[The Daily] Most Anticipated Films of 2018

One of the most intriguing films we can look forward to in the new year is Claire Denis’s English-language debut, High Life. “I’ve always been interested in science, in astrophysics,” Denis told the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough in November. “But I was never obsessed by science fiction, though I read a lot of it when I was an adolescent. But for me, this is less a science-fiction film than a drama, a Claire Denis film, set outside the solar system. The story of the film is about this crew, who are prisoners and are offered the chance to take part in this trip into space, knowing that there is no return. They accept because they think it is better than dying in jail.”

The story centers on a father and daughter played by Robert Pattinson and Jessie Ross. “I had the idea for the story for a long time,” says Denis, and she originally wanted Philip Seymour Hoffman to play the lead. “When he died, I had no one else in mind. And in the process of mourning him, I met a few actors, and the only person who touched me, who really was so much the opposite of Philip, was Robert. . . . And then I met him a few times and realized he is just the sort of actor I love. Because he is like a man with another man inside himself, craving for something. I like actors like that, ones where you always want more but you know there is a secret inside them. . . . Robert is like that.”

As Brent Lang reported for Variety in September, the cast also includes Mia Goth, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Lars Eidinger, Agata Buzek, Ewan Mitchell, and Claire Tran.

James Gray, by the way, is also taking on an ambitious science fiction project, Ad Astra. The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Ford describes it as “an adventure film about one man’s [Brad Pitt] journey across a lawless and unforgiving solar system to find his missing father, a renegade scientist who poses a threat to all of mankind.” With Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, and Donald Sutherland.

We won’t go into quite so much detail here on the other films on the list that follows, but I will drop in links for further exploration when and where I find them. First, though, a few notes:

• Last we heard, Netflix still plans to release the reconstruction of Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind this year.
• One of the most anticipated films not on this list is Martin Scorsese’s $125+ million project, The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin, Ray Romano and Joe Pesci. As Nick Vivarelli reports for Variety, if Netflix releases it in theaters at all, it’ll be in 2019.
• Meantime, who knows what’s up with Shane Carruth’s The Modern Ocean.

Chances are, we’ll likely see a new work from Jean-Luc Godard. Le livre d'image (The Image Book), formerly known as Image et parole, and before that, Tentative de bleu, will have a narrator but no actors.

Pedro Costa’s The Daughters of Fire, his first narrative feature since Horse Money (2014), “details a journey made by three sisters who travel from Cape Verde to visit family in Fontainhas—only to find Fontainhas no longer exists.” Nicholas Bell has a bit more at Ioncinema.

Also, Mati Diop’s directorial debut, The Fire Next Time, “concerns Adele, a sixteen-year-old beautician in Senegal whose lover Soulemaine goes missing and the bodies of his friends wash ashore in Dakar. Soon after, she’s betrothed to marry an older man as she awaits news of Souleimane.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree “revolves around aspiring writer Sinan who returns to his native village and pours his heart and soul into scraping together the money he needs to get himself published,” reports Screen’s Melanie Goodfellow. “But in the backdrop his father’s debts catch up with him, putting a stop to his personal aspirations.”

Ciro Guerra (Embrace of the Serpent) is co-directing Birds of Passage, which is about the impact on Colombia of the sudden demand for weed in the 1970s.

Topping the list of anticipated films at Ostros Cines Europa is Brian De Palma’s Domino. According to the Hollywood Reporter’s Ashley Lee, this “fast-paced crime thriller stars [Nikolaj] Coster-Waldau as Christian, a Copenhagen police officer seeking justice for his partner's murder by a mysterious man called Imran. He teams with Alex [Carice van Houten], a fellow cop and his late partner’s mistress, to hunt down the murderer, but are unwittingly caught in a cat-and-mouse chase with a duplicitous CIA agent who is using Imran as a pawn to trap ISIS members.” With Guy Pearce, too.

Oliver Lyttelton’s picks at the Playlist run up to a hundred and then overflow with dozens of extra mentions. At the top is Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, an adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel with Moonlight’s cinematographer James Laxton and editors Joi McMillan and Nat Sanders returning.

Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, a stop motion animated feature with voice work from Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Greta Gerwig, Frances McDormand, and many more, will open the Berlinale on February 15.

Sundance 2018 will be on from January 18 through 28. Just a few highlights with links:

Olivier Assayas has just completed shooting on E-Book with Juliette Binoche, Guillaume Canet, and Pascal Greggory.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s Maya focuses on a young war photographer struggling to regain a sense of normality after having been held captive in Syria.

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning is an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story, “Barn Burning,” that originally appeared in the New Yorker.

Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, his biggest production yet, will mark the 200th anniversary of the Manchester Massacre.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma “will chronicle a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s,” as Zack Sharf reports for IndieWire.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. “Set against the background of the Cold War in the 1950s in Poland, Berlin, Yugoslavia and Paris—the film depicts an impossible love story in impossible times.”

Richard Linklater’s Where'd You Go, Bernadette is based on Maria Semple’s novel and stars Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, and Judy Greer.

From Germany:

• Christian Petzold’s Transit, loosely based on Anna Seghers’s novel and shot in Marseille, stars Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer.
• Angela Schanelec’s Ich war zuhause, aber. A thirteen-year-old student disappears and then reappears after one full week, raising questions for his mother and teacher.
• In Ulrich Köhler’s In My Room, a man in his forties wakes up to discover that everyone else is gone.

With Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Bi Gan “ follows his remarkable and much-awarded debut Kaili Blues [2015] with a bold, beautiful and ambitious journey into the mysteries of a troubled life.”

Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is finally on track after nineteen years of infamous stop and go. With Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver, and Olga Kurylenko.

Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, shot on an iPhone, stars Clare Foy (The Crown) as a woman committed against her will to a mental institution.

Terrence Malick returns to scripted filmmaking with Radegund, a WWII drama with August Diehl as Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter.

Steve McQueen’s Widows is a heist thriller co-written by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) and starring Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, and Liam Neeson.

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther will be out in February, and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time follows in March. At the recent Vulture Festival, Kyle Buchanan got the two of them talking.

Asghar Farhadi’s Spanish-language psychological thriller Everybody Knows stars Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Ricardo Darin.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, “charting the political machinations and balance of power behind the scenes during the reign of Queen Anne,” stars Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz.

Jennifer Kent’s followup to The Babadook (2014), The Nightingale, follows a young woman seeking revenge in a British penal colony in Australia in 1825.

Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria with Dakota Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Mia Goth, Tilda Swinton, and Jessica Harper is an homage to Dario Argento’s 1977 original.

Harmony Korine’s stoner comedy The Beach Bum stars Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, Isla Fisher, Jimmy Buffet, and Snoop Dogg.

Spike Lee’s Black Klansman is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police detective who not only infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan but also ended up heading the local chapter in Colorado Springs.

David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun may be Robert Redford’s last time out as an actor. The cast also features Casey Affleck, Sissy Spacek, Danny Glover, Tika Sumpter, Tom Waits, and Elisabeth Moss.

Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer “follows LAPD detective Erin Bell [Nicole Kidman] who, as a young cop, was placed undercover with a gang in the California desert with tragic results,” writes Amanda N’Duka for Deadline. “When the leader of that gang re-emerges many years later, she must work her way back through the remaining members and into her own history with them to finally reckon with the demons that destroyed her past.”

In Proxima, directed by Alice Winocour (Mustang, 2015), Eva Green stars as an astronaut preparing for a year-long mission to the International Space Station.

Damien Chazelle’s First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong.

Adam McKay’s Backseat stars Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney, Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush, Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Pullman as Nelson Rockefeller, and Tyler Perry as Colin Powell.

Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers is a western comedy with John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix in the leads, plus Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, and Carol Kane.

Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York stars Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez, Elle Fanning, Jude Law, Diego Luna, and Liev Schreiber.

Sunset, László Nemes’s followup to Son of Saul, focuses on twenty-year-old Irisz Leiter, played by newcomer Juli Jakab, who arrives in Budapest in 1913.

Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased “will tell the story of Jared [Lucas Hedges], the son of a Baptist pastor in a small American town, who is outed to his parents [Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe] at age 19,” reported Variety’s Justin Kroll in August. “Jared is faced with an ultimatum: attend a gay conversion therapy program—or be permanently exiled and shunned by his family, friends, and faith.”

Robert Zemeckis’s The Women of Marwen. From Joe Boden at Little White Lies: “After becoming the victim of a visceral attack, Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell) begins construction on a miniature replica of a World War Two-era town to serve as his therapeutic outlet.” Based on Jeff Malmberg's 2010 documentary Marwencol.

Neil Jordan’s The Widow “follows a young woman named Frances [Chloë Grace Moretz] who strikes up an unlikely friendship with an enigmatic widow named Greta [Isabelle Huppert] whose motives are gradually revealed to be sinister,” reports Amanda N’Duka for Deadline.

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s Luxembourg, his first feature since The Tribe, is a “neo-noir space odyssey taking place in the Chernobyl exclusion Zone.”

Justin Kelly’s JT Leroy stars Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Diane Kruger, plus a cameo from Courtney Love. Based on Savannah Knoop’s memoir of the great literary hoax of the turn of the millennium.

Ramin Bahrani’s Fahrenheit 451 stars Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon.

The Death and Life of John F. Donovan is Xavier Dolan’s English-language debut. With Natalie Portman and Jessica Chastain.

Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, set in the 1970s, stars Matt Dillon as a serial killer.

Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro features Toni Servillo as Silvio Berlusconi.

Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris will be out in February.

Ben Wheatley’s Freakshift, about a team of monster hunters, stars Alicia Vikander, Armie Hammer, and Sasha Lane.

Wendy will be Benh Zeitlin’s first feature since Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), and IndieWire’s Zack Sharf reports that it “follows a young girl who is kidnapped and taken to a destructive ecosystem where mystical pollen breaks the relationship between aging and time.”

David Robert Mitchell’s followup to It Follows (2014) will be Under the Silver Lake, a crime thriller starring Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, and Topher Grace.

The environmental thriller Annihilation, Alex Garland’s followup to Ex Machina, is based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer and stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson.

Yeon Sang-ho follows Train to Busan with Psychokinesis, about a father looking to save his troubled daughter with his newfound superpowers.

David Gordon Green’s Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis. “It’s not a reboot. It’s not gonna be a rehash,” says Danny McBride. And John Carpenter approves.

Duncan Jones’s sci-fi mystery Mute stars Alexander Skarsgård, Paul Rudd, and Justin Theroux.

Lenny Abrahamson’s followup to Room (2015) will be the supernatural horror thriller, The Little Stranger.

Following Green Room (2015), Jeremy Saulnier directs Hold the Dark, “about a wolf expert asked to locate a missing boy in a remote Alaskan town where kids are being ravaged by wolves,” as Nick Schager writes for Esquire.

Bradley Cooper directs himself, Lady Gaga, Sam Elliott, Dave Chappelle, and Andrew Dice Clay in a remake of A Star Is Born.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Marielle Heller’s followup to The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) written by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, stars Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel, a prominent writer who began making things up.

Speaking of Holofcener, her latest, The Land of Steady Habits, stars Ben Mendelsohn as a man in his fifties who leaves his wife to start anew.

Chris Morris follows up on Four Lions (2010) with an untitled project featuring Anna Kendrick and Danielle Brooks.

Holmes and Watson, directed by Etan Cohen, stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.

Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2. Enough said.

The omnibus film Ten Years Thailand includes work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wisit Sasanatieng, Aditya Assarat, Chookiat Sakveerakul, and Chulayarnnon Siriphol.

And finally for now, “Tacita Dean, at 52, is our great poet of art film,” writes Laura Cumming in the Observer. “This spring, in an unprecedented collaboration, three major museums at once will all focus on different aspects of her art. The National Portrait Gallery presents her intimate and pensive portraits of fellow artists, including Merce Cunningham, Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, and David Hockney. The tradition of still life is explored in a show at the National Gallery, featuring, among others, Dean’s brilliant take on nature morte. And the Royal Academy has her landscape works, including a beautiful early film in which the faint breeze passing over its surface transforms a lake from still landscape to moving pictures.”

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