Film Carew's 2014 Cinema Preview

Happy new year! Begone, unlucky '13, cinema in '14 beckons. And though the year-to-come headlines - in most places - will be seized by the mega-budget, bloated blockbusters on the horizon, let's refuse to acknowledge their existence (seriously, if you're really looking forward to Transformers 4, you should seek urgent medical attention). Instead, let's cast our eyes forward to the most vital and potential-filled works on the horizon, with 80(!) films to watch in 2014.

HER

Director: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde

2014 may not get any better than the year-opening Her, Jonze's magnificent film-of-our-times. Its premise - Phoenix plays a writer who falls in love with his operating-system, voiced by Johansson - may sound cutesy, but Her exquisitely captures the existential malaise of a 21st-century life wed intimately to technology.

INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

Director: the Coen Brothers
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Adam Driver, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund

It's not the Coens' finest hour, but few other filmmakers could mount a sustained cinematic riff as singular and unexpected as their take on '60s Greenwich Village folk-music. Isaac stars as the titular songwriter, a couch-hopping wanderer prone to both bad luck and bad decisions.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jean Dujardin, Matthew McConaughey, Margot Robbie

Scorsese's shrine to the grotesqueries of All-American excess embodies its own theme: it's wildly over-the-top and utterly ridiculous for its entire 180 minutes.

THE GREAT BEAUTY

Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli

Sorrentino's opulent cinematic hosanna to Rome - a portrait of decadent high-society set against the decaying architecture of the Eternal City - is a 150-minute visual feast, filled with unforgettable imagery and extensive Fellini homage.

12 YEARS A SLAVE

Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong'o, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Brad Pitt

The presumptive Oscar favourite is a glowering history-lesson that refuses to sugarcoat the bloodied brutality of America's slave-trading history. It's not the film that McQueen's debut, Hunger, was, but it's made with a similar defiant spirit and visceral aesthetic.

LABOR DAY

Director: Jason Reitman
Cast: Kate Winslet, Josh Brolin, Gattlin Griffith, Tobey Maguire, Clark Gregg

Reitman's down-and-outers romance comes with plenty of prestige-picture bona fides, but it's been almost entirely excised from the Oscar conversation, and reviews from Toronto weren't exactly filled with hallelujahs.

THE PAST

Director: Asghar Farhadi
Cast: Ali Mossafa, Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim, Pauline Burlet

Film Carew's number one film of 2013 arrives in regular-release cinemas, bringing with it another astonishing moral-tangle from exiled Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi. The follow-up to 2011's A Separation, it's another subtle domestic thriller in which notions 'truth' are thoroughly explored under the eye of a modern cinematic master.

ALL IS LOST

Director: J.C. Chandor
Cast: Robert Redford

Redford's one-man-show finds him as a solo sailor marooned at sea in a leaking ship. After the talky Margin Call, Chandor's follow-up takes place almost entirely in silence, giving the film a mythical, existential air.

THE DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Jennifer Garner, Steve Zahn, Bradford Cox

Vallée's first dabblings in Hollywood - as director-for-hire on the frock-movie The Young Victoria - had none of his signature music-saturated, timeframe-hopping vastness, but The Dallas Buyers Club proves a far better vehicle: its true-life tale of AIDS activism in '80s Texas building music-videos around the emaciated bodies of McConaughey, Leto, and Cox.

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

Director: Abdellatif Kechiche
Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Léa Seydoux, Aurélien Recoing, Catherine Salée

Although it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Kechiche's latest film has become best known for its girl-on-girl sex-scenes. Though it's verily filled with fucking, his three-hour tale of first-love and love-lost is a stark drama built around vast silences and Exarchopoulos' endless tears.

NEBRASKA

Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Bob Odenkirk

Another quirky comedy-drama set in Payne's home-state - and on the roads of America - Nebraska has earnt endless plaudits for Dern's central performance as an crotchety, drunken, deaf, dementia-riddled dad.

TRACKS

Director: John Curran
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver

Ever since Robyn Davison walked 3000 kilometres across the Australian desert accompanied solely by a caravan of camels in 1977, they've been trying to turn her human-survival tale into a film. After decades in development, it finally comes in the form of Tracks, with Wasikowska doing the walking, and Girls goofball Driver blowing in.

