With the death toll in Palestine now standing at over 40,000 and sadly set to increase as famine takes hold across the country, the need for medical aid has never been more urgent. A group of UK film professionals have come together to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) – a charity doing vital work to bring aid to those in need – via a film-themed charity auction.

Our very own beloved LWLies family members Leila Latif and Sophie Monks Kaufman, along with author and critic Hanna Ines Flint, filmmaker Julia Jackman and producer Helen Simmons have raided their contact books and convinced some of the biggest names in the industry to dig deep into their pockets, offering up some once-in-a-lifetime prizes, from a cup of tea on Zoom with Paapa Essiedu to a meeting with Louis Theroux.

One of the most exciting lots that we’ll be emptying out our piggy bank for is a neon sign as used in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part 2 – here’s your chance to be a part of UK cult film history! If you’d prefer something other than ambient lighting, perhaps you fancy a Zoom with Joseph Quinn? The original poster from Abigail’s Party‘s run at Hampstead Theatre? Exclusive Doctor Who swag? How about tickets to see Brian Cox in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, followed by a swift half in the bar? A suite of signed posters from Jonathan Glazer’s sublime Zone of Interest? Josh O’Connor’s secret to the perfect bowl of porridge? These are just some of the prizes up for grabs as the auction opens.

Running until midnight on Friday 12th April 2024, the auction sees filmmakers, actors, critics, screenwriters, composers and producers all band together to support Palestine. If you don’t quite have the cash to slap a bid down for a portrait taken by the incomparable Misan Harriman, you can get your mitts on lots from friends of LWLies including Mark Asch, Anna Bogutskaya, Ellen E. Jones, Ella Kemp, the Ghibliotheque Podcast, and our very own Hannah Strong.

If you’d prefer to just donate a wad of cash to a very good cause, you can do that too. All proceeds from the auction will go to MAP, who provide desperately needed aid on the ground in Palestine.

If yesterday’s first half wasn’t enough, good news: we’ve got a belated Christmas gift in the form of the second half of our 2024 preview. Movies, now more than ever! Let us know what you’re excited about by tweeting @lwlies.

51. The Outrun (Nora Fingscheidt)

German filmmaker Fingscheidt announced herself in impressive style with System Crasher, but her 2020 follow-up The Unforgivable was a bitter disappointment, so all bets are off with her next drama. We’re hoping for something special, and that might come in the form of Saoirse Ronan. She plays Rona, a recovering alcoholic who returns to her native Orkney after rehab, and reconnects with the farmland where she grew up. Paapa Essiedu and Stephen Dillane co-star in this drama based on Amy Liptrot’s bestselling memoir of the same name. With Steven McQueen’s Blitz on the horizon too, 2024 could be a big year for Ronan.  Hannah Strong

ETA: TBC via StudioCanal

52. Pussy Island (Zoë Kravitz)

A hot contender for the best film title of 2024 since Drive Away Dykes became Drive Away Dolls, Pussy Island is Kravitz’s directorial debut (she co-wrote the script with E.T. Feigenbaum). Her boyfriend Channing Tatum plays a tech mogul whom Naomi Ackie’s cocktail waitress Frida becomes obsessed with – resulting in a trip to his private island, where things begin to go wrong. Joining them are Simon Rex, Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Adria Arjona, Haley Joe Osment, Alia Shawkat and Kyle McLachlan, in what has to be one of the most exciting ensembles of the year. HS

53. The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)

Vincent Cassel portrays a grieving widower who devises a contraption allowing contact with the dead, Guy Pearce and Diane Kruger round out the supporting cast, but the big name here is that of writer-director David Cronenberg. After a nearly decade-long hiatus prior to Crimes of the Future, the godfather of body horror is striking while the iron is hot for his follow-up, a heartening sign that the eighty-year-old is really and truly back in action. They shot back in May, which should leave him plenty of time for a return to Competition at Cannes. Back in 2022, he was fully shut out of the awards categories, a grave injustice that the jury could very well get a chance to right with the latest experiment in Late Style from Canada’s proudest son. Charles Bramesco

54. Polaris (Lynne Ramsay)

Lynne Ramsay surprised everyone back in August when she announced that her next project – a reunion with Joaquin Phoenix after 2017’s You Were Never Really Here – had already wrapped shooting. We don’t know much else, apart from the fact his character is a photographer and this is Ramsay’s first original script since Ratcatcher. One blog suggests the film is about “A photographer who meets the devil in Alaska” and if that’s true we’d love to see it, but with so many rumours constantly swirling regarding Ramsay’s projects, it’s best to just wait and see what shakes loose. Probably at Cannes 2024. HS

55. Sasquatch Sunset (The Zellner Brothers)

It’s been six long years since The Zellner Brothers released a movie. At the end of 2023 they directed three episodes of the Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie television series The Curse, but it’s great to see them popping back up in the Sundance line-up with a suitably quirky project. Jesse Eisenberg plays a sasquatch in this film that documents “a year in the life of a singular family” – it’s unclear yet if Keough and co-stars Christophe Zajac-Denek and David Zellner will play sasquatches too, but according to Eisenberg, he doesn’t have any dialogue. “I grunt, but no lines,” he told Variety. HS

56. Mother Mary (David Lowery)

Progress on David Lowery’s pop-stardom melodrama continued apace through the strikes, as one of the earliest and most prominent productions to secure a waiver from the negotiating unions. So it won’t be a long wait for the hordes clamouring to get a look at Anne Hathaway as a prima donna songstress and Michaela Coel as the fashion designer with whom she cultivates a reportedly “complex” relationship. (Complex in a lesbian way? We shall see!) Throw in a supporting turn from rising talent Hunter Schafer along with original songs from Charli XCX and it-producer Jack Antonoff, and you’ve got the makings of a prefab phenomenon among the influencer class. As if the prospect of a new David Lowery movie wasn’t a draw unto itself. CB

57. Coyote vs Acme (Dave Green)

This animation/live-action hybrid comedy has been in the news of late, owing to Warner Bros’ rather baffling decision to try and shelve the film and include it as a tax-off. After a lot of backlash from social media, the film’s team and other filmmakers, WB backpedalled and have been shopping the title to other studios – which seems pretty smart, given the buzz around screenwriter Samy Burch following her work on Todd Haynes’ May December. With an amusing premise (Wile E. Coyote attempts to sue Acme following years of frustration with their substandard products) and the star power of John Cena, we’re excited to see why on earth WB tried to keep this one in the vault. HS

58. Hedda (Nia DaCosta)

After being done dirty by Disney with The Marvels, we’re glad to see Nia DaCosta reteaming with Little Woods star Tessa Thompson for an adaptation of Ibsen’s 1812 play Hedda Gebla. Thompson will play the title role, the daughter of a general trapped in a marriage and house she has no interest in. No word yet on how DaCosta will put her spin on Ibsen’s work, which has been adapted various times for the big and small screen, but knowing DaCosta it will be something special. HS

59. Weapons (Zack Cregger)

Barbarian was one of 2022’s standout horror films, so plenty of people are awaiting Zack Cregger’s follow-up with bated breath. It’s unclear if Weapons has already started shooting, so we’re not sure if it’s wishful thinking to hope for a 2024 release date, but call us eternal optimists. Another horror, this one supposedly focuses on the disappearance of high school students in a small town, and has been compared to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (brave words). Two of the buzziest stars around are slated to lead: Pedro Pascal and Renate Reinsve. But given how busy they both seem at the moment, we wouldn’t be surprised if things change with Weapons and it ends up shifting to a 2025 release. HS

60. Winner (Susanne Fogel)

It’s unfortunate for Susanne Fogel that 2023 already had a great film about Reality Winner in from filmmaker/playwright Tina Satter, so she has a bit of an uphill battle here. So too does star Emilia Jones, as Sydney Sweeney already turned in a great performance as the NSA whistleblower who was prosecuted for exposing Russian interference in the 2016 election. This is a more starry biopic (the cast is filled out by Connie Britton, Zach Galifianakis, Kathryn Newton, and Danny Ramirez), and likely a more expansive one, as Satter focused purely on the experience of Reality’s arrest and interrogation. While Fogel’s last film, also a collaboration with Jones, was very poor, Winner’s story is interesting enough that perhaps there’s more to see here. HS

61. The Taste of Things (Tran Anh Hung)

We caught this one at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and we can definitively say to you that you’re in for a treat. Juliette Binoche is on her most sparkling form in ages as a ruddy-cheeked country cook and gardener. Benoit Magimel is magnetic as the “Napoleon of gastronomy” who spends his days inventing menus, sampling dishes and making nosh for his “suite” of fellow foodies. It’s been a long while since French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung has been on the scene, but with The Taste of Things, he’s back with delicious vengeance. DJ

ETA: 16 February via Picturehouse (UK)

62. La Retour (Mati Diop)

Mati Diop achieved critical acclaim and a Grand Prix at Cannes for her feature debut Atlantics, and now turns her eye to documentary (having made various shorts previously) for her next film. She will focus on the return of the royal treasures of Abomey from Paris to their country of origin, Benin, which occurred in 2022. Details are otherwise thin on the ground, but given Diop’s relationship with Cannes, it seems likely that if the film is finished, we might see it when the line-up drops in April. HS

63. Love Child (Todd Solondz)

I’ll concede that it’s unlikely Solondz will manage to shoot and edit his next film in time for a 2024 debut, but I’m just excited that the wheels are in motion for his first film since 2016’s Wiener-Dog. Originally set to star Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Olsen is now attached, and she’ll be playing the mother of precocious (and delusional) 11-year-old Junior, whom, after nearly killing his abusive father, persuades the handsome man living in the family’s guesthouse to pursue a relationship with his mother. But when the two fall in love, Junior becomes sick with jealousy, and plots to frame the man for his father’s murder. Sounds like business as usual for Solondz, if I’m honest. HS

