From Megalopolis to Joker 2: the 2024 films Guardian writers are most excited about
Charles Bramesco, Jesse Hassenger, Adrian Horton, Radheyan Simonpillai, Veronica Esposito, Andrew Pulver, Catherine Shoard, Scott Tobias, Benjamin Lee and Alaina Demopoulos
Polaris
Polaris will be the fifth feature film completed in the 25-year career of the unprolific yet consistently excellent Lynne Ramsay, and her first since 2017. She works with a glacial patience matching the one sentence of information known about her next project: “Set in Alaska during the 1890s, an ice photographer meets the devil.” With real-life couple Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara as the only announced cast, either one could conceivably play either role, and both combinations would be equally tantalizing. But Ramsay is a singular talent, irreplaceable and irreplicable in her fluency with psychological violence and expertly calibrated fusions of brutal realism with stylistic liberation. Her sojourn into the frigid wilds brings her into unfamiliar territory, though the elemental minimalism in those endless expanses of snow and ice fits right in with her focus on the barren interiors of her weathered characters. She never got to make her western, booted from Jane Got a Gun before cameras started rolling; this could be our chance to see what might have been. Charles Bramesco
MaXXXine
One of the worst parts of franchise fatigue is the hungover feeling of remorse that now chases the anticipation of even theoretically exciting sequels. Rather than enjoying a few big-ticket series that might produce a fun new installment every three or four years, film fans now have access to a world in which almost anything is fair game for being sequelized and franchised into joyless oblivion. I’m thankful, then, for the small-scale, experimental franchise Ti West and Mia Goth came up with on the fly when they shot their porn-centric riff on 70s slasher movies, X, back to back with its origin-story prequel Pearl. Now they’re ready to complete a trilogy with the already-shot MaXXXine, following Goth’s Final Girl character from X as she high-tails it for Los Angeles and tries to make her dreams come true.
How (or even if) a horrific body count will fit into this story remains to be seen, but X is one of my favorite movies of the decade – funny, sexy, creepy and smart – and its unexpected prequel was a clear labor of love from its film-maker and star. Given those scrappy origins and their strong track record, I’ll allow myself the adolescent pleasure of getting really damn excited for the sequel.
Jesse Hassenger
Dune: Part Two
Despite being unable to finish the book and generally agnostic on sci-fi, I am anxiously awaiting the delayed Dune: Part Two. Maybe it’s because Dune was the first movie I saw in theaters after Covid, and the combination of a massive screen, teeth-chattering Hans Zimmer score, genuinely alien vibes and extreme self-seriousness felt like drugs. Maybe it’s because on multiple subsequent rewatches, at various levels of sobriety, I have found Denis Villeneuve’s angsty, geopolitically dense adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, in which Timothée Chalamet declares “desert power” with complete sincerity, to be both totally convincing and unintentionally hilarious. Maybe it’s the sandworms, or the fact that the first movie was, deceptively, half of a story. Regardless, Dune: Part Two has become, for me, a font of hype, a fact only bolstered by its too-revealing, hype-y trailers. An intergalactic war, scheming Florence Pugh, Austin Butler looking deeply off-putting and Zendaya in more than two scenes? This is the kind of pop culture extravaganza/ intense escapism I want in 2024. Adrian Horton
Megalopolis
If only Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis had come out sooner. He could have joined his fellow octogenarians Michael Mann, Hayao Miyazaki, Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott in this whole “Avengers assemble” scenario we had in 2023. They all came back swinging last year with expensive and ambitious passion projects that defied the current economic model of franchise filmmaking while revisiting themes they’ve explored in the past, giving us what we may inevitably call swan songs. Coppola’s Megalopolis would have fit right in. The movie, which he began writing in the 80s and is currently in the edit, sounds like a Dune-adjacent follow-up to Apocalypse Now, dramatizing the fall of a civilization but this time with a sci-fi lens. We only know scant details about Megalopolis, a $120m production starring Adam Driver that Coppola is paying for himself. No studio would pony up that money for what is being described as a singular and original concept – you know, like Apocalypse Now. Whether it is spectacular or fails spectacularly, Megapolis is an event; a chance for us to line up behind yet another cinema giant refusing to let his art be diminished by algorithms chasing the next Avengers. Radheyan Simonpillai
Mean Girls
Everyone, we need to talk about the 2024 Mean Girls remake. With musical numbers adapted from the Broadway adaptation of the original film, loads of in-jokes calling back to now iconic moments from the original 2004 film, and a cast that had barely even been born when the first Mean Girls hit screens, the Mean Girls reboot has got loads of potential. The movie has both high hopes to appeal to a gen Z audience while also capturing the nostalgia of those of us who know and love the original, which means that the first-time directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr and the Mean Girls alumna/ screenwriter Tina Fey have got their work cut out for them. The trailers so far are promising, and I’m excited to get my 2024 started off with this one. Veronica Esposito
Joker: Folie à Deux
The original Joker, with its Martin Scorsese stylings, unrepentant use of Gary Glitter on the soundtrack and controversy-baiting depiction of serious mental illness, was never going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I thought it really had something: an attempt to reconcile the quotidian derangement of superhero movies with something approximating reality. Hence I am really looking forward to Folie à Deux, which with its subtitle suggesting a theme of shared psychosis, would appear to be amping up the weirdness levels: not only has it cast Lady Gaga as – we are told – the prison psychiatrist Harley Quinn (who falls in love with Joaquin Phoenix’s Arkham asylum-confined Fleck/Joker) but that it’s going to be (of all things) a musical. Well, if it gets anywhere near the first film’s superb feel for atmosphere, and willingness to completely step away from that boring irradiated weightlessness that characterises the vast majority of superhero movies, it’s got my vote.
