Passages
Elegant indie auteur Ira Sachs brings us a disastrous love triangle: Franz Rogowski is the gay film director living with a gentle partner, played by Ben Whishaw. He causes emotional chaos by falling for a woman: Adèle Exarchopoulos.
• 1 September.
Klokkenluider
Neil Maskell, an actor known for his work on Ben Wheatley’s dark and disturbing movies, makes his directing debut with a black comic thriller about a government whistleblower and his minder hiding out in a remote Belgian cottage.
• 1 September
Maigret
In the past the role has gone to actors including Rupert Davies, Jean Gabin, Michael Gambon and Rowan Atkinson. Now it’s the turn of Gérard Depardieu to don the rumpled raincoat and pipe as the French detective Maigret, created by Georges Simenon, in a new film adapted from the 1954 story Maigret and the Dead Girl.
• 1 September
Past Lives
This film from Celine Song has had festivalgoers swooning over its exquisitely understated tenderness and subtlety. A South Korean man and woman, whose close childhood friendship was ripped apart when one family emigrated to Canada, are reunited in adulthood.
• 8 September
Love Life
If the title is an instruction, it’s not so easy to obey in this complex, painful drama from Japanese director Kōji Fukada. A young married couple, both dealing with the fallout from previous partners, are living in a flat with a young son. A domestic tragedy upends everything they think about life.
• 15 September
A Haunting in Venice
Kenneth Branagh returns as Agatha Christie’s iconic sleuth Hercule Poirot with an unfeasibly large moustache in this new adventure, freely adapted from her 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party, transposing the action from England to Venice. Poirot must solve a murder at a séance he attends.
• 15 September
Dumb Money
A comedy drama about a stranger-than-fiction event in the febrile world of web opinion and crowdsourced resistance to the capitalist power brokers. In 2021, the ailing video game retailer GameStop looked like the lamest of lame ducks, but users of the internet forum “r/wallstreetbets” on Reddit mischievously pushed its stock price sky-high causing panic among hedge funds.
• 22 September
RMN
Here’s a knotty, complex psychodrama of central European anxiety from Romanian film-maker Cristian Mungiu. A resentful guy returns to his Transylvanian village, having been sacked from his job in Germany, to find a seething mass of racist tension.
• 22 September
Strange Way of Life
Pedro Almodóvar didn’t please or convince everyone at Cannes this year with his wacky 30-minute short: but it’s an entertaining divertissement – a queer western with a hint of kink. Pedro Pascal plays a handsome Mexican cowpoke who comes riding into town for an emotional showdown with ex-lover Ethan Hawke.
• 25 September
The Old Oak
This could be the final feature film from Ken Loach: a drama in his familiar radically plain and unadorned style, demanding compassion for the oppressed. A Syrian refugee is housed in the north-east and befriends a pub landlord who tries to make his down-at-heel boozer a community meeting place.
• 29 September
The Great Escaper
An emotional farewell for the late Glenda Jackson, who gave her final screen performance opposite Michael Caine in this true story of the stubbornly tough old soldier, played by Caine, who escaped from his care home in 2014 to attend the 70th anniversary of the D-day landings; Jackson plays his wife.
• 6 October
Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese shows no sign of slowing down with his true-crime western epic about an early 20th-century conspiracy to wipe out Native Americans who had a right to oil found on their land. Lily Gladstone is a woman from the Osage tribe who forms a fateful relationship with a slippery predator, Leonardo DiCaprio, who is in turn being manipulated by a cattleman played by Robert De Niro.
• 20 October
Typist Artist Pirate King
Two lovely comic performances are at the heart of this warm, likable, unsentimental movie from Carol Morley about the neglected English outsider artist Audrey Amiss, played by Monica Dolan. The movie imagines her being taken on a journey into her past by social worker Kelly Macdonald.
• 3 November
Anatomy of a Fall
Justine Triet carried off the Palme d’Or at Cannes for this complex, downbeat psychological drama-thriller, with something of Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution. Sandra Hüller plays a fashionable author who one day discovers her husband’s dead body outside her Alpine villa, having apparently fallen from a high window. But was he pushed?
• 10 November
Napoleon
Napoleon inspired an epic silent classic for Abel Gance, Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk gave the role to Rod Steiger, and Stanley Kubrick retreated from his own planned biopic, like the French leader himself from snowy Russia. Now the inexhaustible Ridley Scott takes on this much debated figure: working-class hero or proto-fascist? Joaquin Phoenix is the emperor; Vanessa Kirby is Josephine and Rupert Everett is Wellington.
• 22 November
The Eternal Daughter
There is intimacy and generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg, starring Tilda Swinton in the doppelganger roles of a film-maker bringing her elderly mother to a country house hotel for a break – and the mother herself.
• 24 November
Anyone But You
Sydney Sweeney’s performances in Euphoria, The White Lotus and Reality have made her a rising star; now she appears with Alexandra Shipp in this new spiky romcom from Will Gluck about two young women, sworn enemies in college, who find themselves in confrontation while on vacation.
• 15 December
Wonka
Simon Farnaby and Paul King, the writing/directing duo who worked magic with Paddington, now dream up an origin myth for Willy Wonka, the eccentric hero of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Timothée Chalamet is the young top-hatted confectioner and Hugh Grant steals the whole thing as an Oompa-Loompa.
• 15 December
Next Goal Wins
The original 2014 documentary about the American Samoa national football team, battling to turn their fortunes round after a historically dire 31-0 defeat by Australia, is now turned into a feelgood underdog comedy, directed by Taika Waititi and co-written by him and Iain Morris. Michael Fassbender returns to the screen after a spell away as Thomas Rongen, the ebullient Dutch coach hired by the American Samoans to work his magic.
• 26 December
The Pot-au-Feu
For fans of the “foodie” movie genre, this is a must. The setting is the French Belle Époque, and Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche play a passionate wealthy gourmet and his cook, utterly devoted to food, and to each other, and there are long, detailed sequences of food preparation which will delight the connoisseur.
• 29 December
