Battle of the Sexes
The husband-and-wife team behind Little Miss Sunshine tackle the 1977 gender war between Bobby Riggs, washed-up 55-year-old tennis pro, and Billie Jean King, the young ace (then No 2 in the world) he challenged to a match. Steve Carell (whose breakthrough was in Sunshine) plays the old pretender, Emma Stone his rackety opponent.
Dunkirk
This means war: Christopher Nolan’s second film not set in the present (or future) is an epic tableau about the rescue of hundreds of thousands of troops from the French coast. Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy and, er, Harry Styles, star. Think Saving Private Ryan, but saltier.
Flying Horse
Gary Oldman’s first film as director in 20 years, and only his second ever, is a biopic of the pioneering 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, focusing on the affair between his wife, Flora, and Harry Larkyns, the theatre critic he kills. No casting confirmed, but Oldman had been chasing Ralph Fiennes and Benedict Cumberbatch. The man himself will play Muybridge’s prosecutor.
HHhH
Remember Anthropoid? A rather overlooked drama from earlier this year, it starred Jamie Dornan and Cillian Murphy in the story of a failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s third in command, SS General Reinhard Heydrich. Another crack at this story is being attempted with HHhH, this time round with Jacks Reynor and O’Connell as the plotting soldiers, plus Rosamund Pike and Mia Wasikowska as the objects of their affections, and Jason Clarke the target of their anger.
Sunset
Frankly, this is unlikely to be ready in time for next year, but we’ll include it just in case. The second film from Laszlo Nemes, who won the foreign language Oscar earlier this year for Son of Saul, is a coming-of-age drama set in Budapest just before the first world war.
Untitled Detroit Riots film
Kathryn Bigelow and regular screenwriter Mark Boal have been working for a while on a drama about the 1967 police raid in Detroit, which led to one of the largest citizen uprisings in US history. Kaitlyn Dever, John Krasinski, Will Poulter, John Boyega and Jack Reynor star.
Viceroy’s House
Gurinder Chadha goes colonial with a tale of the 1947 handover and its fallout, when Lord and Lady Mountbatten lived in a mansion also containing 500 Hindu, Muslim and Sikh servants. Hugh Bonneville and Gillian Anderson are our central couple, with Simon Callow and Michael Gambon on hand for sherry and stereotypical views about India.
Victoria and Abdul
The killer combo of Judi Dench and Stephen Frears team up again, four years on from Philomena, with a Lee Hall-scripted look at the friendship between Queen Vic and a young Indian clerk. Eddie Izzard looks like inspired casting as Bertie, the Prince of Wales; filling out the rest of the cast are Olivia Williams, Tim Pigott-Smith and, once again, Simon Callow and Michael Gambon.