64. Sisters (Ariane Labed)

After working with filmmakers including Joanna Hogg, Peter Strickland and her husband Yorgos Lanthimos, the excellent Ariane Labed is getting behind the camera for this adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s bestselling novel. Teenage sisters July and September move from Oxford to Yorkshire with their mentally ill mother, coming to reside in a dilapidated house on the North York Moors. Given the fractured perspective of the novel and its eerie energy, we’re excited to see what Labed has cooked up. HS

65. Bring Them Down (Christopher Andrews)

Two of Hollywood’s hottest young stars – Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott – ended up in this Irish thriller after Paul Mescal and Tom Burke dropped out. Abbott plays Michael, the last son of a shepherding family, who lives with his ailing father, Ray (Irish legend Colm Meaney). Burdened by a terrible secret, Michael has isolated himself from the world. When a conflict with rival farmer Gary (Paul Ready) and his son Jack (Keoghan) escalates, Michael is drawn into a devastating chain of events, forcing him to confront the horrors of his past and leaving both families permanently altered. Sounds bleak. I’m in! HS

66. Maria (Pablo Larraín)

Angelina Jolie makes a welcome return to acting after taking a few years to be with her family, and given Larraín’s track record with Jackie and Spencer, we could be in for the performance of a lifetime. She will play American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, widely regarded as one of the most influential opera singers of the 20th century, who passed away in 1977 aged just 53. Given Callas’ reputation as a diva, this is a chance for Jolie to do something special – while it’s categorically far too early to even think of mentioning the Oscars, it’s the sort of role that a lot of actresses would trip over themselves for. HS

67. La tour de glace (Lucile Hadžihalilović)

It feels terribly dismissive to refer to French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović as a high priestess of weird, but if you look at her films previous films, Earwig and Evolution, she most definitely fits that bill. But weird is underselling it: she creates ambient, tactile fairy tales with an interest in the corporeal, and we love her even when the works themselves don’t entirely connect. She reconnects with Marion Cotillard (who started in her debut, Innocence) for this new film which has been billed as one of her most approachable yet. The logline sounds incredible: a kid flees from her mountain orphanage to Paris where she holes up in a film studio where they’re shooting The Snow Queen. DJ

68. On Swift Horses (Daniel Minahan)

Television veteran Daniel Minahan directs Bryce Kass’s script, adapted from Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel about Muriel and Lee, a newlywed couple whose idyllic life together in 1950s America is interrupted by the arrival of Lee’s younger brother Julius, who has a gambling problem and a secret. Muriel finds herself swept up in Julius’s orbit, discovering a passion for betting on horses, even as he disappears to Las Vegas and falls for a blackjack dealer. Daisy Edgar Jones and Will Poulter play the newlyweds, with Jacob Elordi as Julius and Diego Calva as his lover Henry. HS

69. Trap (M Night Shyamalan) 

A new M Night movie has become an annual treat – one we hope continues for a long time to come. He’s described Trap as “a psychological thriller set at a concert” and Josh Harnett (enjoying a post-Oppenheimer renaissance) is slated to star. We don’t know much else, but notably this is the first film in M Night’s new deal with Warner Bros, after parting ways with his long-time studio partner Universal. HS

ETA: 2 August via Warner Bros

70. Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan)

Here’s a predictably Nicolas Cage-esque logline for a new Nicolas Cage film: A man returns to his native Australia after many years in the US intending to buy back his family’s beachfront property, only to find himself in a violent conflict with the young surfers who have taken up residence there. But the old-timer isn’t backing down easily. If Lorcan Finnegan’s previous film, Vivarium, is anything to go on, things will probably get real weird real quick with this one. HS

71. Handling the Undead (Thea Hvistendahl)

The Worst Person in the World breakout star Renate Reinsve reunites with her co-star Anders Danielsen Lie in Thea Hvistendahl’s adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel (he also wrote Let the Right One In, which is, er, a wild read if you’ve only ever seen the film). Set at the height of an Oslo summer, the newly dead return to life, leaving three families to grapple with the consequences of this strange phenomenon. HS

72. Oh Canada (Paul Schrader)

Schrader reunites with American Gigolo star Richard Gere for this adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel – the first to be written and directed by Schrader since 1997’s Affliction. The story centres on “Canadian-American leftist documentary filmmaker” Leonard Fife, who dodged the Vietnam draft. Some years later, he decides to give a tell-all deathbed interview to his former protegee, Malcolm, played by Jacob Elordi – but the revelations to come will have massive ramifications for those around him. Schrader’s been on a roll since First Reformed, and given the American Gigolo spin-off TV series made without him crashed and burned, the reunion between him and Gere seems all the more exciting. HS

73. Io Capitano (Matteo Garrone)

Matteo Garrone tackles the topic of emigration from Africa to Europe in his new drama, based on accounts from Kouassi Pli Adama Mamadou, Arnaud Zohin, Amara Fofana, Brhane Tareke, and Siaka Doumbia. In the film, two young Senegalese cousins journey from Dakar to Europe, encountering the dangers of the desert and ocean as well as the horrors of Libyan refugee camps. HS

ETA: 8 March via Altitude

74. The Last Planet (Terrence Malick)

Listen – we mentioned Malick’s Jesus biopic in 2022 and 2023, and I will keep putting this film on our annual preview lists until it turns up. What do we know so far? Well, the title has changed from The Way of the Wind, Hungarian actor Géza Röhrig is playing the big JC himself, and Mark Rylance mentioned he’s playing various versions of Satan. All of Jesus’s disciples are expected to feature, including Matthias Schoenarts as Saint Peter and Aiden Turner as Saint Andrew. Ben Kingsley, Douglas Booth and Franz Rogowski are on the rumoured cast list too, but it’s important to remember anyone can end up missing the final cut when it comes to Malick. Just as long as he didn’t can this guy. HS

75. Green Border (Agnieszka Holland) 

The title of Agnieszka Holland’s film refers to the forests between Belarus and Poland, where refugees from the Middle East and Africa are caught up in a crisis caused by triggered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Attempting to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda that promises easy passage to the EU – in the process, the lives of an activist, a border guard and a family of refugees intertwine. Holland’s film, shot in stark black and white, received rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival, even if it’s likely to be a harrowing watch. HS

ETA: 8 March via Modern Films

76. The Beast (Bertrand Bonello) 

The cerebral stalwart of the arthouse tapped stars Léa Seydoux and George MacKay to play lovers dipping in and out of each other’s lives over one hundred and thirty years, from the early twentieth century into the nearby future, where an experimental procedure can remove all emotions. Loosely (very loosely) inspired by Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle, this one got a mixed reception on the autumn festival circuit, but Team LWLies are firmly on board and looking forward to arguing down the pub about this film for many months to come. HS

ETA: 19 April via Vertigo

77. Blitz (Steve McQueen)

The remarkable multi-disciplinary artist Steve McQueen has had a busy six years since his last standalone narrative feature, creating the Small Axe series, the Grenfell installation, plus the documentary Occupied City based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s non-fiction book about Amsterdam under Nazi occupation. Blitz marks his return to the more conventional filmmaking world, with Apple TV+ picking up his original drama about London during the WWII Blitz. Saoirse Ronan is reportedly playing the lead, but the rumoured supporting cast is pretty stacked too, with Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Paul Weller, Hayley Squires, Kathy Burke and Benjamin Clementine all in the mix. McQueen never misses, so this is one of the biggest titles of the year. HS

78. Alien: Romulus (Fede Alvarez) 

Fede Alvarez takes on his third franchise reboot after Evil Dead and The Girl in the Spider’s Web, this time with a standalone story set in the Alien universe between the events of Alien and Aliens. It’s some six years since the last attempt to revitalise the Alien franchise fizzled out with Alien: Covenant, but now with a Noah Hawley television series in development and the success of Hulu’s Predator prequel Prey, it seems like a concerted effort is being made to bring the xenomorphs back. Priscilla breakout Cailee Spaeny stars, with Isabela Merced, David Jonsson and Archie Renaux joining her. HS

ETA: 16 August via Disney

79. In the Hands of Dante (Julian Schnabel)

Schnabel has been working on an adaptation of Nick Tosches’ novel for over a decade – initially Johnny Depp was slated to star, but in a huge win for me personally, Oscar Isaac took over the dual role in 2022 when the film finally went into production (he worked with Schnabel on At Eternity’s Gate, playing the painter Paul Gauguin). The plot of the novel is a bit bizarre, combining the story of a fictionalised version of Tosches as he investigates a potential original copy of the Divine Comedy with an account of Dante Alighieri attempting to finish said work. Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Louis Cancelmi and John Malkovich co-star, with Schnabel’s longtime friend (and the film’s producer) Martin Scorsese also making a cameo. HS

80. La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher)

A new film from Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher is always a cause for excitement, ever since she crash-landed into the 2018 Cannes competition (and Bong Joon-ho’s list of all-time favourite films!) with Happy as Lazzaro. La Chimera is the meandering, gorgeously photographed story of an English, linen-suited diviner (Josh O’Connor) who has the mystical ability to uncover tombs filled with treasures from antiquity. The film offers a chronicle of this fascinating subculture, while also weaving in a tale of obsessive love that transcends the bounds of time. David Jenkins

ETA: TBC via Curzon (UK)

81. The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Another film we’ve been waiting years for – will 2024 be the one? With his directing debut Childhood of a Leader, Brady Corbet tracked the ascendance of fascism in Europe, while his follow-up Vox Lux theorised about the sources and influence of American terrorism. His third film synthesises his transatlantic interests, its subject an immigrant couple (Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones) who come to America to flee the rubble of World War II. They pursue the ideal of an architectural masterpiece with the help of a mysterious benefactor (Guy Pearce), an “epic saga” sprawling out over thirty years and told in a combination of English, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Italian. Add to the cast Joe Alwyn, Isaach de Bankolé, Emma Laird, and Alessandro Nivola along with Vox Lux stars Raffey Cassidy and Stacy Martin, and a prestigious festival berth is all but assured. CB

82. Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch)

