#10 Trance - After taking a short break from cinema for a few years to direct Frankenstein for the Royal National Theatre and the 2012 London Summer Olympics, Academy Award-winning director Danny Boyle returns with Trance. This is also the first time since 2000 that he is directing a film written by John Hodge, a co-writer for Trance who has written many of Boyle's classics like Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and The Beach. In Trance, a fine art auctioneer mixed up with a gang joins forces with a hypnotherapist to recover a lost painting. As boundaries between desire, reality, and hypnotic suggestion begin to blur the stakes rise faster than anyone could have anticipated. It stars James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, and Vincent Cassel, but Boyle's stylish directing will be the true star. Oh yeah, and I've met him.
Release date: March 2013
Trailer: Not yet released, but there is a behind-the-scenes photo of a bloody McAvoy.
Release date: January 20, 2013 (Sundance), March 1, 2013 (limited)
Trailer:
#8 Monsters University - While Monsters, Inc. is not my favorite Pixar movie, I still very much like it. I'm hoping that the great storytelling carries over to this prequel. This movie takes a look at the relationship between Mike and Sulley during their days at the University of Fear. Turns out that they were once rivals before they were best friends. Billy Crystal, John Goodman, and Steve Buscemi all return for this film that's directed by Dan Scanlon. Scanlon has only directed one of Mater's short films, so there's concern there, but it's Pixar, so you can't go too wrong.
Release date: June 21, 2013
Trailer:
#7 Man of Steel - You cannot deny that Zack Snyder makes gorgeous looking films. Sure, some storyline tact is needed in many of his movies, but I'm hoping he's learned a bit for Man of Steel. It helps that The Dark Knight and Inception director Christopher Nolan helped produce and come up with the story for this movie. David S. Goyer also created the story and wrote the screenplay, so if that's combined with Snyder's visuals, it just has to be good.
Release date: June 14, 2013
Trailer:
#6 The Great Gatsby - Typically, news of delaying a film is a very bad sign. This could be one of the rare chances that it's the opposite. The Great Gatsby was supposed to be released on Christmas Day 2012, but Warner Bros. decided to push back the film for a couple reasons. First off, early May is when The Avengers came out in 2012 and became the first film to gross over $200 million on opening weekend. WB is probably hoping to make a few extra bucks on this release date. Second, there was already too much coming out this holiday season that might have weakened The Great Gatsby's box office return, like The Hobbit, Les Mis, Lincoln, and even another Leonardo DiCaprio film Django Unchained. Baz Luhrmann has always been a fun director for me, so I'm anticipating this very much.
Release date: May 10, 2013
Trailer:
#5 Sin City: A Dame to Kill For - Robert Rodriguez's Sin City is one of those movies I could watch over and over again and never get bored. The visual style, the stories, and the all-star cast are just so fun to watch. Most of the major players are coming back for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a sequel based on Frank Miller's second graphic novel in the Sin City series. The majority of major players are returning like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Clive Owen, and Mickey Rourke. Some folks had to be replaced like Michael Clarke Duncan and Brittany Murphy since they have passed away since the first film. So far it is known that Dennis Haysbert is replacing Duncan as Manute, and Jamie Chung is replacing Devon Aoki as Miho due to her pregnancy.
Release date: October 4, 2013
Trailer: Not yet released, but there's a poster.
#4 Saving Mr. Banks - Mary Poppins is one of my favorite Walt Disney films. It took Disney 23 years to get the film rights from P.L. Travers, the female author of the Mary Poppins series of books. Even after that, it wasn't a smooth process as Travers wanted a lot of control over the film's elements that Disney wouldn't simply give up. It's unclear whether or not this will be a historically accurate film, or a fictional dramatization of it, sort of like how Finding Neverland was for J.M. Barrie. But Tom Hanks as Walt Disney should work pretty well along with Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers and Jason Schwartzman as songwriter Richard M. Sherman.
Release date: December 20, 2013
Trailer: Not yet released, but there's a picture of Tom Hanks as Walt Disney.
#3 Star Trek Into Darkness - J.J. Abrams' Star Trek was my second favorite film of 2009. I thought Abrams breathed life back into this franchise and loved that he created an alternate timeline for this series and its characters. My hope is that Abrams is not tired of the Trekkie world, but there is a slight possibility that this movie won't be everything we want it to be. The addition of Sherlock's Benedict Cumberbatch as John Harrison is a great choice. The speculation of him really being Khan is also intriguing, but this is Abrams, so no matter what, there's going to be a high level of mystery around Into Darkness.
Release date: May 17, 2013
Trailer:
#2 Gravity - Alfonso Cuarón might be my current favorite director. I have been anticipating Gravity for a couple years now. He wrote the film with his son, Jonás Cuarón, and colleague Rodrigo García. Produced by David Heyman, Gravity is about a brilliant medical engineer, played by Sandra Bullock, on her first shuttle mission. With a veteran astronaut, played by George Clooney, who is in command of his last flight before retiring, their shuttle is destroyed leaving the two completely alone, tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness. The film has a production budget of $80 million and will be Cuarón's first IMAX and 3D movie, so I expect amazing things.
Release date: October 18, 2013
Trailer: Not yet released.
Here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for...
#1 - The Smurfs 2 - Sike!
#1 The World's End - Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are two of my favorite movies. The World's End is the much anticipated final film in the "Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy," following Dead and Fuzz. Once again, it is directed by Edgar Wright and is written by him, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost. Five childhood friends reunite after twenty years to repeat a legendary pub crawl from their youth, returning to their hometown once again to attempt to reach the fabled pub "The World's End." Over the course of the night, they begin to realize that the real struggle is "not just theirs but humankind's," and completing the crawl becomes the least of their worries. Wright has described the film as an example of the social science-fiction genre, in the tradition of John Wyndham and Samuel Youd. I expect this to be epic and hilarious.
Release date: October 25, 2013
Trailer: Not yet released, but there's a poster.
Runners-up: Pacific Rim, Warm Bodies, Side Effects, A Good Day to Die Hard, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, The Host, The Place Beyond the Pines, From Up on Poppy Hill, The Heat, Anchorman: The Legend Continues, 42, Oblivion, About Time, World War Z, Gangster Squad, 300: Rise of an Empire, Red 2, Movie 43, Elysium, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers, Oz: The Great and Powerful, Ender's Game, Malavita, Frozen, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
Past lists:
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2006
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