2019 Is Going To Be Big For Film: Here Are The Picks Of This Year's Pics

2019 will bring to cinemas an Elton John biopic by the guy who just made the Freddie Mercury biopic, an UglyDolls movie, a Men In Black spin-off, several X-Men instalments, The Angry Birds Movie 2, a Sonic The Hedgehog movie no one wanted, Terminator 6, a Charlie’s Angels reboot, a garbage-looking Hellboy film (whyyy?), a live-action Aladdin directed by Guy Ritchie, and Tyler Perry’s A Madea Family Funeral.

In the face of the horrors of the multiplexes, there’s also much to look forward to, from franchise flicks to tiny art-movies and everything in between. Here’s the pick of the pics coming to screens in the ’19.

1. Ad Astra

Director: James Gray.

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga.

Premise: 20 years after his father disappeared on a mission to Neptune, an engineer goes on a mission in search of answers.

Anticipation: Ornery auteur James Gray commands a long-brewing $50 million epic whose Heart Of Darkness comparisons make it sound like Lost City Of Z in space.

2. Animals

Director: Sophie Hyde.

Cast: Holliday Grainger, Alia Shawkat, Amy Molloy, Fra Fee.

Premise: Two best friends —at the end of a 20s filled with pills, thrills, and benders— start to drift apart.

Anticipation: Adelaide filmmaker Hyde follows up her great debut 52 Tuesdays by heading to Ireland, adapting Emma Jane Unsworth's beloved novel of female friendship and comic miscreancy.

3. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch

Director: Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky.

Premise: A documentary chronicle of the way humanity has irrevocably altered the planet.

Anticipation: The Canadian filmmakers previously made the great Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark, so expect more wild visuals and meditations on human excesses.

4. At Eternity’s Gate

Director: Julian Schnabel.

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Mads Mikkelsen, Oscar Isaac.

Premise: The final years in the life of Vincent van Gogh.

Anticipation: Schnabel’s first film since 2010 is an arty, philosophical, oft-dreamlike portrait of history’s most famous painter, that takes a painterly approach to its own narrative, imagery, and cinematography.

5. Avengers: End Game

Director: Anthony & Joe Russo.

Cast: 30 contractually-obligated Hollywood stars.

Premise: All those superheroes who died last time didn’t really die. And the universe gets saved or whatever.

Anticipation: Fresh off shattering records for the most-viewed trailer in the history of time, Endgame will try and distract people from the fact that the last two Avengers movies were bad.

6. The Beach Bum

Director: Harmony Korine.

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Isla Fisher, Snoop Dogg, Zac Efron.

Premise: The comic misadventures of a free-spirited stoner named Moondog.

Anticipation: This marks Korine’s long-awaited follow-up to Spring Breakers (Spriiiiing Breeeeaaaaaaaaakkkkk!), so anticipate away.

7. Captain Marvel

Director: Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck.

Cast: Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Lee Pace.

Premise: In 1995, an Air Force pilot turns into a super-hero.

Anticipation: It’s the grand gambit of the MCU writ in a movie: if you don’t watch Captain Marvel in March, you’ll regret it when you see Avengers in April.

8. Chaos Walking

Director: Doug Liman.

Cast: Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, Mads Mikkelsen, David Oyelowo, Cynthia Erivo.

Premise: A boy’s uncovering-the-dark-truths adventures on a dystopian planet of mindreading and banished women.

Anticipation: The great spate of dystopian-YA-novel adaptations has largely been and gone, but the top-line cast and presence of Liman (all glory to the Edge Of Tomorrow) offer promise here.

9. Cold Case Hammarskjöld

Director: Mads Brügger.

Premise: An investigation into the 1961 death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who died en route to ceasefire negotiations in the war-torn Congo.

Anticipation: In 2016, newly-discovered documents suggest that Hammarskjöld’s death, in a plane-crash, may’ve been an assassination. It’s clearly a case for the satirist Brügger, whose documentaries border on absurdist performance-art.

