Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk-futurist drama Poor Things and Jeffrey Wright in Cord Jefferson’s literary satire American Fiction.
The films to look forward to in 2024
Timothée Chalamet is back for Dune’s epic conclusion, Joaquin Phoenix returns as the Joker and Paddington heads to Peru – there’s a host of great cinema coming in the new year
Friday 29 December 2023
Scala!!!
A documentary about the extraordinary history of London’s Scala cinema, a repertory movie theatre in the dark heart of 1980s King’s Cross, transformed by manager (and now film producer) Stephen Woolley into an alt-cinephile paradise crossed with a grindhouse den, with groundbreaking selections of LGBTQ+ movies, martial arts, pulp classics, auteur gems and fabulously scuzzy all-nighters.
5 January
Poor Things
With this extraordinary film and her streaming TV comedy The Curse, Emma Stone is having a moment. She takes her career to the next level in this steampunk-futurist Victorian tale adapted from Alasdair Gray by absurdist virtuoso Yorgos Lanthimos; she plays Bella, a young woman raised from the dead in a Frankensteinian experiment, who has a bizarre series of sexual adventures.
12 January
Mean Girls
The eminently fetch high-school comedy of 2004 takes the path that John Waters’ Hairspray and Mel Brooks’ The Producers took: from screen to stage and back to screen. Mean Girls became a Broadway megamusical between 2018 and 2020 and it is this musical that is now being adapted as a movie. Sadly it is not being launched on 3 October, AKA Mean Girls Day, this being the date in the original film that Lindsay Lohan’s character famously has a meaningful conversation with her crush.
17 January
The Holdovers
Alexander Payne is a Hollywood director capable of preserving the gritty, organically grown cinema of the 1970s, and his new comedy stays true to the values of Ashby, Rafelson, Altman et al. Paul Giamatti plays a grumpy boarding school teacher who finds himself having to babysit the “holdovers” during the Christmas vacation; that is, the kids who can’t go home. Could this turn into an unlikely Christmas movie in years to come?
19 January
The End We Start From
Jodie Comer gives a much-acclaimed performance in this eco-survivalist thriller set in a post-apocalyptic Britain, based on the award-winning novel by Megan Hunter. Comer’s new mother and baby flee the horror of a flooded London, Joel Fry plays her partner, and Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya are his parents who offer sanctuary for a while – before the crisis gets worse.
19 January
All of Us Strangers
The director of 45 Years, Andrew Haigh, brings us a fantasy-supernatural romance about loneliness and love – and it’s had the toughest customers sobbing in their seats. Andrew Scott’s lonely screenwriter begins a relationship with a guy who lives in his block, played by Paul Mescal; on a whim, he strolls down to where his late parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) used to live and finds that they are still alive, still living in his old house, still at the age he remembered them.
26 January
Samsara
This multisensory symphonic adventure from Spanish film-maker Lois Patiño has entranced audiences everywhere; it is a mysterious Buddhist tale that follows the journey of a soul from the body of a woman in Laos into that of a baby goat in Zanzibar. The centrepiece is a 15-minute sequence for which the audience are required to close their eyes (no peeking!), listen to the soundscape and register the colours through closed eyelids.
26 January
American Fiction
It’s always a pleasure to watch Jeffrey Wright in the kind of juicy lead role he deserves. He stars in this literary satire adapted from the experimental novel by Percival Everett: Monk Ellison is a black literary professor in the US who in a bleary spirit of satire writes the kind of victim-fetish novel-of-colour work that the white cultural gatekeepers expect – and it becomes a smash.
2 February
The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer’s gripping and icily horrific movie, freely adapted from the Martin Amis novel, is about the Holocaust and how it coexisted with bland bourgeois self-satisfaction among the German ruling classes. A concentration camp commandant’s wife (Sandra Hüller) lives in bucolic paradise in her handsome house just by the barbed-wire fence, almost, but not quite, unaware of what’s going on.
2 February
Perfect Days
Tokyo is the setting for this beautifully shot quirky and bittersweet Zen character study created by Wim Wenders, starring the veteran Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho. He plays a middle-aged man employed as a public toilet cleaner, driving around in his van with the serene dignity of a university professor, listening to classic rock: Patti Smith, the Kinks and of course (given the title) Lou Reed. But he has a poignant secret.
9 February
The Iron Claw
Former teen dreamboat Zac Efron has bulked up massively, creating an almost Hasselhoff look to play real-life 80s American wrestler Kevin Von Erich, who was part of the once much-feared Von Erich wrestling family from Texas. (Harris Dickinson and Jeremy Allen White play his brothers David and Kerry.) They popularised the “iron claw” hold but suffered personal tragedy.
