2024 Arts Preview: The Year Ahead in Film

Oscar tipped Poor Things kicks off a year awash with sequels, prequels and spin-offs, writes Alistair Harkness, but smaller scale gems such as Back to Black and The Zone of Interest are also set to shine

Poor Things, 12 January Since I last previewed Poor Things two years ago (hey, the film industry has been in a state of flux), Yorgos Lanthimos’s suitably twisted Alasdair Gray adaptation has finally emerged to breathless acclaim on the festival circuit and is now a potential Oscar frontrunner. Not that this is so strange: Lanthimos’s furiously filthy The Favourite bagged an Academy Award for Olivia Colman, so its entirely possible Emma Stone’s feral turn as Frankensteined sexpot Bella Baxter will win her a second statuette (Mark Ruffalo – on gloriously funny form as her caddish suitor Duncan Wedderburn – might also get lucky). Gray actually met with Lanthimos in Glasgow years before his death (he was a fan of Dogtooth) and gave him his blessing, though quite what he’d have made of Lanthimos’s subsequent decision to transpose the setting from Glasgow to London is harder to gauge – ditto the fact that its sole link to Scotland is Willem Dafoe’s accent.

The Holdovers, 19 January Sideways director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti reunite for this period comedy drama about a curmudgeonly prep-school teacher (Giamatti) forced to stay on campus over the Christmas holidays to look after those students not going home. A loser-com redemption story, advance reports suggest it marks a return to form for Payne after the conceptually laboured Downsizing.

The Zone of Interest, 2 February Jonathan Glazer makes a film roughly once a decade, but the results are usually worth the wait. Ten years on from Under the Skin, he’s back with this harrowing holocaust drama (is there any other kind?) about a prison camp commandant (Christian Friedel) living with his in-denial family in a kind of bucolic bliss on the edges of Auschwitz. Based on the novel by the late Martin Amis, it co-stars Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller and features another discomfiting score from Mica Levi.

Poor Things

Back to Black, 12 April The tragic life of Amy Winehouse gets the biopic treatment courtesy of director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, who last collaborated on the underrated early-years John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy. Greenhalgh also went on to write the Ian Curtis biopic Control, so hopes are high that they’ve found a similarly nuanced and artistic way to capture Winehouse’s talent, not just revel in the substance abuse that curtailed her life at 27. Marisa Abela (star of the HBO show Industry) stars as Amy, with Eddie Marsan as her father, Mitch, and Jack O’Connell as Blake, the husband who got her hooked on heroin.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, 24 May 2024 is awash with sequels, prequels and spin-offs, but George Miller’s return to the Mad Max universe is one of the few worth getting excited about. Yes, Dune Part II (1 March) is also out, but the first part was a snooze, whereas Mad Max: Fury Road was the most demented piece of blockbuster entertainment of the last decade. For this prequel, Anya Taylor-Joy takes over the role memorably originated by a skin-headed Charlize Theron in the earlier film. “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” snarls co-star Chris Hemsworth in the trailer. Judging from the way Miller seems to be riffing on The Road Warrior (still the best of the series) that’s a very definite “yes”. Tom Burke co-stars.

Gladiator II, 22 November Okay, maybe a belated sequel to Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning Gladiator is also worth getting a little excited about. The 86-year-old Scott has been talking about this almost since the first one made Russell Crowe a global superstar back in 2000. With Maximus dying, though, this sequel will focus on his grown-up son, Lucius, played by Aftersun’s Paul Mescal. Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascale buff up the movie star quotient. Are you not entertained?

Joker: Folie A Deux, 4 October 2023 pretty much saw the death of the superhero film. The supervillain film, on the other hand, is set to get another boost with this sequel to Todd Phillips’s subversive origins story for Gotham City’s clown-prince of crime. That box-office behemoth stood out thanks to Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance, its King of Comedy-influence story and its disinterest in linking up with DC’s other comic-book properties. Little is yet known about the new film other than Phoenix returns and Lady Gaga is playing Joker's partner-in-crime Harley Quinn. Oh, and there are rumours it’s a musical.

Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa in The Holdovers PIC: Seacia Pavao / © 2023 FOCUS FEATURES LLC

Paddington in Peru, 8 November Given the near-universal acclaim for the beloved Paddington 2, there’s a lot riding on Paddington in Peru. Original co-writer/director Paul King was off doing Wonka, so this third instalment is being helmed by veteran British commercials director Dougal Wilson, the man responsible for many of those John Lewis Christmas ads that some people find adorable. The title pretty much explains the premise, with the prodigal bear returning home to visit his Aunt Lucy. Olivia Colman and Antonio Banderas join the cast; Ben Wishaw once again voices the bear with the hard stare.