10. Corporate Animals

Director: Patrick Brice.

Cast: Demi Moore, Ed Helms, Jessica Williams, Karan Soni.

Premise: At a corporate team-building exercise in the desert, a host of disgruntled workers end up trapped in a cave together.

Anticipation: With the genuinely unnerving Creep and convention-challenging bro-com The Overnight, Brice has shown a sense of daring and adventure. Here’s hoping this corporate satire has a similar go-anywhere quality.

11. Ford v. Ferrari

Director: James Mangold.

Cast: Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Caitriona Balfe, Jon Bernthal.

Premise: Two automotive manufacturers rival for technological supremacy at the 1966 Le Mans 24-Hour Race.

Anticipation: Though its premise sounds a little like a Rush redux, this marks Mangold’s first film since his beloved Logan, and comes boasting superstars to boot.

12. Gemini Man

Director: Ang Lee.

Cast: Will Smith, Clive Owen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Benedict Wong.

Premise: In a dystopian future, an aging hitman is stalked by a younger clone of himself, who can predict his every move.

Anticipation: Though he's had some missteps, Lee’s name is enough to garner anticipation, and to suggest that this action-thriller won't just be standard-issue stuff.

13. Glass

Director: M. Night Shyamalan.

Cast: James McAvoy, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Sarah Paulson.

Premise: Unbreakable meets Split in the culmination of a trilogy no one saw coming.

Anticipation: Unbreakable was peak Shyamalan. Split marked his rehabilitation. Glass could go anywhere, really.

14. Godzilla: King Of The Monsters

Director: Michael Dougherty.

Cast: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, O’Shea Jackson Jr.

Premise: Large CGI monsters.

Anticipation: After Gareth Edwards’ unexpectedly good 2014 reboot, now the franchise reins are passed to, um, the guy who made Krampus.

15. The Goldfinch

Director: John Crowley.

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Aneurin Barnard, Ashleigh Cummings, Jeffrey Wright, Luke Wilson, Nicole Kidman.

Premise: After surviving a terrorist bombing at an art museum, a young man falls into underground art dealing.

Anticipation: Crowley’s Brooklyn follow-up marks the first-ever to-screen translation of a Donna Tartt novel, making it feel like an instant event.

16. Grudge

Director: Nicholas Pesce.

Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver.

Premise: A malevolent spirit kills people off, one by one.

Anticipation: No one was clamouring for (another) American reboot of the overflogged J-horror franchise Ju-on. But, with Pesce —fresh off the brilliant Piercing— as director, colour me intrigued.

17. Happy Death Day 2U

Director: Christopher London.

Cast: Jessica Rothe, Israel Broussard, Suraj Sharma, Ruby Modine.

Premise: Two years after the first film, our heroine gets stuck back in the same time-loop.

Anticipation: When endless maddening repetition is verily stitched into the story of your Groundhog Day-meets-Scream slasher-comedy, repetitious sequels feel like an extra layer to the joke.

18. Her Smell

Director: Alex Ross Perry.

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Amber Heard, Cara Delevingne, Dan Stevens.

Premise: The life and times of a self-destructive grunge-rock starlet.

Anticipation: After co-writing Disney’s Christopher Robin, Perry gets back to what he’s best at: pissing people off. Upon its premiere in Toronto, Her Smell was loved and loathed in equal measure.

19. High Flying Bird

Director: Steven Soderbergh.

Cast: André Holland, Zazie Beetz, Zachary Quinto, Kyle MacLachlan.

Premise: During a basketball lockout, a sports agent presents a rookie client with an intriguing, controversial proposition.

Anticipation: The hardest-working retiree in cinema keeps cranking ’em out, with his 29th film —and second straight to be shot on an iPhone— set to hit Netflix in March. It comes penned by Moonlight playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.

20. High Life

Director: Claire Denis.

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger, André Benjamin.

Premise: A group of criminals is sent on a mission into deep space to find an alternative energy source.

