December’s box office may belong to two highly anticipated big-budget sequels (Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday), but look a little lower on the marquee and you’ll find an incredible array of stories. Several queer period pieces look at the ways LGBTQ people found solace in art over the 20th century, including La Bola Negra’s unlikely counterpart, Coward, and Hamnet’s spiritual successor, Elsinore.
Meanwhile, Gen Z’s only contender for a true-blue rock star has a new concert film out, directed by the filmmaker behind last year’s Best Picture winner. And, of course, what better film to take the whole family to at Christmas than Luca Guadagnino’s highly anticipated OpenAI biopic, which Amazon unceremoniously dumped mere days after inking a deal with the tech company, before Neon came to the rescue? Below, find our most-anticipated indie flicks of the winter.
Minotaur, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev
When: Nov. 20
What It Is: The adultery thriller has a long and rich history. This film alone is based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller The Unfaithful Wife (which in turn inspired Adrian Lyne’s 2002 smash Unfaithful).
Why It’s Worth a Look: With a piercing gaze and a tensile script, Andrey Zvyagintsev, who nearly died from Covid complications in 2021, tells the age-old tale of a powerful man whose life unravels in a self-destructive spiral when he discovers his wife is having an affair.
Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone
When: Nov. 20
What It Is: A period-piece tear-jerker prominently featuring Hamlet? It’s true, it feels a bit like Oscar season déjà-vu, but Andrew Scott’s performance is the real deal in this 1980s-set drama about an actor living with HIV/AIDS. Based on the real story of British actor Ian Charleson, the film follows its hero as he gets the chance to take on the Bard’s iconic role at London’s National Theatre.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Just like Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet before it, Elsinore drills into the senselessness of life cut short too soon and the redemptive power of performance when facing those tragedies. While Hamnet focused on childhood illness, Elsinore’s touching rendering of the AIDS crisis in London reanimates a creative community torn apart by disease. (Eagle-eyed viewers can catch David Dawson as a young Derek Jarman.)
Cameron Winter at Carnegie Hall, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
When: Nov. 20
What It Is: How do you imbue a concert film with a reverberating sense of importance? Add one prestige director (Paul Thomas Anderson), one revered vintage format (35mm film), two distribution companies with major indie cred (Janus and Criterion), and a nationwide tour to some of the biggest historic theaters in the country.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Last year, Cameron Winter-fronted rock band Geese embarked upon its first national tour—and sparked an extremely online discourse about astroturfing in music marketing. Perhaps more than any underhanded promotional tactics, the conversation had much to say about young people’s latent pain over their inability to connect with music in an organic way during the digital age. But when Winter took to the stage for a one-night-only Carnegie Hall performance in December, the lightning-in-a-bottle performance felt nothing short of momentous.
All of a Sudden, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
When: Nov. 25
What It Is: The newly appointed director of an elder care facility makes a quietly transformative proposition to prioritize respect and empathy over profit for patients suffering from cognitive degeneration. In her quest to transform the health care system from the inside, she strikes up a unique friendship with a theater director suffering from terminal cancer.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes movies about the spaces between us—linguistic, emotional, economic—and the stubborn persistence needed to bridge them. Fans of Drive My Car will be pleased to find a similarly expansive kind of love story told with quiet contemplation. Lock in: the runtime on this thing is over three hours.
Tender Loving Care, directed by Mike Leigh
When: Dec. 4
What It Is: As the film’s name suggests, this movie turns its lens to an often unseen and unconsidered group of the British population: care workers. After a bad breakup, a government child protection worker moves back in with her best friend, a social services officer who remains chipper despite the daily confrontations.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Mike Leigh has announced that, being in poor health, this will likely be his last film. Throughout his career, from Topsy-Turvy to 2024’s Hard Truths (which should have earned Marianne Jean-Baptiste an Oscar), Leigh has never lost his incisive sense of character, in no small part due to the boundless empathy he affords even the smallest of parts.
The Gallerist, directed by Cathy Yan
When: Dec. 4
What It Is: The second art-world satire this year (after Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex), The Gallerist follows the overzealous and quite possibly insane fledgling Miami gallerist Polina Polinski (Natalie Portman) and her intrepid assistant (Jenna Ortega) as they attempt to reframe a grisly accident in the gallery as a must-see attraction during Art Basel Miami Beach.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The comedy is a bit more precise here than Araki’s sex farce—Catherine Zeta-Jones plays the conspicuously named art dealer Marianne Gorman while Da’Vine Joy Randolph rounds out the cast as the put-upon artist of color whose work funds and furnishes the lives of wealthy white people. Although the movie mostly takes place in the white walls of Polina’s gallery, art historical references expand the scope, including a Damien Hirst-inflected final shot that begs the question: how far is too far in the white cube?
