09/01/2025 - New features by Joachim Trier, Edward Berger, Julia Ducournau and Richard Linklater (in French) head our annual round-up of upcoming cinema

If you’ve clicked on any of the 2025 film curtain-raiser pieces published before ours, they’ve been in hearty agreement that one should be optimistic about the coming year in cinema. Yet, to be more specific, this comes from the array of great contemporary filmmakers with mouthwatering new titles, rather than the wider industry picture, threatened, as ever, by an unstable box office, platform consolidations and now the Pandora’s Box uncertainty of AI.

But the promising new work is happily mimicked when looking at what the European industry is premiering. With the regular overviews of anticipated films for Cineuropa, this writer has always taken note of the over-representation of veteran filmmakers – some deriving from the golden 1960s generation, with one, final great statement to make. For the list to come, it’s impressive how most of these directors have become major figures merely over the past few years (often strongly helped by top festival prizes), and that a gender balance has finally been attained. Most are elaborate co-productions with some financial scale and risk, with transnational casts extending to Hollywood actors, leading to a hazier demarcation if the film derives from a sole country or a particular national cinema. Anatomy of a Fall [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Justine Triet
film profile] was a triumph for the French industry, yet its alternately English and French dialogue, and internationally appealing genre tag as a courtroom drama, still seems like a new pathway – one only likely in the post-pandemic 2020s.

Knowing that the Flow [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Gints Zilbalodis
film profile] of 2025 is somewhere out there, hiding, ready to amaze us all after eluding industry prognostications, the 20 selected films are an imperfect attempt to corral the year’s best. And that’s not forgetting the following honourable mentions: Robin Campillo’s Enzo (originally to be made by the late Laurent Cantet – see the news), the Dardennes’ Young Mothers, Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower (starring Marion Cotillard), Sylvain Chomet’s The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Private Life (with Jodie Foster), Harry Lighton’s Pillion (a potential breakthrough this year from the UK), Agnieszka Holland’s Kafka biopic Franz (see the news), Lois Patiño’s Ariel, Bruno Dumont’s Red Rocks, Tarik Saleh’s thriller-trilogy capper Eagles of the Republic, Laura Samani’s Un anno di scuola, Bi Gan’s Resurrection (a French co-production), Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, Peter Greenaway’s Lucca Mortis, Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s crime flick Hot Spot, Ilker Çatak’s Yellow Letters (following up The Teachers’ Lounge [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: İlker Çatak
interview: Leonie Benesch
film profile] – see the news), Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s El ser querido (see the news), Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s spy-movie homage Reflection in a Dead Diamond, and Kirill Serebrennikov’s Disappearance.

As for Carlos Reygadas’ Wake of Umbra, Andriy Zvyagintsev’s Jupiter and Lucrecia Martel’s Chocobar, there’s vaguer information on whether they’ll be ready this year. Otherwise, 2025 – show us what you’ve got.

The Ballad of a Small Player - Edward Berger (Germany/UK)

Edward Berger (Conclave [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) continues his transnational success and versatility with this stylish thriller set in the gambling dens of Macau. Colin Farrell plays a dissolute conman passing himself off as an aristocrat, whose debts and past start catching up with him. Berger has confirmed in interviews that he's hunting big thematic game with this adaptation of a novel by British expat writer Lawrence Osborne, which is backed by Netflix, calling it “about the end of capitalism, in a way.”

Alpha - Julia Ducournau (Belgium/France)

Titane [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Julia Ducournau, Vincent Li…
film profile] was perhaps the most intriguing choice for the Palme d’Or this decade, noteworthy for the wider industry’s hesitancy towards it compared with other recent winners. Ducournau is finally back this year with Alpha, which looks to be her most topical and serious work to date, following an 11-year-old girl in Le Havre who's rejected by her schoolmates once she's rumoured to have contracted a mysterious new disease. With its 1980s period timeframe, we can guess the AIDS crisis is being invoked. Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim and Barbie star Emma Mackey head up the adult cast.

Silent Friend - Ildikó Enyedi (Germany/France/Hungary)

Sounding more like the more original and sui generis On Body and Soul [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ildiko Enyedi
interview: Ildiko Enyedi
interview: Réka Tenki
film profile] than the sleepy literary adaptation The Story of My Wife [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ildikó Enyedi
film profile], Silent Friend boasts another typically eccentric premise from Enyedi: in the botanical garden of the university town Marburg, a tree is at the centre of three stories taking place across a century. Léa Seydoux re-teams with the Golden Bear-winning director after The Story of My Wife, with fellow arthouse legend Tony Leung in tow.

