‘The Brutalist’: a masterpiece of epic proportions

Adrien Brody in ‘The Brutalist’

Depending on your bookie, you may only get very short odds on The Brutalist winning Best Picture at the 2025 Oscars. After a critical frenzy at film festivals, a robust awards campaign is now persuading Academy voters to free up the 215 minutes needed for director Brady Corbet’s maximalist portrait of genius at work. (A further 15-minute interval is non-optional.) 

But then everything about The Brutalist is bound up with scale, a biopic of fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), whom we meet in 1945 leaving the trauma of Europe for the gleaming postwar US. Seismic clashes await: America and assimilation; art and commerce; the knowledge that life only has room for so many near-four-hour movies even when hailed as a masterpiece.

‘Babygirl’: is the erotic thriller back?

Harris Dickinson and Nicole Kidman in ‘Babygirl’

Can the erotic thriller really make it back this time? A guilty pleasure of the 1990s multiplex, the genre returned to screens last year with Fatal Attraction remade as a streaming series. The show was quickly cancelled — but the future looks brighter for Babygirl, precision engineered to inspire a billion commentaries on sex and the corporate landscape. 

Nicole Kidman stars as a poised Manhattan CEO embroiled with a younger male intern (Harris Dickinson). As directed by Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, the rest reportedly brims with kinks and power plays, the retro vibe enhanced by strategic use of George Michael.

‘Mickey 17’: the many deaths of Robert Pattinson

Robert Pattinson and Robert Pattinson in ‘Mickey 17’

The Oscars of February 2020 were a late moment of business as usual before the Covid pandemic. But the film named Best Picture was an atypical winner: Parasite, the first movie not in English to claim the prize, a symphonic black comedy of class and imposture from South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho.

Screwball sci-fi Mickey 17 is Bong’s first film since that night of triumph (and one which has been made in English). Robert Pattinson plays the title character — an artificial human helping to colonise a grim new planet, replaced with a clone each time he dies. But the movie offers a double dose of Pattinson — the star also plays Mickey 18, brought into being only to find his hapless predecessor still alive.

‘Hard Truths’: Mike Leigh returns to form

Marianne Jean-Baptiste in ‘Hard Truths’

There was a time any preview of the year would invariably feature a new Mike Leigh film. The director was a figurehead of British cinema; he was also unfailingly prolific. And yet after a muted response to his 2018 historical recreation Peterloo, whether Leigh would make another film at all became a subject of debate. 

But life is cyclical as well as sweet, and excitement surrounds Hard Truths. The film finds the director reunited with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who starred to great acclaim in his Secrets and Lies (1996). Now she plays a middle-aged Londoner beset by anxiety. The backdrop of the suburban capital is vintage Leigh, but reports suggest the film is the freshest thing he has made in years.

F1: time to make a Pitt stop

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in Joseph Kosinski’s motor-racing epic ‘F1’

The year’s first real blockbuster arrives in May with Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. Given the title, Tom Cruise may never again do his own crazy stunts as super-agent Ethan Hunt. But if this is goodbye, the farewell party could be cut short at the box office by Joseph Kosinski, the blue-chip filmmaker who directed Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick.

Now Kosinski has made F1, a motor-racing epic with Brad Pitt in front of the camera and massed bigwigs behind it. A first collaboration between Apple and Warner Bros, its producers include Hollywood veteran Jerry Bruckheimer and British champion Lewis Hamilton. The pitch promises unprecedented access to real-life circuits through a partnership with the sport’s governing body, the FIA. Forget ideas of an exposé, then — think chicanes at Imax scale.

‘Michael’: Jackson biopic prompts questions

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson in ‘Michael’

Don’t take it as a recommendation, but people will certainly be talking about Michael in 2025. Musical biopics are about to be everywhere: Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Jeremy Allen White playing Bruce Springsteen in Deliver Me From Nowhere. But particular scrutiny will fall on director Antoine Fuqua’s portrait of Michael Jackson. If you’re already taking a deep breath, join the club.

Of course, the question will be which Jackson Michael presents us with: the beloved pop savant brought low by rumours, or a man less unjustly accused. One clue may come with the cast list: the singer’s own nephew Jaafar Jackson will star. Another is at the top of the credits, with veteran producer Graham King having also made fan-friendly Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.

‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Bride!’: the next Barbenheimer?