The Debut, directed by Jesse Eisenberg
When: Dec. 11
What It Is: Julianne Moore is back in repressed housewife mode (complete with a collection of knit cardigans and ankle-length skirts) as a New Jersey woman who auditions for a local show and ends up in a battle of wills with the director (Paul Giamatti) in this musical.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Jesse Eisenberg’s transformation from Hollywood’s go-to for a surly nerd to one of the industry’s most promising writer-directors was swift. After A Real Pain scooped up an Oscar for Kieran Culkin (and garnered an original screenplay nom for Eisenberg), the industry’s machers have been eagerly awaiting his next move. The fact that he chose a musical is a testament to Eisenberg’s guts. (He even wrote the music and lyrics.)
Clarissa, directed by Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri
When: Dec. 11
What It Is: This modern-day retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway set in contemporary Lagos starring Sophie Okonedo and David Oyelowo was a festival favorite. It’s artistically ambitious and looks stunning, nodding to the major choices that we make but can never take back. The film follows a middle-aged Okonedo as the title character, comfortably ensconced in a safe but dull relationship and oil-funded wealth, looking back on past relationships, realized and imagined, before a party.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Does anyone else feel like we haven’t seen Ayo Edebiri in a while? Sure, she’s been repping Chanel on the red carpet, but for all of us who fell off the final few seasons of The Bear (and for the many, many more who missed the beautiful disaster that was Ella McCay), this will be the next real chance to remember why we love her before she stars in next year’s Will Sharpe-created TV series Prodigies.
Coward, directed by Lukas Dhont
When: Dec. 25
What It Is: Gay yearning on the Western Front! In 1916, a shy soldier finds himself drawn to a flamboyant infantryman leading a ragtag theater troupe of male performers in drag who roam the countryside to keep spirits high.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The tension between tenderness and brutality amongst soldiers has proven to be powerful cinematic fodder in the past (Beau Travail, for one; this year’s La Bola Negra, for another). Despite the terror and stakes of the setting, Coward is ultimately a wartime romance with all the gentle touches of first love.
Artificial, directed by Luca Guadagnino
When: Dec. 25
What It Is: At first blush, it’s hard to imagine why famed sensualist Luca Guadagnino, the director behind Call Me By Your Name and Challengers, would want to make a movie about the rise of OpenAI—especially at a time when the public narrative of what AI is and how it will impact our lives is changing, sometimes literally hour by hour. But the Italian director’s Pinocchio tale of the lives and lies of Ilya Sutskever (Anora breakout Yura Borisov) and Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield as chaos gay) is a fascinating—and surprisingly funny—first draft of history.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Think of Artificial as a spiritual successor to The Social Network (minus the elegant score; Damien Albarn’s soundtrack for Artificial is a clown car of clangorous sounds that distracts from an otherwise compelling ride). Garfield is legitimately hilarious playing Altman as an underhanded Millennial nightmare boss, but it’s Borisov who really shines, with puppy-dog eyes and the jankiest hairline in cinema this year, as the idealist computer programmer beating the drum for AI safety measures once it’s already too late.
The Liberation, directed by Guy Nattiv
When: Jan. 8
What It Is: This slow-burn follows ’80s New Jersey housewife Rita (Carrie Coon) as she’s sucked deeper and deeper into a nefarious all-female cult presided over by the charismatic Ricky (Lily James). This is no Netflix true-crime doc, but the story is a real one, and personal. It’s based on director Guy Nattiv’s grandmother, who joined a cult when he was a child and never returned.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Carrie Coon has stealthily been one of our finest actors for decades (her turn as Ben Affleck’s twin sister in Gone Girl, hello), but it wasn’t until The White Lotus season three that she became a household name. Rarely has she gotten as good a chance to flex her acting chops as here. Even though the cult in The Liberation is firmly rooted in its time (there’s lots of bloviating about overconsumption and harmony with nature), there are certain MAHA overtones to the cult’s beliefs that feel all too relevant today.
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