MANDELA: THE LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

Director: Justin Chadwick
Cast: Idris Elba, Naomie Harris, Tony Kgoroge

For those who like their cinema Inspirational, the recently-deceased hero of the fight against Apartheid is given the stirring Biopic treatment.

THE WIND RISES

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

It's hard not to see the final film for the grand-master of animé as a culmination of his peerless career, but in his semi-true tale of an aeronautical engineer who designs aircraft used by Japan in World War II, Miyazaki's love of engines and airplanes, and his long-running anti-war, anti-Empire, pro-environmental sentiments all converge.

WADJDA

Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour
Cast: Waad Mohammed, Reem Abdullah, Sultan Al Assaf, Abdullrahman Algohani

Wadjda marks the first film ever made in Saudi Arabia by a female filmmaker, yet it's not just a token presence in world cinema. Al-Mansour's debut uses a child as a protagonist in the middle of a parable on life for women in Islamic society; the director clearly having learnt from the greats of Iranian cinema.

GLORIA

Director: Sebastián Lelio
Cast: Paulina García, Sergio Hernández

Lelio's amazing character-study has been a festival favourite over the past year, its mixture of droll comedy and unexpected drama striking a chord with audiences. García is magnificent as the titular anti-heroine, a boozy divorcée looking for love - in all the wrong places - as a 50-something.

NOAH

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, Logan Lerman, Douglas Booth, Anthony Hopkins

The last time a Darren Aronofsky joint got the 'debacle' vibes that're floating around his quote-unquote "troubled" biblical epic, we were treated the the delirious ridiculousness of his unfairly-maligned metaphysical valentine The Fountain. There's no way Noah can be that batshit, but any take on the silly fictions of bible-story needs to be a little bit zany.

VERONICA MARS

Director: Rob Thomas
Cast: Kristen Bell, Max Greenfield, Jerry O'Connell, James Franco

A test-case for new-millennial fandom, the Veronica Mars movie finds the cult TV show resurrected for a 10-year-high-school-reunion movie that was bankrolled by fanboi/girl nerds pledging nearly $6 million on the internet.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Director: Wes Anderson
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton, Léa Seydoux, Mathieu Amalric, Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Willem Dafoe, Edward Norton, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman

It's the new film by Wes Anderson. His last film was Moonrise Kingdom. The cast is bananas. I'm excited already.

NYMPHOMANIAC

Director: Lars von Trier
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Uma Thurman, Stellan Skarsgård, Shia LaBeouf, Jamie Bell, Christian Slater, Willem Dafoe

Von Trier's latest monolith of cinematic martyrdom is a two-part account of a woman's entire sexual history. After using non-simulated fucking in 1998's The Idiots, here von Trier is doing something similar: digitally grafting porn-actor genitals onto Hollywood stars fakin' it. God bless that dickwad Dane, and his every cinematic provocation.

YOUNG & BEAUTIFUL

Director: François Ozon
Cast: Marine Vacth, Géraldine Pailhas, Frédéric Pierrot, Charlotte Rampling

Ozon's acidic portrait of a high-school student with a secret side-trade as call-girl is a return to the acidic cinema that typified his early years. Anyone expect a morality-play or sociological study is in the wrong place: this is dark, unsettingly, and happily open-ended.

YOU & THE NIGHT

Director: Yann Gonzalez
Cast: Kate Moran, Niels Schneider, Nicolas Maury, Eric Cantona, Alain Fabien Delon, Béatrice Dall

Gonzalez's surrealist synth-pop video - which comes awesomely scored by his brother, M83 - is a must for cinema-nerds. It plays vaguely like a genderqueer riff on Buñuel, with hints of Lynch and Fassbinder; though it's neon lights and soupy dream-sequences are weirdly reminiscent of the recent style pieces of macho Dane Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive and Only God Forgives).

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Director: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Jeffrey Wright

'Vampire movie' is one of the least-interesting genre propositions in the world, but having deadpan icon Jim Jarmusch turn it into a symbolic saga of human society - set to a discordant outre-rock soundtrack - is the way to give the Twilight'd genre some bite.

THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN

Director: Felix Van Groeningen
Cast: Veerle Baetens, Johan Heldenbergh, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg

Having spent 2013 doing crowdpleasing victory-laps around the global festival circuit, Van Groeningen's bittersweet saga hits regular-release cinemas. Its drama is writ big in love and grief, but its theme is played out in its film-long love of bluegrass: what does it mean to be a 'spiritual' human-being - playing All-American, god-fearin' music - amidst the Bush era's use of religion to justify imperialism?

THE YOUNG & PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Callum Keith Rennie, Robert Maillet, Dominique Pinon, Judy Davis

The last time lurid French stylist Jean-Pierre Jeunet made a movie in America, it was the ill-fated but wildly photographed Alien Resurrection. Here, though, he's no director-for-hire: adapting Reif Larsen's shrine to childhood whimsy into the first family-friendly film of his career.

THE GRANDMASTER

Director: Wong Kar-wai
Cast: Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Zhang Ziyi, Song Kye-kyo, Chang Chen

After his wildly-disappointing English-language debut, 2007's My Blueberry Nights, Wong seems set to return to his high throne with The Grandmaster. Based on the life of Ip Man - the master who trained Bruce Lee - it finds him returning to the story-telling delirium he's best known for (his last martial-arts movie, Ashes Of Time, is an infamously-confusing proposition), whilst, at the same time, harbouring the greatest commercial potential of his career.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Cast: Masaharu Fukuyama, Machiko Ono, Yoko Maki, Riri Furanki

Given Kore-eda's cinematic track record, Like Father, Like Son could be seen as a mild disappointment, but it's still a thoughtful and profound take on a dramatic premise - babies accidentally switched at birth! - as old as time. In the debate between nature and nurture, Kore-eda sees no black-and-white answers, only endless human greys.

CHINESE PUZZLE

Director: Cédric Klapisch
Cast: Romain Duris, Audrey Tatou, Cécile de France, Kelly Reilly, Sandrine Holt

After The Spanish Apartment and The Russian Dolls, Klapisch and Duris again pick up with their ongoing drama. Where the first two films were minor-riffs on foreign-exchange 20s and settling-down 30s, Chinese Puzzle is a more-loaded portrait of the messy lives of the divorce, re-hitched, ever-unsettled citizens of the globalised world.

ATTILA MARCEL

Director: Sylvain Chomet
Cast: Guillaume Gouix, Anne Le Ny, Bernadette Lafont, Hélène Vincent

Cult French animator Sylvian Chomet makes his live-action debut with Attila Marcel, but it feels more like a cartoon built around human figures. Brightly coloured, wildly stylised, and filled with musical sequences, it's a cinematic conversation on memory told by a filmmaker who manages to be both iconoclast and crowdpleaser.

BRIGHT DAYS AHEAD

Director: Marion Vernoux
Cast: Fanny Ardant, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Chesnais

Vernoux's film is, at its basic dramatic premise, about a torrid affair between a recent retiree (Ardant, glowing) and her computer-class teacher (Lafitte). But it's also a study of generations; between those afford life-long marriages and golden retirements, and those existing in a era of fractured relationships and tenuous self-employment.

MICHAEL KOHLHAAS

Director: Arnaud des Pallières
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Delphine Chuillot, David Kross, Bruno Ganz, Denis Lavant, Sergi López, Amira Casar

It may or may not be released under the far-more-unwieldy title The Age Of Uprising: The Legend Of Michael Kohlhaas, which makes des Pallières' picture sound like the action-movie it's not. Sure, it finds TV's Hannibal leading a bloody uprising motivated by revenge in the 16th-century French countryside, but its long stretches of rural naturalism and philosophical air aren't the stuff of multiplexes.

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DONALD RUMSFELD

Director: Errol Morris

A thematic companion-piece to his sterling 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara, this time the ever-inquisitive Morris sits down with the great villain of 21st-century American imperialism, and tries to find the morality behind the smirk.

THE MONUMENTS MEN

Director: George Clooney
Cast: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray

Clooney's presumptive Oscar contender was unexpectedly bumped from the Awards Show season sometime into 2014. Whether that's a commentary on its worth is up for debut: his film an arched-brow barney about a team of WW2 operatives heading into Nazi germany to reclaim stolen artworks.

