Film Carew's 50 Films To Watch In 2017

Another year, another Star Wars. There’s a host of movies on the horizon in 2017 — from the obligatory reboots and remakes, to the return of beloved auteurs — but, by the year’s end, all anyone’ll be talking about is that galaxy far, far away. Episode VIII arrives in December, marking the latest instalment of the global phenomenon, and the final film for Carrie Fisher.

But, Episode VIII is just one of many highlights upcoming. Here, in hope of a sweet year spent sitting in the dark, are 50 Films To Watch In 2017.

1. Alien: Covenant

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, James Franco, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz

After his bizarre Alien-saga prequel Prometheus, Scott — fresh off the success of The Martian — seemingly gets a little more ‘classic’ with his latest return to the Alienverse, as a crew travelling through space come face-to-face with Fassbender’s android survivor from last time around.

2. American Made

Director: Doug Liman

Cast: Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson, Jess Plemons, Lola Kirke, Sarah Wright, Caleb Landry Jones

Cruise has spent this decade on screen playing Jack Reacher, in the hair-metal musical Rock Of Ages, and performing endless variations of saving the world. American Made offers him a chance to do some actual acting: reteaming him with Edge Of Tomorrow director Liman in a based-on-a-true-story tale of an American pilot who flew drug-run for Colombian cartels in the ’80s.

3. Annihilation

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac

Garland’s follow-up to his beloved directorial debut, Ex Machina, seems almost like it could be a sister picture. Adapting Jeff VanderMeer’s page-turner, it charts a quartet of female researchers heading into a wilderness of biological threat and biblical overtones.

4. Baby Driver

Director: Edgar Wright

Cast: Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal, Kevin Spacey, Sky Ferreira, Elza González

In 2003, back before he’d made a feature film, Wright made a Mint Royale music-vid — with Spaced and Mighty Boosh stars in tow — in which Noel Fielding played a music-obsessed getaway driver. It’s now been turned into a feature, which could either be utterly inspired or a bad idea. Given that Wright’s filmography since includes Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (and, sure, the Cornetto trilogy, if you can stand the Peggin’), the former seems more likely.

5. Battle Of The Sexes

Director: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris

Cast: Emma Stone, Steve Carell, Andrea Riseborough, Sarah Silverman, Elisabeth Shue

After the noxious roadtrip Little Miss Sunshine and the Manic-Pixie-Dream-Girl takedown Ruby Sparks, one-time ’90s music-vid power-hitters Dayton & Faris will bring to screen the retelling of the famous 1970s tennis showdown between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

6. Beatriz At Dinner

Director: Miguel Arteta

Cast: Salma Hayek, Chloë Sevigny, John Lithgow, Connie Britton, Amy Landecker, Jay Duplass

‘A holistic medicine practitioner attends a wealthy client’s dinner party’ is a premise to relish when it comes from the creative team — director Arteta, writer/creator Mike White — behind erstwhile TV provocation Enlightened. And if you’re a fan of the TV soap Transparent, there’s Landecker and Duplass, together again.

7. The Beguiled

Director: Sofia Coppola

Cast: Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Kirsten Dunst, Angourie Rice, Oona Laurence

The latest film for Coppola is an unexpected one: a remake of a 1971 Clint Eastwood western, a Southern Gothic locked-room drama about a wounded soldier who ends up rescued by a house full of women. It finds Coppola reuniting with Dunst (The Virgin Suicides and Marie-Antoinette) and the incomparable Elle Fanning (Somewhere).

8. Blade Runner 2049

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Mackenzie Davis, Robin Wright, Carla Juri, Jared Leto

“Things were simpler then,” Gosling says, in the teaser for the 30-years-on legacyquel for Blade Runner, a film no one has ever described as ‘simple’. This kind of years-on revivalisation is normally treated with due suspicion, but with Villeneuve coming off the best film of 2016, Arrival, expectations are sky-high.

9. The Book Of Henry  

Director: Colin Trevorrow

Cast: Jaeden Lieberher, Jacob Tremblay, Naomi Watts, Maddie Ziegler, Dean Norris, Lee Pace, Sarah Silverman

The premise sounds lukewarm — a boy plots to murder the abusive father of the girl-next-door — but The Book Of Henry boasts two of the great child actors of recent years as the leads, and finds Trevorrow returning to mid-budget indie-filmmaking in between Jurassic World and Episode IX.

10. The Circle

Director: James Ponsoldt

Cast: Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, Karen Gillan, Patton Oswalt

Dave Eggers’ novel about a sinister, Google-like tech company is adapted for screen with Watson as the girl who digs her way deep into conspiracy. Ponsoldt’s bulletproof run of indie films — Off The Black, Smashed, The Spectacular Now, The End Of The Tour — suggests we’re in good hands.

