Caught Stealing
Comic book author and novelist Charlie Huston adapts his own cult bestseller of the same title, Darren Aronofsky directs – and this comedy certainly signals a shift in tone after his last movie, body-image tragedy The Whale. Austin Butler stars as ex-baseball-player Hank Thompson who gets mixed up in the seedy underbelly of crime in 90s New York.
29 August
The Roses
Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman star in this new version of the acrid satire of marital breakdown last filmed in 1989 as The War of the Roses with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner and audiences will be keen to see if this new movie matches its predecessor’s devastating final shot. Certainly Cumberbatch and Colman look like an A-lister clash.
29 August
An amazing return to form for the Belgian veteran masters of classic social-realism the Dardenne brothers. The movie follows the lives of teen mothers and mothers-to-be at a state home – gentleness, compassion and love are the keynotes of this quietly outstanding movie. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving and asking for help is powerful.
29 August
Little Trouble Girls
This elegant and mysterious debut picture from Slovenian director Urška Djukić reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening: an all-girl teenage choir is under the thumb of a demanding and charismatic choirmaster, who isn’t above humiliating girls if they displease him in any way.
29 August
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
Before there was Ricky Gervais, before there was Steve Carell … there was the rock colossus Spinal Tap, whose 1980s comeback tour was famously the subject of a documentary, or … if you will … well, you know how it goes. Now a sequel reunites us with the band, in their mature and reflective silver years, still rocking hard and finding that sex-positivity has brought them back into fashion. What’s wrong with being sexy?
12 September
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
The Korean auteur with the nom de cinéma Kogonada (his actual name is as closely guarded as Elena Ferrante’s in the literary world) takes a big swing with this romantic drama about two strangers – played by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell – who unite after an extraordinary journey. In the hands of anyone else it could be slushy, but Kogonada has a light and expert touch.
19 September
One Battle After Another
For movie-hipsters and superfans this is the big one. Director Paul Thomas Anderson returns with a movie inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, another black comic riff on the war on drugs, the war on terror, the paranoid style of American politics and much else. Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn star as two ex-revolutionaries trying to save the former’s daughter, played by Chase Infiniti.
26 September
Him
A drama on classic underdog sports movie lines: Tyriq Withers plays Cameron, a promising but callow young American football player who gets the chance to train with the charismatic quarterback Isaiah White – a serious role for comedy veteran Marlon Wayans – and the experience is unnerving. Jordan Peele produces.
3 October
The Smashing Machine
One of the Safdie brothers – Benny – goes solo directing this true-life sports movie, inspired by the 2002 HBO documentary of the same title, starring Dwayne Johnson as the humungous MMA fighter Mark Kerr and Emily Blunt as his wife, Dawn. The action will surely show that the hero is more than just a machine.
3 October
British actor Harris Dickinson makes a really impressive directorial debut with Urchin, a smart and compassionate picture about homelessness: engaging, humorous and sympathetically acted by Frank Dillane as Mike, a guy who has been on the streets for five years. Intelligent and heartbreakingly vulnerable.
3 October
Roofman
Jeffrey Manchester was a former US army reserve soldier who became a pop-culture antihero in the 1990s for robbing branches of McDonald’s by breaking in through the roof – for which he was dubbed the “roofman” – and then waiting in the lavatories for opening time, at which point he would storm out and empty the cash registers. Channing Tatum plays Jeffrey and Derek Cianfrance directs.
17 October
Good Fortune
In this trading-places comedy, Keanu Reeves brings his imitable unreadable deadpan style to the role of Gabriel, a “budget” angel who intervenes in the lives of lesser humans with mixed results. Writer-director Aziz Ansari stars as a stressed gig worker Arj, insecurely employed by Seth Rogen’s heartless plutocrat. Gabriel swaps their existences to show Arj that money isn’t everything. Or, actually, is it?
17 October
After the Hunt
A #MeToo story of American academe from screenwriter Nora Garrett and director Luca Guadagnino. Julia Roberts stars as an Ivy League professor Alma Olsson who is put under pressure when her friend and colleague, played by Andrew Garfield, is accused of sexual assault. Ayo Edebiri plays Alma’s star pupil Maggie.
22 October
A House of Dynamite
A big, brassy, real-time apocalypse scenario from action specialist Kathryn Bigelow, whose title may remind you of Sam Goldwyn’s apocryphal remark in 1945: “This atom bomb … it’s dynamite!” Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson star in a white-knuckle drama set in the White House as officials deal with what appears to be an incoming nuclear missile attack.
24 October
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Playing a living icon is always tricky, and rock icon trickier still. Jeremy Allen White brings the blue-collar energy to take on the role of Bruce Springsteen, as he made his 1982 album Nebraska. Stephen Graham plays Bruce’s father, Douglas, and Jeremy Strong is Springsteen’s manager and producer Jon Landau.
