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So, what are we looking forward to this year? I can't think of anything right away, but this would be a good way to start this thread I think.

Dark Skies. It looks like the new The Happening. Only here will you find such spooky imagery as o-faces, mass bird suicide, little green men, and headbanging.

Claire Denis recently shot a film, hopefully it'll see a 2013 release.
Modest expectations for Martin Scorsese's Wall Street film - wish it was The Silence with Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio Del Toro - but I'll see it.
Jim Jarmusch's latest movie should be out this year.
David Fincher's new NetFlix series with Kevin Spacey - at the very least, he's directing the pilot.
Richard Linklater's Before Midnight
Terrence Malick's new movie, despite the mixed reviews - I'm not expecting much, but I'll still see it
The Coen brothers have that movie about the folk scene in the '60s - I think they shot it a while ago but I haven't heard anything about it
Aronofsky's Noah may be out, but doubtful

I'm awaiting Andrzej Wajda's Wałęsa with some trepidation - rumoured to be his last film (he turns 87 in March and hasn't been in the best of health in recent years), it's clearly going to be marketed as an archetypal Great Man Biopic along the lines of his friend Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, but with the added complication that its subject is not only still alive (and still hugely controversial at home), but Wajda and Lech Wałęsa have been friends and occasional political colleagues for over thirty years. Which could be an advantage, but some of Wajda's previous films have been hamstrung by them dealing with ostensibly strong material that was ultimately too personal - notably Lotna (1959) and Katyń (2007).

Still, there are positive signs - Robert Więckiewicz is not only one of Poland's best actors right now, but he's practically the living spit of the younger Wałęsa, and when I interviewed him earlier this year he wouldn't talk about it in detail but said that it was definitely a warts-and-all portrait. Also, by mutual agreement, Wałęsa has apparently had no involvement with the film at all.

personally looking forward to:

Stoker (Park Chan-wook)
Before Midnight (Linklater)
The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-Wai)
Under The Skin (Glazer)
I’m So Excited (Pedro Almodóvar)
Passion (Brian DePalma)

Joy of Joys!

Hollywood makes 2013 the year of the sequel: Cinema audiences will be hit with a battery of sequels, prequels, remakes and reboots in 2013, as Hollywood, stung by a series of recent box office flops, banks on safe follow-ups to successful blockbusters.

The long list of tried and tested concepts will include instalments of franchises that have gone well beyond the usual two or three films.

Audiences will be given a sixth helping of X-Men plus Fast and Furious 6, Die Hard 5, Scary Movie 5 and Paranormal Activity 5. There will also be Iron Man 3, The Hangover 3, and second outings for The Muppets, The Smurfs, GI Joe and Bad Santa.
Reboots include the Superman film Man of Steel, plus a new version of The Evil Dead, a new Mad Max, and a second film in the latest reincarnation of Star Trek.

The reluctance of studios to take risks on original concepts follows a series of disastrous results this year. The most notorious was the epic flop John Carter, based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs book A Princess of Mars, which saw Disney taking a $200 million (£123 million) write down, and Rich Ross, the chairman of the studio, resigning soon after.

Isn't that true of every year since at least '07? There's a lot of greatness Hollywood is producing beyond the money earners.

That is the biggest non-story imaginable.

GKids is releasing so many promising-looking animated films this year: THE RABBI'S CAT, FROM UP ON POPPY HILL (hated TALES FROM EARTHSEA, but I can't miss a Ghibli film), THE PAINTING, A LETTER TO MOMO, etc.

Other titles coming in 2013 with potential:

Top of the Lake (Jane Campion) Technically a mini-series
Jimmy Picard (Arnaud Desplechin)
Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry)
Venus In Fur (Roman Polanski)
The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)
Princess Kaguya Story (Isao Takahata)
The Dance of Reality (Alejandro Jodorowsky)
The Past (Asgard Farhadi)
The Congress (Ari Folman)
The Last Sentence (Jan Troell)
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao Hsien) Finally happening!

