The next two months will bring the customary glut of awards contenders. It’s a brave distributor that releases its films into this throng, but the UK outfit The Works will do just that with House of Tolerance, an acclaimed drama set in a brothel in fin de siècle Paris. Bertrand Bonello’s picture was named by the New York Times as one of last year’s “Don’t Miss Movies You Probably Missed” (under its US title, House of Pleasures); the UK finally gets to see it on 27 January.
Elsewhere the schedules are dominated by awards magnets including Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (13 Jan), Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus, which was recently celebrated in the NS by Slavoj Zizek, and Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 tale Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (10 Feb). Also falling under the hoping-for-silverware umbrella are two films which between them comprise the UK’s own mini Michael Fassbender-fest — Steve McQueen’s Shame (13 Jan) and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (10 Feb).
Once the tearful winners have been mocked and the voting injustices mourned, it’s anyone’s guess which films will prevail. Personally I’m hoping for a release for The Eye of the Storm, directed by the excellent Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Six Degrees of Separation) and starring Geoffrey Rush alongside the reigning mistresses of hauteur, Charlotte Rampling and Judy Davis.
Regrettably, 3D makeovers are already clogging up the schedule, with an extra dimension added visually (though not creatively) to defunct, corroded epics including Titanic (6 April) and Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (9 Feb). Re-releases of Casablanca (10 Feb) and La Grande Illusion (6 April) appear to have been spared this technological molestation, for which we should be grateful.
Some of us are still recovering from the shock of 2011, one of the few years since 1995 in which Michael Winterbottom did not release a new film (unless you count the non-UK cinema edit of his six-part BBC series The Trip). The drought ends with Trishna (9 March), an adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles transposed to modern-day India. Connected in name only is the Austrian chiller Michael (2 March). This controlled study of a man who keeps prisoner a 10-year-old boy will be the very definition of a tough sell; to others, Cameron Crowe’s whimsical comedy-drama We Bought a Zoo (16 March) will be more deserving of that label. At least Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, from the great Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is released on the same day.
As Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation proved last year, the best films often arrive unheralded by net-casting previews such as these. But we do know that there will be new work from Wong Kar-Wai (The Grandmasters), Michael Haneke (Amour), Bernardo Bertolucci (Me and You), Laurent Cantet (Foxfire, adapted from Joyce Carol Oates’s novel about 1950s girl gangs) and Takashi Miike (Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney). Meanwhile, François Ozon will adhere to a new government directive aiming to see Kristin Scott Thomas cast in at least 87 per cent of all French films (his contribution is Dans la maison). Currently awaiting UK release dates are Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Andrew Dominik’s Cogan’s Trade, Park Chan Wook’s Stoker and Baz Lurhmann’s The Great Gatsby.
Tim Burton fans get a double-dose this year. First up is the gothic extravaganza Dark Shadows (11 May), with Johnny Depp as a vampiric patroarch. Then it’s animation — and, to be more precise, reanimation — in Frankenweenie (5 October), a feature-length version of Burton’s 1984 short about a boy who refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. Pixar releases Brave (17 August), widely trumpeted as the studio’s first movie with a female lead; I know, I know, Studio Ghibli never made such a fuss about putting a girl in the driving seat.
A triple-shot of big-budget superheroism hoopla this year, starting on 27 April with the Marvel extravaganza The Avengers — sadly nothing to do with Steed, Mrs Peel or kinky boots, but rather a superheroes’ get-together which includes Mark Ruffalo’s first outing as the Hulk. He’s the third actor in ten years (after Eric Bana and Edward Norton) to try to get a handle on the big green lug. Then Andrew Garfield will make his wall-climbing debut in The Amazing Spider-Man (6 July) before Christopher Nolan’s third and final Batman gloom-o-rama, The Dark Knight Rises (20 July). Does James Bond count as a superhero? Or is that just a spurious attempt to shoehorn Daniel Craig’s third Bond movie, Skyfall (26 Oct), into this paragraph? Next thing you know, I’ll be wangling the same privileges for the hairy-footed ramblers of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (14 Dec), the first instalment of Peter Jackson’s two-part return to Tolkien.
Of course, by then we’ll all be terribly excited about Judd Apatow’s This Is 40 (21 Dec), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (26 Dec) and other lesser-known films on which “Action!” is only now being called.