THE IMMIGRANT

Director: James Gray
Cast: Marion Cotillad, Jeremy Renner, Joaquin Phoenix

Gray is one of American cinema's stranger figures: a director operating on the fringes of genre, a minor cult director in American but a beloved auteur in France. His latest film has a long-and-chequered production history behind it - it's gone by about three different titles, and was finished years back - but it's yet to be turned out unto the world. Yet the premise - duelling grifters prey on a Polish immigrant in early-20th-century Manhattan - and the cast's pedigree make it eternally appealing.

UNDER THE SKIN

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Paul Brannigan

Given Glazer took nine years to follow-up Birth with this unexpected adaptation of Michel Faber's tale of an alien haunting the Scottish highlands, waiting patiently for the undoubtedly-strange film to slowly trickle through the festival circuit has felt borderline unfair. Yet it'll finally arrive on Australian screens in 2014, with the re-hot Johansson sure to earn plenty of acclaim - or, at least, raised eyebrows - for her other-species turn.

INTERSTELLAR

Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Matt Damon, Casey Affleck, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley

Having finally put his Dark Knight trilogy to bed, Nolan returns with another mindbending sci-fi thinkpiece boasting a mighty cast.

TRANSCENDENCE

Director: Wally Pfister
Cast: Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Kate Mara, Rebecca Hall, Cillian Murphy, Paul Bettany

Nolan's long-time cinematographer makes his directorial debut, and the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. The near-future philosophical-sci-fi flick is a study in artificial intelligence and technological singularity that, hopefully, will mark the return-to-relevance of blockbuster cinema's great ham, Johnny Depp.

JUPITER ASCENDING

Director: Andy & Lana Wachowski
Cast: Mila Kunis, Channing Tatum, Sean Bean, Douglas Booth, Eddie Redmayne, Doona Bae

After the world was generally puzzled to their wildly-ambitious and utterly ridiculous take on David Mitchell's centuries-spanning poly-genre saga Cloud Atlas, the Wachowskis have returned to something far more in their cinematic wheelhouse: another chosen-one sci-fi adventure in which an unlikely messiah must cause a revolution in a dystopian distant future.

FOXCATCHER

Director: Bennett Miller
Cast: Steve Carell, Mark Ruffalo, Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Michael Hall

Bumped from its original 2013 release, Miller's picture will be an Oscar favourite from the moment it drops. His Moneyball follow-up chronicles the bizarre real-life tale of an eccentric, schizophrenic billionaire murdering a handsome young wrestler.

EDGE OF TOMORROW

Director: Doug Liman
Cast: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton

Although it's sadly-ditched the awkwardly-translated title of its original manga - All You Need Is Kill! - the latest far-future sci-fi action caper for the Scientological crusader finds him trapped in a Groundhog Day time-loop, endless experience the same-day's alien invasion battle over-and-over again. Hopefully, when Cruise finally takes down the marauding aliens, it's anywhere near as hilarious as the finale to Oblivion.

NIGHT MOVES

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, Peter Sarsgaard

One of American cinema's most vital voices, Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy & Lucy, Meek's Cutoff) makes something resembling a genre picture: in which a trio of questionable eco-terrorists decide to blow up a dam.

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD

Director: Gregg Araki
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Eva Green, Angela Bassett, Christopher Meloni, Shiloh Fernandez

Araki has made a singular study of teenage-nihilism throughout his career, with his definitive works - from The Doom Generation through Kaboom - marking him as queer cinema's most obnoxious popcorn-auteur. His one outlier is Mysterious Skin's sombre meditation on abuse and mental illness, and White Bird In A Blizzard seems like its spiritual kin: a tale of a wayward teen that marks a dark study in human cruelty.

TOM AT THE FARM

Director: Xavier Dolan
Cast: Xavier Dolan, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Lise, Roy, Evelyne Brochu

Now a grizzled 24, Québécois boy-wonder Xavier Dolan has shown himself to be a prodigious filmmaker: Tom At The Farm marks his fourth film in four years; with another, The Elephant Song, already deep in production. This is an adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard's play, which finds Dolan visiting the family of his recently-deceased, closeted boyfriend.

ENEMY

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Isabella Rossellini, Sarah Gadon

Villeneuve and Gyllenhaal united to make two productions back-to-back: the by-the-numbers, '90s-serial-killer-movie-esque action-thriller Prisoners, and this, the passion-project they really wanted to roll tape on. It's an adaptation of José Saramago's droll novel about obsessive doppelgängers that finds Villeneuve harkening back to the existential oddness of his early pictures.