Cate Blanchett reteams with Jim Jarmusch after last working together on Coffee and Cigarettes all the way back in 2003. Reportedly shooting is split between New Jersey and Paris, but we don’t know much more beyond Jarmusch describing it as ​​”a funny, sad film”. Yeah, that sure sounds like a Jarmusch picture. Anyway, whatever it ends up being, it sounds very different to his 2019 offbeat zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, which got something of a lukewarm reception back at Cannes. HS

83. Hit Man (Richard Linklater)

The surprise hit of the Venice Film Festival, Richard Linklater co-wrote this black comedy with Glen Powell, who stars as Gary Johnson, a mild-mannered psychology professor who moonlights as a wiretapper for the New Orleans PD. When a colleague is suspended he begins working undercover to entrap people trying to hire a hitman – a line of work that he quickly gets a little too attached to. Netflix snapped this comedy up for $20 million after its rapturous Venice reception, and it has the potential to make a killing with the date night crowd (if it gets a cinema release). HS

ETA: TBC via Netflix

84. Emmanuelle (Audrey Diwan)

A suitable follow-up to her 2021 Golden Lion winner Happening, Audrey Diwan’s next drama is a new take on Emmanuelle Arsan’s classic erotic story about a young woman’s sexual voyage of self-discovery. From a script developed by Diwan and Rebecca Zlotowski, Noemie Merlant will play the lead role after Lea Seydoux dropped out, and the film will be Diwan’s English language debut. No word yet on how close the film will hue to the original narrative, but given Emmanuelle’s storied (and often lurid) on-screen history, it’s exciting to think how a female filmmaker might shake things up. HS

85. Imaginary (Jeff Wardlow) 

We’ve had evil dolls, evil puppets, evil restaurant animatronics, evil dolls that also have AI, and finally, Blumhouse are brave enough to bring us…evil teddy bears. DeWanda Wise plays Jessica, a mother who must face off against a sinister stuffed bear (named Chauncey) who is terrorising her young stepdaughter Alice. Turns out the bear is actually an imaginary friend from Jessica’s childhood – and guess what? He’s not very happy about being left in the basement for years. Does this look ridiculous? Yes. Am I still going to see it? You bet. HS

ETA: 8 March via Lionsgate

86. The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed (Joanna Arnow)

A standout from Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight sidebar in 2023, this offbeat indie about a young woman’s strained relationship with both BDSM and her parents (though not at the same time) features a brief cameo from LWLies own Charles Bramesco and his betrothed Maddie Whittle. That alone should be enough of a reason to see it, but if you need more convincing, Arnow’s wickedly funny film is a charming, often sweet story of the search for connection in a disconnected world. It’s got a US distribution deal for this spring, and I very much hope a UK one follows soon. HS

87. Anora (Sean Baker)

Sean Baker heads to NYC for his eighth feature, which was shot in Brooklyn – a first for the lo-fi filmmaker. After the positive response to Red Rocket and The Florida Project, it’s likely that Baker will get another prime festival spot for this one, billed as a comedy about a sex worker and starring Mikey Madison (who had a supporting role as a Manson Girl in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood), Mark Eydelshteyn, Yuriy Borisov, Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan. HS

88. Death of a Unicorn (Alex Scharfman)

Alex Scarfman is best known as a producer, but he makes his feature debut with this black comedy, starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a father and daughter who accidentally hit a unicorn with their car while en route to a work retreat. Rudd’s billionaire boss – played by Richard E Grant – immediately sees an opportunity to exploit the dead mythical creature’s remains for profit, but things quickly start to go awry. Great premise, great cast, but even more exciting: John Carpenter is doing the score! HS

89. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude) 

If most film comedy could be classed as weak domestic mass-marketed beer, then Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World is max-strength gut-rot that will leave your head throbbing for days to come. A corporate satire of sorts about the making of a safety video, this foul-mouthed odyssey into Romania’s self-lacerating heart of darkness – replete with Andrew Tate Insta filters – has to be seen to be believed. DJ

ETA: 8 March via Sovereign (UK)

90. Cuckoo (Tilman Singer)

Tilman Singer’s sophomore film wrapped in 2022, so we’re not sure why it hasn’t made an appearance yet (could it be due to rumoured animated sequences?) but we’re still excited to see it at Berlinale 2024. Hunter Schaffer plays Gretch, a 17-year-old who has moved to an alpine resort following the death of her mother. Pursued by a mysterious woman, Gretchen finds herself at the heart of a conspiracy that threatens both herself and her sister. As well as Schaffer, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey star. HS

91. Hoard (Luna Carmoon) 

We’re very excited to catch Luna Carmoon’s buzzy, surreal psychodrama Hoard following the plaudits it received from its initial festival run. Word on the street that the film signals the arrival of a bold and brassy new voice on the British film scene, one that holds little truck for the timeworn traditions of conventional storytelling in this country. DJ

ETA: 10 May via Vertigo (UK)

92. The Idea of You (Michael Showalter)

A movie can come from anywhere — for example, an adult woman’s fanfiction about taking her teenage daughter to a One Direction August Moon concert only to so enchant singer Harry Styles Hayes Campbell that they tumble into a May-December romance speculated by readers to be inspired by a certain pop star. Robinne Lee’s markedly Fifty Shades of Grey-ish novel comes to the screen courtesy of journeyman director Michael Showalter, with the cougar protagonist played by Anne Hathaway opposite Nicholas Glitzine, who’s been making a name for himself with roles in Bottoms and Red, White and Royal Blue. Wish fulfilment is a powerful motivator, so who knows, maybe we’ll have another left-field phenomenon from humble origins on our hands. CB

ETA: TBA via Amazon

93. We Live In Time (John Crowley)

Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh were papped plenty on the London set of Brooklyn director John Crowley’s new romance, and given the collective star power of these bright young things, we’re expecting something special. Crowley’s adaptation of The Goldfinch was a bit of a letdown, but we’re not holding that against him. While there’s no sign of further plot details at the moment, suffice to say we’ll always be seated for Garfield and Pugh. HS

94. The Substance (Coralie Fargeat)

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley play mother and daughter in Coralie Fargeat’s follow-up to her 2018 thriller Revenge, which is rumoured to be a body horror. It was also supposed to star Ray Liotta, but unfortunately, he passed away before filming could finish, and was replaced by Dennis Quaid. There hasn’t been much said about this one since the summer of 2022 when Qualley confirmed she was still working on the film, but if it has indeed wrapped production since then, perhaps a 2024 premiere is on the cards. HS

95. Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)

Jason Schwartzman had an excellent 2023 with his turn in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, so we’re looking forward to seeing him again in this “anxious comedy” alongside Carol Kane. He plays a cantor locked in a crisis of faith, who discovers his new adult Bat Mitzvah student is none other than his former eighth-grade teacher. More good news: Triangle of Sadness breakout Dolly De Leon co-stars and the film was shot by New York lo-fi’s favourite cinematographer, Sean Price Williams. HS

96. A Real Pain (Jesse Eisenberg)

To honour their beloved Jewish grandmother and learn more about their heritage, David and Benji set off on a tour of Poland – but the cousins couldn’t be more different, and against the backdrop of their shared family history, old tensions begin to flare. Although Jesse Eisenberg’s filmmaking debut When You Finish Saving the World was a disappointment, there’s enough here to warrant a look – not least the fact that Eisenberg’s co-star is the always-excellent Kieran Culkin. HS

97. Greedy People (Potsy Ponciroli)

The residents of a small island town are rocked by a sensational murder and the subsequent discovery of a large sum of money in Potsy Ponciroli’s black comedy, which boasts the stacked casts of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lily James, Himesh Patel, Tim Blake Nelson, Uzo Aduba and Simon Rex. Ponciroli’s previous film Old Henry, which also starred Tim Blake Nelson, received favourable reviews – this one is being likened to Fargo and the television series Better Call Saul. HS

98. MaXXXine (Ti West)

The third film in a Mia Goth trilogy also containing X and Pearl, Ti West sets his sights on the lurid world of 1980s Hollywood as Maxine – the only survivor of the farmhouse massacre in X – pursues her dream of becoming an actress. But it seems that bodies stack up wherever Maxine goes, and there’s a serial killer in Los Angeles who’s just dying to meet her. Halsey, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito and Elizabeth Debecki play various film industry figures, while Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan are the long arm of the law. X and Pearl have a strong contingent of fans, so we’re expecting some sort of buzzy festival premiere for the final instalment. HS

99. Ash (Flying Lotus)

Musician and artist Flying Lotus makes his second feature in Ash, which focuses on a woman played by Eiza González, who wakes up on a planet and finds the crew of her space station have been viciously killed. A man – played by Aaron Paul – arrives to rescue her, but his appearance sparks more questions than answers. We’ll likely get a Flying Lotus score too, and given the artist’s wild imagination, this probably won’t be your standard sci-fi thriller. HS

100. Freaky Tales (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck)

In the years since they directed Captain Marvel, director duo Boden and Fleck have spent a little time in television, directing episodes of Mrs. America and the upcoming Spielberg and Hanks-produced WW2 miniseries Masters of the Air. They return to filmmaking with something that errs closer to the indies of their pre-Marvel career, reuniting with Ben Mendelsohn after Mississippi Grind and Captain Marvel, and working with Dominique Thorne, Ji-young Yoo and Angus Cloud, who sadly passed away in 2023. Comprised of our interconnected stories set in 1980s Oakland, the Sundance logline outlines “Teen punks defend their turf against Nazi skinheads, a rap duo battles for hip-hop immortality, a weary henchman gets a shot at redemption, and an NBA All-Star settles the score.” HS

With Christmas and the excitement of the holidays over, one can be left with a strange feeling of emptiness. That’s why we look forward to publishing this list every year – an expansive preview of all the most interesting new films tipped to hit festivals and cinemas in 2024. Check back tomorrow for part two, and let us know what you’re excited about by tweeting @lwlies.

