It’s that time of year again, when movies jockeying for awards-buzz and places on critics’ Top 10 lists crowd our multiplexes. To guide you, I’m going in chronological order this December. This week brings The Return, which is based on the last portion of Homer’s The Odyssey, when Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) comes back home to his wife (Juliette Binoche). The Order stars Jude Law as an FBI agent tracking white supremacists in the 1980s. As counterprogramming, Y2K is a teen horror-comedy that imagines machines rising up against humans when the calendar switches from 1999 to 2000, so expect late-’90s nostalgia to be out in force. The most anticipated offering of this week figures to be Nightbitch, adapted from Rachel Yoder’s novel about a frustrated housewife (Amy Adams) who finds herself changing into a wild animal. I’ll post a review of it in our online edition.
The weekend of December 13 brings the relatively unheralded supervillain origin story Kraven the Hunter, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson starring and J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, All Is Lost) directing. September 5 is a German-made thriller about the ABC sports reporters who covered the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Of most interest is The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated prequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga that uses the voices of actors from Peter Jackson’s trilogy but is drawn by Japanese animators. An anime treatment of Tolkien might be just what Middle Earth needs.
On December 20, we get the third Sonic the Hedgehog movie, but we’ll be much more interested in Mufasa: The Lion King. The prequel to the Disney saga is directed by Barry Jenkins in an abrupt turn from his films like Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, and it features songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Jenkins is also the writer on The Fire Inside, a biography of gold medal-winning Olympic boxer Claressa Shields, which comes out on Christmas Day. The 25th also features Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ hotly anticipated remake of the 1922 silent vampire classic, which is set during the Christmas season. Nicole Kidman is drawing Oscar talk as a CEO who has a dangerous affair with a much younger man in Babygirl, and the same can be said for Timothée Chalamet in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown.
A much weirder music biopic will drop soon after the New Year. Better Man tells the life of Robbie Williams with a CGI monkey portraying the British singer as a “narcissistic, punchable, shit-eating twat.” (That is Williams’ description of himself, FYI.) Other 2024 specialty releases whose dates are to be confirmed include 2073, a time-travel docudrama by Asif Kapadia, who won an Oscar for Amy. There’s also Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, which stars Pamela Anderson as a Vegas showgirl whose show abruptly closes after 30 years. That film has a packed supporting cast, and so does Brady Corbet’s monumental The Brutalist, with Adrien Brody as a Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to Philadelphia after World War II.
Luca Guadagnino’s second feature film of the year is his William Burroughs adaptation Queer, with Daniel Craig as a gay man who finds love in South America in the 1950s. Actor Jack Huston makes his directing debut with Day of the Fight, a black-and-white drama about a boxer (Michael Pitt) who prepares for his first bout after serving a prison sentence. Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig was the talk of the Cannes Film Festival this past summer, and RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys is a stunning drama (adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel) about a group of Black kids who are tortured at a Florida reform school in the 1960s. Finally, Pedro Almodóvar makes his very first English-language feature with The Room Next Door, with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as women who reunite decades after working together at the same magazine. Many of these titles figure to be players in the Oscar race this coming March, so you can get a step on awards season at your multiplex.