9 February
Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s enigmatic eco-parable, with its challenging title, is not easy to pin down. A charming, unspoiled woodland is the home of a woodcutter and his child, living as simply as in a folktale. A corporation intends to build a “glamping” site in this forest and their PR representatives seem indifferent to locals’ fears about environmental damage – but the PR people’s inner lives are as complex as everyone else’s.
1 March
Dune: Part Two
The second half of Denis Villeneuve’s gigantic Dune adaptation weighs in at a chunky 2hrs 46mins. Timothée Chalamet returns as Paul Atreides, battling against the betrayers that attacked his family and uniting with the Fremen peoples and with Chani, played by Zendaya. The first Dune was a dazzling epic; Villeneuve is promising something spectacular for the conclusion.
1 March
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
Romanian auteur Radu Jude revives the Godard spirit in this essay-movie-slash-black comedy collage from the dark heart of his homeland, lacerating its stagnation, racism and official incompetence. A harassed film production assistant called Angela travels around, trying to get people to participate in a new corporate video; she has a media side hustle posting TikTok clips pretending to be Romania’s most famous foreign resident: ultra-misogynist Andrew Tate.
8 March
Copa 71
The current exciting success of women’s football in the UK makes the time right for this documentary about a part of women’s football history that has been erased: the 1971 Women’s World Cup, a pioneering unofficial event held, despite Fifa’s indifference, in Mexico City in the same venues as the iconic men’s World Cup the year before (of Pelé and Bobby Moore fame). The women’s version got 110,000 people for the final.
8 March
Io Capitano
The migrant crisis is at the centre of this mighty epic film from Italian director Matteo Garrone who here works with non-professional newcomer and TikTok musical star Seydou Sarr; Sarr plays a teen who leaves his home in Dakar in Senegal with his cousin, dreaming of a new future in Europe. It becomes an ordeal through which he is sustained by hope and self-belief.
8 March
Monster
A complex and intricate world of family dysfunction is disclosed in this typically cerebral, smart movie from the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda, a film of great moral intelligence and humanity. A boy at school appears to have been cruelly treated by his teacher, but seems to have bullied another boy; then their relationship emerges as something different.
15 March
Banel & Adama
This quiet, strong movie from French-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy is just the thing to clean the palate after a surfeit of clamorous content. Banel and Adama are two young people in love; they are in fact a married couple, but with an attitude to life that infuriates their conservative village elders.
15 March
Drive-Away Dolls
Following his Jerry Lee Lewis documentary, Ethan Coen now unveils his second solo directing project away from brother Joel: a wacky queer road-trip comedy inspired by exploitation movies of years gone by, but with a new innocence. Two women, played by Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, need to fix their aimless lives and broken hearts, so just get in the car and drive.
21 March
Lisa Frankenstein
Screenwriter Diablo Cody promises some more gothic horror fun with this gender-flipped teen take on the classic monster, directed by Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin. Kathryn Newton plays Lisa Swallows, a lonely misunderstood goth who chances across a comely male corpse which is revivified during a lightning storm, and a classic love story commences.
22 March
Mickey 17
A return to speculative sci-fi fantasy for Bong Joon-ho, who went stratospheric with his Oscar-winning psychological satire Parasite. Adapted from the novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton, this stars Robert Pattinson as an “expendable” – a disposable crew member on a space mission, selected for dangerous tasks because he can be renewed if his body dies, with his memories largely intact. With one regeneration, though, things go very wrong.
29 March
Close Your Eyes
Spanish auteur Victor Erice returns, now in his 80s, with a defiantly slow, ruminative, digressive piece of work about the fragility of memory. It is in some ways a film-within-a-film. A mysterious wealthy figure called the Sad King receives a visit from an anti-Francoist activist. But this is only a movie. The actor playing the visitor disappeared midway through the shoot and has to be tracked down.
12 April
Challengers
The last big tennis movie became famous for its star slapping the host of the Oscars; let’s hope for something better for Luca Guadagnino’s effort. Zendaya plays a former tennis prodigy who has gone into coaching and manages her husband (Mike Faist), a former worldbeater now in a slump. Then he finds himself up against Josh O’Connor, his former pal – and his wife’s former lover.
26 April
Joker: Folie à Deux
There was a huge fan response to the 2019 Joker film with Joaquin Phoenix as the depressed party clown and comedian who becomes a DC supervillain and here comes a sequel. Phoenix is the eponymous toxic humorist and Lady Gaga is Harley Quinn, the psychiatrist brought in to treat him, who falls in love with her patient.
4 October
Paddington in Peru
Paddington 2 became a colossal smash in the US and its prestige was crowned with a TV sketch for the Platinum Jubilee co-starring the Queen and the movie’s co-creator Simon Farnaby as a footman. Next comes a threequel: Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw) and his adopted family the Browns head off to Peru to find his Aunt Lucy.
8 November
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