Films to watch out for in 2025

As the US braces for one of the worst sequels in recent memory – one that will play out in the offices of the White House – it’s refreshing to survey the cinema landscape and see so much original material on the horizon. British viewers frustrated by the fate of Kelly Reichardt’s previous movie, Showing Up (2022), which was never distributed in the UK, will be glad to know her next film will get a better deal: Mubi has picked up The Mastermind, the story of an ambitious thief (Josh O’Connor) who plans an art heist while the Vietnam War rages in the background. John Magaro, who made such a soulful impression in Reichardt’s First Cow (2019), has signed on, as has Alana Haim.

Perhaps Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (2023) gave O’Connor a taste for playing criminals abroad; he also seems to be taking that film’s interest in folk songs a step further in another of his upcoming projects, Oliver Hermanus’s The History of Sound, in which he and Paul Mescal play two amateur musicologists who traverse New England after World War I to record the area’s folk music.

As for Haim: having made her name as an actor in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021), she’s starring in his next film, currently titled The Battle of Baktan Cross. Shot on 35mm, it’s rumoured to be a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). 

If true, it would be Anderson’s second take on the author after Inherent Vice (2014). That film cost £15 million, which is what Leonardo DiCaprio is being paid for The Battle (total budget: £110 million). The director’s Texan namesake, Wes, is returning with The Phoenician Scheme – a spy picture starring many actors he’s worked with before (Benicio del Toro, Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson) as well as a few he hasn’t (Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Charlotte Gainsbourg). But this is no ensemble piece: Anderson has said del Toro will appear in every shot.

Bong Joon Ho is back with Mickey 17, his first film since Parasite (2019). Robert Pattinson stars as an ‘expendable’ employee forced to contend with one of his clones on a faraway ice planet. Put in hypersleep amid the actors’ and writers’ strikes of 2023, the film is now thawing out in time for an April release. Pattinson is also acting opposite Zendaya in The Drama; plot details are thin on the ground but this dark romance is directed by Kristoffer Borgli, a filmmaker few had heard of two years ago but who seems suddenly to have vaulted into the big league: having written and directed the surreal Nicolas Cage vehicle Dream Scenario last year, he’s also been tasked with turning Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards (2023), into a series for HBO.

The Drama is co-produced by Ari Aster, whose next film, Eddington, is in post-production: a blackly comic western starring Joaquin Phoenix and set during the Covid pandemic, it swaps the sweaty New York of Beau Is Afraid (2023) for a sun-baked New Mexico. It will likely be shorter than the three-hour Beau, but if duration’s your thing you might be in luck with The Way of the Wind – not the latest Avatar but a biblical epic by Terrence Malick starring Géza Röhrig as Christ. Röhrig, an Orthodox Jew known for his lead role in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015), will star opposite Mark Rylance, who was cast as four different versions of Satan. Malick has been editing it for five years, no mean feat given the thousands of hours of footage he reportedly shot.

That most blasphemous of creators, Frankenstein, is getting not one, but two outings. There’s Guillermo del Toro’s take, with Oscar Isaac as the god-playing scientist and Jacob Elordi as the monster. It’s backed by Netflix, which baulked at and eventually dropped Maggie Gyllenhaal’s very different vision, The Bride! – a loose musical adaptation of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, which turns 90 next year. If her film, with Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley as the betrothed, recoups its £80 million budget, Netflix’s loss will be Warner Bros’s gain – that is, if the company doesn’t shelve the film indefinitely as a tax write-off, as it has done for other completed projects.

Cinema may sometimes eat itself, but it can feed itself too: at least two upcoming movies are merrily repurposing East Asian classics. Both centre around kidnapping: Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, a “reinterpretation” (Lee’s word) of Kurosawa Akira’s ransom thriller High and Low (1963), is slated for a summer release, while Yorgos Lanthimos, as prolific as ever, is delivering Bugonia, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s delightfully unhinged Save the Green Planet! (2003). The premise: two men abduct a pharmaceutical CEO (Emma Stone) in the belief that she’s secretly an alien.

All of this barely surfs the wave of American films due to break next year. There’s a film apiece by Josh and Benny Safdie; two by Richard Linklater (including Nouvelle Vague, his love letter to the film movement of the title); Steven Soderbergh’s espionage movie Black Bag, starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender; Edgar Wright’s dystopian thriller The Running Man, featuring Glen Powell and based on the 1982 Stephen King novel rather than the 1987 Arnie vehicle it inspired; and Kogonada’s romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, starring Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

But let’s not forget the as-yet-untitled film with perhaps the most piquant premise. Trey Parker is directing – and Kendrick Lamar producing – a film about a museum-employed slave re-enactor who discovers his girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his. The South Park creator is nothing if not good with deadlines, so it should be ready for its scheduled release date… the Fourth of July.

