12 hours ago
Auteurs assemble! Why 2025 offers a banquet of movies by cinema’s great creators
Malick, Ramsay, Bigelow, Denis, Guadagnino, Zhao: cinema’s most exciting visionaries are all back with new films this year. And then there’s Iñárritu directing Tom Cruise 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. Continue reading...