1. The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin)

The story of the Von Erich family – regarded by many as one of the greatest wrestling dynasties of all time – is one of unthinkable tragedy, brought to the big screen by indie godhead Sean Durkin with an all-star cast. Zac Efron plays eldest son Kevin Von Erich, a sweet Labrador of a man who loves his brothers, wrestling, and his daddy – in that order. He’s joined by Harris Dickinson and Jeremy Allen White as his younger brothers, while the indomitable Holt McCallany plays their domineering, single-minded father Fritz. The wigs are big, the spandex is tight, and the emotions run high. Hannah Strong

ETA: 9 February via Lionsgate (UK)

2. Spaceman (Johan Renck)

As a card-carrying member of the Adam Sandler Academy Award lobby, I’ve been keeping a close eye on this sci-fi drama, adapted from Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel about a Czech astronaut who travels to a far corner of space to investigate a cloud of mysterious dust. He leaves behind his pregnant wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), but not the trauma of his childhood, shaped by his father who was a member of the secret police, and the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. Determined to redeem his family’s honour he’s taken on a mission no one else wanted, which will see him befriend a giant, gentle arachnid named Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano). Sounds nuts – count me in. HS

ETA: Spring 2024 via Netflix

3. Gladiator II (Ridley Scott)

Paul Mescal has some big sandals to fill in this long-awaited sequel to Scott’s historical epic, which is set 15 years after the events of Gladiator. Mescal plays Lucius Verus, the wee tyke that Russell Crowe’s Maximus saved back in the day – after living in the wilderness for some time, he emerges in search of his mother (Connie Nielsen reprising her role as Lucilla). With a starry cast including Denzel Washington, Joseph Quinn and Pedro Pascal – plus Djimon Hounsou returning as former gladiator Juba and Derek Jacobi as conniving politician Gracchus – this is set to be one of the cinematic events of the year, and not just because we get to see Mescal fight a load of baboons. HS

ETA: 22 November via Universal

4. Kind of Kindness (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Presumably Searchlight realised that the previous title ‘And’ was an SEO nightmare – but we can expect Lanthimos’ next project roll out sometime in 2023. Shot right after he completed Poor Things, this anthology film reunites Lanthimos with his muse Emma Stone, plus Poor Things stars Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, The Favourite‘s Joe Alwyn, and new collaborators Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau and Hunter Schafer. When speaking to LWLies earlier this year, Lanthimos confirmed the film comprises several chapters, with the same actors appearing in different roles. HS

ETA: TBC via Searchlight

5. Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass)

As seems to be the case with so many rising directors these days, Rose Glass made a name for herself in horror (the wrenching Saint Maud) only to pivot out of the genre and explore wilder narrative territories. Fans of watching Kristen Stewart do things will be excited to learn that Kristen Stewart stars as the protective lover of a female bodybuilder (Katie M. O’Brian), concerned that her paramour will be chewed up and spat out by the cutthroat world of competitive musclewomen. The press release foretold a “romance fueled by ego, desire, and the American dream” which places this film in the compact, fascinating canon of movies about the US made from a European vantage. Charles Bramesco

ETA: TBC via A24 (US)

6. Dune II (Denis Villenueve)

Those curious about what will take place in the second instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s sandy, spicy sci-fi epic can just consult anyone who’s read the novel — the people who have love nothing more than being asked about it. As for the laypeople, there’s still plenty to look forward to in the introduction of new cast members Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Lea Seydoux, and Christopher Walken, plus the promise of more screen time for the heretofore sparsely-shown Zendaya. Eyes will glow, empires will fall, Timothée Chalamet will probably do that goofy little two-step walk across the desert again. Now that the SAG strike has ended and Warner Bros. will presumably cool it with the delays, bring on the giant worms! CB

ETA: 1 March via Warner Bros

7. Paddington in Peru (Dougal Wilson)

The little bear with the big heart returns after the phenomenal success of his 2017 adventure Paddington 2. This time, he’s headed back to his native Peru (something the Tories will probably be delighted about) and taking the Brown clan with him, on a voyage to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy. Of course hijinks ensue. Antonio Banderas will play ‘Hunter Cabot’, surely the film’s big bad, with his daughter played by Carla Tous after Rachel Zegler had to drop out due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. There are two other big changes too: Sally Hawkins has been replaced in the role of Mrs Brown by Emily Mortimer, and Dougal Wilson subs in for director Paul King, who had prior commitments with Wonka. No pressure then! HS

ETA: 8 November via StudioCanal (UK)

8. Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola)

Soon, it will have been thirteen years since Francis Ford Coppola last completed a movie, and many more since he made one generally agreed upon as “good.” But that’s no reason to approach his surefire comeback with anything less than feverish excitement; when you’re the guy who did The Godfather, you get the benefit of the doubt. In his long-gestating new sci-fi/fantasy, an architect (Adam Driver) drafts a bold blueprint for the future of New York in the wake of a disaster decimating the city, a sweeping proposition that corrals a massive ensemble cast including Forest Whitaker, Jon Voight, Nathalie Emmanuel, Laurence Fishburne, Aubrey Plaza, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Shia LaBeouf, and Kathryn Hunter, among others. Driver has called his time working on the film “one of the best shooting experiences of [his] life.” Can it be one of the best viewing experiences of ours? CB

9. Joker: Folie a Deux (Todd Phillips)

Perhaps one day I’ll understand what it is about the role of the Joker that fascinates Joaquin Phoenix so much. He’s joined by Lady Gaga for the sequel to Todd Phillips’ gritty DC standalone – she’s playing the psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel, who is assigned to treat Joker in prison and subsequently falls in love, taking on the moniker Harley Quinn. Given the raft of accolades that inexplicably followed the first film, chances are Hollywood will be rolling out the red carpet for Phillips and co this time around. Expect a ritzy premiere, possibly at the Venice Film Festival, where Joker won the Golden Lion back in 2019. HS

ETA: 4 October via Warner Bros

10. The Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

RaMell Ross’s documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening was widely regarded as one of the finest films of 2018, earning him an Academy Award nomination. He returns with an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, which marks his narrative feature debut, and centres on the historic Dozier School for Boys in Florida, which was notorious for its abusive treatment of pupils. A fictionalised version of the school appears in Ross’s film, which follows a young African-American student who is sent there and forms a friendship with classmate Turner. From there, the pair try to survive the horrors of the Nickel School together. HS

ETA: TBC via Amazon MGM

11. Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho)

After cranking it among the stars for Claire Denis in High Life, Robert Pattinson will return to the deepest reaches of the cosmos with an even higher-profile global auteur, portraying a series of mentally deteriorating clones sent to colonise an ice planet in Bong Joon-ho’s follow-up to crossover smash Parasite. It’s one of the year’s most giddily anticipated releases, but the March date suggests a pass on a festival premiere (too big for Sundance, too on the radar for Berlin) as well as a possible lack of confidence from Warner Bros., a company that made some unfortunate decisions over the past year. Only time will tell whether our jokes about this film’s debut closely following the entrance of Mickey Mouse to the public domain — and the graphically sexual potential implied therein — have come true. Or maybe it’ll just be existentialism in space. Either way, it’s director Bong, so the floor on expectations is still pretty high. CB

ETA: 29 March via Warner Bros

12. Civil War (Alex Garland)

Described as an “action epic”, Garland’s film sounds like his most ambitious to date, set in a future United States where the states have gone to war. Kirsten Dunst​, Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson appear to be playing members of the press covering the conflict, while Nick Offerman is the President. Cailee Spaeny, Jesse Plemons and Karl Glusman also star, but I’m a little concerned by Garland describing the film as a “companion piece” to his last film, Men, which was…not great. Still, his sterling work on Ex Machina, Annihilation and Devs is enough to ensure I’m still rooting for him, and hope that Civil War is a return to form. HS

ETA: 26 April via A24 (US)

13. Wizards! (David Michôd)

Franz Rogowski and Pete Davidson, together at last! The odd couple play hapless, permanently zooted beach bar owners who come across some stolen loot that quickly proves more trouble than it’s worth. It sounds like Michôd is returning to the comedic territory of Hesher and War Machine after his rather dreary take on Shakespeare’s Henriad – hopefully a pivot that will pay off. HS

ETA: TBC via A24 (US)

14. Challengers (Luca Gudagnino)

Pushed from a Venice 2023 premiere to an arguably less glam April release, Luca Gudagnino’s tennis love triangle drama set pulses racing with its trailer last summer, in which we caught a glimpse of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor set to Rihanna’s classic bondage bop S&M. The trio play the tennis pros caught up in an enduring love affair, and it’s Guadagnino, so you can count on big emotions, a flair for the dramatic, excellent needle drops and some gorgeous costumes. HS

ETA: 26th April via MGM/Amazon (US) Warner Bros (International)

15. The Watchers (Ishana Shyamalan)

Like father like daughter – M Night’s progeny started out working with her dad on his television series Servant, where she wrote and directed various episodes, and then served as a second unit director on his 2021 holiday thriller Old. She strikes out on her own with The Watchers, in which Dakota Fanning plays Mina, an artist stranded in an Irish forest. She meets three strangers, but the group soon find themselves stalked by mysterious creatures at night. The Watchers has been described as a dark fairy tale, and studying under a modern master, we’re excited to see what Isahana’s picked up from her pops. HS

ETA: TBC via Warner Bros 

16. Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung)

Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical drama Minari was a 2020 Sundance standout (and a LWLies cover film!) It netted six Academy Award nominations back in 2021, with Youn Yuh-jung becoming the first Korean to win an Oscar for her performance as mischievous grandma Soon-ja. How does one follow such a well-received film? By making a sequel to the 1996 disaster film Twister of course! Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramirez are slated to star, though filming was halted back in the summer due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, so it may yet end up moving out of the 2024 schedule. Nevertheless, we’re interested to see how Chung takes on a big-budget blockbuster, considering the beauty of Minari was its incredible intimacy. HS

ETA: 19 July, via Universal (US) Warner Bros (International)

