25 films to look forward to in 2025

The coming year sees the return of Superman, Avatar and Bridget Jones, along with new films from Bong Joon-ho, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryan Coogler.

Pixar has ticked off toys, fish, monsters, cars, superheroes, elves and emotions. Now cinema’s smartest animation studio has made a cartoon about aliens: Elio. Its hero is a shy young boy who is obsessed by outer space, so he is delighted to be beamed up to the Communiverse, the intergalactic home of intelligent lifeforms from all over the universe. The only snag is that these intelligent lifeforms have mistaken him for the supreme leader of planet Earth. Elio might not be able to match the success of Pixar’s last film, Inside Out 2, which was the highest grossing film of 2024, but it’s certainly promising, not least because its co-director, Domee Shi, made the glorious Turning Red. And it might make a stellar double bill with another of 2025’s cartoons, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, which has Daffy Duck and Porky Pig saving the world from an alien invasion. (NB)

Twenty-four years after Bridget Jones’ Diary, Renée Zellweger returns in the fourth film in the series as middle-aged Bridget, with a different life but the same qualities that made her popular in the first place. She’s still an adorable bumbler in life. In the romcom, based on Helen Fielding’s 2013 novel, Bridget is now a widow, after the death of Mark (Colin Firth in the earlier films), and is the mother of two small children. Single again in a new world of dating apps, she looks horrified when a co-worker says, “I’ve set you up on Tinder”, And once more she is torn between two appealing men: Mr Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a teacher at her children’s school, and a 29-year-old called Roxster (Leo Woodall). Hugh Grant returns as Daniel – Uncle Daniel to Bridget’s children – along with Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones as her parents and Shirley Henderson and Sally Phillips as her loyal best friends, Jude and Shazz. (CJ)

Releases on 13 February on Peacock in the US and 14 February in UK cinemas

Michael B Jordan and director Ryan Coogler have formed an exciting collaboration that goes back 12 years, from Fruitvale Station through Black Panther and Creed. Their fifth film together is a socially conscious horror story written by Coogler. A bulked-up Jordan plays twins, Elijah and Elias, in a period piece set in the 1930s. When one of the troubled twins returns to his hometown in the South to start over, he only finds more trouble, which includes Jim Crow-era violence, as well as snakes and supernatural evil. “I ain’t never seen no demons, no ghosts, no magic – till now,” Jordan says in voiceover in the creepy, enticing trailer. Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku also star in the film, which was shot in New Orleans by the great cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). Coogler hasn’t made a weak film so far, and Sinners should continue that streak. (CJ)

Releases 18 April 2025 in the US and UK

F1 stars Brad Pitt as a 1990s car-racing champion who comes out of retirement to mentor a rookie, played by Damson Idris. One selling point is that the film was shot at real racing circuits, and features numerous real Formula One drivers. But another intriguing aspect is who it doesn’t feature. F1 reunites several key members of the Top Gun: Maverick team, including director Joseph Kosinski, screenwriter Ehren Kruger, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and composer Hans Zimmer. In other words, Tom Cruise is just about the only one of the team who is missing. And considering that Cruise starred in Days of Thunder, a car-racing drama produced by Bruckheimer, F1 does raise a fascinating question: why didn’t Cruise star in this, too, and call it Days of Thunder 2? (NB)

Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell star in this romantic fantasy directed by Kogonada (After Yang and Pachinko) and written by Seth Reiss (co-writer of The Menu). The journey they take is an actual road trip as well as a metaphor. Farrell plays David, who is en route to a wedding, driving a 1996 car that has a magical GPS, when he meets Sarah (Robbie). The strangers go off together, guided by the car’s sixth sense, and discover they have a mysterious connection. Lily Rabe, Jodie Turner-Smith and Phoebe Waller-Bridge also star. You really have to go with the premise on this because it sounds absurd, but I wouldn’t underestimate the brilliant Kogonada’s ability to make it work. When the production was announced, Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony Pictures, said: “We believe the audience is desperate for originality.” In the current film landscape, that amounts to welcome counterprogramming. (CJ)

