Here we go again. After this year’s Cannes lineup offered up some fascinating oddities but precious few Oscar contenders, all eyes are eagerly aimed at the trifecta of festivals on the horizon.
Venice kicks off at the end of next month, shortly followed by Telluride and Toronto, with schedules to be revealed in the next few weeks. But what films can we hope to see and which of those might end up dominating throughout awards season?
Dead certs
A United Kingdom
Belle director Amma Asante’s new one, a chronicle of the real-life romance between Botswanan prince Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo) and English typist Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) has already been picked for a European premiere at the London film festival, so it’s bound to have been given a slot at Toronto and/or Telluride.
Queen of Katwe
After her Oscar win for 12 Years a Slave, Hollywood has oddly kept Lupita Nyong’o’s face in the shadows (we were only allowed to hear her in Star Wars: The Force Awakens and The Jungle Book) but she’s finally granted some much-deserved screen-time in Mira Nair’s Uganda-set fact-based drama, playing the mother of a chess prodigy. A European premiere at the London film festival suggests a Toronto or Telluride bow.
Nocturnal Animals
It’s been seven years since Tom Ford made perhaps the most successful yet transfer from designer to director. A Single Man was a stylish and emotionally rich take on Christopher Isherwood’s memoir that bagged Oscar nods for Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. Ford will be hoping to go one better with his own adaptation of Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan starring – deep breath – Jake Gyllenhaal (in emaciated mode), Amy Adams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, Isla Fisher and Armie Hammer.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Spectacle, military triumphalism, America the great (again). Ang Lee’s adaptation of Ben Fountain’s book – about an Iraq war hero paraded as part of the Super Bowl show – looks as timely as it does bombastic. Newcomer Joe Alwyn brings the requisite wide-eyedness to our Billy. Kristen Stewart, Vin Diesel and – cripes! – Steve Martin have his back.
American Pastoral
Ewan McGregor has chosen the slightly high-risk route for his directorial debut, taking on an adaptation of Philip Roth’s universally acclaimed 1997 novel about the disintegrating life of an apparently successful family man. McGregor has cast himself in the lead role – no doubt a condition to get backing – and Dakota Fanning as the Patty Hearst-ish daughter Merry. It’s out in the US on 21 October, so a major festival appearance should be taken as read.
Denial
While The Lobster was seen as a major comeback for Colin Farrell, it also brought Rachel Weisz back into the spotlight, and she’s set to continue her jog away from underwhelming franchise pics with four awards-season films. This drama from The Bodyguard and Volcano director Mick Jackson tells the true story of historian Deborah E Lipstadt’s legal battle with Holocaust denier David Irving, played by Timothy Spall.
Sully
Remember Flight, the Robert Zemeckis action drama in which Denzel Washington played a boozy pilot who pulled off an amazing mid-air saving manoeuvre in part because he was half-cut? Remember how it wasn’t based on real life? Well this is like that, but real (the daring Hudson river landing in 2009) and much more sober, in every sense. Tom Hanks suits up to play another heroic captain, with trusty 86-year-old Clint Eastwood in the pilot’s seat.
Rules Don’t Apply
Another buzz around the Howard Hughes story, steered this time by Warren Beatty, who does everything bar serve the drinks as co-writer, director and star. Out of the window to your left you’ll see Alden Ehrenreich (recently cast as a young Han Solo) as an ambitious young driver to the stars. Lily Collins plays the innocent offering being launched into Hughes’s stratosphere.
The Founder
Harvey Weinstein’s big hope for the awards season, this biopic of McDonald’s co-founder Ray Kroc will get everywhere it needs to be, festival-wise. Michael Keaton has another chewy role as the businessman who bought the franchise-burger-restaurant system from the McDonald brothers after working for them for several years. John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr Banks) directs.
Lion
Another film getting a big awards push from Harvey Weinstein is this family drama from Top of the Lake director Garth Davis, starring Dev Patel as a man who finds his family via Google Earth. Nicole Kidman and Rooney Mara also star.
The Girl on the Train
Emily Blunt gets her Rosamund Pike on for this moody, sexy, liquor-lashed adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s bestseller, directed by Tate Taylor and transplanted from the London suburbs to upscale New York. Comparisons with Gone Girl are inevitable. David Fincher’s film opened the New York film festival, which feels a good fit for that, but this one opens early October, suggesting Toronto is a more likely launchpad.
Arrival
Sci-fi shenanigans from Sicario director Denis Villeneuve in which alien spacecrafts that have landed on earth are scoped out by humanity’s brainiest boffins (read: Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner). Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, an expert linguist, who – according to Wikipedia – will “take a chance that could threaten her life, and quite possibly humanity”. Quite possibly! Eek!