THE DOUBLE

Director: Richard Ayoade
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jesse Eisenberg, Chris O'Dowd, Sally Hawkins, Yasmin Paige, Noah Taylor

Ayoade will never do anything that tops his turn as Ned Smanks in Nathan Barley, but after his impressive cinematic debut with the painful coming-of-age comedy Submarine, his directorial career continues on with an unexpected (though very loose) adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novella The Double.

ZERO THEOREM

Director: Terry Gilliam
Cast: Christoph Waltz, Lucas Hedges, Mélanie Thierry, David Thewlis

There's a very large chance the Gilliam's latest film will be awful; though he's earnt a place as some cinematic immortal thanks to Brazil, most of his films aren't very good. But at least they're zany disasters and calamtious train-wrecks, and Zero Theorem returns Gilliam to his spiritual home: the near-future dystopia.

ALOFT

Director: Claudia Llosa
Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Mélanie Laurent, Cillian Murphy, William Shimell

After a pair of brilliant pictures in her native Peru - 2006's Madeinusa and 2009's Academy Award-nominated (but actually really strange and great!) The Milk Of Sorrow - Llosa makes her first English-language film; a drama of haunted pasts, secrets, etc. Just announced as screening in Berlin.

ANIMAL RESCUE

Director: Michaël R. Roskam
Cast: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts, James Frecheville

The American debut for angry Belgian stylist Michaël R. Roskam will garner plenty of attention as the final screen role for the late Gandolfini.

THE ASSASSIN

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien
Cast: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Satoshi Tsumabuki

Hou's years-in-the-making wuxia epic has had a long and sometimes-troubled gestation, but the prospect of the Taiwanese master taking on a big-budget, sword-swinging period-piece is finally inching from cinephile fantasy to on-screen reality.

BIG EYES

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman

After a depressingly-long stint alternating between brand-name-blockbuster stooge and caricature of himself, Burton's latest film - a based-on-a-true-tale portrayal of the ugly divorce between artist Walter Keane and wife Margaret - is a small-budget drama blessedly free from a mugging Johnny Depp.

BIRDMAN

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough, Zach Galifianakis, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone

Iñárritu's wildly-acclaimed (and/or overrated) filmography is filled with feelbad dramas so gritty they feel insincere - 21 Grams and Babel chief offenders - but his latest picture is a meta-comedy in which Michael Keaton stars as an action-movie icon attempting to stage a theatrical production of Raymond Carver.

BOYHOOD

Director: Richard Linklater
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Ellar Salmon

As if his Before series hasn't done enough to explore the passage-of-time on screen, Linklater's latest film was shot over 12 years, with Salmon playing a kid who ages from 7 to 18 as it goes.

CAROL

Director: Todd Haynes
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara

After his Mildred Pierce mini-series Haynes returns to cinema with his first feature since 2007's I'm Not There. It's an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's queer touchstone Carol, which seems an apt fit for the filmmaker.

CEMETERY OF KINGS

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Weerasethakul's much-awaited follow-up to his Cannes-conquering Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives has the most Weerasethakulian premise possible: on the Mekong at the Thai/Laos border, a housewife tends to a soldier suffering from sleeping sickness, and "falls into a hallucination that triggers strange dreams, phantoms, and romance."

THE CUT

Director: Fatih Akin
Cast: Tahar Rahim, Akin Gazi, George Georgiou, Numan Acar

Akin's new flick is the spiritual successor to 2004's Head-On and 2007's The Edge Of Heaven; where the first two explored love and death, this latest picture is an exploration of "the devil"! Or, at least, the darkness within the hearts of men. And it stars world-cinema sweetheart Tahar Rahim!

CYBER

Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei, Leehom Wang

The following synopsis - "after a case of high-level computer hacking arises, American and Chinese military forces work together to stop it" - would sound awful in the hands of any other Action-Thriller director, but Mann has a long history (from Miami Vice on TV to Miami Vice in cinemas!) of turning shootouts into high-art.