The Running Man is a novel written by Stephen King, using the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which was published in 1982. Set in a far-fetched alternate reality in which the US of the year 2025 is a totalitarian dystopia, the novel features a scrawny family man who is so desperate for money that he signs up for a dangerous television game show: he has to survive for 30 days while being chased around the world by the TV network’s trained killers. The novel was the basis of a daft 1987 action film, starring an extremely unscrawny Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is remembered mainly for the sub-James Bond puns he uses when he kills someone, such as “He had to split!” And: “He was a real pain in the neck!” But now Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Last Night in Soho) has directed and co-written a darker, more faithful adaptation of King’s novel, starring Glen Powell with Katy O’Brian, Josh Brolin and Michael Cera. It’s sure to be closer to Squid Game than it is to the Arnie film, but whether Wright can resist a bad pun or two remains to be seen. (NB)

Avatar: Fire and Ash is due to come out a mere three years after Avatar: The Way of Water, which is no time at all by the standards of its director, James Cameron: there were 13 years between the first two Avatar films, and 12 years separating Avatar and Titanic before that. Still, it’s not as if Cameron has to rush to pay the bills. His last three films – Titanic and the first two Avatar instalments – are three of the four highest grossing films ever released (Avengers: Endgame is the other). Will Avatar: Fire and Ash join them in box-office history? Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña are back as blue-skinned Na’vi on the moon of Pandora – and this time they’re up against a tribe of Na’vi baddies, the “Ash people”, who live in a volcano. If you fancy seeing more CGI-heavy sci-fi sequels in 2024, there’s also a third Tron film, Tron: Ares, in October, and Jurassic World Rebirth, starring Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, in July. (NB)

The masterful zombie-apocalypse movie 28 Days Later (2002) quickly became a classic, with a little-known Cillian Murphy as a survivor in a world decimated by a virus that caused rage and turned people into the walking dead. That film is more resonant and horrifying than ever in our own post-pandemic world, and this follow up might land as a nightmare come true. As with the original, Danny Boyle is directing and Alex Garland wrote the screenplay. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as a man who leaves an island of survivors and ventures to the mainland, not the smartest move. Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes also feature. When the trailer dropped, it became the second most watched horror trailer of all time and created a surge of speculation that a skeletal creature was the zombified version of Murphy’s character. The idea was soon debunked, but the frenzy is a sign of how eagerly viewers are waiting for the film, the first in a projected new trilogy. (CJ)

Releases 20 June in the US and UK

Bong Joon-ho directed Parasite, the international hit which became the first film not in the English language to win the Oscar for best picture. But that came out back in 2019, so we’ve had a long wait for the Korean director’s follow-up. A year ago, in fact, Mickey 17 was on the BBC’s list of films to watch in 2024, but its release date was pushed back, so we’ve had to put it on the list again. Still, the surprisingly wacky trailer has only made Mickey 17 more tantalising. As we said last year, Bong has made a science-fiction thriller about a man called Mickey (Robert Pattinson) who volunteers to be an “expendable”, that is, a labourer on a deep-space mission who is cloned every time he is killed. Adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, the plot thickens when more than one Mickey is allowed to live at the same time. (NB)

Almost everything about the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson is veiled in secrecy except the fact of its existence, but that alone is good reason to look forward to it. We know he is daring and varied in his work, most recently with the delicately crafted drama Phantom Thread (2017) and the offbeat romantic comedy Licorice Pizza (2021). Given that range, it would be foolish to guess what the new film might be, but we know it will be shown in Imax, and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor and Alana Haim. The secrecy hasn’t stopped a swirl of rumours, of course, the most common being that the film is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 politically tinged novel Vineland. Who knows about that, but there is intriguing photographic evidence of Leo and PT together on the shoot. (CJ)

