2023 Arts Preview: The Year Ahead in Film
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (30 June) Anyone who found themselves wandering the New York sets of the new Indiana Jones film when the massive production rolled into Glasgow in the summer of 2021 probably felt as giddy as a schoolboy (or girl) when the trailer for the finished film dropped in early December. Set in 1969, against the backdrop of the moon landing, the film’s use of Glasgow to recreate the ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts featured prominently, with Harrison Ford still delivering the punches four decades on from first picking up the iconic whip and hat. But as Indy might say, it’s not the years, it the mileage, and Wolverine director James Mangold (taking over from Steven Spielberg) seems to be getting plenty of mileage out of his star for this final outing. Just don’t mention Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The Fabelmans (29 January) Speaking of Spielberg, his best films have always had a heavy autobiographical element, but his latest sees him fictionalising his own complicated childhood for a coming-of-age drama about an aspiring filmmaker torn apart by his parents’ faltering marriage. Don’t make any judgements based on the saccharine trailer: Spielberg’s work often has more depth than it’s given credit for and Michelle Williams reportedly gives her all as the fictional stand-in for Spielberg’s mother, a woman whose creativity is stifled by the social mores of 1950s suburbia. Paul Dano co-stars as his disapproving scientist father, but if you know Spielberg’s biography, you know there’s more to this fractious relationship than meets the eye. David Lynch cameos as Hollywood legend John Ford.
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Hide AdGlasgow Film Festival (1-12 March) The highlight of the British film festival calendar returns with its 19th edition and if the last year has taught us anything, it’s not to take these cultural institutions for granted. The full programme will be announced on 25 January, but among the screenings already revealed is a focus on double-Oscar-winning actress and filmmaker Lee Grant and a special live-scored showing of Jonathan Glazer’s masterful Under the Skin. The 2023 festival will also mark the final year under artistic co-director Allan Hunter, who has been instrumental in making the festival the success that it is. In particular he’s made GFF’s free classic film retrospectives his own, delivering witty, informed introductions that bring the stories behind some of the best films ever made vividly to life. His final themed series is entitled In the Driving Seat and will showcase ten films celebrating stories about women taking charge of their lives, including It Happened One Night, The Piano, Roman Holiday and New Hollywood classic Bonnie & Clyde. Do not miss.
Oppenheimer vs Barbie (both 21 July) The box-office battle of the summer sees Christopher Nolan’s imposing biopic of the father of the atomic bomb go head-to-head with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. It’s hard to tell which film will come out on top. After all, one’s about the most destructive, civilisation-threatening force ever created. And the other’s a Christopher Nolan movie. Joking aside, these are currently 2023's most intriguing blockbusters. Dunkirk showed Nolan could bring his customary mind-bending narrative flair to a period war movie, so don’t expect the famously secretive director to deliver a straightforward biopic of J Robert Oppenheimer (played by Nolan regular Cillian Murphy). Gerwig, meanwhile, is coming off the back of her delightful Little Women adaptation, not to mention a whole career of slyly subversive indie films, so do expect her Margot Robbie-starring live-action film (which also features Ryan Gosling as Ken) to do something entertainingly leftfield with the beloved doll.
Killers of the Flower Moon (release date TBC) Martin Scorsese re-unites with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro for this historical epic about the birth of the FBI. Based on the David Grann’s best-selling non-fiction book of the same name, the film revolves around a series of murders among the Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s after oil is discovered on their land. Delayed for several years by Covid and swelling budgets, the Apple Original film marks Scorsese’s second major collaboration with a streamer (after his Netflix-backed The Irishman), though there’s no way this won’t also be on the big screen. One thing is for sure: having recently turned 80, America’s most revered director shows no sign of slowing down.
The Outrun (release date TBC) Scottish author Amy Liptrot’s best-selling memoir gets the big screen treatment with quadruple Oscar-nominee Saoirse Ronan taking the lead as Liptrot stand-in Rona, a young woman fresh out of rehab who returns to Orkney to reconnect with the landscape of her childhood in an effort to heal herself following a decade of addiction. Adapted by Liptrot and German director Nora Fingscheidt (System Crasher, The Unforgivable), the film was shot in Orkney earlier this year, partly on Liptrot’s dad’s farm, where the titular “outrun” – an area of rough pasture running alongside the cliff’s edge – is located. Paapa Essiedu and Stephen Dillane co-star.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (14 July) Having successfully completed one seemingly impossible mission by saving Covid-decimated multiplexes with Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise gets back to Mission: Impossible proper with this first instalment of the two-part Dead Reckoning. The Cruiser’s status as the only movie star bigger than the franchises he fronts makes this seventh instalment of the globe-hopping action spectacular a tantalising prospect, especially after the bar-raising Fallout reminded us just how good a proper movie-movie could be.