17. Janet Planet (Annie Baker)

Annie Baker, the finest playwright-turned-filmmaker since Kenneth Lonergan, arrived in auspicious fashion on the fall festival circuit with this quasi-memoir recounting a passage of her girlhood in a liberal enclave of the Massachusetts boonies. The mordant, hilarious Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) watches her single mother (Julianne Nicholson, astonishing) try on different partners and versions of herself, but this is no soul-searchy Sundance cast-off. Baker has bona fide chops as a slow-cinema formalist, her confident compositions and unhurried editing betraying her as a true student of the medium rather than another stage expat treating the screen like a big proscenium. Rich with emotional nuance, expansive in its quiet contemplations, this is one of the all-time great debuts — no further qualification required. CB

ETA: TBC via A24 (US)

18. Nightbitch (Marielle Heller)

Marielle Heller’s peculiar new film adapts Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel, in which an accomplished artist (the still-somehow-Oscarless Amy Adams) takes a step back from her career to care for her child, and finds herself chafing under the smallness of domestic life. Instead of taking up pills like so many before her, however, she instead starts turning into a dog and wanders into a sinister multi-level marketing scheme run by housewives. Who among us, right? Festival selection committees baulked at the surreal, blackly comic approach to feral feminism this past fall, but Heller’s got a couple of strong movies to her name in Diary of a Teenage Girl and Can You Ever Forgive Me, and that’s more than enough to earn her “one to keep an eye on” status. CB

ETA: TBC via Searchlight

19. Drive Away Dolls (Ethan Coen)

Two paths diverged in the yellow wood of the Coen brothers’ directing partnership, and their first solo projects suggest why; Joel gave us an austere, experimental-theatre-inspired adaptation of Macbeth in 2021, and soon Ethan will retort with a long-delayed “action-sex-comedy” road movie chockablock with bawdy, sapphic hijinks. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play a pair of lesbians traversing the great lattice of American highways circa 1999, encountering along the way a “potpourri of a severed head in a hatbox, a bitter ex-girlfriend, a mystery briefcase, and an evil senator.” Cowritten with Coen’s wife Tricia Cooke under the working title of Drive-Away Dykes, it’s a start to rectifying the urgent issue of not having enough present-day Russ Meyer homages. CB

ETA: 15 March via Universal

20. Mufasa: The Lion King (Barry Jenkins)

This sequel to 2019’s The Lion King was announced back in 2020, but the pandemic and then the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes slowed things down a little bit. What we do know is that it will be an original prequel rather than an adaptation of The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride, with Aaron Pierre voicing Mufasa and Kelvin Harrison Jr voicing Scar (boo hiss, because Simba’s Pride had some banging original songs). Billy Eichner, Seth Rogen and John Kani are expected to return as Timon, Pumba and Rafiki. The script was written by Jeff Nathanson, who also wrote the script for the 2019 film. Barry Jenkins’ involvement has confused a lot of people, but with his track record, we’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. HS

ETA: 20 December via Disney

21. Borderlands (Eli Roth)

For the uninitiated, Borderlands is a first-person shooter video game series which achieved particular popularity in the 2010s. Inspired by the likes of Mad Max, the games focused on loot-seeking individuals battling their way across barren planets in search of fabled prizes. A film adaptation has been on the table since 2015, initially under the supervision of Leigh Whannell, before Eli Roth became involved in 2020. Despite initially wrapping filming in 2021, Borderlands has had a rocky production history. Reshoots took place in 2023 under Tim Miller as Roth was shooting his festive horror Thanksgiving, and screenwriter Craig Mazin had his name removed from the film in 2023, replaced by ‘Joe Crombie’. So, who knows what the finished film will look like. But at least we can look forward to Cate Blanchett playing ‘a infamous outlaw with a mysterious past’! HS

ETA: 9 August via Lionsgate

22. Immaculate (Michael Mohan)

Those bemoaning the lack of good sleaze in today’s movie landscape have a friend in Michael Mohan, who massaged devious wit into the long-dormant erotic thriller with 2021’s The Voyeurs, and will soon set his sights on the august tradition of the psycho nun flick with Immaculate. Sydney Sweeney plays a maiden of God on the assignment of a lifetime at a prestigious convent in the Italian countryside, only to discover that the sisters (one of whom is played by Simona Tabasco, Sweeney’s fellow alumna from TV’s The White Lotus) harbour a dark secret. Principal photography wrapped early this year, and even with strike-related delays in post-production, it should’ve been a lock for Sundance’s Midnight section this January. No such luck, but “a trash-ified Black Narcissus homage featuring two of Earth’s most rapturously gorgeous women” shouldn’t be such a hard sell whenever it comes around. CB

23. The Front Room (The Eggers Brothers)

If you recognise the surname, is because Max and Sam are the brothers of Robert “The VVitch” Eggers. They’re making their feature debut with The Front Room, starring US singer Brandy Norwood and British theatre legend Kathryn Hunter. Together at last! According to Screen International, the film follows “a young, newly pregnant couple who are forced to take in an ailing stepmother who has long been estranged from the family”. Sure sounds like a convenient set-up for a psychological horror. HS

24. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

If you’re reading this list from the USA or France, you’ll have already had the chance to catch Jonathan Glazer‘s haunting Cannes Gran Pix winner back in 2023, but the UK has to wait a little bit longer. It’s worth it though – Glazer’s fourth film focuses on the day-to-day life of Auschwitz camp commander Rudolf Höss and his family, exposing the callous indifference of those ‘just following orders’ during the Holocaust, and the normalisation of the unthinkable. Shot with a discomforting, voyeuristic camera set up and featuring imposing discordant soundscapes by Mica Levi, it’s a horror story played out amid immaculate gardens and ambient terror. HS

ETA: 2 February

25. Humane (Caitlin Cronenberg)

Following in the footsteps of dad David and brother Brandon, Caitlin Cronenberg will make her feature debut in 2024 with the environmental horror Humane, starring Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire and Peter Gallagher. Taking place over a single day, the film is set months after a global environmental collapse, with world leaders forced to take “extreme measures” to reduce the earth’s population. Mass murder it is then. Just as cheery as we’d expect from a Cronenberg! HS

26. Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz)

Rebecca Lenkiewicz is best known as a screenwriter but makes the jump to director with this adaptation of Deborah Levy’s bestselling novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. Emma Mackey plays Sofia, a young woman who travels to Spain with her unwell mother Rose (Fiona Shaw) in search of a dubious cure for her debilitating paralysis. While tensions with her mother heighten, Sofia becomes infatuated with a traveller named Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) and begins to experience freedom for the first time. The bonds between Sofia and Rose quickly begin to strain under the tension. HS

27. Little Death (Jack Begert)

Jack Begert is best known as a music video director and makes the jump to films with an all-star cast at Sundance 2024. A screenwriter (David Schwimmer) suffers a midlife crisis and a pair of taco truck operators (Talia Ryder and Dominic Fike) search for an opioid fix among a cast of other oddballs in this LA story, which also features “surreal montage” and “AI animation”. Hmm. Jena Malone, Fred Melamed, Gaby Hoffman and Karl Glusman also star. HS

28. Babygirl (Halina Reijn)

Nicole Kidman plays a high-flying businesswoman who begins an affair with her intern (played by Harris Dickinson) in the next project from Bodies Bodies Bodies director Halina Reijn. Her debut feature, Instinct, was an erotic thriller, so she’s got form here, and if the prospect of Kidman/Dickinson getting up close and personal wasn’t tantalising enough, consider the fact Jude Law is on board too. Make movies sexy again! HS

29. Love Me (Sam & Andy)

Kristen Stewart has a busy Sundance – alongside Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, she’ll star alongside Steven Yeun in a decidedly different romance. The pair play “a smart buoy and an orbiting satellite” in “a love story that spans a billion years” in the directorial debut of Sam and Andy Zuchero, which will focus on questions of identity, sentience, reality and existence. Sundance has a track record for high-concept indie films that don’t necessarily nail the execution, but Stewart and Yeun are two of our finest, so we’re intrigued all the same. HS

30. Bird (Andrea Arnold)

Demonstrating an affinity for single-word animal-themed titles that began with her short film Wasp and continued with Cow, Andrea Arnold returns to fiction with Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski on side. We don’t know much else about this upcoming title, other than the fact it was shot last summer in the south of England and on the Isle of Sheppey, but given the Cannes success of her past films, it seems likely Bird will debut on the Croisette. HS

31. Juror No. 2 (Clint Eastwood)

Proving that age really ain’t nothing but a number, 93-year-old Clint finished up his 40th directing credit in November 2023. It’s his first film after a few years off – some naysayers speculated that Cry Macho might actually be his swan song, but you can’t keep a good man down, or Clint away from the director’s chair. He works with Nicholas Hoult for the first time on this legal drama, about a man who discovered he is actually responsible for the murder he’s on the jury for. Yikes. Toni Collette, Zoey Deutch, Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Messina co-star. HS

32. Rebel Ridge (Jeremy Saulnier)

Fine purveyor of miserable stories that he is, it’s no surprise that the IMDB logline for Jeremy Saulnier’s latest thriller is “​​A high-velocity thriller that explores systemic American injustices through bone-breaking action sequences, suspense and dark humor.” John Boyega was originally slated to star, but after he dropped out Aaron Pierre (best-known as Mid-Sized Sedan in M Night Shyamalan’s Old, later to be seen voicing Mufasa in Barry Jenkins’ Lion King sequel) stepped in. He stars alongside Don Johnson, James Badge Dale, AnnaSophia Robb and James Cromwell. HS

33. Mother’s Instinct (Benoît Delhomme)

Benoît Delhomme is best known as a cinematographer, having shot films including Tran Anh Hung’s The Scent of Green Papaya, John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, and James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything. He makes his directorial debut with a remake of the 2018 Belgian thriller Duelles, which was adapted from Barbara Abel’s novel Derrière La Haine (Behind the Hate) psychological thriller starring powerhouse actresses Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway, who play best friends and neighbours Alice and Celine in tranquil 1960s suburbia. Following an accident, their relationship is shattered, and paranoia and suspicion begin to take hold. HS