Releases 8 August in the US and UK

Daniel Craig may have made his last ever Bond film, but he seems happy to keep playing Benoit Blanc, the puzzle-solving sleuth with the dapper dress sense and the extravagant Southern accent. The third in the deliciously devious Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man is once again written and directed by Rian Johnson, and once again named after a pop song (by U2 in this case). It also boasts a typically star-studded cast of potential killers and victims, including Josh Brolin, Thomas Haden Church, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Andrew Scott and Cailee Spaeny. Will Hugh Grant return as Benoit’s partner, as spotted for a moment in Glass Onion? That’s one of the many things we don’t know about Wake Up Dead Man, but if it matches Johnson and Craig’s first two satirical murder mysteries, it should be one of the year’s most entertaining films. (NB)

Maggie Gyllenhaal proved that she has a true director’s vision with her first film, The Lost Daughter (2021), an eloquent adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel. She makes an even bolder move with an imaginative take on The Bride of Frankenstein, set in 1930s Chicago. Christian Bale plays the monster who needs an appropriately patched-together mate, and Jessie Buckley is the Bride. There is an echo of the 1935 classic in her look. Elsa Lanchester had an electric streak of white hair in the original movie, and Buckley has a platinum blonde period style. But this Bride also sets off a social movement, which only hints at how original Gyllenhaal’s film will be. “There are big dance numbers,” Peter Sarsgaard, Gyllenhaal’s husband, told The Hollywood Reporter. “The Bride is punk and it’s fast.” He’s in the cast, along with Annette Bening and Penelope Cruz. And if things don’t work out with this husband, maybe The Bride can get together with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein monster, also coming this year. They’re from different time periods, but what’s a little time travel between Frankensteins? (CJ)

Releases 26 September 2025 in the US and UK

This off-kilter true crime story and romance from Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine) sounds like a romp. Channing Tatum stars as the real-life Jeffrey Manchester, who robbed a series of McDonald’s by cutting holes in the roof. The film focuses on his time after he escaped from prison for those crimes, and in an even less likely turn hid out in toy stores, living on baby food and candy and riding a bicycle at night for exercise. Kirsten Dunst plays Leigh, a single mother who falls for Jeffrey without knowing about his past. Her character is based on the real-life Leigh Wainscott, who even after the revelation said the roofman was “funny, romantic, the most sensitive man I’ve ever met”, a description that calls for just the kind of goofy charm Tatum can bring. Juno Temple, Peter Dinklage, LaKeith Stanfield and Ben Mendelsohn also star in this you-couldn’t-make-it-up tale. (CJ)

Could The Final Reckoning be the final Mission: Impossible film? The action-espionage series began back in 1996, and its star, Tom Cruise, is now 62, so it might be time for him to stop running through cities and hanging onto the side of planes in mid-air. On the other hand, maybe that subtitle is just a snappier alternative to its wordy working title, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two. The previous film in the series, Dead Reckoning Part One, was a box-office disappointment in 2023, so Cruise and his writer-director, Christopher McQuarrie, may prefer audiences to think of this one as a stand-alone blockbuster rather than the second half of an ongoing story. Either way, Ethan Hunt and his gang (played by Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell) will be racing around the world, dodging explosions and assassins, in their attempt to foil a dastardly AI known as the Entity. (NB)

Wicked has made over half-a-billion dollars at the box office, so there’s no doubt about the ready audience for this film. Formerly known as Wicked Part 2, its new title is taken from a duet sung by Elphaba and Glinda in the musical’s second half, which follows a time jump between the two parts. Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is now firmly the Wicked Witch of the West and Ariana Grande’s Galinda now Glinda the Good Witch. The other familiar characters return, including Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero, the centre of a love triangle with Glinda and Elphaba, Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible, Marissa Bode as Nessarose, now Governor of Munchkinland, and Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard. Stephen Schwartz, who composed the Broadway show, has added new songs for part two, which will also include the origin stories of the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion. But a gazillion impatient fans probably knew that already. For Good arrives a year after part one, and as Bowen Yang, who plays Glinda’s friend Pfanee, has said, “Everyone’s like, ‘This is the longest intermission ever.'” (CJ)

