Films of 2025
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The most intriguing and perhaps riskiest of these cinephilic projects is Nouvelle Vague. Richard Linklater will take us back to the offices of Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s, when Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), and Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy) were beginning to focus more on making films than writing about them.
Highest 2 Lowest is “not a remake,” says Spike Lee, but is instead “a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s great film,” High and Low (1963), starring Toshiro Mifune as a wealthy industrialist being extorted by a cold-blooded kidnapper. In Lee’s version, Denzel Washington plays “a music mogul with his own label and [a] reputation as the best ears in the business,” but “the main role” will be played by A$AP Rocky. Lee’s cast also features Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, and Ice Spice.
In 1996, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson presented their first features, Hard Eight and Bottle Rocket, both of them expanded from shorts that had screened at Sundance. The directors return this year with typically dynamic ensemble casts. PTA’s tenth feature may or may not be called The Battle of Baktan Cross—Licorice Pizza was referred to for a good while as Soggy Bottom—and may or may not draw from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. What we do know is that PTA has been working with his biggest budget yet, that the film will likely screen in IMAX theaters, and that the cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio features Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Alana Haim, Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, Benicio del Toro, Shayna McHayle, and Chase Infiniti.
For The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson has once again loaded up on star power: Benicio del Toro, Michael Cera, Bill Murray, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mathieu Amalric, Rupert Friend, Willem Dafoe, and Bryan Cranston. The Phoenician Scheme will likely be a tale of espionage hinging on a father-daughter relationship.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, a project for Netflix cowritten with Emily Mortimer, has been described as a “funny and emotional coming-of-age film about adults.” Those adults are to be played by Mortimer, George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent, Greta Gerwig, and Alba Rohrwacher. Set in New York’s criminal underworld in the 1990s, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing will star Austin Butler as a former baseball player as well as Zoë Kravitz, Regina King, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Bad Bunny, Griffin Dunne, Vincent D’Onofrio, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Action Bronson, and Carol Kane.
Romanian director Radu Jude promises to get playful with the iconography of another Hollywood monster in Dracula Park. Tourists and a restaurant owner lead a chaotic chase after an actor portraying the Transylvanian count, trailing storylines spun from AI and social media. Leigh Whannell, whose 2020 reboot of James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) was a box-office smash, is at it again with Wolf Man, based on Curt Siodmak’s 1941 showcase for Lon Chaney Jr.
Bong Joon Ho’s long-delayed Mickey 17 will finally be out in March. The adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7 stars Robert Pattinson as a lowly earthling who signs up to become an “expendable” employed to take on missions that are all but guaranteed to kill him as humans attempt to colonize an ice world. Each time he does indeed die, he’s replaced by a replica of himself with most of his memories intact. Mickey 17 also features Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo.
Jennifer Lawrence will play a mother struggling with psychosis in an isolated house in the countryside in Die, My Love, Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation—cowritten with playwright Enda Walsh—of Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel. Robert Pattinson costars as the husband, LaKeith Stanfield plays the lover, and Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte joined the cast just before the shoot that wrapped last fall.
Robert De Niro will play two rival mob bosses, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, in Barry Levinson’s Alto Knights. The screenplay comes from Nicholas Pileggi, who cowrote Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and wrote the book it was based on, Wiseguy (1985).
Kristen Stewart’s debut feature as a director will be based on The Chronology of Water, a 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, who left her abusive household on a swimming scholarship, which she then lost due to her drinking problem. So it was off to Oregon, where she worked with Ken Kesey and experimented sexually and chemically before settling down and starting a family. Imogen Poots plays Yuknavitch, and the cast includes Thora Birch, Kim Gordon, and Jim Belushi.
Bernard Rose calls his Lear Rex a “radical but accessible adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest play.” Al Pacino stars as the aging and raging king, and the supporting cast includes Jessica Chastain as Goneril, Ariana DeBose as Cordelia, Rachel Brosnahan as Regan, LaKeith Stanfield as Edmund, and Peter Dinklage as the Fool. Aneil Karia, whose The Long Goodbye (2020) won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short, is working on a contemporary take on Hamlet. His cast: Riz Ahmed as the Prince, Morfydd Clark as Ophelia, Joe Alwyn as Laertes, Timothy Spall as Polonius, and Art Malik as King Claudius.
Obviously not all of these will be good, but looks like a lot of interesting pics being released this year!