Looking Forward to Fall and Winter Movies II

Continuing yesterday's list of the films I'm most anticipating for the fall and winter, we come to our prestige pictures. These are the films of artistic ambition, the ones that critics and cinephiles will spend early 2011 debating over, and everyone else might just happily ignore. This is not to say that more mainstream films don't have their cinematic merits, but they don't market themselves by underlining those bona fides the way most of these will. There's always a little uncertainty about whether some of these films will actually make it to theaters before the end of the year, and those up for major awards tend to have later rollouts after initial qualifying runs in select cities. I've made an effort to focus on movies that already have a release date, but there are a few others that are already being talked up, though their distributors haven't hammered out the details yet. Plus, I've included one big question mark.

"Never Let Me Go" - I'll start with the film I'm the most unsure about, mostly because it depends on a premise that could be terribly gimmicky if handled badly. Andrew Garfield, Keira Knightley, and Carey Mulligan are three students who attend a boarding school together and face uncertain futures when they leave it. To seek out more specifics about the story may be unwise for those trying to avoid spoilers, but it's based on a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also gave us "The Remains of the Day," and examines similar issues in a very different way. Mark Romanek, director of "One Hour Photo" and a very long list of music videos, will be at the helm.

"The Social Network" - When I first heard that a film was being made about the birth of Facebook, and its enigmatic creator Mark Zuckerberg, I was indifferent. And then I found out that David Fincher had signed on to direct. And Aaron Sorkin had scripting duties. And the underrated Jesse Eisenberg would be playing Zuckerberg, joined by a lot of other twenty-something up-and-comers, including the new Spiderman and the new Lisbeth Salander. Then the teasers started popping up, piquing a lot of interest from the cinegentsia and inspiring mash-up parodies left and right. As a result, my expectations for the "The Social Network" have gone through the roof.

"The Black Swan" - Darren Aronofsky laid bare the miseries of the wrestling ring with "The Wrestler." Now he's taking on the ballet world with "The Black Swan," a tale of two rival ballerinas played by Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. The trailer hit the web a few days ago, featuring desperate characters pushed to the psychological brink, blurred realities, and a few salacious hints of lesbianism - no doubt to draw in insecure menfolk unsure about the subject matter. But it's not necessary. Aronofsky makes tiny women in tutus and toeshoes look absolutely terrifying, and gets across what dancers and enthusiasts already know: ballet is not for sissies.

"The Tempest" - My favorite Julie Taymor film is still her first, "Titus," based on the lesser-known Shakespeare play, so I'm glad to see her return to the Bard's folio for "The Tempest." This version will have a few novel twists, including a gender-swap of Prospero so Helen Mirren can play the vengeful magician. The rest of the cast includes Ben Whishaw as Ariel, Djimon Honsou as Caliban, and especially interesting - or possibly disastrous - Russell Brand as the jester Trinculo. The play's use of magic and supernatural spirits should also give Taymor the opportunity to conjure more of her famously bold, hallucinatory visuals.

"True Grit" - The Coen brothers are remaking "True Grit" with Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon. I haven't seen the 1969 original with John Wayne (yet), and I have no great love for Westerns, but it doesn't matter. I've seen every Coen brothers film and there's no chance that I'm missing this one, especially since it will reunite them with Jeff Bridges. The last time they worked together, they birthed The Dude, hero of "The Big Lebowski." The protagonist of "True Grit," a cranky, one-eyed, alcoholic deputy marshal gone to seed, sounds right up their alley. Between this and "TRON," Bridges could have a very good Christmas this year.

"The Illusionist" - French animator Sylvain Chomet, best known for "The Triplets of Belleville," will resurrect the great director Jacque Tati through traditional hand-drawn animation, for an old-fashioned cartoon feature based on an unproduced Tati script, "The Illusionist." The sight gags and visual whimsy of Tati's comedies should be a good match for Chomet's gift for caricature and slightly surreal sensibility. As a fan of both directors, I've been following the production of the film for what feels like ages, through endless delays and setbacks. Now that it's finally finished, I can hardly wait until December to see the results.

"Somewhere" - Sofia Coppola's latest is a father-daughter dramedy starring Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning, partly inspired by Coppola's own childhood experiences in Hollywood with her celebrated father. Comparisons have been made to "Paper Moon," which should put "Somewhere" closer in tone to her breakthrough, "Lost in Translation," than her less well-received "Marie Antoinette." For the record, I liked both pictures about equally. Dorff and Fanning the Younger have been largely flying under the radar with smaller roles in recent years, so I'm curious about what they can do with the screen to themselves for once. We'll see in December.

"A Film Unfinished" - I'm cheating a little with this entry, since the film opened on Wednesday in New York, but I wouldn't expect it to show up at a theater near you for a few more months. "A Film Unfinished" is a documentary dissecting a 1942 Nazi propaganda film about Jewish life in the Warsaw ghetto. Many of the depictions were considered at least partially accurate in the past, until additional material surfaced a few years ago containing outtakes and deleted footage that show the staggering degree to which the production was staged. The documentary has already stirred controversy due to a ratings battle with the MPAA.

"Biutiful" - Alejandro González Iñárritu clearly has hefty directing chops, but can he write? After parting ways with Guillermo Arriaga, who scripted practically all of his previous efforts, that's the big question that must be asked of Iñárritu's "Biutiful," his first film without Arriaga. It will also be something of a homecoming for the director, his first Spanish language film since "Amores Perros" ten years ago. Javier Bardem will play a man named Uxbal, struggling to keep a complicated life from spinning out of control on the edges of the Barcelona underworld. From the trailers, it certainly looks promising so far.

"The Tree of Life" - Terrence Malick my be the new Stanley Kubrick. This is not because his films are of comparable quality, though they are terribly good, but because the director is famously reclusive, has unimpeachable auteur status, and each of his films seems to be in post-production percolation for years before they finally emerge. Thus the completion of every new Malick film is an event. "The Tree of Life," with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, has been delayed multiple times, but there's a good chance we may finally see it released this year, since there have been some indications that Malick is busy gearing up for his next one.