11. The Discovery

Director: Charlie McDowell

Cast: Rooney Mara, Jason Segel, Riley Keough, Jesse Plemons, Robert Redford

McDowell’s last film, The One I Love, ran a relationship-drama in the prism of a thinkpiece sci-fi conceit, and The Discovery looks to do the same. Mara (McDowell’s real-life squeeze) and Segel play a couple living in a world in which the existence of the afterlife has been scientifically verified.

12. Downsizing

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig, Christoph Waltz, Alec Baldwin, Jason Sudeikis, Neil Patrick Harris

Payne originally intended to do Downsizing after 2004’s Sideways, but, instead, ended up making The Descendants and Nebraska. Now, he finally mounts the “science-fiction social satire” of his dreams, with Damon playing a man who decides to voluntarily shrink himself.

13. Dunkirk

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance

Nolan’s first film since Interstellar is a war epic, dramatising the Dunkirk evacuation. The famous war-front has been brought to screen before — last, memorably, in Joe Wright’s Atonement — but never before has it been brought to screen featuring Harry Styles’ hair. Production tales have been suitably Nolany: the director filling a beach with cardboard cut-outs of soldiers and actually crashing a $5mil vintage WWII plane so as to avoid using CGI.

14. The Fate Of The Furious

Director: F. Gary Gray

Cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Dwayne Johnson, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Kurt Russell, Jason Statham, Charlize Theron

I think it’s about cars or something.

15. Free Fire

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley, Jack Reynor, Sharlto Copley, Sam Riley, Noah Taylor, Babou Ceesay

On the heels of his gleefully ridiculous adaptation of Ballard’s High-Rise, Wheatley sticks with the wild ’70s wardrobe for the shootout rumpus Free Fire, a fast and nasty black-comedy of criminal bungling.

16. Get Out

Director: Jordan Peele

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Keith Stanfield

Peele makes his directorial debut — and cult-Brit-TV hero Daniel Kaluuya finally gets a leading-man turn — with a horror film laced with social satire, in which the normal socio-economic tropes of horror-movies are inverted.

17. A Ghost Story

Director: David Lowery

Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Will Oldham, Sonia Acevedo, Rob Zabrecky

After production wrapped on his classic Disney family drama Pete’s Dragon, Lowery reunited with old Ain’t Them Bodies Saints stars Mara and Affleck, roped in Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and made a film in secret. It’s, still, being kept largely secret, but it is about a ghost, and it is showing in Sundance soon.

18. Golden Exits

Director: Alex Ross Perry

Cast: Emily Browning, Adam Horovitz, Jason Schwartzman, Chloë Sevigny, Analeigh Tipton

Also coming soon to Sundance is another film made by an indie auteur doing time for Disney. Whilst penning his live-action Winnie The Pooh adaptation, Perry made another low-budget indie on the side, re-teaming with Listen Up Philip star Schwartzman. It’s apparently — and, like, of course — about bourgie intellectual families in Brooklyn.

19. Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Kurt Russell

The runaway success of the first film meant a sequel was obligatory, but after Guardians Of The Galaxy came with no expectations, Vol. 2 now must meet great ones.

20. Happy End

Director: Michael Haneke

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Kassovitz, Jean-Louis Trintignant,

Everyone’s favourite Austrian asshole reteams with the world’s greatest actress, making his latest film — following The Piano Teacher, The Time Of The Wolf and Amour — the fourth Haneke/Huppert Joint. It’s a Code Unknown style ensemble film, a portrait of a bourgeois French family oblivious to the refugee crisis playing out under their noses.

21. Justice League

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Ciarán Hinds

After the critical mauling of Batman V Superman, you’d have to hope Snyder has learnt some lessons. But, even if not, watching him set fire to a truckload of money, cash-cow IPs, and plans for a DC-styled cinematic ‘universe’ will have its own schadenfreude charms.

22. The Killing Of A Sacred Deer

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan, Raffey Cassidy, Bill Camp, Alicia Silverstone

Greek master Lanthimos follows his English-language debut, 2015’s astonishing The Lobster, with another collaboration with Farrell. The actor called it “eerier than The Lobster”, and said that he “felt nauseous after reading” the script, which is music to my ears.

23. King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword

Director: Guy Ritchie

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey, Jude Law, Eric Bana, Djimon Hounsou, Mikael Persbrandt

Ritchie’s re-dos of Sherlock Holmes and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. were surprisingly entertaining and well-made, which makes it, I suppose, not-implausible that he could fashion a fun, frenetic King Arthur blockbuster. But, be duly warned: as the colon in the title suggests, Legend Of The Sword is planned to be the first in a franchise.