While I haven't been too impressed by what little I've seen from James Franco as a director, I am interested in both Child of God and As I Lay Dying for obvious reasons. Not expecting much. There are also a couple of directorial debuts that sound promising: The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini) and You are Here (Mathew Weiner)

I'm a sucker for a good baseball movie, so I'm waiting for 42.

So we count Like Someone In Love and Post Tenebras Lux as 2013 films for our lists? I didn't know if we went by when the film was first shown (in festivals 2012) or US release date (2013).

You can do it either way for your own personal dynamic top 10. If you go by U.S. release date, they're both 2013 films. If you go by IMDb year, or by first non-festival release date in the country of origin, they're both 2012 films. For the consensus lists, I will count them both as 2012 films.

Really looking forward to 56UP.

Thanks swo.

This is the End looks like a comedy I will enjoy. Everything else that I'm waiting has already been mentioned.

That looks really promising, actually. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have all but proven at this point that when they keep it somewhat simple, they can write some pretty hilarious screenplays and impressively execute on them. Pineapple Express was particularly fantastic.

Really exciting and not mentioned yet:

Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont)
A Perfect Day for Plesiosaur (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

Of course these might not be making it to the States this year, but will (or should, in the case of Snowpiercer) be released in their respective countries.

Wasn't sure where to post this, but here's a stellar article about production of Paul Schrader's The Canyons which appeared in New York Times Magazine.

Giuseppe Tornatore's latest, The Best Offer (La migliore offerta) (2013) came out in Italy on New Year's Day, and appears to be an English language Italian production.

The film stars Geoffrey Rush, Jim Sturgess, Sylvia Hoeks and Donald Sutherland.

Ennio Morricone has composed the score for the film.

Dubbed Italian trailer

Variety on the film's big opening in Italy

The Muppets follow-up has been officially moved to March 2014.

Caught a screening of Mama tonight and found it to be a surprisingly effective and atmospheric ghost story. Of the horror pictures Guillermo del Toro has executive produced, I've only seen this and Splice, and it interested to me that both were strongly tied to the ideas of reluctant parenthood and smothering love. Jessica Chastain continues her strong run of picking interesting film projects (a relief, as I saw her last night in the Broadway production of The Heiress and found her horribly miscast, though the production itself didn't help). It's a modest picture, but worth a look.

I thought Mama was really good. Liked it as much as some other recent horrors I liked, like Sinister and Insidious. It's got similar 3rd act issues like those movies too, but the scares are excellent before it loses its power by showing too much (and repeating some devices). The trailer made me most interested in whatever backstory/mythology was going to go on, and this delivers there (to a great degree, altho possibly at the expense of the craft that made the first 2/3rds so great), but it bookends itself very nicely with dark and ambiguous emotional areas. The camerawork is especially impressive throughout, lots of longtakes and swooping sleight-of-eye panning. And let's never forget: Goth Chastain (yum) \:D/

more spoiler-y thoughts (incl for Texas Chainsaw 3D):

Spoiler

Again, I think I liked this mostly for how in-depth and emotional-closure-y it gets w/ the backstory/mythology, where a movie like Sinister or Insidious just sorta stops at the definition of the monster/ghost/demon like a lot of horror films do.

Also of interest to me is the question of empathy and how ultimately that is mandated for the ghost in this, but perhaps not as effectively - since not as simplistically? - as in the lesser (read: terrible) Texas Chainsaw 3D. At the end of both movies the villain's last kills are justified at least to characters in the film and I guess to the audience depending on that individual but regardless the capital-A Audience is complicit in the final kills.

And it's interesting to note that since the traditional horror villain gets diluted by empathy (great mathrock bandname!) we need a surrogate villain and in both films WASP privilege stand-ins are the ultimate monstrosity whose deaths aren't given any sense of emotional loss.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:So, what are we looking forward to this year?

