30. “Last Days In The Desert”
Director: Rodrigo Garcia (“Albert Nobbs”)
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Tye Sheridan, Ciaran Hinds, Ayelet Zurer
Synopsis: As he nears the end of his forty-day exile in the desert, Jesus grapples with the devil over the fate of an ordinary family.
What You Need To Know: As we’ve already seen this year, religious-themed movies continue to reliably draw a certain audience to the box office, but the problem is that many of those films are, well… objectively awful. Can they be persuaded to turn up for something a little classier and more challenging. That’s got to be the hope of the backers of “Last Days In The Desert,” which finally hits theaters over a year after its Sundance premiere. Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia has a mixed track record, but he’s brought along his pal, three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, to shoot the film. According to our Park City review, it’s a serious and sincere film, “an admirable and touching picture” that can be “deeply moving,” though its restraint may mean that it won’t connect with many. Still, fans of Chivo, McGregor (playing both Christ and Lucifer) and ambitious spiritual fare should find plenty of food for thought.
Release Date: May 13th
29. “Swiss Army Man”
Director: DANIELS
Cast: Paul Dano, Daniel Radcliffe, Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Synopsis: A suicidal man attempts to make his way home from a desert island with the aid of a corpse.
What You Need To Know: If you were reading any Sundance coverage this year, the term ‘Daniel Radcliffe farting corpse movie’ will likely be a familiar one. The hotly-touted directorial debut of music video veterans DANIELS does indeed feature the erstwhile Harry Potter as a dead body, mostly without the ability to speak, but with a fair amount of gas inside him (to the extent that he can be used as a motorboat at one point in the film). But “Swiss Army Man” isn’t a sort of millennial take on “Weekend At Bernie’s.” Well, it sort of is, but it’s a bunch of other things as well, and may have been the most ambitious film at Park City this year. As with many ambitious things, it divided critics: our Russ Fischer called it “a big whiff that rarely connects its characters and situations to humor or empathy,” but it has plenty of fans too, and it’s likely to be one of the conversation movies of the summer, one that it’s surely worth having your own opinion on.
Release Date: June 17th
28. “Central Intelligence”
Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber (“Dodgeball”)
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Amy Ryan, Aaron Paul, Megan Park
Synopsis: A former nerd, now a badass CIA agent, must team with his old high school pal, now an accountant, to retrieve the key to the U.S. satellite program.
What You Need To Know: It took longer than expected for Dwayne Johnson to become a megastar: though he was always clearly hugely charismatic and a formidable physical presence, some questionable early roles meant that he took a while to become a legit box-office draw. But between the “Fast & Furious” franchise, last summer’s “San Andreas,” and occasional smart, off-the-wall choices, Johnson’s now one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and he could well get bigger with this action-comedy. Co-written by “Neighbors” actor Ike Barinholtz, and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who’s been a fairly comedically steady pair of hands with “Dodgeball” and “We’re The Millers,” this teams Johnson with the ever-rising Kevin Hart. And while the film doesn’t look like it’ll reinvent the wheel, it’s hard to think of many more appealing pairings than these two, particularly as it’ll give Johnson the chance to flex his considerable comedic muscles as well as his actual ones.
Release Date: June 17th
27. “The Founder”
Director: John Lee Hancock (“The Blind Side”)
Cast: Michael Keaton, Laura Dern, Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Patrick Wilson
Synopsis: The story of Illinois salesman Ray Kroc, who turned McDonald’s from a loval harmburger restaurant to a giant, worldwide corporation.
What You Need To Know: Three years after he dug into the secret history of the man behind one of America’s most recognizable companies (with “Saving Mr. Banks,” to decidedly mixed success), John Lee Hancock returns to try a similar trick. But “The Founder” seems potentially rather more interesting than most of his films to date. From a script from “The Wrestler” and “Big Fan” scribe Robert Siegel, it promises to be a rather darker affair than most, with comparisons to “The Social Network” and “Macbeth” being made in some quarters. And it has an undoubted boon in lead Michael Keaton, coming off two back-to-back Oscar winners with a role that promises to play to his strengths (and there’s an excellent supporting cast behind him). The biggest question here is whether the Weinsteins moving the film from Oscar season to August was because they saw a gap for a grown-up drama in the release calendar, or an admission that this doesn’t have Oscar bona-fides.
Release Date: August 5th
26. “ X-Men Apocalypse”
Director: Bryan Singer (“The Usual Suspects“)
Cast: Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne, Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner
Synopsis: An ancient mutant with godlike powers awakens after thousands of years and recruits Magneto and several others to the cause of bringing about a new mutant World Order, with only the X-Men to stop them.
What You Need To Know: In a summer crammed with ensemble superhero pics, it’s been oddly easy to forget that the next instalment in the original ensemble superhero blockbuster franchise, “X-Men,” is also due. Perhaps that’s down to its air of familiarity: it’s original “X-Men” director Bryan Singer back for a second outing in the rebooted franchise, after ‘Days of Future Past,’ the story feels a bit been-there done-that, and even its fresh faces (Isaac and Turner) feel closely associated with other blockbusting films and TV shows. But all that said, ‘Days of Future Past’ represented a big improvement on ‘First Class,’ and Singer’s comfort within this world is palpable, plus the period setting (this time it’s the 80s) always adds a neat spin. And hey, this A-list cast could elevate the reading of the nutritional info on a cereal box, so we’re definitely hopeful.