Anticipation: I feel like I’ve been waiting for this for years already.

21. Hobbs And Shaw

Director: David Leitch.

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby.

Premise: Two men with large muscles undertake fistfights and car-chases and ball-busting banter.

Anticipation: A peripheral spin-off to the very-lame Fast & Furious franchise don’t sound like much, but it comes directed by David Leitch, the stunt double turned fight choreographer turned director, AKA the guy behind John Wick, Atomic Blonde, and Deadpool 2.

22. Honey Boy

Director: Alma Har’el.

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, FKA Twigs, Maika Monroe.

Premise: LaBeouf plays his father, in a film based on his childhood experiences as child-star with stage-parent.

Anticipation: LaBeouf’s dabblings in performance-art suggest he’s perfect for an unflinching study of self through cinema. Enabling him will be Har’el, who previously made the singular documentaries Bombay Beach and LoveTrue.

23. The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley

Director: Alex Gibney.

Premise: Documentary chronicle of biotech startup Theranos, its poster-girl CEO, and its rapid fall from grace.

Anticipation: The hardest-working man in documentaries turns his journalistic lens on Elizabeth Holmes, and Silicon Valley’s culture of salesmanship, spin, and deception.

24. The Irishman

Director: Martin Scorsese.

Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, Ray Romano, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel.

Premise: A mob hitman recalls his possible involvement in the mysterious disappearance of union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Anticipation: Scorsese plays the hits, getting the band back together for a $100 mafia epic based on a sensational real life crime, with the ’70s setting a boon for wardrobe, song placement, Scorsese montages, etc.

25. It: Chapter Two

Director: Andy Muschietti.

Cast: James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain, Jay Ryan, Bill Hader.

Premise: 27 years after the events of the first film, It returns to haunt the now-grown-up members of the Losers Club.

Anticipation: A comically-large amount of people watched the awful-looking CGI clown last time, now the sequel brings with it movie stars.

26. Joker

Director: Todd Phillips.

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Brett Cullen, Robert De Niro.

Premise: In Gotham City in 1981, a failed comedian turns to a life of crime.

Anticipation: The guy who made the Hangover movies helms the DCEU’s second stab at the Joker; what could go wrong?

27. The Kitchen

Director: Andrea Berloff.

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss, Domhnall Gleeson.

Premise: After the FBI arrests their husbands, a trio of wives take over organised-crime operations in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen.

Anticipation: Based on a comic-book series, Berloff’s directorial debut is being pitched as both nasty genre-work and hopeful awards-show pic.

28. The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

Director: Mike Mitchell.

Cast: voices of Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Tiffany Haddish, Will Arnett, Alison Brie.

Premise: More ridiculousness.

Anticipation: It almost makes sense that a shameless movie-product spin-off of toy blocks would become a self-referential shrine to postmodernist cinematic monkeyshines. Here’s the next product.

29. Limited Partners

Director: Miguel Arteta.

Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Rose Byrne, Salma Hayek, Ari Graynor.

Premise: Two friends with wildly-different ambitions start a beauty company together.

Anticipation: Arteta once made Chuck & Buck. Everything he does, then, should be much anticipated.

30. The Lion King

Director: Jon Favreau.

Cast: Donald Glover, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner.

Premise: A young lion cub grows up to receive the righteous philosophical lesson ‘hakuna matata’.

Anticipation: A remake for nostalgic adults to take their children to: it’s the circle of life.

31. Little Women

Director: Greta Gerwig.

Cast: Meryl Streep, Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Laura Dern.

Premise: The lives of sisters in 1860s New England.

Anticipation: Fresh off the universally-beloved Lady Bird, Gerwig marshals a so-hot-right-now cast in this latest retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s much-adapted novel.

32. Memory: The Origins Of Alien

Director: Alexandre O. Philippe.

Premise: The “untold origin story” behind the writing, and making, of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic.