I deleted my earlier, slapdash response to this question. Here are the 100 films I am most anticipating this year. I haven't included anything that hasn't started filming yet. The Kiarostami and Malick would have been at the top of the list if they hadn't been met with shrugs at their festival bows.

1. Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier)
2. Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
4. Her (Spike Jonze)
5. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen)
6. The Grandmasters (Wong Kar-wai)
7. Nebraska (Alexander Payne)
8. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)
9. The Past (Asghar Farhadi)
10. Only God Forgives (Nicolas Winding Refn)
11. Jimmy Picard (Arnaud Desplechin)
12. Captain Phillips (Paul Greengrass)
13. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)
14. To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
15. Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
16. Oktober November (Götz Spielmann)
17. Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)
18. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach)
19. The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam)
20. The Counselor (Ridley Scott)
21. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
22. Vi är bäst! (Lukas Moodysson)
23. I’m So Excited (Pedro Almodóvar)
24. Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski)
25. Monuments Men (George Clooney)
26. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
27. Labor Day (Jason Reitman)
28. Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller)
29. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)
30. Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu)
31. Something in the Air (Olivier Assayas)
32. Mood Indigo (Michel Gondry)
33. The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola)
34. Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas)
35. Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh)
36. Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley)
37. Low Life (James Gray)
38. Devil’s Knot (Atom Egoyan)
39. The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance)
40. The Last Sentence (Jan Troell)
41. Stoker (Park Chan-wook)
42. Old Boy (Spike Lee)
43. A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn)
44. Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche)
45. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy Andersson)
46. Pieta (Kim Ki-duk)
47. Prince Avalanche (David Gordon Green)
48. Joe (David Gordon Green)
49. The Angels’ Share (Ken Loach)
50. Twelve Years A Slave (Steve McQueen)
51. No (Pablo Larraín)
52. The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann)
53. Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
54. Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro)
55. 42 (Brian Helgeland)
56. Trance (Danny Boyle)
57. Reality (Matteo Garrone)
58. Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams)
59. Man of Steel (Zack Snyder)
60. Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight (Stephen Frears)
61. A Nine Minute Interval (Corneliu Porumboiu)
62. A Perfect Day for Plesiosaur (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
63. August Osage County (John Wells)
64. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho)
65. In the House (François Ozon)
66. Foxfire (Laurent Cantet)
67. The Bastards (Claire Denis)
68. Wally and André Shoot Ibsen (Jonathan Demme)
69. Abus De Faiblesse (Catherine Breillat)
70. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (David Lowery)
71. Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon)
72. Mud (Jeff Nichols)
73. Elysium (Neill Blomkamp)
74. The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg)
75. Camille Claudel, 1915 (Bruno Dumont)
76. The Company You Keep (Robert Redford)
77. How I Live Now (Kevin Macdonald)
78. Girl Most Likely (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini)
79. Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
80. Jack Ryan (Kenneth Branagh)
81. The Wolverine (James Mangold)
82. Dead Man Down (Niels Arden Oplev)
83. 56 Up (Michael Apted)
84. Capital (Costa-Gavras)
85. Calm at Sea (Volker Schlöndorff)
86. Byzantium (Neil Jordan)
87. The Double (Richard Ayoade)
88. Passion (Brian DePalma)
89. The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini)
90. Calvary (John Michael McDonagh)
91. Serena (Susanne Bier)
92. Malavita (Luc Besson)
93. Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper)
94. The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)
95. The Fifth Estate (Bill Condon)
96. I, Frankenstein (Stuart Beattie)
97. Now You See Me (Louis Leterrier)
98. Diana (Oliver Hirschbiegel)
99. All You Need Is Kill (Doug Liman)
100. World War Z (Marc Forster)

Jeff wrote:The Kiarostami and Malick would have been at the top of the list if they hadn't been met with shrugs at their festival bows.

Don't count the Kiarostami out yet: that film burrows even deeper in misdirection than Certified Copy, and a lot of those first viewers didn't even seem to realise that there was a rug to pull out from under them.