Barbenheimer. Gladicked. Deadpool & Wonkarine. The big movies of the past couple of years have been cash-splash smashes by mainstream directors loudly airing strong authorial voices. They are films on which studios have taken heavy bets during the rocky post-Covid period and ushered through a landscape potholed with strife and strikes.
Major arty punts have been less in evidence. But the acclaim and appetite for those that have been made – The Zone of Interest and Poor Things, Emilia Pérez and The Brutalist – is cheering, not least because 2025 looks likely to go down as the year auteurs roared back. The slate of releases by international big hitters needs only a new Haneke – and perhaps a splash of Almodóvar – to be unrivalled in recent memory.
First up, the grandaddy, Terrence Malick, whose first film since the muted 2019 drama A Hidden Life is a magic-hour smackdown between God (the Son of Saul star Géza Röhrig) and four versions of Satan (all played by Mark Rylance). The director has spent five years culling thousands of hours of footage for The Way of the Wind, which bodes well for maximum Malickican chaos.
Other films all but guaranteed a Cannes spot come May are Orphan, from the Son of Saul director László Nemes; Jupiter, Andrey “Leviathan” Zvyagintsev’s film about the reckoning of a Russian oligarch, his first since a near fatal bout of Covid; and Die, My Love, AKA the return of Lynne Ramsay. Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattison star in a Repulsion-esque drama of postpartum unravelling in rural Montana.
Claire Denis and Lucrecia Martel will probably appear on the Croisette, too, the former with a drama starring Matt Dillon, the latter a documentary about the murder of the Indigenous Argentinian leader Javier Chocobar.
Martel’s last film, Zama, was released more than seven years ago, as was Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit. She has a White House thriller due out this year, while Celine Song follows up Past Lives with a romcom starring Chris Evans and Dakota Johnson. Meanwhile, Jodie Foster goes Francophone in Rebecca Zlotowski’s psychotherapist murder mystery – while Agnieszka Holland has just wrapped her Kafka biopic.
Reaction to Eternals, Chloé Zhao’s less than marvellous superhero followup to Nomadland, suggested she might be better off sticking to a smaller canvas; hopes are high for Hamnet, her adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal (as Shakespeare).
While Mescal’s Oscar nomination hopes for Gladiator II went unrealised, this year he has a double shot: he is also starring opposite Josh O’Connor in Oliver “Living” Hermanus’s buzzy romantic drama The History of Sound, about two musicologists in the first world war. O’Connor continues to make bold choices, following up that film – as well as La Chimera and Challengers – with The Mastermind, the latest from Kelly Reichardt, whose acclaimed 2022 drama Showing Up was entirelyoverlooked for a UK release.
Also vying for gongs will be Benedict Cumberbatch, who stars opposite Olivia Colman in a remake of The War of the Roses, as well as in an adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief is a Thing With Feathers. Cillian Murphy can also be seen in a Porter drama – his reform-school novel Shy, now titled Steve.
Some auteurs are more prolific than others. Luca Guadagnino gave us two movies in 2024; in 2025, he is back again with After the Hunt, a thriller with Julia Roberts as a university professor with a dubious past, co-starring Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri and Chloë Sevigny. Yorgos Lanthimos teams up with Emma Stone yet again, after last year’s Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, for Bugonia, a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s loopy sci-fi Save the Green Planet!.
Richard Linklater has another couple of features, including his tribute to the Nouvelle Vague, and there is a film apiece from each Safdie brother, one from Darren Aronofsky and Bennett Miller’s mysterious drama about AI, his first since 2014’s Foxcatcher.
Wes and Paul Thomas Anderson (no relation) also return, the former with a regulation ensemble comedy featuring Bill Murray, the latter with his biggest-budget knees-up yet, shot in Imax at a cost of about $140m (£110m) and set in 70s California. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro and Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim.
Finally, Tom Cruise may just be straddling next year’s biggest box office hit – the final Mission: Impossible – and its splashiest arthouse hot ticket. He is starring in Judy – not a quickie remake of the Judy Garland biopic, but Alejandro González Iñárritu’s drama, co starring Riz Ahmed and Sandra Hüller, about “the most powerful man in the world, who embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s saviour before the disaster he’s unleashed destroyed everything”. Too on-the-bottom for the age of Trump and Musk? Let’s hope not.
