Hopes for the holidays

Fantastic Mr. Fox (Nov 20)
A clever fox who has retired from larceny and settled down with a wife and kids tries to pull one last heist to pay for their heavily mortgaged home in a hollow tree (ooh, topical!). In just five films, Wes Anderson has gone from distinctive quirkiness to tiresome self-parody, so we greeted his decision to helm a stop-motion animated adaptation of a children’s book with a mix of hope (this might get him out of his rut) and dread (this could be a cloying collapse of his sometimes wry sensibility into maudlin nostalgia for childish pleasures). The mixed-to-positive advance buzz from those who’ve seen it at the London Film Festival suggests that even with stop-motion furry animals, the film is easily recognizable as an Anderson project, from the oddball soundtrack choices (Burl Ives, the Beach Boys, Georges Delerue) to the frontal shot composition.

Nine (Dec 25)

We’ve had just enough time to forgive Rob Marshall for 2005’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and his return to adapting musical theater for the big screen makes us optimistic, especially because the roots of Nine are cinematic; the stage musical is based on Fellini’s 8½, in which a director recalls the influential women in his life. Nicole Kidman aside, the musical cast starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard and Judi Dench may sound like a bizarre proposal, but Day-Lewis seems capable of anything, and we’re betting at least some of the women (namely Dench and Kidman) turn out to be better than you might guess.

Broken Embraces (Dec 25)

Pedro Almodóvar is back with another strange drama, again starring his muse, the busy Penélope Cruz. After a car crash, a writer and director, now blind, chooses to live under his literary pseudonym, pretending not to remember any of his life as a filmmaker. Eventually, he tells the story of his previous life and the accident that changed him. Confused? Of course you are; it’s an Almodóvar film. With Talk to Her, Bad Education and Volver, Almodóvar has been on a roll, and we expect this film to continue the trajectory.

Avatar (Dec 18)
We’ll admit our interest is not necessarily based on any hope that this sci-fi flick—about humans who explore an alien world using ten-foot-tall blue avatars—will be good. Rarely has the buzz campaign for a film crashed and burned so fast. James Cameron has been fiddling with this project for more than a decade, so you’d think the studio would have had time to figure out how to generate excitement. Instead, when the much-hyped Avatar Day arrived in August, those who caught 20 minutes of footage made unflattering comparisons to FernGully and found worrisome parallels to the animated disaster Delgo. On the other hand, the last time the media declared Cameron had a potentially studio-bankrupting bomb on his hands, he delivered Titanic. So, crap it may turn out to be, but it might also make truckloads of money.

Invictus (Dec 11)
Clint Eastwood directs Morgan Freeman in a film about Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, rise to the presidency of South Africa and effort to use the 1995 Rugby World Cup as a point of national unity. The title, by the way, is Latin for unconquered. Eastwood is a polarizing director; some find his films “tasteful” (that’s meant as an insult), while others are deeply moved by his work. The subject matter seems weirdly uplifting given Eastwood’s recent musings on the dark side (Gran Torino, Changeling, Letters from Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers), but maybe that’s a good thing.

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