Anticipation: If the endless awful sequels have sullied your feelings for Alien, then Philippe —who last made the film-nerd-friendly Psycho study, 78/52 — is ready to return you to the beginning, and the genesis of one of cinema’s great nightmares.

33. The Nightingale

Director: Jennifer Kent.

Cast: Aisling Francisosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin.

Premise: In 19th-century Van Diemen’s Land, a British settler and officer recruit an Aboriginal tracker for an overland trip seeking revenge.

Anticipation: Kent’s Badabook follow-up is a grand period-piece poking at colonial history. Anticipate accordingly.

34. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Director: Quentin Tarantino.

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Damon Herriman.

Premise: In 1969 Los Angeles, a TV actor and his stunt double try to find fame.

Anticipation: 50 years after the Manson Murders, Tarantino — after the misstep of The Hateful Eight — uses them as dramatic element in his ninth film.

35. Pokémon: Detective Pikachu

Director: Rob Letterman.

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, Kathryn Newton.

Premise: A former Pokéman trainer and Pikachu team up to uncover a mystery.

Anticipation: I mean sure if you like.

36. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project

Director: Matt Wolf.

Premise: Stokes spent 30 years recording TV 24 hours a day, amassing over 70,000 VHS tapes.

Anticipation: Wolf previously helmed the great Arthur Russell doc Wild Combination and the All-American history lesson Teenage. Here, he looks at the life of someone whose obsessive, destructive behaviour made her herald of a digital era in which everything is documented.

37. Share

Director: Pippa Bianco.

Cast: Rhianne Barreto, Charlie Plummer, Poorna Jagannathan.

Premise: After an explicit, humiliating video of her goes viral, a teenage girl must return to school.

Anticipation: Bianco’s directorial debut digs into rich, dark thematic territory, expanding on her excellent 2015 short of the same name.

38. The Souvenir Part 1 & 2

Director: Joanna Hogg.

Cast: Honor Swinton-Byrne, Tilda Swinton, Tom Burke, Ariane Labed.

Premise: In the early ’80s, a film student becomes romantically involved with an untrustworthy older man.

Anticipation: Cult English auteur Hogg seems primed for a breakout with this two-part coming-of-age tale, starring the mother/daughter Swinton act.

39. Spider-Man: Far From Home

Director: Jon Watts.

Cast: Tom Holland, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michael Keaton, Cobie Smulders, Samuel L. Jackson.

Premise: Whilst on a summer vacation, Spider-man must team up with Mysterio to battle the Elementals.

Anticipation: Even though typing the above premise was painful, there was enough fun to be had with the prior Spider-Man reboot to augur anticipation.

40. Star Wars: Episode IX

Director: J.J. Abrams.

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac.

Premise: Something involving light sabres and dark sides.

Anticipation: The revived Star Wars films have all been good, but now the franchise also serves as forum for a greater critical discussion of toxic masculinity in the guise of horrifying fanboi entitlement. In unrelated/totally-related news, Rian Johnson’s Last Jedi follow-up is called Knives Out.

41. Top End Wedding

Director: Wayne Blair.

Cast: Miranda Tapsell, Gwilym Lee, Kerry Fox.

Premise: Ten days before their wedding in the remote NT, a couple set out to find the bride’s mother, who’s gone AWOL in the interior.

Anticipation: Top End Wedding marks the reunion of Blair and Tapsell, last seen charming plenty with local success-story The Sapphires.

42. Toy Story 4

Director: Josh Cooley.

Cast: voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Wallace Shawn, Michael Keaton, Kristen Schaal, etc.

Premise: The arrival of a new toy leads the old toys on a roadtrip. Bittersweet nostalgia for the lost innocence of childhood ensues.

Anticipation: Depends on how ready to cry you are.

43. Triple Frontier

Director: J.C. Chandor.

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Charlie Hunnam, Garrett Hedlund, Pedro Pascal.

Premise: Five friends team up to rob a South American drug kingpin, against the backdrop of the Argentina/Paraguay/Brazil border.

