It may be a trifle late for my most anticipated films for the year ahead, given that January is almost behind us, but here goes. Obviously, on top of the list has to be French auteur Leos Carax long-in-the-planning English-language début Annette , his first feature since 2012’s Holy Motors . Marion Cotillard plays a celebrated soprano married to edgy comic Adam Driver. They have a child, Annette, who has a special gift. Another keenly anticipated comeback, and another English-language début is Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who returns with Memoria , starring Tilda Swinton, that promises to be at least as enigmatic as his last feature, 2015’s Cemetery of Splendour . While on English-language débuts, France’s Ursula Meier makes hers with noir Quiet Land.
It is time for you to delve into your collections and watch Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane again. After giving us seven terrific episodes spread over two seasons of Mindhunter , David Fincher returns to the big screen with Mank where Gary Oldman plays screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz. The film follows the troubled development process of the Citizen Kane script. Fresh off Little Women and Marriage Story respectively, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach are co-writing Barbie , a live-action interpretation of the iconic doll, with Margot Robbie, fresh off Bombshell herself playing her. I’m not sure if it’ll hit screens this year though.
If you were wondering what Ildiko Enyedi was up to after 2017’s brilliant On Body and Soul , you’ll be delighted to know that she’ll be back with her adaptation of Milan Fust’s 1942 novel The Story of My Wife , where a sea captain marries a woman on a dare. After 2016’s Sex Doll , Sylvie Verheyde is back this year with Madame Claude that will follow a prostitution business with a tremendous impact on French government and mafia in the 1960s.
Closer home, Singaporean filmmaker and visual artist John Clang is ready with A Love Unknown , an abstract tale of a woman in New York, and her abandoned daughter in Singapore who she has never met. The film premières at Rotterdam shortly. From Bangladesh, Live from Dhaka director Abdullah Mohammad Saad has completed principal photography on his next feature I See Waves , while eminence grise Mostofa Sarwar Farooki is halfway through the shoot of his most ambitious film yet, a complex journey tale, No Land’s Man , starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Megan Mitchell. From Sri Lanka, Somaratne Dissanayake’s epic disaster drama Tsunami looks extremely promising as does Kalpana and Vindana Ariyawansa’s Little Miss Puppet AKA Rookada Panchi, where a little girl finds solace at a beachside carnival.
There are plenty of obvious ones that are not on this list, simply because they are on a myriad others, like the new Nolan, Bond, Reichardt, Jenkins, Villeneuve, Scott, Schrader, Soderbergh, Spielberg etc, that will get enough eyeballs closer to their release dates. So let me conclude with my most anticipated début. Luminous actress Rebecca Hall turns director with Passing , based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name that takes a deep look at race relations in America.
