40. “The Goldfinch”
Director: John Crowley (“Brooklyn”)
Cast: Ansel Elgort, Aneurin Barnard, Ashleigh Cummings, Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Kidman
Synopsis: After surviving a terrorist bombing in an art gallery that kills his mother, young Theo steals a painting in the aftermath.
What You Need To Know: Although it’s one of the most enduringly successful popular novels of the last thirty years, Donna Tartt’s seminal “The Secret History” has mystifyingly never been brought to the screen. But finally, the author’s work is about to make its film debut, with this adaptation of her sprawling Dickensian novel, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. There’s an appropriately prestigious team involved, including “Brooklyn” director John Crowley, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” scribe Peter Straughan, and DP Roger Deakins, but the cast (also including Luke Wilson, Finn Wolfhard, and Sarah Paulson) has proved more divisive among fans of the book. Can it all be squeezed into a movie? And perhaps more importantly for those who didn’t like the divisive book, should it have been in the first place?
Release Date: October 11th
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/891018907179462658
39. “Pale Blue Dot”
Director: Noah Hawley (“Legion”)
Cast: Natalie Portman, Jon Hamm, Zazie Beetz, Dan Stevens, Ellen Burstyn
Synopsis: After a long period in space, an astronaut returns home, only to lose her grip on sanity when her colleague and lover has another affair with a trainee astronaut.
What You Need To Know: Other than the naturally genre-minded J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon, it’s interesting that few of the showrunner auteurs from the Golden Age of TV have translated successfully to the movies. Some simply haven’t bothered, some have some honorable failures behind them (David Chase’s “Not Fade Away”), some have some less honorable ones (Matthew Weiner’s “Are You Here”). This year will see Noah Hawley, who found fame after the against-the-odds success of “Fargo,” and the subsequent superhero epic “Legion,” attempt to make the transition, and the signs are pretty good. Based loosely on the true story of that astronaut who drove across country to attempt to kidnap a love rival, it’s got a high-calibre cast, while giving a very different look at spacegoing life from “First Man,” “Gravity” et al. Hawley’s super talented but some have found his work derivative in the past — this, however, has such a distinctive premise that that might not be a problem here…
Release Date: Fox Searchlight haven’t set a date yet, but expect it in awards season, with a likely Venice/Telluride/TIFF bow first.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/951570058349654016
38. “Toy Story 4”
Director: Josh Cooley (“Riley’s First Date”)
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Tony Hale, Keanu Reeves
Synopsis: After the addition of a makeshift new toy called Forky to the playroom, Woody, Buzz & co end up on a new road trip.
What You Need To Know: How do you follow up perfection? Over more than twenty years, the “Toy Story” trilogy set up a level of quality that established one of our more reliable filmmaking names, in the shape of Pixar. And 2010s “Toy Story 3” gave what seemed to be such a perfect ending for our heroes that many have been actively hostile to the idea of the series continuing. Nine years on, and after a somewhat troubled gestation (the film was pushed back a year, director John Lasseter departed, before sexual harassment allegations that saw him ultimately depart the studio he founded), and original writers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack left the project in less-than-good-terms (releasing a statement saying that Pixar have a culture “where women and people of color do not have an equal creative voice”), the film’s finally on its way. We’d say that we’re skeptical that this can live up to the original trilogy, but Pixar has proved us wrong with this series many times, and the presence of “Inside Out” co-writer Josh Cooley in the director’s chair is a comforting one.
Release Date: June 21st.
37. “Wendy”
Director: Benh Zeitlin (“Beasts Of The Southern Wild”)
Cast: Unknown
Synopsis: A young girl is kidnapped and taken to an ecosystem where pollen stops the aging process.
What You Need To Know: Seven years on, it sort of feels in a weird way like “Beasts Of The Southern Wild” never happened. It was such a strange, singular movie that yet somehow went on to be a multiple Oscar nominee, but its director Benh Zeitlin didn’t go off and make some blockbuster or TV series like many of his peers, and instead has been quiet for the last half decade (the inevitable backlash probably didn’t help it maintain its place in the cultural sphere too). But production finally got underway on his secretive follow-up “Wendy” back in 2017. It sounds like another mix of ecological concerns, grit, and magic realism, with a story that seems to be a riff on “Peter Pan,” but little’s known beyond that right now. Will it prove to be Zeitlin’s “Southland Tales,” or his “La La Land?” We’ll be finding out sometime very soon.
Release Date: Not at Sundance, so Zeitlin might wait for Cannes, where ‘Beasts’ won the Camera d’Or. Then again, we said that last year…
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/629345192102002692
36. “Frankie”
Director: Ira Sachs (“Little Men”)
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Greg Kinnear, Marisa Tomei, Jérémie Renier, Brendan Gleeson
Synopsis: Three generations of a family go through a life-changing experience during a vacation in Portugal.
What You Need To Know: Thankfully, when Isabelle Huppert picked up her first Oscar nomination for Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle” two years ago, she didn’t respond by immediately signing up to play Aquaman’s mom or something: she’s continued to do what she’s always done, working with some of the world’s best filmmakers, from Hong Sang-soo to, most recently, Neil Jordan. While we wait for the Barry Jenkins collaboration that surely has to happen at some point, 2019 will bring an equally tantalising proposition, with Huppert teaming with Ira Sachs, the man behind the consistently wonderful, though somewhat underseen, likes of “Forty Shades Of Blue,” “Keep The Lights On” and “Love Is Strange.” He reunites here with a few actors he’s worked with in the past like Kinnear and Tomei, but Huppert gets the title role (changed from the early title “A Family Vacation”), and the pair working together is certainly the draw.
