but it’s the final, gut-punch ending that sent us reeling to the exits.
Emmanuelle
The history of Emmanuelle is an interesting one; before the Sylvie Kristel version brought sex to mainstream cinema in the mid-70s, Emmanuelle Arsan’s book was an under-the-counter smash in France, where its depiction of swinging 50s Bangkok helped lay the ground for the sexual revolution. Now the story is being retold by Audrey Diwan, who already exploded a grenade under backsliding debates around women’s reproductive rights in Happening, with Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Tár) sliding into the famous wicker chair as the heroine.
Love Lies Bleeding
“Revenge gets ripped” in the new film from British director Rose Glass, who established her mastery of mood and character with the bleak psychological shocker Saint Maud in 2020. Starring Our Lady Kristen Stewart as a gym worker who falls for bodybuilder Jackie (martial artist Katy O’Brian, in her first leading role), the film promises a sizzling revenge thriller with blood and guts and Lycra – and as Crimes of the Future proved, no one does horny quite like K-Stew.
Bird
Andrea Arnold’s first fiction feature since American Honey sees her team up with Passages star Franz Rogowski and Barry Keoghan, fresh from his willy-waving turn in Saltburn. The film was shot last summer in the Kent/London borderlands the director grew up in; expect social-realist drama with the kind of exuberant joie de vivre only Arnold can supply.
