Jan. 18, 2012 - Issue #848: City of champions
Prevue
Coming attractions 2012 - part 1
A preview of the coming year in film
» Coming soon: Studio Ghibli's The Secret World of Arrietty
JANUARY
Leftovers from 2011 and critics' best-of lists hit town. British star-loaded spy-chiller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, from Tomas Alfredson (Let The Right One In), drifts in. Expose yourself to Steve McQueen's Shame, with Michael Fassbender as a sex-addicted Manhattanite. Brace yourself for Asghar Farhadi's divorce drama A Separation, the most critically-acclaimed film of last year. Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Cannes hit Once Upon A Time in Anatolia tracks a nighttime search for a body in the Turkish steppes.
Longtime documentarian Frederick Wiseman's latest, Crazy Horse, looks beneath the surface of a Paris strip-club. The beauty-pageant queen in Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala finds herself caught in Mexico's drug war, while the fighting force in Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, played by mixed-martial-arts fighter Gina Carano, must elude an international womanhunt. Ralph Fiennes' take on the Bard's rivalry-and-revenge-bound war tragedy Coriolanus is set in the Balkans.
FEBRUARY – MARCH
From amazing animator Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli comes The Secret World of Arrietty, based on the tiny-person tale The Borrowers and co-written by Miyazaki. A scary kid pops up in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay's take on the novel about a mother (Tilda Swinton) dealing with her son's murderousness. Another Scot, Andrea Arnold, sweeps us into her handheld-shot, teenage-cast vision of Wuthering Heights. Werner Herzog plunges us Into The Abyss of death row, staring at two men convicted of a triple homicide in Texas. Ben Wheatley marks us for Kill List, a mixture of family drama, hitman flick and horror.
Markus Schleinzer creeps out with the Austrian abduction drama Michael, about a pedophile who keeps a boy captive. Terence Davies (The House of Mirth) wades into The Deep Blue Sea with his adaptation of the '50s-set Terence Ratigan play, starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston. Joseph Cedar adds his Footnote to the short list of films set in academia—this Cannes hit concerns a strained relationship between a father and son, both professors. And the Duplass brothers, known for their mumblecore films, visit Jeff Who Lives At Home, with Jason Segal and Ed Helms as struggling brothers, one still with his parents, the other failing as a husband. Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit) sees March out with its 3D stop-motion The Pirates! Band of Misfits, based on Gideon Defoe's books about swashbuckling schmucks.
SPRING
April fooling, high-society chronicler Whit Stillman (The Last Days of Disco) returns after nine years with his oddball, colourful campus-musical-noir Damsels in Distress. King-of-quirk Wes Anderson's back with Moonrise Kingdom, starring Bill Murray, Edward Norton and Frances McDormand in a tale of Rhode Island townsfolk searching for two young lovers on the run. Pavel Pawlikowski (My Summer of Love) re-emerges with The Woman in the Fifth, a Parisian thriller starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. John Hillcoat visits The Wettest County for a Prohibition-era bootlegging family drama, with Guy Pearce and Gary Oldman.
Steven Soderbergh's second of the year, Magic Mike, watches as one male stripper (Channing Tatum) teaches the poles to a young up-and-comer. José Padilha's The Wire-like look at Rio corruption, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, should arrive. Also coming is The Scent of Green Papaya director Tran Anh Hung's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's loss-haunted novel Norwegian Wood. And there'll be Bernardo Bonello's House of Tolerance, set in a Parisian brothel 100 years ago but with its sex-work scored by modern-day music. Plus Andrew Dominik's crime thriller Cogan's Trade, with Brad Pitt as a mob-snooping point man (scout) for a hitman.
Next week: Films of the summer, the fall and the final few flicks to look for this year.
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