2024 was a great year for cinema—American and otherwise—especially if you knew where to look, and 2025 looks to be just as striking.
Between exciting Hollywood studio movies, eccentric arthouse indies, and international festival fare, the world of movies has never been more accessible than it is today. And thanks to new streaming and distribution channels, audiences have never been more connected (through the likes of Letterboxd and social media). These 10 films from renowned directors are likely to enter the conversation and stay there once they debut. So, they’re worth keeping an eye on, whether they have planned release dates and festival premieres, or they only exist, in the public sphere, as a brief synopsis.
RELATED: The 10 Best Indie Films of 2024
1. “Mickey 17” (March 7)
Bong Joon Ho’s long-delayed “Mickey 7” adaptation is finally seeing the light of day. The good news is that despite this being the Korean maestro’s first Hollywood outing, his contract with Warner Bros. grants him final cut on the sci-fi comedy. If you’ve seen any of his other works (“Memories of Murder,” “Snowpiercer,” “Parasite”), the prospect of pure, unfiltered Bong on a massive budget and scale is incredibly exciting, as is the fact that he’s re-teaming with “Okja” star Steven Yeun. He’s also collaborating with Robert Pattinson, Robert Pattinson, and Robert Pattinson; the “Batman” star plays several cloned worker drones in an off-world mining colony.
2. “Sinners” (April 18)
While filmmaker Ryan Coogler has spent the last decade on franchise fare—the “Rocky” sequel “Creed,” and Marvel’s two “Black Panther” films—he’s remained incredibly adept at telling rigorous, dramatic stories within genre confines. For Warner Bros. period horror “Sinners,” his first original film since 2013’s tragic biopic “Fruitvale Station,” he teams up once again with Michael B. Jordan for not one but two onscreen roles. Jordan plays Elijah and Elias, twin brothers in the Jim Crow–era South hoping to leave their past behind, only to find a deep evil waiting for them in their rural hometown. Few other details are known, but every reported rumor points in the same direction: This is Coogler’s bloody answer to vampire movies with some unexpected historical twists.
RELATED: How Robert Eggers Turned ‘Nosferatu’ Into a Psychosexual Nightmare
3. “Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning” (May 23)
The nearly three decade–old “Mission: Impossible” franchise was once an auteurist pit stop, where one-of-a-kind filmmakers from Brian De Palma to John Woo would put their stamp on each new entry. However, every film since the fifth installment, 2015’s “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation,” has been handled by close Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie. Paramount’s eighth film in the series (being teased as the last one) looks to up the ante, both in terms of death-defying stunts—Cruise hangs off another plane or two—and for what’s at stake for IMF agent Ethan Hunt.
Cruise and McQuarrie have been out to prove the wonder and effectiveness of old-school, tactile action filmmaking (their villain is also, notably, an algorithmic AI), and seeing the lengths they’ll go to deliver cinematic thrills is just as exciting as the series’ long-running story.
4. Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Film (Aug. 8)
While it’s rumored to have been inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” little else is known about the next film from “There Will Be Blood” and “Licorice Pizza” director Paul Thomas Anderson. Even its title is a mystery, though some reports point to it being called “The Battle of Baktan Cross.” Despite a wide release being planned by Warner Bros. (including plenty of IMAX screens), Anderson is one of the few American filmmakers who, even nine movies in, appears to have retained his indie arthouse sensibility at the studio level. He continues to turn in exciting, idiosyncratic works on increasingly larger scales. Shot on 35mm using VistaVision cameras (the only film to do so in decades outside of “The Brutalist”), it’s set to star a who’s who of Hollywood: Leonardo DiCaprio, Regina Hall, Sean Penn, Alana Haim, Teyana Taylor, Wood Harris, and Benicio del Toro.