Ever since Barbenheimer, the film business has longed to matchmake again. Witness the attempt to sell November’s Gladiator II and Wicked as Glicked. But in 2025, the biggest chance for a splashy gender clash will come with twin riffs on the same giant of gothic horror. 

First, Frankenstein will be reimagined by Guillermo del Toro with Oscar Isaac as the doctor and Jacob Elordi as the creature, after years in development hell. Indeed, at one point del Toro planned to fold a retelling of Bride of Frankenstein into his film too. 

And yet that deathless chiller has now been remade as The Bride! with director Maggie Gyllenhaal giving life to her own glamorous cast: Jessie Buckley will play the reluctant sweetheart to Christian Bale’s monster. The stew is further seasoned by industry friction. Del Toro’s movie is made for Netflix, which also backed Gyllenhaal’s film until a dispute over budgets. Let the undead have at it.

‘Jupiter’: homeland and the human condition

Andrey Zvyagintsev is in exile. The brilliant Russian director now lives in Paris, having almost lost his life entirely. From the early 2000s onwards, visionary films such as The Return and Leviathan built into a stunning mosaic of post-Soviet Russia. Then, in 2021, Zvyagintsev suffered a reported adverse reaction to the Sputnik V Covid vaccine. He was hospitalised for a year, first in Moscow then Germany, where he was placed in an induced coma.

But now the director is recovered and working again, with Jupiter announced as his first film since 2017’s Loveless. While Zvyagintsev has left Russia, the country remains foremost in his thoughts. The new film is the story of an oligarch whom the director describes as tied up with his homeland and the still greater puzzle of the human condition.

‘Die, My Love’: film legend Lynne Ramsay is back

By the time the posters for comic horror Die, My Love go up, they will feature the faces of Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson — with Lawrence starring as a new mother in the grip of post-partum psychosis. 

But there will be those — me included — for whom the biggest draw of the movie is actually Lynne Ramsay, the mercurial but hugely gifted Scottish director making just her fifth film in a 25-year career. Ramsay may not have made many features since her indelible first, Ratcatcher — she has also never shot a dull image.

‘The Battle of Baktan Cross’: is Paul Thomas Anderson finally making a blockbuster?

Leonardo DiCaprio snapped filming in Los Angeles in what is thought to be ‘The Battle of Baktan Cross’

At the time of writing, The Battle of Baktan Cross is still a working title. The movie also goes by the name Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Event Film. That event could have a double meaning. For diehard fans of the American critical darling behind There Will Be Blood, any film he makes is exactly that. But his new project also seems surprisingly close to the “event movie” as defined by industry jargon — a blockbuster of the kind he has never come close to making before.

Slated for release in August, it finds Anderson nudging into box office high season, with Imax screens reportedly booked en masse. Further advance word is sparse, but the bare bones hint less at action spectacle than Martin Scorsese, with what appears an 1980s-set crime thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

‘No Other Choice’: economic precarity turned murderous

Park Chan-wook was once synonymous with violence: the South Korean maestro with mayhem behind cult favourite Oldboy (2003). Since then, Park has kept making flawless films while dialling down the blood: The Handmaiden, a lushly subversive period piece; Decision to Leave, a beautifully sad crime drama.

Now, however, the axe is back. In Oldboy, the weapon was literal. In No Other Choice, it is the source material: the director adapting Donald E Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, a tale of economic precarity turned murderous. Our hero is a family man laid off after 25 years in one job who then seeks a competitive advantage in the labour market — by killing off rivals for interviews.

‘Marty Supreme’: tale of New York table tennis star

Timothee Chalamet during the filming of ‘Marty Supreme’

Timothée Chalamet will follow his turn as Bob Dylan with Marty Supreme, in which, at last, ping pong becomes the subject of a major American movie. Thus far it is being discussed as not quite a biopic, but inspired at least by Marty Reisman, outsize legend of New York table tennis in the 1950s, when the story is set.

It also marks the return of director Josh Safdie, half of filmmaking unit the Safdie brothers. Together, the pair made Uncut Gems, the madcap 2019 one-off from which some of us have still only just caught our breath. Since then, his brother Benny Safdie has moved into acting, appearing in Licorice Pizza, Oppenheimer and more. But now Benny too is directing a sports-tinted solo debut with martial-arts story The Smashing Machine. Few siblings rivalries have promised so much.

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