34. Furiosa (George Miller)

The sun is rising on another lovely day. After decamping to Namibia to shoot his crowd-pleasing Fury Road, George Miller has blazed a path back to his home of Australia for the latest addition to the astonishingly consistent franchise of post-apocalyptic motor opera. Anya Taylor-Joy fills out the robot arm previously wielded by Charlize Theron as the warrior heroine Imperator Furiosa, lashing out against a patriarchal biker gang led by Warlord Dementus (a mustachioed Chris Hemsworth). Meeting the standard set by the most rapturously acclaimed action picture of the millennium is no small feat, but George Miller can do it, and indeed, has done it on multiple occasions in the past. Anyone foolhardy enough to think, “Well, surely this one can’t be as good as the others” is betting against the house. CB

ETA: 24 May via Warner Bros

35. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson)

It’s great to see the great author Percival Everett have his work adapted for the big screen, and this soulful satire sees Jeffrey Wright as a writer whose jokey attempt at a mainstream literary hit backfires in the strangest way possible. Taking its cues from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, Jefferson Cord’s film is a more laid-back and ambling affair, and it’s always just a real treat to have perennial supporting guy Wright in a lead role. David Jenkins

ETA: 2 February via Curzon (UK)

36. Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)

Robert Eggers’ continuing odyssey through the most obscure corners of the past has brought him to Romania circa 1838, where Transylvanian townspeople whisper of Count Orlok, the ghoulish owner of the house on the hill that junior real estate agent Thomas Hutter has come to inspect. Eggers wanted his remake of F.W. Murnau’s proto-horror landmark to be his second film, only to hold it as a passion project while he shifted focus to The Lighthouse and The Northman, but he’s finally got the industry firepower to make it happen his way — which, as he told LWL in a 2022 interview, has a lot to do with Biedermeier-style furniture design. With Bill Skarsgård as the noted bloodsucker, Nicholas Hoult as the hapless Hutter, and Lily-Rose Depp taking over for Anya Taylor-Joy as his bride, it’s sure to be a major event, though when we’ll see it is anyone’s guess. Eggers brought The Lighthouse to Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight, so maybe this could be his entrée to Competition. Maybe US distributor Focus will hold for the fall festivals. Or maybe they’ll bypass it all and count on the natural buzz generated by one of the most acclaimed genre filmmakers currently in the game taking on a monster icon prominently lodged in cinema history. CB

ETA: 25 December via Universal

37. Y2K (Kyle Mooney)

Kyle Mooney starred in and co-wrote the underrated Brigsby Bear and was consistently one of the better performers on NBC’s dwindling sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live before he left in 2022, so his filmmaking debut is something to keep a close eye on. Two high school losers (Jaeden Martell and Julian Dennison) crash a party on New Year’s Eve 1999, only to find the projected events of Y2K actually come true. HS

38. Longlegs (Oz Perkins)

Maika Monroe plays young FBI agent Lee Harker, who is tasked with solving a serial killer case in Oz Perkins’ fourth feature, produced by Nicolas Cage who also stars. The case quickly becomes stranger, taking a turn for the occult, and Harker realises there’s a familial connection between her and the killer. Back at the end of 2022 Cage mentioned the film during a conversation with John Carpenter, and referred to his character as a “possessed Geppetto, who’s making these dolls”. Sure! HS

39. Lisa Frankenstein (Zelda Williams)

It’s not really her rep, but scanning her filmography, one may notice that screenwriter Diablo Cody has quietly become a polarising quantity; though the tide has turned in favour of Jennifer’s Body, her last two produced scripts (for 2018’s Tully and 2015’s Ricki and the Flash) have as many detractors as champions for their winky middlebrow wit. She’s taking a hard left turn into the weird and whimsical for the feature debut from Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin), in which a lonely, horny teen goth (Kathryn Newton) lands a boyfriend by reanimating the corpse of a gallant Victorian (Cole Sprouse, better known as TV’s Hot Jughead on Riverdale). Anyone who’s ever made love to themselves while picturing Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice will feel seen. CB

ETA 22 March via Focus/Universal

40. Echo Valley (Michael Pearce)

We were big fans of Michael Pearce’s eerie debut Beast, which also brought Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn into the mainstream. His sophomore film, Encounter was a bit of a disappointment, but he’s assembled a very exciting cast for film number three: Julianne Moore plays a horse trainer living in Pennsylvania’s Echo Valley, whose daughter returns home one day covered in someone else’s blood. Domhnall Gleeson provides an air of menace as a local thug with an axe to grind. Fuck us up, Michael! HS

41. Holland, Michigan (Mimi Cave)

Mimi Cave’s modern cannibal breakout Fresh debuted at Sundance in 2022 and was promptly snapped up by Searchlight for distribution. She’s harnessed some serious star power for her next film: Nicole Kidman stars as a woman living in a small town who begins to suspect her husband is living a double life – but the reality is even more shocking than she could have imagined. Kidman is joined by Gael García Bernal, Matthew Macfadyen and Rachel Sennott, plus cute kid Jude Hill, who played a young Kenneth Branagh stand-in in Belfast. The script for this one has been doing the rounds for a while, first appearing on the Blacklist in 2013, and now it seems to have found a home at Amazon. HS

42. Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

How do you follow up a very unlikely foray into the wilds of American award season, which Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi experienced with his Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car? Well, with something very much the same, but very much different at the same time. This new one, which has already received an award at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, sees the members of a rural enclave gently pushing back against a “glamping” start-up who want to take over their land. DJ

ETA: 1 March via Modern Films

43. The Order (Justin Kurzel)

While I wasn’t so keen on Nitram, plenty of other fine folks found a lot to admire about Kurzel’s true crime film about the Port Arthur massacre. Continuing his interest in the darker side of human behaviour, Kurzel has teamed up with writer Zach Baylin for this interpretation of the non-fiction book The Silent Brotherhood, which focused on ‘The Order’, a white supremacist group active in the United States throughout the 1980s. In this film Jude Law plays an FBI agent who discovers that a radical group may be responsible for a string of violent bank robberies across the Pacific Northwest – leading him to their charismatic leader Robert Jay Mathews (played by Nicholas Hoult). HS

44. I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun) 

Schoenbrun’s feature debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was one of the great surprises of 2022, so all eyes are on them for their second film. Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine play the leads, with Smith’s Owen introduced to a mysterious late-night television show which suggests a supernatural world existing beneath their own. Soon enough Owen’s vision of reality begins to distort. The rest of the cast is eclectic: Danielle Deadwyler, Helena Howard, Connor O’Malley, Phoebe Bridgers and Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst. A Sundance debut followed by a Berlinale bow suggests we’ll get a release sometime in 2024 – hopefully in the UK as well as the US. HS

45. Timestalker (Alice Lowe)

Agnes has a problem – every time she’s reincarnated, she falls in love with the wrong man. Sounds pretty inconvenient, but like the premise for a very fun twist on the rom-com. Alice Lowe writes, directs and stars in her second feature, and it’s a welcome return seven years after her criminally underrated debut Prevenge. Her supporting cast is pretty great too: we’ve got Jacob Anderson (currently winning audiences over in the Interview with the Vampire television series), Aneurin Barnard (David Copperfield), Tanya Reynolds (Sex Education) and Nick Frost (you know who he is!) HS

46. Swimming Home (Justin Anderson)

The second Deborah Levy adaptation slated to hit cinemas this year after Hot Milk, Swimming Home sounds like it has shades of La Piscine about it – a troubled married couple and their teenage daughter holidaying in the south of France find their idyll interrupted by the appearance of a naked stranger in their swimming pool. It turns out she’s a big fan of poet Joe, and despite her intrusion, matriarch Isabel invites her to stay with them. Ariane Labed, Christopher Abbott and Mackenzie Davis are tipped to star. HS

47. Visitation (Nicolas Pesce)

Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother and Piercing were great – his remake of The Grudge…less so. But his next film sounds promising: with her mother dying, 14-year-old Maria (Isla Johnston, who played a young Anya Taylor Johnson in The Queen’s Gambit) is sent away to live with Catholic nuns, but her arrival turns sinister as one of her caretakers becomes enamoured with her. Olivia Cooke plays a nun in the story – no word on if she’s the sinister one or not. HS

48. The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols)

Taking inspiration from photojournalist Danny Lyon’s 1968 book which documented the exploits of a group of motorcyclists, Jeff Nichols has crafted a romantic homage to the easy riding heydays of Harley Davidson. Austin Butler stars as a James Dean-esque figure, while Comer plays his fast-talking, no-nonsense wife, and Michael Shannon, Tom Hardy and Boyd Holbrook round out the cast as members of the biker gang. Despite a positive reception out of Telluride and London Film Festival, Searchlight chose to offload The Bikeriders to Focus for release, but don’t let that put you off – in typical Nichols fashion, this is a poetic, lovingly crafted take on the golden age of bike riding. HS

ETA: 21 June via Focus/Universal

49. Babes (Pamela Adlon)

Veteran actor Pamela Adlon is best known as the voice of Bobby Hill and for her collaborations with Louis CK, but she’s also been writing, producing and directing for a long time. Babes is her feature debut, in which Ilana Glazer plays the aggressively single Eden, who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and leans on her married best friend to help her navigate this new chapter of her life. Hasan Minhaj, Michelle Buteau, John Carroll Lynch, Stephan James and Oliver Platt round out the cast. HS

50. Faces of Death (Daniel Goldhaber)

After the excellent Cam and How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Daniel Goldhaber has established himself as one to watch within the American indie filmmaking scene. Along with creative partners Isa Mazzei and Isabelle Link-Levy, he’s tackling the iconic Faces of Death, which achieved notoriety back in 1978 for allegedly showcasing actual death on film. Of course, most of the footage was staged, but the legend of the film endures – and now it’s being updated for a new generation. Starring Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery, this new version “revolves around a female moderator of a YouTube-like website, whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, that stumbles across a group that is recreating the murders from the original film.” HS

The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is one of the largest events of its kind, bringing together filmmakers, industry experts, journalists and film lovers from around the world to celebrate and reflect on the art of documentary filmmaking. As an art form suited to political discussion, protest and dissent, it stands to reason that IDFA would welcome filmmakers challenging injustice and the limitation of freedom.