Weightless
Not much is ever disclosed about in-the-works Terrence Malick films: this one, we know, features Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara, is set in Austin and used to be called Lawless (until Malick gave the title away to John Hillcoat). But the feeling is that the festival-catnip director is holding Weightless back for a prime slot in the autumn festivals, though exactly where it will end up is anyone’s guess.
The Mercy
One of the most obviously awards-friendly titles of the forthcoming festival season sees The Theory of Everything director James Marsh assemble Oscar winners Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz to tell the true story of Donald Crowhurst, the businessman whose attempt to sail around the world by himself ended in tragedy.
Free Fire
Ben Wheatley’s first US-set film had been tipped for Cannes this May; the heroic opening Toronto offered High-Rise last year makes us suspect they may premiere this hard-boiled crime drama set in Boston in 1978 in Canada. Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Sam Riley and Cillian Murphy join Wheatley’s lucky charm, Michael Smiley. Early photos suggest a preponderance of big lapels and tight trousers.
The Secret Scripture
Jim Sheridan’s take on Sebastian Barry’s book about the reminiscences of Roseanne McNulty, a patient in an Irish mental hospital facing closure. Vanessa Redgrave plays McNulty old, Rooney Mara’s checked in as her younger self.
Voyage of Time
The “other” Terrence Malick project of the moment – the Koyaanisqatsi-esque Imax documentary Voyage of Time – has a little more flesh on its bones than Weightless. After a long-running lawsuit, it’s due be released on 7 October in the US, so it’s bound to be platformed at one or more of the autumn festivals; though as Malick likes to play his cards close to his chest, there’s no suggestion yet as to where.
Quite likely
Allied
Last year, Robert Zemeckis stumbled with his 3D wire-walking caper The Walk, but he’s sticking to safer territory with this second world war thriller. Brad Pitt stars as a hitman who falls in love with a spy, played by Marion Cotillard, in what is reportedly a true story.
Silence
Here’s one everyone’s waiting for: Martin Scorsese’s epic adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel about two Jesuit Portuguese Catholic priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) facing persecution on a trip to Japan to find a priest (Liam Neeson) who has lost his faith. Scorsese’s been working on Silence for 23 years – previous castings included Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio del Toro – and production was strenuous, with cast members dropping scary amounts of weight, the shoot being hit by an earthquake and a construction worker killed after scaffolding collapsed on set.
20th Century Women
Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners) returns with a 1970s-set drama about a group of women (Elle Fanning, Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig) set all a-flutter when a dishy handyman (Billy Crudup) rents a bungalow behind their boarding house. Likely to be more subtle and less sugary than it sounds.
War Machine
Brad Pitt follows up Fury with another war picture, this time as rock’n’roll US army general Stanley McChrystal, who was recalled from Afghanistan in disgrace after an article in Rolling Stone quoted his disparaging opinions of pols back home. With David Michod (Animal Kingdom) on board as director, this looks like a pretty classy project, more MASH than American Sniper, and Netflix may well put big money behind it for an awards push. A festival spot beckons.
How to Talk to Girls at Parties
Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell’s latest sees him adapting a Neil Gaiman short story about an alien girl touring the galaxy who gets lost in Croydon. Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman and Ruth Wilson star.
Brain on Fire
Produced by Charlize Theron, this adaptation of a memoir by a young journalist at the New York Post who wakes with no memory of the previous month is tipped to clean up at awards and signal Chloë Grace Moretz’s transfer into adult acting. Jenny Slate, Will Poulter and Tyler Perry co-star.
HHhH
Operation Anthropoid was the secret mission to assassinate SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Cooked up by the British Special Operations Executive but carried out by Czech soldier, the attack took place in Prague in 1942, leaving Heydrich with injuries from which he would later die. Your brave allies in this version of events are Jacks Reynor and O’Connell. Jason Clarke and Rosamund Pike are on the side of the dastardly as Reinhard and Lina Heydrich. That title, in case you were wondering, is pronounced “HHhH”.
Gold
Matthew McConaughey leads the line in a Treasure of the Sierra Madre-style gold-hunting jaunt, apparently inspired by the spectacular mid-90s Bre-X fraud over fake gold samples in Indonesia. McConaughey’s career has sputtered a little since his Dallas Buyers Club triumph, but he’s still got the major-league credibility that should see this safely into a big festival slot.
Planetarium
Grand Central director Rebecca Zlotowski’s follow-up was originally touted as a Cannes possibility but it’s now looking like a potential Venice inclusion. In a strange, 30s-set supernatural drama/horror/romance/fantasy, Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp play sisters who can speak to ghosts.
The Seagull
A Miss Julie-style spot at Toronto surely beckons for this top-end adaptation of the Chekhov play starring Saoirse Ronan, Annette Bening, Elisabeth Moss and Corey Stoll. You want 19th-century Steppes dissatisfaction? Michael Mayer’s faithful-looking transfer promises just that in spades. That said, his big-screen track record is hardly flawless: A Home at the End of the World in 2004 was followed by straight-to-video family film Flicka (2006). And that’s it, until now.