24. Kong: Skull Island

Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Reilly, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Jing Tian, Toby Kebbell, Tom Wilkinson

Warning: High Camp Potential.

25. The Lego Batman Movie

Director: Chris McKay

Voice Cast: Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Zach Galifianakis, Ralph Fiennes, Rosario Dawson, Jenny Slate, Mariah Carey, Billy Dee Williams

After the unexpected delights of The Lego Movie, let’s see how awesome everything still is.

26. Life

Director: Daniel Espinosa

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada

Reuniting the chaps who wrote Deadpool with Reynolds seems like a sure-fire fun-time, but the trailer does make it look like a generic contagion-in-space movie.

27. Live By Night

Director: Ben Affleck

Cast: Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, Sienna Miller, Scott Eastwood, Brendan Gleeson

Affleck’s second directorial adaptation of a Dennis Lehane novel —following 2007’s Gone Baby Gone— is a bona fide men-in-hats movie, following a crew of gangsters in Prohibition-era 1920s Boston.

28. Logan Lucky

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Cast: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston, Katherine Heigl, Katie Holmes, Riley Keough

Not to be confused with Logan (AKA Yet Another Fucking Wolverine Movie), Logan Lucky finds everyone’s favourite “retired” filmmaker reuniting with his ol’ Magic Mike homie to direct a caper comedy set in the world of NASCAR.

29. The Lost City Of Z

Director: James Gray

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Robert Pattinson, Sienna Miller, Tom Holland

In 1925, British explorer Percy Fawcett disappeared in the Amazon, on an expedition to find a mythical lost city. It’s a fascinating stranger-than-fiction tale that’s equally fascinating as a subject for Gray, whose prior five films were all set in Brooklyn.

30. The Masterpiece

Director: James Franco

Cast: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Josh Hutcherson, Zac Efron, Ari Graynor, Jacki Weaver, Hannibal Buress, Alison Brie, Sharon Stone, Melanie Griffith, Bryan Cranston

The Franco bros’ much-awaited adaptation of Greg Sestero’s The Disaster Artist finally hits screens, shining a light on the behind-the-scenes lunacy of the worst film of our times — and maybe all-time — Tommy Wiseau’s The Room.

31. The Meyerowitz Stories

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Candice Bergen

“An estranged family gathers together in New York for an event celebrating the artistic work of their father” sounds like a particularly Baumbachian premise. The Meyerowitz Stories (if you think that title’s a mouthful, it was previously known as Yeh Din Ka Kissa) finds Baumbach working, again, with Stiller, the pair having previously made Greenberg and While We’re Young.

32. Molly's Game

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Michael Cera, Kevin Costner, Chris O’Dowd

Having long churned out wordy, award-winning scripts and created self-congratulatory TV shows, screenwriting king Sorkin finally transitions to the director’s chair. It’s an adaptation of the memoir of Molly Bloom, who found infamy for running a high-stakes underground-poker ring.

33. Okja

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Cast: Ahn Seo-hyun, Lily Collins, Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun, Choi Woo-sik, Shirley Henderson

After his bonkers English-language debut Snowpiercer, Bong’s been given $50mil from Netflix to do whatever the fuck he wants. Which is, apparently, to make a monster movie that doubles as critique of capitalism.

34. The Snowman

Director: Thomas Alfredson

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, J.K. Simmons, Chloë Sevigny, Val Kilmer

Six long years after Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Aflredson — director of the great Let The Right One In — finally returns to screens. He does so with another spy saga, marking the first to-screen adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole series.

35. Spider-man: Homecoming

Director: Jon Watts

Cast: Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Zendaya, Donald Glover, Bokeem Woodbine, Tony Revolori, Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei

Holland’s appearance in Captain America: Civil War was plenty fun, and, well, shit, this couldn’t be any worse than all the other cinematic Spider-men…

36. The Square

Director: Ruben Östlund

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Claes Bang, Dominic West

The put-forth premise suggests a film about conceptual modern art, ‘safe spaces’ and internet-age controversy-mongering, but the most important details come with director and star: Östlund following up his master-work Force Majeure, and bringing in Peggy Olson herself to do so.

37. Star Wars: Episode VIII

Director: Rian Johnson

Cast: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Benicio del Toro

It’s yet to get a post-colon title, but Episode VIII will surely be a biggest-box-office-earner-ever contender.