However, this year’s edition takes place during the ongoing conflict in Palestine, and on 8 November, at the opening night screening, protesters carrying a banner with the popular slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ took to the stage. The phrase has been interpreted as anti-Semitic by some members of the Jewish community, and an open letter was issued by key figures of the Israeli film community condemning IDFA, particularly the festival’s artistic director Orwa Nyrabia, for applauding the protesters.

IDFA was quick to issue a response on 10 November, in which they thanked the “Jewish community in Amsterdam and internationally, from Israel, from Palestine, and many other places, for reaching out.” In the statement, Nyrabia explains that, “The slogan written on the banner held by the young protesters, which later was reported as very visible to the audience but not to me on stage, is a triggering statement and an offensive declaration for many, regardless of who carries it. It does not represent IDFA, and was and will not be endorsed. I apologize for not paying attention to the banner in the moment. I clapped to welcome freedom of speech, and not to welcome the slogan.” Last month, the Dutch Court of Appeal ruled that ‘From the river to the sea’ is protected speech and not anti-Semitic, which seems at odds with IDFA’s comments. Later on 10 November, IDFA issued a separate statement calling for a ceasefire.

In return, the Palestinian Film Institute issued a statement on 11 November condemning IDFA’s actions and withdrew their activities and films from the festival, including three projects in the market by Palestinian filmmakers Yousef Hammad and Noora Said (Sheikh Jarrah), Dalia Al Kury (We Never Left), Hazem Alqaddi and Elettra Bisogno (The Roller. The Life. The Fight). “As the world’s largest documentary film festival, IDFA holds the responsibility to respond to the plight of journalists and documentarians on the ground in Gaza, the Palestinian film community, and Palestinian lives. Contrary to its stated goal of promoting films that inspire critical thinking and societal betterment, IDFA‘s actions fall short,” the PFI’s statement read.

At the same time, filmmakers began withdrawing their films from the festival in solidarity with Palestine. Filipino filmmaker Miko Revereza, who had initially called on IDFA to denounce the bombardment of Gaza on 9 November, withdrew his documentary Nowhere Near on 11 November. He was swiftly followed by Basma al-Sharif (a Palestinian filmmaker with four shorts selected to play, who also resigned from the Envision jury), Jumana Manna (a Palestinian filmmaker screening her short Blessed Blessed Oblivion), Maryam Tafakory (Mast-del), Charlie Shackleton (Lateral), Terra Long (Feet in Water, Head on Fire), Kaori Oda (Gama), Joshua Gen Solondz (We Don’t Talk Like We Used To), Nika Autor (Newsreel 242 – Sunny Railways), Niles Atallah, Dr Nariman Massoumi (Pouring Water on Troubled Oil), Sister Sylvester and Deniz Tortum (Shadowland) and Sky Hopinka (małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore). 

During a conversation event with Manna, Hopinka read al-Sharif’s public statement aloud to the audience including the festival director. On 13 November, in his own withdrawal statement, Hopinka also expressed his support for Nyrabi, writing, “He’s in an impossible position as the director of the festival, as an Arab, as a Syrian, and as a friend to so many of us.”  

Others chose to use their platform at the festival to highlight the situation in Gaza, such as Mohammed Almuganni during his pitch for Son of the Streets, and the Peruvian XR team consisting of Claudix Vanesix, Juan Pablo TantaVilca and Lorena Garcia pulled their work following a live statement. Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Jabaly is continuing to screen his film Life is Beautiful – quoted in the Guardian, he explained “I want to be heard, because now that everything has been destroyed, what is left are our stories and freedom of expression.”

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter on 14 November, Nyrabia said: “We respect the choices and the decisions of all filmmakers, whether that is to speak their minds on stage or online or to withdraw their films, all forms of peaceful protest, including criticism of our work, we honor and respect.”

In a statement posted to Instagram, Manna pointed out that IDFA’s initial statement goes against the Dutch court’s ruling, and “sets a precedent whereby bad-faith accusations are given leverage rather than dismantled,” adding, “This is dangerous particularly when it happens in a prestigious documentary film festival that should set a standard of critical thinking and journalistic truth. Over 40 journalists have been killed in Gaza this past month. If IDFA did not have the court to make a clear statement against this systematic targeting of Palestinian voices, call for the end of the genocidal onslaught and the end of apartheid, the least it could have done is protect a slogan for equality and freedom from demonization.”

“‘From the River to the Sea’” is an expression of liberation and resistance by Palestinian freedom fighters,” said Tafakory in her statement. “To call this slogan ‘hurtful’ is to be against the end of occupation. To equate decolonization with terrorism is to maintain the colonial narrative.”

On 12 November, IDFA responded to growing criticism with a third statement: “IDFA is about giving the stage to outstanding artists to be critical and free. IDFA is an open platform and not a censor. Our aim is to make sure everybody feels welcome and safe to express themselves and to listen openly to others, even when in disagreement.” This response was welcomed by the Palestinian Film Institute – as reported by Screen International, the PFI’s  public programme curator Mohanad Yaqubi urged filmmakers still attending the festival to use it “as a way to speak up and use their platforms to talk about the continuous atrocities in Gaza.”

However, the situation has severely damaged the trust between some filmmakers and IDFA. In a press statement shared with LWLies, Basma al-Sharif wrote: “As a Palestinian and a filmmaker, I am shaken and terrified by the precedent set by IDFA that when confronted with real world politics within its framework, they have chosen to throw its most vulnerable under the bus at the first sign of trouble. If one of Europe’s biggest and most important documentary festivals cannot be trusted to protect the space for rigorous, important and necessary dialogue, then the festival is in crisis and the platform to share our work has been devalued.”

Readers are able to watch and support the work of Palestinian filmmakers and journalists who often put themselves in harm’s way in order to speak out against the persecution they face. Girls in Film, Roxy Faridany, Alannah Olivia and Amir El Masry held a film screening fundraiser on 8 November in support of Medical Aid Palestine, and The London Palestine Film Festival returns this week, running from November 17 to December 1. The Arab Film & Media Institute has also made a selection of Palestinian films available globally to watch for free during November.

IDFA has not yet responded to LWLies’ request for comment about the films withdrawn from the festival – we will update this article when they do.

It’s been a busy year for Sofia Coppola. In between shooting her Priscilla Presley biopic and a tribute to Suntory whisky with her good pal Keanu Reeves, she’s also found time to create her first book. Archive by Sofia Coppola is a mammoth look back across 24 years of filmmaking, from The Virgin Suicides to Priscilla. Preceded by an interview between Coppola and her close friend Lynn Hirschberg, it’s the most in-depth look we’ve ever had at Coppola’s creative process.

Divided into eight chapters – each dedicated to one of her films, in chronological order – the book comprises short introductions from Coppola followed by photography and scanned documents from the production process. While most books about filmmaking comprise lengthy essays full of anecdotes and advice, it’s fitting that Coppola – a filmmaker who has always been led by her strong photographic sensibility – is more visual in her approach. Moodboards, costume tests, magazine cuttings and reference images instead fill the pages, as well as plenty of gorgeous set photography from Coppola’s long-time collaborator Andrew Durham (who was also instrumental in the creation of Sofia Coppola: Forever Young).

For fans of her work, it’s a beautiful peek behind the curtain, capturing sweet on-set moments – such as Coppola’s young daughter visiting the set of Somewhere – alongside captions that provide some interesting trivia about her work. Beneath a behind-the-scenes picture from The Beguiled, Coppola reveals that the film was Elle Fanning’s first without a chaperone, and she lived with Kirsten Dunst throughout production.

Reproduced copies of script pages, letters and email screenshots also provide a rare insight into what goes into making a Coppola film. We see a note from Jeffrey Eugenides about The Virgin Suicides and the photos that Priscilla Presley emailed to Coppola for her research. Such a wide range of documents might also prove useful to filmmakers or screenwriters working on their own projects – it’s useful to see how another artist organises their thoughts, and Coppola’s wide-ranging inspiration from classical art to Paris Hilton’s personalised cushions.

Archive by Sofia Coppola is out now from MACK Books, RRP £55.

New Wes, new merch. Just in time for Asteroid City to blast off in the UK and Ireland on 23 June, fans will be able to admire a range of original artwork of Wes Anderson’s eleventh release – as well as getting their hands on limited edition merchandise – in the capital.

Asteroid City, the latest film from Isle of Dogs and The Grand Budapest Hotel director, takes place in a fictional American desert town around 1955, where the itinerary of their annual Junior Stargazer Convention does not quite go to plan…

This special pop-up exhibition at 180 The Strand celebrates every artistic detail of Anderson’s new film, in a similar way to previous pop-ups. Visitors have the opportunity to see original sets, props, miniatures, costumes and artwork featured in Asteroid City. The exhibition is accompanied by trademark Anderson sounds and visuals – so the soundtrack for visitors’ TikTok videos imagining themselves in one of his films is sorted already.

As well as experiencing the pastel-toned scenery up close and personal, there is also the chance for ticket holders to immerse themselves in the film by dining out at the film’s iconic 1950s diner, the Luncheonette. For hardcore Wes fans and collectors, exclusive vinyls of the soundtrack and the screenplay are just some of the goodies available to buy.

You can find the pop-up 180 Studios, 180 The Strand, 12pm to 7pm from 17 June – 8 July. Tickets are available to buy now, with under 12s getting in for free. If you’re stateside, don’t worry – Los Angeles locals can experience their own immersive experience at Landmark Theaters Sunset.

If you can’t wait until then to get your dose of Anderson content, the upcoming Issue 99 of Little White Lies has got you covered.

Asteroid City is released in UK and Irish cinemas on June 23.

Last week set the international arthouse circuit abuzz with the reveal of the Cannes Film Festival’s program of Official Selection titles, encompassing both the uppermost-level Competition and the second-most-prestigious Un Certain Regard sections, but that was only the beginning. A few straggler picks will be added in the days to come, but today brings a windfall of additions through the sidebars playing just a short jaunt from the Palais des Festivals down the beach-adjacent Boulevard de Croisette.