EXODUS

Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Aaron Paul, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Ben Kingsley

If you ever wanted to see the bogan builder from The Secret Life Of Us playing Ramesses, does Ridley Scott have a film for you! The presence of Noah and Exodus has people calling 2014 the year of the biblical epic, but given Scott's dubious past-30-years, best not consider him the standard-bearer for any cinematic year. That said, the fact that Gladiator (somehow) won five Oscars means expectations for Exodus are high.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Juno Temple, Michael Sheen, Tom Sturridge, Matthias Schoenaerts

Following his memorable Hollywood debacle It's All About Love, Dogme OG Thomas Vinterberg got back in the biz's good graces with his likely-Oscar-winner The Hunt. His next project is, unexpectedly, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's much-adapted classic-lit love-story; and it'll be interesting to see if he can stage an unexpected take on the period-piece.

FURY

Director: David Ayer
Cast: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal

Ayer's much-typed WWII picture features tanks. Tanks! And manly men piloting 'em en route to blowin' up Nazis.

GONE GIRL

Director: David Fincher
Cast: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Missi Pyle, Neil Patrick Harris, Casey Wilson, Scoot McNairy, Tyler Perry

After the tepid The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Fincher looks to return to form with this typically dark-and-angsty tale of a wife (Pike) who disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary, and the husband (Affleck) who's either desperately trying to find her, or actually responsible for her disappearance.

THE HOMESMAN

Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Hailee Steinfeld, Meryl Streep, James Spader, William Fichtner

TLJ's directorial efforts are few and far between —this is his third feature film, and first since 2005's underrated The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada— but his latest is a period Western (of course!) in which three insane women are escorted, on horseback, across state lines. With Swank and Streep on board, you almost assume there'll be some kind of Awards Show buzz.

HOW TO CATCH A MONSTER

Director: Ryan Gosling
Cast: Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Matt Smith, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn

The internet's boyfriend makes his directorial debut with a "fantasy-neo-noir" film - set partially in an "underwater utopia" - that's been described as 'experimental' by its key players; Ronan recounting extended sessions with a dream therapist. The premise is wild, the cast is curious, and the director is quite attractive, don't you think?

INHERENT VICE

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jena Malone, Reese Witherspoon, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio Del Toro

Anderson took five years to get to both There Will Be Blood and The Master, so the two-year turnaround to his Thomas Pynchon adaptation is an unexpected blessing for cinephiles.

JIMMY'S HALL

Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Barry Ward, Simone Kirby, Andrew Scott, Jim Norton, Brían F. O'Byrne

It's long been suggested that Loach's latest film may be his last. The 77-year-old firebrand makes what sounds like a companion piece to his 2006 masterwork The Wind That Shakes The Barley: an historical tale of the Irish communist party's leader being deported from Ireland during a 'red scare' in the 1930s.

KNIGHT OF CUPS; VOYAGE OF TIME; UNTITLED TERRENCE MALICK PROJECT

Director: Terrence Malick
Cast: Half of Hollywood

Malick used to move at a glacial pace - the gap between Days Of Heaven and The Thin Red Line was 20 years! - but, these days, ol' Terry's all about working on concurrent projects. After last year's To The Wonder, 2014 could bring anywhere from one to three Malick movies. Knight Of Cups is due next (its vast cast: Christian Bale, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Isabel Lucas, Antonio Banderas, Wes Bentley, Imogen Poots, Freida Pinto; all of whom could end up on the cutting-room floor), and it was filmed concurrently with the likely-later-to-come Untitled Terrence Malick Project (a set-against-the-Austin-music-scene film featuring the insane cast: Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, Val Kilmer, Benicio del Toro, Holly Hunter, and Bérénice Marlohe). Then there's Voyage Of Time, which takes the evolutionary-history-of-life-on-Earth stuff from Tree Of Life and turns it into its own film, narrated by Brad Pitt and Emma Thompson.

THE LOBSTER

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Cast: Jason Clarke, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Olivia Colman, Ariane Labed

Lanthimos - the genius behind 2009's Dogtooth, one of the 21st century's truly great films; and the Godfather of the Greek Weird Wave - makes his English-language debut. The follow-up to 2011's Alps is another ripe parable, this time set in a sinister, dystopian near-future in which 'unmated' humans are turned into animals.