Ann Lee - Mona Fastvold (USA/Sweden/UK/Hungary)

Talk about timeliness: Mona Fastvold (The World to Come) has been shooting her latest project under the radar in Hungary, as her spouse and collaborator Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist [+see also:
film review
film profile] has been enjoying its triumphal festival and awards run. It further foregrounds the talents of regular composer Daniel Blumberg, as this time he contributes songs as well as the score to Fastvold’s epic fable on the founder of the Shaker evangelical movement in America, unusually led for its era by a woman. Amanda Seyfried plays the title figure, in her best arthouse role since her touching work in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed.

Sacrifice - Romain Gavras (USA/UK/Greece)

After her anticipated turn as Furiosa in the Mad Max universe didn’t quite live up to expectations last year, Anya Taylor-Joy is back in a role inspired by a fellow righteous avenger, Joan of Arc, leading a militia group as they kidnap a movie star (Chris Evans) at a ritzy charity gala. Advance word on Romain Gavras’ latest movie also foretells of high-fantasy elements: cataclysmic visions and mystical prophecies. Other “highs” this film could be: high-voltage and high-octane – like a juddering bass line from Gavras’s old amis Justice. 

Dao - Alain Gomis (France/Senegal)

Okay, it graced our 2024 anticipated list, for those with good memories, but there’s now full confirmation that the French-Senegalese director’s new fiction feature is ready. Béa Mendy plays the central figure of Gloria, her mind and memories floating between two important family events: the marriage of her daughter in the Paris banlieues, and a ceremony consecrating her dead father in Guinea-Bissau. Beyond the acclaimed Félicité [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alain Gomis
film profile], a Berlinale premiere, Gomis is also following up Rewind & Play [+see also:
film review
interview: Alain Gomis
film profile], his innovative doc on the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk – a must for music aficionados if they’ve missed it.

Dracula Park - Radu Jude (Romania/Austria)

Make Dracula great again! It’s tempting to merely repeat that sole publicity phrase when previewing the latest Radu Jude, yet there’s more. With the recent, Europhilic Nosferatu remake having just been released, Bram Stoker’s legendary character returns further to its roots, as a panoply of stories – some generated with the help of AI software – commences when an actor portraying Dracula in a restaurant show flees the performance, and tourists and owners set off to chase and hunt the “vampire”.

Gavagai - Ulrich Köhler (Germany/France)

Analytical, wry, unsettling – this is the very specific tonal territory of the Berlin School auteur Ulrich Köhler, who’s made several critically celebrated features this century that have been distributed more inconsistently. No plot information has been circulated about his latest movie, but Maren Eggert is in a central role, and she is arguably the best German-speaking thespian presence to sustain a film like this. Köhler is also the spouse of the more widely known Maren Ade, of Toni Erdmann [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Maren Ade
film profile] fame.

After - Oliver Laxe (Spain/France)

An acclaimed director of a more experimental bent, Laxe could potentially reach a new plateau of esteem with After, which looks set to expand the sensory and transportive aspects of his previous work. Sergi López, a pleasingly regular hire in great European films now, plays a stricken father who, along with his son, is searching for his daughter Marina, who disappeared at a rave in the mountains in Morocco. They join another group of ravers in search of “one last party”, in the hope Marina will be there. So, ethnographic docu-drama and EDM euphoria, united at last.

Dry Leaf - Alexandre Koberidze (Germany/Georgia)

And the coincidences pile up; somehow, next on our list is another tale by an experimental maverick of a father searching for his missing daughter in unique locales – here, the Georgian village football stadiums that she was photographing for an art project. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alexandre Koberidze
film profile] marked Koberidze out as an unpredictable new thinker in cinema, synthesising ideas and content that few of his peers would consider. Shot with a small crew over several summers, Dry Leaf will be ready for unveiling at a festival this year, with it being in IFFR Pro’s recently announced Darkroom line-up for nearly completed films.

Nouvelle Vague - Richard Linklater (France/USA)

Your eyes weren’t deceiving you: we are highlighting a Richard Linklater film on Cineuropa. Yet he couldn’t have swung by – to use a nicely casual, Linklaterian verb – with a more fitting project. Rather than being the umpteenth disquisition on the meaning of the New Wave, this will be a sincere tribute to the joys of youthful, on-the-street moviemaking, according to the director: namely, the making of one of the most revolutionary modern films, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless [+see also:
trailer
film profile], shot with a French cast in the French language, with domestic funding as well.

Duse - Pietro Marcello (Italy/France)

In Europe, the idea of the “prestige picture” doesn’t have the derogatory shading it might in anglophone film culture. Pietro Marcello, well inspired by the work of his countryman Marco Bellocchio, partly suggests why: this will likely be a lucid and detailed look at the elite early-20th-century acting world, as Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi regally incarnates Eleonora Duse, considered the greatest stage actress of her era. Noémie Merlant is on call to play the actress’s daughter Enrichetta in this later-life portrait set after World War I.