Hacksaw Ridge
A star-stuffed Mel Gibson war epic, meaning there will be plenty of dramatic collateral on standby to take a bullet for lead man Andrew Garfield. Garfield plays Desmond T Doss, a real-life medic who served in the battle of Okinawa despite refusing to carry a weapon because of his Seventh-day Adventist beliefs, and became the first conscientious objector to receive the medal of honour. Back to big, meaty film-making for Gibson. Likely to make a noise come Oscar time.
Wilson
This has flown under the radar: a Daniel Clowes graphic novel about a middle-aged, divorced misanthrope who reconnects with his drug addict ex-wife and finds out he has a daughter. Produced by Alexander Payne and with Woody Harrelson in the lead role, this has got some pedigree and – you’d think – more than a dollop of appeal to festival programmers.
Billionaire Boys Club
Ansel Elgort and Taron Egerton sell this crime thriller about a real-life money-making scheme that flipped from Ponzi to nasty. The duo play Joe Hunt and Dean Karny, the creators of an investment programme that made very rich young men of its founders in the early 80s, before the money ran out and they turned to more murderous ways to make moolah.
Brimstone
This looks terrific: a wild west tale of faith and retribution starring Guy Pearce as a demented preacher and Dakota Fanning as the damned young woman who must defeat him. Extra incentive is lent by Kit Harington. But, the director, who is a Dutchman called Martin Koolhoven, was responsible for 2005’s Schnitzel Paradise, AKA one of the worst films we’ve ever seen. Let’s just pray he’s had a major conversion since then.
Frantz
First world war woe here as Françcois Ozon wraps grief in jealousy over the story of a widowed young German (Paula Beer) who has to deal with the appearance of a handsome veteran (Pierre Niney) at her husband’s graveside.
The Untamed
Mexican film-maker Amat Escalante came from seemingly nowhere to win best director at Cannes in 2013 for his feature debut Heli; his followup – original title: La Región Salvaje, or The Wild Region – is a bizarre-sounding fable about “machismo, homophobia and repression of women”, inspired by a tabloid story about the drowning of a male nurse. Although it’s already been released in Mexico, this surely must find a festival berth.
If it’s ready
Passengers
A project that has undergone many iterations (Keanu Reeves was slated to star), this ambitious sci-fi romance now has Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, arguably the most SEO-friendly match-up of the year, play strangers brought together by a tech malfunction on a spaceship. It’s not released until late December and given its commercial nature, it might skip festivals altogether.
Patriots’ Day
The first film based around the Boston marathon bombings is the one which most focuses on the cops coping with the aftermath and investigation – cops whose numbers here include Mark Wahlberg, JK Simmons and John Goodman. Director Peter Berg and Wahlberg have two real-life tragedy films due this year; the other being oil rig disaster movie Deepwater Horizon.
Fences
Denzel Washington takes directing duties for the first time since 2007’s The Great Debaters. Fences is based on the play of the same name by August Wilson, who insisted that any film version of his story be directed by a black person. Washington also stars as Troy Maxson, a former Negro League baseball player struggling to make ends meet as a garbageman in 1950s Pittsburgh.
Marshall
In the film industry’s current disquiet over its poor record on diversity, this is likely to drum up attention. Reginald “Great White Hype” Hudlin has been immersed in TV for the last decade, but he’s back in film with a sober-sounding biopic of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice on the supreme court. Get on Up’s Chadwick Boseman is Marshall, and the film centres largely on Marshall’s defence of Joseph Spell, a black chauffeur accused of raping his white female boss in 1940. Reports suggest it’s still in post-production, though, so it may not make the deadline.
Miss Sloane
A timely drama here from John Madden, finally freed from the Marigold Hotel cinematic universe, who directs Jessica Chastain as an ambitious lobbyist putting her own life at risk to push for gun control. It’s got a December release date and production only wrapped earlier this year so it could be more of an AFI/NYFF choice.
The Yellow Birds
More war, this time starring Jennifer Aniston as Maureen, the worry-racked mum of a soldier fighting in Iraq. Tye Sheridan plays her boy over there, while – him again – Alden Ehrenreich plays the young squaddie who promises to bring him home safe. Based on the book by Iraq veteran Kevin Powers.
The Promise
The sexiest of shapes gets another airing as Christian Bale, Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon make up the comely corners of a love triangle forming in the ferment of the last days of the Ottoman empire. Issac is a medical student living in Paris, Bale plays an visiting American journalist, while Le Bon’s publicised character traits include “beauty” and “sophistication”. Ho hum. Let’s hope the chemistry matches up to the geometry.
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