MAPS TO THE STARS

Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Sarah Gadon

In which Cronenberg's long-in-development, scathing Hollywood satire finally hits screens, thanks to the power of Bobby Patz.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

Director: Jeff Nichols
Cast: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst

Nichols' follow-up to Mud reunites him with career-long muse Michael Shannon, and features a premise - "a father and son go on the run after the dad learns his child possesses special powers" - both at odds with and perfectly in with his downhome cinematic sensibility.

A MOST WANTED MAN

Director: Anton Corbijn
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright, Nina Hoss, Daniel Brühl, Willem Dafoe

John Le Carré's airport-bookstore novels have, in recent years, ascended to the ranks of 'prestige' source-text, and the assembled players here - from Hoffman in front of the lens to Corbijn and DOP Benoît Delhomme behind it - suggest good things; especially given Corbijn's work on The American.

MR. TURNER

Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Timothy Spall, Roger Ashton-Griffiths, Jamie Thomas King, James Norton

I'm sure there's a particular circle of hell that shows only the biopics of artists, but even the most disreputable genre can offer potential: like Mike Leigh directing old muse Timothy Spall in a portrait of the life of JMW Turner.

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE

Director: Roy Andersson

Andersson's odd films - existential sketch comedies built on droll, elaborate, Tati-eque sight gags - come around rarely, and the wonderfully-titled A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence marks a culminating companion-piece to 2000's Songs From The Second Floor and 2007's You, The Living.

THE ROVER

Director: David Michôd
Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy, Anthony Hayes

Michôd's follow-up to 2010's globe-conquering Animal Kingdom finds him taking the road-less-travelled: rather than going to Hollywood, he's imported Hollywood here. With Pattinson bringing the glamour, his latest crime-saga is set in the deserts of a dystopian-near-future Australia.

SERENA

Director: Susanne Bier
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, Rhys Ifans, Toby Jones

Bier's previous dalliance with American filmmaking was the disappointing Things We Lost In The Fire, but Serena holds more promise: a depression-era epic starring everyone's favourite O. Russellites, Lawrence and Cooper.

SILS MARIA

Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Johnny Flynn

Assayas wrote his latest film for Binoche, with whom he worked on 2008's Summer Hours. She's an aging actress returning to a high-profile theatre production opposite a young starlet played by Mortez.

THE SMELL OF US

Director: Larry Clark
Cast: Alex Martin, Lukas Ionesco, Théo Cholbi, Michael Pitt, Pete Doherty

"A group of self-destructive skateboarders in Paris" is the premise. Don't go changin', Larry.

TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

Director: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Olivier Gourmet, Catherine Salée

The legends of socio-realism have made another character-study about the victims of harsh economic times; Cotillard playing a downsized worker who can keep her job if she convinces colleagues to sacrifice their bonuses.

UNBROKEN

Director: Angelina Jolie
Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Domhnall Gleeson, Jack O'Connell, Alex Russell, Jai Courtney

The world's paparazzi have descended on Australia for Jolie's directorial turn, helming an inspirational based-on-a-true-story tale of WWII-era survival. The fact that the Coen brothers were involved in the screenplay - even if just as a pair of credited writers - inspires more confidence in Unbroken than anything else.

THE VOICES

Director: Marjane Satrapi
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arterton, Anna Kendrick, Jackie Weaver

Satrapi makes her unexpected English-language crossover directing a psychological thriller starring the ever-awful Reynolds. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, except the film finds Reynolds taking existential advice from his pets; a good dog and evil cat.

WE COME AS FRIENDS

Director: Hubert Sauper

Sauper's long, long-awaited follow-up to his definitive documentary Darwin's Nightmare is an observationist companion-piece: where the first film was about the secret horrors of globalisation, its successor is about colonialisation, and the modern-day 'slave trade' of immigrant workers and deregulated production zones.

WILD

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Gaby Hoffmann, Laura Dern, Kevin Rankin

Fresh off his sparklingly-successful Hollywood-crossover with The Dallas Buyers Club, the beat goes on for Vallée, with another Awards-Show-trawling take on real-life heroism: adapted from the memoir of a woman's 1,100-mile solo hike across North American wilderness.

WINTER SLEEP

Director: Nuri Belge Ceylan
Cast: Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sozen, Demet Akbag

Ceylan's follow-up to his masterful Once Upon A Time In Anatolia has been, thus far, kept carefully under wraps, but it's a 'human drama' once against set against the vastness of the Turkish steppes, and seems likely to premiere at Cannes.