December's most anticipated films: Ferrari, The Color Purple, Wonka, and more

Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki, and Godzilla

Director: Takashi Yamazaki

In the middle of a veritable Godzillarenaissance, with American and Japanese versions of the character roaring into theaters and streamers, Toho Studio’s live-action entries stand tall. Nearly a decade removed from 2016’s hysterical Shin Godzilla, director Takashi Yamazaki trades bureaucracy for humanism, taking cues from Jaws and Dunkirk as often as the 1954 nuclear era monster movie. Godzilla Minus One promises to make even the most skeptical viewer a fan. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Cast: Beyoncé

Director: Beyoncé

If you couldn’t make it out to Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, Queen Bey still has you covered with Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé. The film will also have plenty to offer fans who did see the live show: it’s a hybrid concert documentary, combining footage from the tour with snippets of the Renaissance visual album and some behind-the-scenes recording sessions. Like Taylor Swift did with her Eras Tour, Beyonce is taking her work straight to the fans, bypassing the major studios and inking a distribution deal directly with AMC Theaters. [Jen Lennon]

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, and Ramy Youssef

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Emma Stone is out to prove her weirdness, attaching herself to the industry’s most masterful cringe artist. First came her turn as the gentrifying HGTV host on Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse. Now, she plays Frankenstein’s horny monster for Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, his long-awaited follow-up to his Oscar-winning The Favourite. Lanthimos’ high-concept nightmares finally get a budget to match, allowing him to rummage around The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari all he wants. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Japanese voice cast: Soma Santoki, Masaki Suda, Yoshino Kimura, Takuya Kimura, Aimyon, Ko Shibasaki, Karou Kobayashi, Shinobu Otake

English voice cast: Robert Pattinson, Luca Padovan, Karen Fukuhara, Christian Bale, Gemma Chan, Florence Pugh, Mark Hamill, Willem Dafoe

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Legendary director Hayao Miyazaki is back with his first film in 10 years. Whether The Boy And The Heron will actually be his last, as he’s sometimes claimed it will be, remains to be seen, but we’ll take any Miyazaki we can get. Like most of his films, it centers on a young child who gets swept up in a beautifully whimsical new world. This time, Mahito (Soma Santoki in the Japanese version, Luca Padovan in the English dub), befriends a talking heron (Masaki Suda/Robert Pattinson) who leads him to a mysterious tower in the forest near his new home. Early reviews have been extremely positive, which is pretty much expected from Miyazaki at this point. [Jen Lennon]

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Thomasin McKenzie

Director: William Oldroyd

Based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s breakthrough novel of the same name, Eileen centers on Eileen Dunlop (McKenzie), a young woman working as a prison secretary in 1960s Massachusetts. When a new co-worker, Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), shows up, Eileen finds herself drawn into Rebecca’s orbit, and she becomes both the object of Eileen’s fantasy and obsession as well as a mysterious presence, leading them both to some dark places. Moshfegh co-wrote the script with Luke Goebel, so whether or not it’s a straightforward interpretation of the book, it’s at least guided by Moshfegh’s creative choices, and we’re here for it either way. [Jen Lennon]

Cast: Aunjanue Ellis, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Blair Underwood, Nick Offerman

Director: Ava DuVernay

DuVernay has been setting records left and right with Origin, and it’s not even in theaters yet. It was the first film directed by an African American woman to compete at the Venice International Film Festival, and it’s the highest-testing movie ever for distributor Neon and for DuVernay. The film is an adaptation of the nonfiction book Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, which explores the history of racism in America. Origin seemingly came out of nowhere with its premiere at Venice, but it’s been dominating awards-season speculation ever since. DuVernay is no stranger to the Oscars stage: her 2014 film Selma was nominated for Best Picture and won for Best Original Song, and her 2016 film 13th was nominated for Best Documentary Feature. [Jen Lennon]

Cast: Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth, Imogen Kogge, and Max Beck

Director: Jonathan Glazer

A decade after transforming Scarlett Johansson into the universe’s most terrifying maneater in Under The Skin, director Jonathan Glazer turns his attention to the everyday horrors of genocide. Christian Friedel stars as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, building a life with his wife (Sandra Hüller) and family as the Nazis carry out the holocaust next door. The banal horror of Zone Of Interest promises to be an unflinching and relevant showcase of the depths of dehumanization war brings. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Sally Hawkins, Keegan-Michael Key, Rowan Atkinson, Olivia Colman

Director: Paul King

Tim Burton and Johnny Depp totally misfired with their dark and unpalatable 2005 collaboration, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. For Wonka, director Paul King (Paddington and Paddington 2), at least based on reports out of Cinemacon, will deliver an upbeat, straight-up musical prequel that follows a young Willy Wonka (Chalamet) crooning and tap dancing as he sets about launching his candy empire. We’ll watch Chalamet, Hawkins, and Colman in anything, but the wild card here is Atkinson. It’ll be a sweet treat to see the erstwhile Mr. Bean and Blackadder as Father Julius. [Ian Spelling]

Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Keith David, Issa Rae, and Sterling K. Brown

Director: Cord Jefferson

Writer/director Cord Jefferson already had a sterling resume that includes Watchmen, Succession, and Station Eleven. His first feature, American Fiction, promises to put him over the top. In this pseudo-companion to The Holdovers, Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a curmudgeonly English professor seething with professional jealousy, who returns to his family home outside Boston to care for his ailing mother. After years of failing to produce a book audiences want to read, Monk writes a pandering novel about “the Black experience” as a goof that turns into a literary sensation. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Cast: Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney, Stanley Simons, Lily James, and Holt McCallany

Director: Sean Durkin

Zac Efron’s bodily transformations continue with The Iron Claw, a nostalgic and heartbreaking tour through the 1980s pro-wrestling boom via one of the sport’s most tragic stories. Director Sean Durkin (The Nest, Martha Marcy May Marlene) finds a new dysfunctional family dynamic in the Von Erichs, a supposedly cursed family led by a brutal taskmaster father, Fritz (Holt McCallany), who brings about their downfall. The family of babyfaced grapplers had championship promise yet could never escape the pressure of the patriarch’s headlock. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Starring: Jason Momoa, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Amber Heard, Dolph Lundgren, Patrick Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Kidman, Indya Moore, Pilou Asbaek

Director: James Wan

Aquaman and his estranged brother Orm must make relatively nice as they team up to take on a larger threat. Black Manta’s still out there and enraged, but our money’s on Pilou Asbaek as a big bad, given his recent arch-villain turn in the Sylvester Stallone superhero flick Samaritan. One thing we know for sure: Aquaman will don a blue costume at some point in Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom. Ben Affleck and/or Michael Keaton may or may not appear as Batman. [Luke Y. Thompson]

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Anthony Hopkins, Ray Fisher, Jena Malone, Charlie Hunnam, Michiel Huisman

Director: Zack Snyder

Zack Snyder continues his partnership with Netflix for Rebel Moon, which, as its title indicates, is split into two parts (the second part will be released next year). The space epic stars Sofia Boutella as a disenfranchised former government worker who leads a rebellion against her planet’s corrupt rulers, and it all takes place on—you guessed it—a moon. Subtlety has never been Snyder’s thing, but it’s clear that he hasn’t lost his talent for creating striking visuals, as the trailer looks ridiculously pretty. [Jen Lennon]

Cast: Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy

Director: Andrew Haigh

Paul Mescal is coming off a surprise Best Supporting Actor nomination at last year’s Oscars, and Andrew Scott is coming off an entire career of award-worthy work (he’s got a BAFTA, two Laurence Olivier awards, a Critics’ Choice Award, and nominations for Emmys and Golden Globes), so awards season pundits have their eye on this British romance film. All Of Us Strangers centers on Adam (Scott), a Londoner who sparks up a relationship with his neighbor, Harry (Mescal), as Adam is simultaneously plagued by memories and visions of his parents who died 30 years ago. Early reviews are strong, and while this film isn’t likely to be a massive success at the box office, it’ll probably end up on a lot of critics’ year-end lists. [Jen Lennon]

Cast: Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, and Patrick Dempsey

Director: Michael Mann

For his first film in nearly a decade, director Michael Mann brings a classical approach to his career-long interest in difficult geniuses. Mann’s fourth piece of non-fiction filmmaking, following The Insider, Ali, and Public Enemies, is less fractured, focusing on the kitchen table melodrama between Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) and his estranged gun-toting wife Laura (Penélope Cruz). Punctuated by thrilling race sequences, Ferrari promises a return to form for Mann and something we’ve never quite seen before from him. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Cast: Callum Turner, Joel Edgerton, Jack Mulhern, Sam Strike, Alec Newman, Peter Guinness

Director: George Clooney

The Boys In The Boat just might be one of the rare inspirational sports stories that translates well to film without becoming a total schmaltz-fest. The film is based on the book of the same name, which tells the story of the U.S. men’s eight rowing team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. They’re underdogs in a hostile environment, two ingredients for any great sports narrative. Clooney has proven effective as a steward of stories with a big emotional heart, and he seems well-suited for this project. The book was a publishing sensation and was nominated for several awards; it won’t be too much of a surprise if Clooney pulls off the same feat with the film. [Jen Lennon]

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Halle Bailey, Aunjanue Ellis, Danielle Brooks, and Corey Hawkins

Director: Blitz Bazawule

The Color Purple is not a remake of Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s classic novel, but rather an adaptation of the Broadway musical based on the book. Starring Taraji P. Henson, Halle Bailey, and Corey Hawkins, this late-December release is poised to be a deserved awards contender come Oscar time. [Phil Pirrello]