Releases 21 November 2025 in the US and UK

After Conclave, one of the best of 2024, and the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Edward Berger has become a director whose films leap onto any list of the year’s most promising. He has put together another terrific cast for this drama, starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton. Farrell plays a high-rolling gambler with debts who flees and hides out in Macau. He is also a con man, who pretends to be an aristocrat called Lord Doyle. The story, based on a 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, takes place in the glitzy fake opulence of Macau’s casinos, where Doyle meets a woman who might help save him. Berger told Deadline, “If Conclave is a really well-constructed chess game, very architectural, this embraces chaos and opera.” He was curious, he said, about “the external pomp and circumstances of Colin Farrell in Macau, China, thrown into the last days of capitalism, in a way”. Adding authenticity, the film was shot in Macau and Hong Kong. (CJ)

The return of Ke Huy Quan is one of Hollywood’s most heartening comeback stories. As a child actor, he co-starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, but he became disillusioned with that side of the business, and he pivoted to stunt work. Almost 20 years later, Quan had another go at acting, and he went on to win an Oscar for his performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Now he is starring in a film of his own. In Love Hurts, he plays a mild-mannered estate agent, Marvin Gable, who keeps his criminal past a secret. When his gangster brother (Daniel Wu) sends a pair of goons to his house, Marvin has no choice but to show off his martial arts skills once again. It isn’t the most original plot ever, but Love Hurts does look fun. Besides, it co-stars Ariana DeBose, who won the best supporting actor Oscar in 2022 for West Side Story, making it one of the only action comedies to have two Oscar winners in the central roles. (NB)

Guillermo del Toro was making great elevated horror films before anyone called them that, going back to Cronos in 1993. In Frankenstein, he brings his distinctive vision to the ultimate horror story, Mary Shelley’s enduring Gothic tale of Dr Victor Frankenstein’s scientific ambition, his monster’s humanity and the quest for immortality. Oscar Isaac plays Frankenstein, who has a mad, demonic look in his eyes, and Jacob Elordi is the monster. The film’s period look is true to Shelley’s 1818 novel with nods to the lab in the classic 1931 Frankenstein movie. The project has been simmering in various incarnations since 2008 and in Del Toro’s mind for much longer. “Frankenstein to me is the pinnacle of everything, and part of me wants to do a version of it, part of me has for more than 25 years chickened out of making it,” he said in 2016. In a world full of Frankenstein movies, there’s none I’d rather see than del Toro’s. (CJ)

Marvel’s superhero films never quite regained their momentum after Avengers: Endgame came out in 2019. In 2023, the studio suffered two outright flops, The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. And in 2024, the only Marvel film was Deadpool & Wolverine – and that one made a point of using characters from other studios, rather than from Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. But Marvel is hoping to bounce back with three potential blockbusters in 2025. In February, there’s Captain America: Brave New World, with Anthony Mackie as the new Captain America and Harrison Ford as the Red Hulk. In May, there’s Thunderbolts, which teams up various supporting characters and anti-heroes, including Florence Pugh’s Yelena and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky. But Marvel’s most feverishly anticipated offering is The Fantastic Four: First Steps, with Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby. This retro-futuristic sci-fi caper is set in the 1960s, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original comic was launched, so it should look different from any other Marvel film. Anyway, it can only be an improvement on the last Fantastic Four film, from 2015, which was one of the greatest debacles in the history of superhero cinema. (NB)

Both of Hollywood’s major superhero film studios are relaunching in 2025. Marvel is having a soft reboot, in that its stories will focus on a new group of characters, but will be set in the same fictional universe as all of its previous films. But DC is wiping the slate clean, which means that Henry Cavill’s Superman, Ben Affleck’s Batman, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and the rest will be nowhere to be seen. That’s probably for the best. James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad) is overseeing the new DC Universe, which suggests that it might have a bit more light and humour than the last few DC efforts. Gunn has also directed the first film set in this new universe: Superman. David Corenswet (Twisters) is the latest actor to play the Man of Steel, Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvellous Mrs Maisel) is playing Lois Lane, and Nicholas Hoult is the evil Lex Luthor. The trailer also promises that we’ll see several other DC superheroes – not to mention Krypto the Superdog. (NB)