Heading south, two films by Mexican directors look especially enticing. Carlos Reygadas – best known for Silent Light (2007) and the bracingly fragmentary Post Tenebras Lux (2012), both of which won prizes at Cannes – is at work on Wake of Umbra, about four friends who take on different incarnations across time and space; the director has recently wrapped shoots in Poland, Norway and Mexico. And Michel Franco’s latest movie, Dreams, sees him reunite with Jessica Chastain: she starred in Franco’s Memory, which premiered at Venice last year (her co-lead Peter Sarsgaard won the Volpi Cup for his performance). This time she’s playing a socialite who falls in love with a Mexican ballet dancer.

In Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho has been working on The Secret Agent, a thriller set in the 1970s, when the country was in thrall to military dictatorship. Wagner Moura, star of Narcos (2015-16) and Alex Garland’s Civil War, stars as a fortysomething father who travels to Recife to see his son but finds himself being tailed by menacing operatives.

Autocracy in the 1970s has also proved fertile ground for the Chilean director Manuela Martelli, who broke through in 2022 with her quietly chilling feature debut 1976, set during the Pinochet era. Her new film The Meltdown skips ahead to the country’s rocky transition to democracy in 1992, once again tracking sociopolitical flux through the eyes of a young girl. Sebastián Lelio has politics on the brain, too, albeit in more exuberant form: his musical The Wave was inspired by the feminist protests that spread through Chile in 2018.

For years, fans of Lucrecia Martel have been patiently awaiting an update on her documentary Chocobar, about Indigenous Argentine leader and activist Javier Chocobar, who was murdered in 2009 after fighting for his people’s ancestral land rights. She was on her fourth cut of the film 18 months ago, and there’s been no update since, but the film may yet be delivered in time for Cannes.

Having dallied with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Eternals, 2021), Chloé Zhao is scaling things back with Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s critically lauded 2020 novel, which imagines the grief shared by William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway at the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley is Hathaway. It’s not to be confused with Hamlet, Aneil Karia’s contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, which stars Riz Ahmed as the doomed prince.

Romain Gavras is following Athena (2022), his Molotov cocktail of a state-of-the-nation movie, with Sacrifice, written by Succession writer and Pulitzer nominee Will Arbery. Backed by Film4, it stars Anya Taylor-Joy as a fanatic who kidnaps three people (played by Vincent Cassel, Chris Evans and Ambika Mod) in the hope that sacrificing them will avert an apocalypse. Film4 is also behind Dylan Southern’s The Thing with Feathers, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays an illustrator grieving the loss of his wife. It’s based on the 2015 novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, who is having a busy year: he’s adapted his novel Shy (2023) into Netflix drama Steve, which is set over the course of a single day at a reform school. The book takes the perspective of a troubled pupil; the film is more concerned with the eponymous headmaster (Cillian Murphy). 

If you prefer your teetering power structures in animated form, Andy Serkis’s take on Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) has been scheduled for release in 2025. Class is also at the heart of Polish director Jan Komasa’s intriguing thriller Good Boy – produced by Jeremy Thomas and Jerzy Skolimowski, and shot in Yorkshire and Warsaw – about two middle-class parents (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough) who kidnap a teenage football hooligan and try to ‘civilise’ him.

Those of us who were thrilled by Albert Serra’s Pacifiction (2022), the Catalan auteur’s most beguiling and politically rich work to date, are looking forward to his next fiction feature, Out of this World, which takes his interest in geopolitics to a new level. Shot in Latvia, set amid the continuing war in Ukraine and said to star Kristen Stewart, it follows an American delegation which travels to Russia to resolve an economic dispute triggered by sanctions. Serra’s fellow Catalan Carla Simón will also have a new film premiering: Romería, her third portrait of youth after Summer 1993 (2017) and the Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs (2022). It concerns a girl who travels to Galicia to get to know the family of her late biological father, who died of Aids.