The Director’s Fortnight programmers unloaded their full lineup this morning on Twitter, with an emphasis on up-and-comers under the radar as well as first-timers. The slate features an international array of six debut features: Thien An Pham’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Ilya Povolotsky’s Grace, Zarrar Kahn’s In Flames, Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire, Zihan Geng’s A Song Sung Blue, and Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed. Having not seen any of these films, your humble news reporter is nonetheless obligated (in part by journalistic protocol) to declare Arnow’s the best of the bunch, and to disclose that that’s because I shot a few lines of dialogue for one scene last summer.

The Fortnight attracts the most attention for the known names, however, and they’ve got a handful of biggies this year. The absurdly prolific Hong Sang-soo will close out the section with In Our Day, his second new feature of the year, which should leave plenty of time for a third or perhaps fourth as the fall festival season ramps up. Sean Price Williams, go-to cinematographer for the Safdie brothers and Alex Ross Perry, isn’t technically making his feature directing debut with the reportedly ribald road picture Sweet East — he co-directed the little-seen Eyes Find Eyes in 2011 — but it represents a re-arrival all the same. French wizard of whimsy Michel Gondry will show his comedy The Book of Solutions, rumored to be a faintly autobiographical work about a filmmaker battling his demons. And Portuguese legend Manoel de Oliveira will make an appearance from beyond the grave, his 1993 film Abraham’s Valley to be played as a Special Screening.

Riding high after launching the runaway success of Aftersun last year, the Critic’s Week programmers also pulled back the curtain on their 2023 selections, an eclectic mix of possible breakouts. From Brazil, Lillah Halla’s queer pregnancy drama Power Alley; from South Korea, the somnambulant horror flick Sleep directed by Bong Joon-ho’s former protgege Jason Yu; from Malaysia, Amanda Eu’s dark coming-of-age genre-bender Tiger Stripes; from France, Iris Kaltenbäck’s baby-snatching psychothriller Le Ravisssement; from Serbia, Vladimir Perišić’s political drama Lost Country, set during the country’s 1996 anti-Milošević student protests; from Jordan, Amjad Al Rasheed’s feminist character study Inshallah a Boy; and from Belgium, Paloma Sermon-Daï’s “hybrid drama” Il Pleut Dans La Maison, in which a pair of teen siblings while away an ennui-stricken summer while left alone by their mother.

Anticipation among cinephiles has now kicked into the rabid register, with only a few short weeks separating us all from the deluge of premieres that comes with each Cannes Film Festival. As a preview of what we’ll spend the next twelve months talking about, it offers a peek into the future, and the rest of 2023 looks mighty bright.

The 2023 Cannes Film Festival runs from 16 to 27 May.

The cinephile equivalent of Christmas morning, with its attendant mix of excitement and flatly fulfilled expectations, has come once again. That charge in the air you’re feeling signals the announcement of the Official Selection for the Cannes Film Festival, led by their Competition lineup of marquee titles from the customary murderers’ row of world-renowned auteurs.

A handful had already been confirmed, most buzzworthy among them Killers of the Flower Moon, which will occasion director Martin Scorsese’s first appearance on the Croisette in decades. He won’t be in Competition, however, presumably due to Apple’s reluctance to release their big-ticket title right to French cinemas after the festival, as is Cannes law. Among his fellow johnny-come-earlies were Pedro Almodóvar (with the Western short Strange Way of Life), Wes Anderson (unveiling the spacefaring adventure Asteroid City), James Mangold (whose Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will fulfill the obligatory Hollywood tentpole out-of-Comp spot previously held by Top Gun: Maverick), and Maïwenn (for the out-of-Comp Opening Night pick Jeanne du Barry, which has shoveled heaps of coal into the controversy furnace by bringing Johnny Depp to the festival).

But this morning belongs to the big reveals, some previously tipped for inclusion in Competition and others coming in out of nowhere. We’d prepared for Todd Haynes’ off-kilter romance May December, Jessica Hausner’s school-set psychodrama Club Zero, and Catherine Breillat’s daring erotic drama L’Été Dernier. Here at Little White Lies HQ, we’re pleasantly surprised by the appearance of Competition newcomer Ramata-Toulaye Sy with the Senegalese production Banel and Adama, Wang Bing with the rare documentary to break into the big dance (it’s called Jeunesse, doubling the Bing at this year’s Cannes with the Special Screening pick Man in Black), and the long-absent Jonathan Glazer with The Zone of Interest, his first feature in nearly ten years.

This year’s Competition slate has been filled out by the usual arthouse suspects, such past Palme winners as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Ken Loach all making their way back to the site of their past victory. A solid chunk of the lineup boasts at least one past Competition appearance, from Marco Bellochio to Nanni Moretti, with a goodly handful of exceptions: Green, Glazer, Sy, Bing, and Un Certain Regard alumni Tran Anh Hung, Karim Ainouz, and Kaouther Ben Hania. (Nowhere to be seen are the rumored Yorgos Lanthimos, Bertrand Bonello, and Bruno Dumont, past friends of the fest.)

But the Official Selection entails more than just Competition, the curtain having been pulled back on the Un Certain Regard sidebar and Special Screenings. The latter includes works from Steve McQueen (Occupied City, his documentary about Amsterdam under Nazi occupation during World War II) and Wim Wenders (with a doc about artist Anselm Kiefer, pulling double duty with the Comp pick Perfect Days). Meanwhile, UCR collects an array of filmmakers slightly farther from the radar, most notable among them Warwick Thornton (with The New Boy, starring Cate Blanchett) and Molly Manning Walker (whose daringly-titled How To Have Sex has already raised an eyebrow or two).

More announcements will trickle in over the next couple of weeks, but a couple trends have already presented themselves, most encouraging among them a bumper year for female filmmakers. Sy, Hausner, Ben Hania, Breillat, Alice Rohrwacher, and Justine Triet all made it to Competition, their number raising the ratio a bit higher than usual while still falling a ways short of gender parity. Cannes head honcho Theirry Fremaux has long been vocal about his belief that his selections should be informed only by merit, with no considerations to diversity or equity — all the same, heartening to see.

Every year’s movie calendar brings with it a slew of subplots, mini-narratives that accumulate and eventually cool into what we accept as history. This summer promises a resolution to one of 2023’s big ones, the Graduation/Curtis face-off of our time – by which we of course mean the impending box-office duel between Christopher Nolan‘s destroyer-of-worlds biopic Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig‘s plastic, fantastic movie treatment of iconic children’s plaything Barbie.

Can Gerwig, one of the few name-brand filmmakers in her generation making distinctive work at the studio level, best the reigning king of the thinking man’s blockbuster? Moreover, can she make it through Hollywood’s IP Factory with her sense of wit and personality intact? The first proper trailer for her salute to the game-changing dolly has arrived this morning, and offers an encouraging answer to both questions.

The trailer deliberately withholds the details of the plot, instead more focused on exploring Barbieland, a chipper dimension in which everyone appears as smiley and smartly attired as Barbie (Margot Robbie) herself — except, it seems, for our Ken (Ryan Gosling), fuming with jealousy over those competing for his gal’s affections. An adventure to the real world may be in the cards, if the road signs are to be believed, but there’s plenty of trouble in the paradise of Barbieland to go around. We’ve got a beach-off on our hands!

As a fleet of 24 character posters confirmed earlier, Robbie is not the Barbie, but rather a Barbie, joined by Hari Nef, Emma Mackey, Dua Lipa, Sharon Rooney, Ana Cruz Kayne, and Issa Rae, while the posse of Gosling’s Kens includes Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, Scott Evans, and Ncuti Gatwa. Emerald Fennell also has a character poster of her own, as Midge, whose only defining features seem to be that she is pregnant and Midge. She’s Midge! And Michael Cera plays Allan. You know Allan. He’s Ken’s best friend.

Most intriguing of all, it appears that Gerwig has embraced the color-saturated artifice of digital filmmaking for an aesthetic that foregrounds its fakeness until it circles back to hyperreality, the same trick deployed by the Wachowski sisters in Speed Racer. That film was another big-swing attempt to make something clever and idiosyncratic from big-budget IP adaptation, consigned to the sad fate of a megaflop only appreciated with time. America wasn’t ready, but this time around, they just might be.

Barbie comes to cinemas in the UK and US on 21 July.

It’s been nearly a decade and a half since Edgar Wright‘s adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series first came to theaters, but the fandom has only grown larger and more passionate in the intervening years. Today, the faithful devotees of the mild-mannered, ex-lover-dueling Torontonian bassist can claim a big win, as the cult favorite will soon return for another adventure in awkwardness.

This morning, Netflix pulled back the curtain on an upcoming anime miniseries take on the Scott Pilgrim books, executive-produced by Wright along with original creator Bryan Lee O’Malley and writer Ben-David Grabinski (creator of the recent Are You Afraid of the Dark? series). Wright’s film condensed the six volumes of the series’ original run to feature length, and so this new project will blaze a trail into original narrative, joining Scott and his many pals as he searches for a girlfriend — and, along the way, maybe a little self-respect.

Wright’s film has gained in stature partially for its absurdly stacked cast, many of them tapped just as they reached the precipice of a huge jump in fame. Nevertheless, they’re all back to contribute their vocal stylings to the anime, an ensemble that includes Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin, Aubrey Plaza, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman, Alison Pill, Mae Whitman, Brandon Routh, the whole gang.

With Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Wright contrived a hyperkinetic pop-art style informed by comic books, video games, anime, and martial arts films; it stands to reason that going fully-animated will further free the text from realism. To the great excitement of animation aficionados, the production work will be handled by Science SARU, the Japanese studio behind the widely-praised features Inu-Oh and The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl. (Pop group Anamanaguchi, which soundtracked the video game, has also been hinted to record new music for the score.)

A release date has yet to be set, and the number of episodes has not yet been specified, but Wright’s tweeting suggests that it’s all in the can and should be out in the world before too long. Soon, we’ll all learn some new fun facts about the etymological origins of Pac-Man and the intricacies of beta-male masculinity.