38. A Storm In The Stars

Director: Haifaa al-Mansour

Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, Ben Hardy, Tom Sturridge, Bel Powley, Maisie Williams

In 1816, 18-year-old Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein whilst surrounded by the romantic poets in Italy. Here, she’s played by Elle Fanning, in a period-piece by Saudi director al-Mansour (Wadjda), penned by Australian screenwriter Emma Jensen.

39. Suburbicon

Director: George Clooney

Cast: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin

Clooney’s latest film as director comes with a script by the Coen Brothers, in which the smiling post-war façade of a 1950s pre-fab development falls away to reveal dark secrets. Killer cast, too.

40. Suspiria

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Jessica Harper, Sylvie Testud, Jessica Harper

Obligatory remakes of old horror films rarely justify their existence, but there’s optimism to be found with this go-over of Dario Argento’s 1977 giallo classic. Guadagnino’s radical rewrite of La Piscine, as A Bigger Splash, was something akin to a rollicking failure, and he reunites with ongoing muse Tilda Swinton for his take on Suspiria, which will preserve the 1977 setting of the original. It’s not Guadagnino’s only film for 2017, as he also delivers the more-modest, queer coming-of-age story Call Me By Your Name, whose cast includes Armie Hammer and Michael Stuhlbarg.

41. T2: Trainspotting

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Robert Carlyle, Jonny Lee Miller, Kelly Macdonald, Shirley Henderson

’90s heroin nostalgia in the house! 20 years on, all your old friends are back, and they’re just as old as you.

42. Thor: Ragnarok

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Hiddleston, Tessa Thompson, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, Idris Elba, Anthony Hopkins, Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch

The inspired appointment of Kiwi comic genius Taika Waititi as the director of the latest Thor movie suggests that it’s going to be, largely, a comedy. And if it’s anything like this what-Thor-was-doing-during-Civil-War promotional mockumentary (below), good times await.

43. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Director: Martin McDonagh

Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage, John Hawkes, Abbie Cornish, Caleb Landry Jones

The premise for this oddly-titled tale is: “a woman wages war on her local police force”. Given it’s the latest cinematic work for Irish playwright McDonagh — director of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths — the set-up seems as likely a vehicle for comedy as violence.

44. Untitled Detroit Project

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Cast: John Boyega, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, Ben O’Toole, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever, Anthony Mackie, Jason Mitchell, Jacob Latimore, John Krasinski

Bigelow’s long-awaited follow-up to Zero Dark Thirty is a dramatisation of the Detroit riots of 1967. 50 years on, the uprising of a largely young, black mob against an overbearing, racially-profiling police force carries all kinds of cultural resonance.

45. Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Fashion Project

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis

It’s still under wraps, but the latest film for PTA — which is set in the fashion world in the 1950s, and reunites him with his There Will be Blood star — will indeed be out before the year is out.

46. War For The Planet Of The Apes

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Andy Serkis, Steve Zahn, Judy Greer, Woody Harrelson, Gabriel Chavarria

After two unexpectedly-excellent instalments in the rebooted series, let’s see how we fare in the latest return to that teeeeerrrrrrible Planet of the Apes.

47. War Machine

Director: David Michôd

Cast: Brad Pitt, Ben Kingsley, Tilda Swinton, Emory Cohen, Keith Stanfield, Scoot McNairy, Topher Grace

After Animal Kingdom and The Rover, local-boy-made-good Michôd heads overseas, making a satirical portrait of US war profiteering, based on Michael Hastings’ non-fiction investigation The Operators: The Wild And Terrifying Inside Story Of America’s War In Afghanistan.

48. Weightless

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Haley Bennett, Christian Bale, Michael Fassbender, Benicio del Toro, Bérénice Marlohe

After years of speculation and anticipation, the great poet of American cinema will finally unveil his latest opus. Set in and around Austin’s indie music scene, it boasts not just a top-shelf cast (whose listed actors may or may not actually make the final 145-minute cut), but apparent appearances from Florence Welch, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Arcade Fire, Iron & Wine, etc.

49. Wonder Woman

Director: Patty Jenkins

Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Ewen Bremner, Saïd Taghmaoui

The DC ‘universe’ has, thus far, been a Snyderist disaster. Wonder Woman offers a genuine hope for something different, and actually good; hope that’s emboldened by its genuinely-delightful trailer and distant, pre-Batffleck period-piece setting.

50. Wonderstruck

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Cory Michael Smith, Oakes Fegley, Millicent Simmonds

After Carol, Haynes works on adapting a book by Brian Selznick, whose latest quasi-graphic-novel to be brought to screen — by Martin Scorsese, no less — was The Invention Of Hugo Cabret. The twin narratives of Wonderstruck are set in 1927 and 1977, and Haynes will depict the earlier era as a silent film.