24 October
The Mastermind
Possibly the most downbeat – and yet intriguing and hilarious – heist movie in history. Josh O’Connor stars as James, the art school dropout in 1960s Massachusetts who conceives a plan to rob the local art gallery with the help of tough guys that he has bizarrely recruited. Director Kelly Reichardt makes of him a rather Updikean figure who ends up on the run from the consequences of his own actions.
24 October
Bugonia
The Onion joked that Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos now estimates he’s only three films away from hanging with Emma Stone outside work. His latest film brings him nearer to that goal. It’s a remake of the South Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! in which Stone stars as the CEO of a drugs company who is kidnapped by two men who believe that she is a hostile alien.
31 October
The Running Man
A dystopian thriller-satire on the classic theme of TV being evil, directed by Edgar Wright and based on the 1982 novel by Stephen King – last filmed in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead. Now the star is slightly less jacked: Glen Powell is Ben, a guy who takes part in a TV reality show in which he is chased across the world by guys out to kill him – and there’s a big cash prize if he can survive 30 days.
7 November
The Thing With Feathers
A drama about grief, taken from the novella by Max Porter whose title modifies the Emily Dickinson quotation about hope. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a guy who, along with his two sons, has to deal with the terrible loss of his wife and their mother. Grief appears in the guise of a Ted Hughes-style crow.
7 November
The Choral
An original screenplay by Alan Bennett has to be something to savour. Nicholas Hytner directs and Ralph Fiennes stars in the second notable choirmaster film of 2025: he is Dr Guthrie – who, in a small Yorkshire town in 1916, where most of the menfolk are absent, has to recruit a choir of young boys and girls to sing Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Their innocence and the beauty of the music make a fierce contrast to the war’s horror.
7 November
Train Dreams
Based on the novella by Denis Johnson and directed by Clint Bentley (who recently made the much-loved Sing Sing), this is a drama about fragile masculinity. Joel Edgerton plays Robert, a railway worker whose life is secluded, vulnerable and lonely, as he spends so much time away from his wife but is poignantly aware of the beauty of the American landscape in which he finds himself.
7 November
Keeper
Actor and film-maker Osgood Perkins had a breakthrough last year with his strange horror thriller Longlegs and now he returns with another scary movie. Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland play Liz and Malcolm, a couple who escape for a cosy romantic getaway at … uh, oh … a secluded cabin. When Malcolm has to return briefly to the city to sort out some business, Liz finds herself alone with a terrible evil.
14 November
Nuremberg
It is the beefy, lairy role that Russell Crowe was surely born to play. He is the Nazis’ Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring in this tense postwar psychological drama, and Rami Malek plays Douglas Kelley, the US army psychiatrist tasked with examining and questioning Göring to see if he was fit to stand trial at Nuremberg. An unsettling battle of wits ensues.
14 November
Jay Kelly
George Clooney is a Hollywood legend with old-school class who commands a lot of affection – and who could also use a hit. Perhaps this will be the one. The director and co-writer is Noah Baumbach, working with Emily Mortimer, and Clooney plays a superhandsome movie megastar of a certain age, with Adam Sandler as his agent, as they make a somewhat Fellini-esque journey across Europe surrounded by a carnival of fans.
14 November
Lynne Ramsay brings the gothic-realist steam heat to this ferocious and blazingly visual study of a woman, played by Jennifer Lawrence with the passionate commitment reminiscent of Gena Rowlands, and her descent into bipolar disorder as she is left alone all day with a new baby in a rambling Montana house. Robert Pattinson plays her husband and Sissy Spacek is her stressed mother-in-law.
14 November
Blue Moon
Some fascinating casting here as Ethan Hawke plays the great lyricist Lorenz Hart, struggling with depression and alcoholism in 1943 (an era when these disorders were heartlessly described as being a maudlin drunk) and we see poor Hart at the opening night of Oklahoma!, which his former partner Richard Rodgers has written with a new collaborator: Oscar Hammerstein. He stumbles out early and we see him in the bar trying and failing to come to terms with what this obvious hit says about his own future.
14 November
Wicked: For Good
The public and the pundits gave a thumbs up to the first part of this mighty screen adaptation of the stage musical Wicked (imagining the origin story of the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz) and now in this second part we are reunited with Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s Glinda – and also Jonathan Bailey’s hilarious Prince Fiyero.
21 November
It’s high time author Adam Mars-Jones had a presence in British cinema and here is an uproarious and tender adaptation of his novella Box Hill, a queer BDSM tale of biker romance and devotion with something of Alan Bennett, Tom of Finland and Wallace and Gromit. Alexander Skarsgård is the leather-clad alpha male Ray who likes the submissive style of Harry Melling’s sweet-natured Colin, and their relationship takes an unusual course.
28 November
Avatar: Fire and Ash
James Cameron’s Avatar movies are sometimes set to be gigantically successful while leaving no trace in the collective memory. If this new one is going to do the same thing, it’s going to take its time about it – this weighs in at three hours and 12 minutes. Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña return as Jake and Neytiri, who must struggle for survival in a changing world.
19 December