Release Date: May 27th
25. “From Afar”
Director: Lorenzo Vigas
Cast: Alfredo Castro, Luis Silva
Synopsis: An isolated man, who works as a denture technician, strikes up a co-dependent occasionally physical relationship, with a young handsome auto mechanic/petty criminal that seesaws between mutually beneficial and mutually corrosive.
What You Need To Know: Venice has a reputation for awarding “difficult” films, and if the austere and aloof debut from Venezuelan helmer Vigas isn’t as challenging as, say, Kim Ki-Duk‘s “Pieta,” the 2015 Golden Lion winner is certainly a chilly and deliberately alienating experience. But it’s also a very compelling one, as with impressive sureness Vigas follows this story of fragile, possibly unhealthy connection in a disconnected and unforgiving world. It’s largely due to a stunningly contained performance from Pablo Larrain regular Alfredo Castro (Larrain also produces and it’s his regular DP Sergio Armstrong who is the cinematographer here, so the film does share a good deal of DNA with Larrain’s), which means that even if you might find its Caracas-set story simply too enigmatic and remote to fully invest in (the title is highly descriptive) Castro alone can keep you riveted to your seat.
Release Date: June 7th
24. “Money Monster”
Director: Jodie Foster (“Little Man Tate”)
Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Catriona Balfe, Dominic West
Synopsis: The host of a famous shock-jock-style financial TV show is held at gunpoint live on air by a disgruntled viewer who blames him for the loss of his money.
What You Need To Know: Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster has had a low-key directorial career to date, but the quirky humanist dramedies that she’s mostly focussed on so far look to be giving way to something a little more caustic in “Money Monster.” Apparently largely a three-hander between Clooney as the Jim Cramer-esque TV personality, Roberts as his producer and O’Connell as the blue-collar gunman who lost his life savings, the thriller has the potential to be as savage as “Network” or as limp as “Mad City.” Perhaps the trailer slightly dampens our enthusiasm, hinting at the TV host’s moral awakening and we’d hoped to see Clooney play an irredeemable asshole, but the clips of the interplay between him and O’Connell suggest there might be some meaty performances delivered nonetheless. Whatever the case, we expect Foster’s innate intelligence to produce something suitably coherent, though whether she can inject real urgency into a story that’s about 8 years overdue is another question.
Release Date: May 13th
23. “Sunset Song”
Director: Terence Davies (“The Long Day Closes,” “The Deep Blue Sea“)
Cast: Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan
Synopsis: The story of six tumultuous years in the life of a young Scottish woman in the early 1900s, the daughter of a tyrannical farmer father.
What You Need To Know: British filmmaker Terence Davies has become something of a national institution and not before time — for decades he’s been making exquisitely personal, finely wrought dramas often featuring beautiful photography (and Michael McDonagh’s work here is no exception), thus making a valuable and unique contribution to British heritage cinema — we all fell especially hard for his last film, “The Deep Blue Sea” with Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz. “Sunset Song,” which features starring roles for model Deyn and the ever-reliable Mullan, and which Nik adored when he saw it at TIFF, seems a continuation of many of his preoccupations. So while it boasts a quieter, more rural setting than we’re used to from his autobiographical Liverpool-set films “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” as well as shimmering documentary masterpiece “Of Time and the City,” Davies is the kind of director who can invest even relatively undynamic narratives with such intensity of feeling they become much broader in scope.
Release Date: May 13th
22. “High Rise”
Director: Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”)
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss
Synopsis: In a dystopian class-riven Britain, the occupants of a luxury tower block begin to turn on each other.
What You Need To Know: A film so divisive it has even cleaved the usually harmonious Playlist staff (Kevin’s TIFF review was unimpressed; Oli considers it one of his favorite films of 2015) the rest of us are finally about to get a chance to see what all the fuss is about. Director Wheatley has never made easy-to-love movies, but his skewed, incisive brand of highly individual, horror-tinged intelligence makes him perhaps the most perfect filmmaker to adapt the work of British writer JG Ballard since David Cronenberg made “Crash” — maybe even more so since his similarly class-conscious Britishness has also infused everything he’s done to date. Very few of us have a simple yay-or-nay response to Wheatley’s overall output so far (“Kill List” and “Sightseers” are generally admired but his last film, “A Field in England,” turned people on and off in roughly equal measure) but there’s no denying that a new film from the relative newcomer is an event, and that whether we end up liking or loathing it, it will be unlike anything else we’ll be seeing in 2016. Except maybe his next film, “Free Fire” which is reportedly finished and may make a showing at 2016 festivals.
Release Date: May 13th
21. “The Conjuring 2”
Director: James Wan (“Furious 7“)
Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, David Thewlis, Franka Potente
Synopsis: Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren are brought in on a new case involving a single mother of four living in North London who is being terrorized by malicious spirits.
What You Need To Know: It’s tempting to describe “The Conjuring” as a “surprise horror hit” but by this stage there should be nothing surprising about a James Wan movie raking in the $$$ and spawning a franchise: he did it with “Saw,” then with “Insidious” and then turned in the most lucrative instalment of the ‘Fast & Furious‘ franchise, and the 6th biggest film of all time worldwide with “Furious 7.” Of course, it feels less likely that “The Conjuring” the comparatively low-key “classy” ghost-story horror that sets itself apart from the schlocky pleasures of most films in the genre with the quality of its moody photography and relative investment in character, should also get the sequel treatment. But when even the substandard spin-off/prequel “Annabelle” (which Wan did not direct) made a 40-fold box office return on investment, a sequel was inevitable, and, even more unusually, actually a fairly enticing prospect with the same stars and filmmaker returning.
Release Date: June 10th