Release Date: Filmed last fall, so Venice or TIFF is likely.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/1063889065177698305
35. “Waves”
Director: Trey Edward Shults (“It Comes At Night”)
Cast: Lucas Hedges, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Taylor Russell, Alexa Demie, Sterling K. Brown
Synopsis: Two young couples negotiate the minefield of falling in love.
What You Need To Know: As soon as his ultra low-budget debut “Krisha” debuted, it was clear that Trey Edward Shults was a major talent, and he backed that up with bleak post-apocalyptic sophomore feature “It Comes At Night” — a very different kind of movie, but one that showcased similar strengths. Shults is mixing it up again with this new film, a musical love story with a cast of rising stars including Oscar-nominee Hedges and “It Comes At Night” veteran Harrison, plus the great Sterling K. Brown, who is terrific even in bad movies (looking at you, “The Predator”). Don’t expect this to be “La La Land,” though — it’s’ “almost entirely synchronized to music, mixing some iconic contemporary songs alongside an original score,” so think “Baby Driver” without the car chases.
Release Date: Filmed last summer, so could pop up at Cannes (where Krisha played in the Critics’ Week sidebar).
https://www.instagram.com/p/BlOmS10gLWk/
34. “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”
Director: Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”)
Cast: Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Chris Cooper, Susan Kelechi Watson, Enrico Colantoni
Synopsis: A cynical Esquire journalist is asked to profile the children’s TV legend Mister Rogers, and finds the experience transforming his life.
What You Need To Know: In these, frankly, fucking horrible times, it’s not surprising that “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” this year’s acclaimed documentary on the legendary Mister Rogers, an emblem of goodness and niceness, proved to be a sleeper hit (it took $22 million, outgrossing the new Dragon Tattoo movie and “Bad Times At The El Royale,” and becoming one of the biggest documentaries of all time). So hopes from Sony will clearly be high that this film about the same man will be just as big a hit. It’d be easy for a film about Mister Rogers, not least one starring the of-course-it-should-be-him casting of Tom Hanks, to be overly saccharine, but Marielle Heller, whose assured directorial touch elevated “Diary Of A Teenage Girl” and this year’s excellent “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” feels like the perfect choice. We’re sobbing already.
Release Date: October 18th.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/1045408295966498816
33. “Antlers”
Director: Scott Cooper (“Black Mass”)
Cast: Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, Graham Greene, Amy Madigan, Scott Haze
Synopsis: A small town teacher and her sheriff brother become fascinated with a local student with a terrifying secret.
What You Need To Know: Scott Cooper’s a funny one: ever since breaking out with “Crazy Heart,” he’s made a series of sturdy, star-studded, old-fashioned movies that look great on paper, but nevertheless add up to something less than the sum of their parts. After last year’s “Hostiles” (actually his best film) failed to get much awards traction, he’s changing tack a bit with this horror movie, co-written by Nick Antosca, showrunner of the cult “Channel Zero” anthology series, and produced by Guillermo Del Toro, making this GDT’s first post-Oscar project. The pairing of Cooper and this particular genre is intriguing, especially with Russell and Plemons in the lead roles, so this could be one of the horror highlights of 2019.
Release Date: Nothing firm, but expect it in the fall.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/1046800181348335623
32. “Dolor Y Gloria”
Director: Pedro Almodovar (“All About My Mother”)
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz, Asier Etzeandia, Julieta Serrano
Director: A filmmaker in his twilight years recalls past loves, past friendships and former colleagues as he grapples with his inability to make movies anymore.
What You Need To Know: After 2011’s “The Skin I Live In,” it’s been an uncharacteristically bumpy patch for the great Pedro Almodovar — comedy “I’m So Excited” was the Spanish helmer’s least well-reviewed movie in decades, and follow-up “Julieta” was received respectably, but without the adulations that often greets his work. But his new film, which shot earlier this year, looks like it has the potential to be a real return to form: reteaming with two of the best-known actors that he helped launch in Banderas and Cruz, for a project that sounds self-reflective and a little Fellini-ish in intriguing ways.
Release Date: The movie’s apparently set for a February release in Spain, so it could be at Berlin, but often Almodovar’s movies go on release before bowing for the rest of the world at Cannes, so that might be the case too.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/986255847016706049
31. “Untitled Miranda July Project”
Director: Miranda July (“You, Me & Everyone We Know”)
Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger, Mark Ivanir
Synopsis: A family of con artists invites an outsider to participated in their biggest heist yet.
What You Need To Know: For someone who has made only two full-length films, Miranda July has an outsized cultural imprint (“What’s So Infuriating About Miranda July?” went one New Yorker headline). That’s partly because she’s prolific in other media, including fiction, but it’s also because those two films to date were so distinctive and, well, excellent. After a return to screens with an excellent supporting performance in “Madeline’s Madeline” this year, July gets behind the camera for the first time in eight years for this still-untitled project, that sounds, at least on paper, like her first mainstream-crossover possibility: a starry cast, a genre element, and the backing of Annapurna and Brad Pitt’s Plan B. Then again, this is Miranda July, so expect the unexpected…
Release Date: Filmed in May so a return to Sundance was too early in the end. Expect it in the fall at this point.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/979441579109658624