The same illness haunts the French director Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, her follow-up to 2021’s body-horror tour de force Titane. Reportedly about an 11-year-old girl who may be carrying a new disease, the film, set in the 1980s, was informed by the director’s encounter with one of the founding members of the Aids activism group Act Up. Lighter fare will be served up by Ducournau’s compatriot Sylvain Chomet, who recently attracted a new fanbase with his animated opening sequence to Joker: Folie à Deux. His upcoming feature The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol is a hand-drawn biopic of the novelist, playwright and filmmaker perhaps best known now for the 1952 saga Manon des Sources, which was remade in the 1980s by Claude Berri.
In chillier climes, Hlynur Pálmason is following up Godland (2022), his astonishing travelogue of a 19th-century Danish photographer-priest trying to establish a parish in the wilds of Iceland, with On Land and Sea, set in the same period, in which a family turns its house into a raft and sets out in search of a new home. Meanwhile, Joachim Trier is staying in his comfort zone – Oslo: he’s just wrapped production on Sentimental Value, about the tetchy reunion of a cinephile family in the city. Elle Fanning, Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård star.

As for central Europe, Anton Corbijn has been filming Switzerland, starring Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith, whose agent (Alden Ehrenreich) is beseeching her – with mounting frustration – to write a final instalment of the Ripley series. In Germany, Christian Petzold has been shooting Miroirs No. 3, about an injured pianist – played by Paula Beer – taken in by a family whose motives are not what they seem. Tony Leung is making a very rare appearance in a European film: he’s playing a neuroscientist in Silent Friend by Ildikó Enyedi (On Body and Soul, 2017), set over a century in the medieval German town of Marburg and comprising three stories, all related to the same tree. Together the tales chart the way our understanding of nature has (or hasn’t) evolved.

Further east, Agnieszka Holland is finishing her Kafka biopic Franz, narrowly missing the 2024 centenary of the writer’s death; and László Nemes is delivering Orphan – only his second film since Son of Saul – which already seems rife with political metaphor, pitting idealised imagined patriarchs against real deadbeat dads. A far gentler and more whimsical treatment of fatherhood is at the heart of Dry Leaf, to which Alexandre Koberidze is now applying the final touches in Georgia. It follows a father who visits a series of amateur football pitches in search of his missing daughter.

Park Chan-wook is returning with No Other Choice, his Korea-set adaptation of Donald Westlake’s novel The Ax, which Costa-Gavras filmed in 2005. The plot seems a natural fit for the director, following a fired salaryman who goes to brutal lengths to get a new job. Also likely to take on a gruesome aspect is Hope, Na Hong-jin’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2016 cult hit The Wailing; it’s about a mysterious entity that threatens a remote port town. Though largely in Korean, it co-stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.

In Sight and Sound’s 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll, several critics (including me) cast a vote for Bi Gan’s second feature, the dreamlike extravaganza Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018). What happy news, then, that Bi will soon be wrapping production on his third, Resurrection. The director has long professed a love for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), so it’s unsurprising that his next film concerns a woman whose consciousness enters an “eternal time zone” and navigates a series of dreams – a premise that serves Bi’s knack for capturing the slippage between realities. Likely less formally invigorating, but still a welcome break from the franchise entries and war films he’s been making lately, is Chen Kaige’s coming-of-ager Flowers from the Ashes, which is awaiting release.

In Japan, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), is in the works; in the Philippines, Lav Diaz is in post-production on Kawalan, about a town’s attempt to create a forest idyll away from marauding Japanese forces in the 1940s; and in India, Mani Ratnam’s Tamil gangster film Thug Life has been given a June release date. Co-written by and starring Kamal Haasan in what is apparently his 234th film performance, it is the first time the two have worked together since their crime epic, Nayakan, in 1987.

Danny Boyle is returning to the world of the undead with 28 Years Later, a reunion of the major names behind 28 Days Later (2002): Alex Garland wrote it, Anthony Dod Mantle is shooting it and Cillian Murphy may or may not feature. It already has a sequel in the works, with Nia DaCosta slated to direct.

Having stunned Cannes in 2017 with You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay is back with Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a mother in the countryside who develops post-partum depression and becomes psychotic; shot in Academy ratio on 35mm, it takes its cues from Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Roman Polanski’s double serving of 60s horror.

Speaking of one-two punches: Osgood Perkins is following Longlegs with a brace of films starring Tatiana Maslany. The Monkey, based on Stephen King’s 1980 short story about a cursed toy, is out in late February; Keeper is about a romantic weekend that gets supernaturally upended in a remote cabin.

Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, 2018) is making his first foray into horror with Sinners, which stars Michael B. Jordan as twins who return to their hometown and have to contend with evil forces. Also new to the genre is Justin Tipping, whose upcoming Him is the dark tale of a young American football player summoned to the training compound of a once-renowned quarterback (Marlon Wayans). It’s produced by Jordan Peele, whose own next film, which remains a tightly guarded secret, was recently pushed back to 2026. Watch this space.