Celine Song’s first film, the Oscar-nominated Past Lives (2023), was a nuanced drama about a New York woman who reconnects with the boy she knew as a child in Korea years before, as the lure of the past intrudes on her happily married life in the present. Christine Vachon, who has produced both Song films, predicted, “She’s going to be the kind of director who doesn’t make the same movie twice”.  Sure enough, she moves into lighter, romcom territory with Materialists, starring Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a matchmaker who has to deal with her own romantic dilemma. Should she go for the perfect match she would have set up for herself or the ex she thought she had left behind? Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal also star, so she probably can’t go far wrong, but the premise reflects a timely question: does the heart speak louder than the algorithm? (CJ)

If you’ve seen Piece by Piece, the Pharrell Williams documentary which was made using Lego animation, you’ll know that the multi-talented music superstar has fond memories of growing up in the Atlantis Apartments in Virginia Beach, Virginia, not far from Missy Elliott and Timbaland. Now he is producing a whole film that revolves around those apartments, a coming-of-age musical set in the summer of 1977. The director is Michel Gondry, the eccentric French genius who made The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the cast includes Halle Bailey (The Little Mermaid), Da’Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers), Quinta Brunson (Abbott Elementary), Janelle Monáe and Missy Elliott herself. More importantly, the songs are by Pharrell, together with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (The Greatest Showman, La La Land), so Golden should have one of 2025’s best soundtrack albums, if nothing else. (NB)

This will be a big year for live-action remakes of cartoons. In May, Disney is releasing Lilo & Stitch, and in May, Universal / DreamWorks is releasing How to Train Your Dragon – although we can assume that Stitch and the dragons are CGI rather than live-action per se. But the remake which is making all the headlines is Disney’s Snow White, a new version of the studio’s very first animated feature film, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It has created controversy on social media for all sorts of reasons, including the ethnicity and the politics of its stars, and a screenplay (co-written by Greta Gerwig) which reimagines Snow White (Rachel Zegler) as a rebel leader who foments a revolution against her wicked stepmother (Gal Gadot). Let’s hope that all of this controversy doesn’t dwarf the film itself. (NB)

Just trust him. Noah Baumbach, the writer and director of Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale, knows what he’s doing, even if Netflix isn’t ready to say much about what that is yet, not even offering up a title. It is a comedy written with Emily Mortimer (The Pursuit of Love) and has a cast of people you wouldn’t necessarily think belong in the same film, which is probably the point. George Clooney stars in his first film with Baumbach, along with Adam Sandler, who was a central character in the director’s The Meyerowitz Stories. The sterling lineup of actors includes Laura Dern, who won an Oscar for Marriage Story, as well as Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Jim Broadbent, Eve Hewson, Patrick Wilson, Alba Rohrwacher and Greta Gerwig (Baumbach’s wife, frequent collaborator and co-writer on Barbie). The cast is as sprawling as the locations where the film was shot, in various cities in the US, the UK and Italy. (CJ)

David Lowery is known for such experimental supernatural dramas as A Ghost Story, which showed life after death from the perspective of a ghost, and The Green Knight, a weird and wonderful Arthurian saga. But even he is perplexed by his latest film. “It is so wild,” the writer-director has said. “It is a movie I am sure will provoke a lot of strong feelings, in every possible direction. It feels very true to who I am, and very close to me, but it is also consistently surprising me in ways that I did not anticipate.” What Lowery can confirm is that Mother Mary is an “epic melodrama” about the relationship between a pop star, played by Anne Hathaway, and a fashion designer, played by Michaela Coel (I Will Destroy You), who has the job of designing a dress for her. Also, Hathaway will be performing songs by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX – and given that her supercharged singing in Les Misérables earnt her an Oscar for best supporting actress, those songs should indeed be “wild”. (NB)