5. “Bugonia” (Nov. 7)
The fifth collaboration between actor Emma Stone and Greek “weird wave” maestro Yorgos Lanthimos, “Bugonia” is set to follow the director’s pivot à la 2024’s “Kinds of Kindness” toward the violent and surreal—or rather, a realignment with his earlier films. A remake of Korean sci-fi comedy “Save the Green Planet!,” “Bugonia” will follow the kidnapping of a powerful pharma CEO Michelle (Stone) by a pair of conspiracy theorist cousins who are convinced she’s an alien intent on destroying planet Earth. Details are currently sparse, but one of the aforementioned kidnappers appears to be a beekeeper named Teddy played by Jesse Plemons, Stone’s co-star on Lanthimos’ most recent project, “Kinds of Kindness.” The film from Focus Features sounds like the perfect combination of vicious and loopy, and will likely make a major festival bow before its release (either at Cannes or Venice).
6. “Avatar: Fire and Ash” (Dec. 19)
After the gargantuan success of “Titanic,” “Avatar,” and “Avatar: The Way of Water”—three of only six films to gross $2 billion—it would be folly to doubt James Cameron. The director’s technical experimentation has gone hand in hand with simple, functional, emotionally driven storytelling for decades.
His “The Way of Water” took the world of Pandora to new heights and undersea depths, and given Cameron’s bro-meets–flower child sensibilities, he’s likely to stage some eye-popping action scenes in novel environments, while preaching a preservationist message. With “Fire and Ash” set to introduce another new tribe of Na’vi, his sprawling alien world will undoubtedly expand in new and unexpected ways.
7. “Alpha” (TBD)
Both of Julia Ducournau’s films—cannibal coming-of-age movie “Raw” and the Palme d’Or–winning, mechanophillic drama “Titane”—premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. So, it’s likely the French fest will host the debut for her third feature, “Alpha.” Five-time Palme d’Or winner Neon acquired the rights last year, and while the plot is under wraps at this time, the film will star Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim. A set report suggests it’s Ducournau’s “most personal” film yet and revolves around a teenager in the ’80s being rejected by her classmates after a rumor that she’s contracted a new disease spreads. There are already distinct echoes of the early AIDS crisis, but knowing Ducournau’s visceral and transformative approach, there are likely to be more layers and unsettling genre metaphors disguising this political critique.
8. “Franz” (TBD)
Polish director Agnieszka Holland—whose last film was the gut-wrenching refugee thriller “Green Border”—tends to deal in the complex darkness of the human soul. This makes her a perfect fit for a biopic about Austrian-Czech author Franz Kafka, perhaps the most famous 20th century surrealist. According to Holland, the film—boarded by Films Boutique for world sales—will deal with Kafka’s life in mosaic fragments, but it will also trace his lingering influence in modern-day Prague. Starring striking-looking newcomer Idan Weiss, expect to find out more about this intriguing approach when “Franz” inevitably hits the festival circuit.
9. “Resurrection” (TBD)
With atmospheric works in the tradition of Andrei Tarkovsky, but with a distinctly Chinese political and cultural sensibility, director Bi Gan has carved himself a niche in the world of arthouse cinema. Following the melodic slow burn “Kaili Blues” and the dreamlike 3D experiment “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Bi’s next film sounds like a sci-fi mind-melter. “Resurrection” follows a woman who, during surgery, falls into an eternal, timeless realm where she stumbles across an android corpse whom she awakens by telling stories. Like “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” “Resurrection” has been boarded for sales and distribution by French company Les Films du Losange, making a Cannes premiere probable.
10. “The Way of the Wind” (TBD)
Given his lengthy editing process, there’s no telling whether Terrence Malick’s latest film, which wrapped filming in 2019, will actually release in 2025—though a premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival has been the apparent plan since before last year’s edition. Malick’s films have always been deeply spiritual (his Palme d’Or–winning “The Tree of Life” is practically an impressionistic letter to God), and “The Way of the Wind” looks to tackle some of his beliefs head-on. While this time he’s focusing on a grounded story about the life of Jesus Christ, his last film “A Hidden Life,” about an Austrian farmer facing death for refusing to fight alongside Nazis on the cusp of World War II, tackled similar themes of conscientious objection.
According to Géza Röhrig, the actor portraying Jesus in “The Way of the Wind,” the film will follow Saint Peter (Matthias Schoenaerts) as he convinces the messianic figure to become more politically involved against Roman oppression. Whatever its level of historic accuracy, Malick’s soulful, freewheeling approach will likely lend the film his trademark visual poetry, and offer up new ways of seeing cinema, ourselves, and the world at large.