Andrew Pulver
The End
The best directors make you wait. Jonathan Glazer took nine years between Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest. Alexander Payne’s new one, The Holdovers, comes six years after his previous. But clear the decks and hold my calls because 2024 promises an apocalyptic musical from Joshua Oppenheimer, the man who upended documentaries in 2012 with The Act of Killing and its 2014 companion piece The Look of Silence. Little is known about The End other than that it’s about a wealthy family in a bunker years after an armageddon they helped hasten. Michael Shannon is the patriarch, Tilda Swinton his wife. George MacKay, Lennie James and, obviously, Tim McInnerny co-star. Rare is the film about which you have no idea what it’ll be like, other than that it will be majestic. Catherine Shoard
Nosferatu
A Robert Eggers take on Nosferatu sounds almost too on-the-nose, such an ideal pairing of director and material that it feels like an inevitability. From his uncommonly assured first feature, The Witch, Eggers’s gothic sensibility has strongly evoked FW Murnau’s Nosferatu and other works by German expressionists, and his followups, The Lighthouse and The Northman, have steadily ramped up his ambition. Willem Dafoe, who played Count Orlok in Shadow of the Vampire, has been cast in the Van Helsing-like role of a crazed vampire hunter, and Bill Skarsgård, so unsettling in Barbarian and John Wick: Chapter 4, seems right for the title role. But it’s Eggers’s obsession with historical detail that makes his Nosferatu such an enticing proposition. Few film-makers devote themselves so monistically to period ambience and bric-a-brac, and it stands to give this oft-revisited classic a specific flavor.
Scott Tobias
Holland, Michigan
Last year’s ferocious dating thriller Fresh might not have caused the commotion it deserved (funny what happens when you dump a film designed to provoke a big crowd in the overcrowded netherworld of streaming) but it showed the debut director Mimi Cave to be a first-time marvel, the kind of film-maker whose next project one impatiently awaits. The wait has thankfully been relatively brief, this year seeing the release of her intriguing “Hitchcockian” thriller Holland, Michigan. Nicole Kidman (delivering on her promise to bring back “sexy, datenight movies” with this and her upcoming erotic office thriller Babygirl) plays a woman who suspects her husband might be leading a double life, but things may be “worse than she initially imagined” as she also engages in an affair of her own. It’s giving off an early 90s throwback vibe, an era of glossy yet nasty domestic deceit, and with an unusual supporting cast that includes Matthew MacFadyen, Rachel Sennott, Jude Hill and Gael García Bernal and
Cave’s proven ability to shock and push buttons, it should be a blast. Benjamin Lee
Problemista
Many films that were supposed to debut last year but got delayed due to the concurring WGA and Sag-Aftra strikes will finally hit theaters this year. I’m especially excited to see Problemista, a movie written, directed and starring Julio Torres, an SNL writer and co-creator of HBO’s Los Espookys. The story follows Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador trying to make it in New York. This means finding a permanent gig before his work visa runs out. His only hope, according to the trailer, is assisting an out-oftouch artist redeemed only by her neon pink hair and the fact that she’s played by Tilda Swinton. It promises to be an offbeat and surreal visual treat.