Orphan - László Nemes (Hungary/France/Germany/UK)

There’s nothing self-effacing about László Nemes’s art: he’s a director who goes (thematically and formally) big or goes home. But from early reports, his third feature, Orphan, looks more digestible than the overambitious and diffuse Sunset [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: László Nemes
film profile], with the logline detailing the suspenseful story of a 12-year-old protagonist who, just after the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising, learns shattering things about his genesis amid World War II. Mátyás Erdély is again on cinematography duties – will he stick to the same choreographed, over-the-shoulder POV as the first two Nemes films?

The Love that Remains - Hlynur Pálmason (Iceland/Denmark/Sweden/France)

Pálmason was set to shoot the very ambitious-sounding On Land and Sea last year; instead, he made the more contained The Love that Remains, capturing “a year in the life of a family as the parents navigate their separation”. The Icelandic director lensed the film himself on 35 mm, and early production stills reveal his impressionistic eye happily retained. Scanning the passage of time over a year in such a way also has a precedent with his popular 2022 short Nest.

Miroirs No. 3 - Christian Petzold (Germany)

Having spoken of the awesome ambition of Nemes two entries back, here’s a director who seems to work at the same elegant and economical scale each time, with a regular stock company of solely German actors and few international partners. Still, Petzold has harnessed these elements with the requisite skill to make him one of the most acclaimed of his generation. With its title referencing a Ravel piano suite, Paula Beer is back in her fourth consecutive lead role for the director, playing a woman who cautiously integrates into her dead boyfriend’s family after he perishes in a car crash.

Heads or Tails? - Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis (Italy/USA)

Italian-US directorial duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis possibly have the lowest degree of name recognition in this list’s directors, yet they seem poised to make a full breakthrough with this Italian (but definitely not Spaghetti) western. Having John C Reilly play the legendary frontiersman Buffalo Bill on one of his Italian tours would be enough of a hook, but they also have two of the best new European actors in Alessandro Borghi and Nadia Tereszkiewicz as an outlaw couple on the run, the former of whom is a local cowboy who beats Bill in a wild horse-taming contest. Our interview with the directors a few years ago promised many “dirty tracking shots” amid its “vibrant” 35 mm shooting.

Romería - Carla Simón (Spain/Germany)

This seems like another achingly personal film for Golden Bear winner Carla Simón, continuing a trilogy that commenced with Summer 1993 [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carla Simón
film profile] and Alcarràs [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carla Simón
interview: Carla Simón
interview: Giovanni Pompili
film profile]. Developing the premise of the former film, Romería finds an orphaned young woman seeking information from her uncle in Vigo about her deceased father, who died of AIDS. With these being roles that most dramatic actors would covet, Simón here maintains her usual preference for non-professionals, which has always given her work an inimitable authenticity.

Sentimental Value - Joachim Trier (Norway/Germany/Denmark/France/Sweden)

Vibrant, novelistic Norwegian comedy: this is the exact stylistic mix that Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt alight upon, where its influences (Nordic psychological drama, 1990s Gen X cinema, Woody Allen) are clear but congealed enough to seem truly original. Wisely reuniting with Renate Reinsve in one of the lead roles, and adding Stellan Skarsgård (speaking Norwegian?) and Elle Fanning, Trier expands the scope of The Worst Person in the World [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Joachim Trier
film profile] into a cross-generational family saga, following a filmmaker father who wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter by casting her in his next movie.

In Adam’s Interest - Laura Wandel (Belgium/France)

Following 2021’s Playground [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Wandel
film profile], one of the most acclaimed and confident breakthrough features of its year, Belgian director Laura Wandel has entrusted a blue-chip francophone cast (Léa Drucker, Anamaria Vartolomei and Alex Descas) to tell an intricate, high-stakes story set in paediatric healthcare. Drucker and Vartolomei will respectively play a head nurse and a stricken mother, in conflict over appropriate protocol when the latter’s son is admitted to hospital.

Stitches - Alice Winocour (France/USA)

Angelina Jolie, belatedly, has reached her European auteur years. After Maria [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and Stitches, Alice Winocour’s Paris Fashion Week-set film, it’s hard to imagine her giving these kinds of movies the shaft, given how natural she seems in their mise-en-scène. With Winocour also eyeing a wide international success that’s so far eluded her, Jolie will play a US filmmaker who “goes on a journey” at the aforementioned event, with Louis Garrel and Ella Rumpf as some of the characters she’ll cross paths with.