Anticipation: Netflix has brought out the chequebook for this star-filled action-flick, which marks Chandor's first film since 2014's excellent A Most Violent Year.

44. Untitled Christopher Morris Comedy

Director: Chris Morris.

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Danielle Brooks, James Adomian, Kayvan Novak, Denis O’Hare.

Premise: The film was shot in secret, the premise remains so. As does the title.

Anticipation: Eight years after Four Lions, the English comic genius (Brass Eye, Nathan Barley, etc) returns with his second feature film. Shot on location in the Caribbean, it looks like a private-military-contractor satire, and expectations should be duly exorbitant.

45. Untitled Miranda July Project

Director: Miranda July.

Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger.

Premise: “A woman's life is turned upside down when her criminal parents invite an outsider to join them on a major heist they're planning.”

Anticipation: It feels criminal that July has only been allowed to make two features: 2005’s Me & You And Everyone We Know and 2011’s The Future. Her return to the director’s chair should be met with due excitement.

46. Untitled Noah Baumbach Project

Director: Noah Baumbach.

Cast: Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern.

Premise: A divorce drags between New York and Los Angeles.

Anticipation: Not much to go on thus far, but Baumbach reuniting with Driver (following Frances Ha, While We’re Young, and The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected)) is plenty unto itself.

47. Us

Director: Jordan Peele.

Cast: Winston Duke, Lupita Nyong’o, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker.

Premise: A family beach holiday turns tense when some unexpected visitors arrive.

Anticipation: Peele’s follow-up to Get Out promises another horror-movie loaded with a thematic examination of race in America.

48. Vox Lux

Director: Brady Corbet.

Cast: Natalie Portman, Raffy Cassidy, Jude Law, Stacy Martin.

Premise: Teenage sisters are thrust into pop-stardom after writing a song about surviving a school shooting.

Anticipation: Sometimes it sucks patiently waiting for films to arrive in Australia. Corbet’s follow-up to The Childhood Of A Leader comes with songs by Sia, a score by Scott Walker, and a hyper-stylised study of pop iconography. So, y’know, hurry up, already.

49. Wendy

Director: Benh Zeitlin.

Cast: Unknown.

Premise: “A young girl is kidnapped and taken to a hidden ecosystem, where a tribal war is raging over a form of pollen that breaks the relationship between aging and time”.

Anticipation: In an era of corporate franchise instalments and Oscarbait prestige-pics, it’s heartening to see Zeitlin going off the reservation, making a film of wild ambition far from the Hollywood sausage factory. Seven years after his Oscar-crashing debut Beasts Of The Southern Wild, the onetime wonderboy finally returns with a years-in-the-making, wildly-ambitious project long shrouded in secrecy.

50. Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Director: Richard Linklater.

Cast: Emma Nelson, Cate Blanchett, Judy Greer, Kristen Wiig, Billy Crudup.

Premise: A teenage girl’s attempts to track down her agoraphobic, antisocial, acidic mother after she goes missing in Antarctica.

Anticipation: Linklater’s adaptation of Maria Semple’s comic novel gives Blanchett a killer, Awards-friendly role as a star architect turned hilarious misanthrope.

51. The Woman In The Window

Director: Joe Wright.

Cast: Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Wyatt Russell.

Premise: Whilst spying on her neighbours, a child psychologist witnesses a crime.

Anticipation: An adaptation of AJ Flynn’s novel, Wright’s Darkest Hour follow-up is, with its Rear Window-esque premise, duly billed as a ‘Hitchcockian’ thriller.

52. Wounds

Director: Babak Anvari.

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Armie Hammer, Zazie Beetz.

Premise: After a New Orleans bartender picks up a phone left behind at his bar, mysterious and disturbing things begin to happen.

Anticipation: After impressing with his debut, the 2016 Iranian horror-movie Under The Shadow, Anvari makes an American crossover, with a horror-thriller that, thus far, remains mysterious.