Watch List | The Watch List
(Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
From Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in a controversial take on the Brontë classic to the latest instalment of the serial killer horror franchise – these are the films to see this month.
(Credit: Samuel Goldwyn Films)
1. Cold Storage
David Koepp is one of Hollywood’s busiest screenwriters. Among his many other credits, he has scripted a Mission: Impossible film and a Spider-Man film, three recent Steven Soderbergh thrillers (Kimi, Presence and Black Bag), and several Steven Spielberg blockbusters, including War of the Worlds and the forthcoming Disclosure Day. If that weren’t enough, he’s also found time to write two novels, beginning with 2019’s Cold Storage. And, inevitably, it’s been made into a film, too – a slime-drenched horror comedy that Koepp himself has scripted. Joe Keery and Georgina Campbell star as two young security guards at a self-storage facility with a dangerous secret. Deep beneath the ground are the remains of a defunct military base where a mutant fungus has been kept in check by the near-freezing temperature. But as the planet has warmed up, the fungus has woken up, and now it’s bursting out of the earth to turn everyone it touches into a ravenous zombie. Can an army boffin played by Liam Neeson save the day?
Released on 6 February in the UK and Ireland, and on 13 February in the US and Canada
2. The President’s Cake
Iraq, 1997. President Saddam Hussein is about to celebrate his 60th birthday, and the Iraqi people have to celebrate it, too – whether they want to or not. Nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is assigned the job of baking a cake for her classmates in a rural school, but, after years of US sanctions, she and her grandmother (Waheed Thabet Khreibat) are too broke to buy eggs, flour and sugar. They take a day trip to the bustling city to barter for and borrow whatever they can but they’re soon separated, and Lamia has to fend for herself, with only her pet cockerel for company. Written and directed by Hasan Hadi, The President’s Cake is a heart-wrenching child’s-eye view of life in a crumbling totalitarian state. “From the pastoral beauty of its opening sequence to the gut punch of its last, Hadi’s film is an exceptional screen debut,” says Sheri Linden in The Hollywood Reporter, “as perceptive as it is kinetic and, with one eye on the bombers overhead, brimming with life”.
Released on 6 February in the US and Spain, and on 13 February in the UK and Ireland
(Credit: Cannes Film Festival)
3. Pillion
In US cinemas just in time for Valentine’s Day, Pillion is a romantic comedy drama with a difference. Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films) plays Colin, a shy parking attendant whose social life amounts to singing in a close-harmony quartet with his dad (Douglas Hodge). Then he meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the hunky leader of a motorcycle gang, and finds himself in an intense sexual relationship. But is he being liberated or exploited? Adapted from a novella by Adam Mars-Jones, Harry Lighton’s directorial debut is daringly explicit, but also strangely sweet. And it could become a “classic”, says the BBC’s Martha Henriques. “Tackling themes of grief and belonging, Pillion takes in the kinky paraphernalia of harnesses, wrestling and revving engines, while never losing sight of its emotional core: two people working out an unconventional romantic path.”
Released on 6 February in the US and Sweden, 12 February in Brazil, and 19 February in Australia
(Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
4. “Wuthering Heights”
Emerald Fennell is the writer-director of two hyper-stylish comedy thrillers, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, so when she announced that she was adapting Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, not everyone was pleased. She didn’t seem like the obvious fit for a beloved classic of 19th-Century literature. And Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi didn’t seem like the obvious actors to play the teenage Cathy and Heathcliff. Then, more recently, there was Fennell’s contentious decision to put the film’s title in quotation marks. (It’s her way of emphasising that the film is an interpretation of the book, not the book itself, apparently.) But as the months passed, and the torrid trailers came out, much of that early scepticism was replaced by excitement: “Wuthering Heights” looks as if it might be a decadent delight. Besides, it’s made by someone who has been obsessed by the novel for 25 years. “I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14,” Fennell said at the Brontë Women’s Writing Festival last September, “which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s primal, sexual. It’s completely singular.”
Released on 11, 12 and 13 February in cinemas internationally
(Credit: Sony Pictures Animation)
5. GOAT
Ever since the acronym GOAT was applied to any athlete who was the “Greatest Of All Time”, it was only a matter of time before a cartoon had a GOAT who was also a goat. Sure enough, this new Sony animation tells the tale of Will (voiced by Caleb McLaughlin from Stranger Things), a teenage goat who wants to excel at professional roarball, ie the equivalent of basketball in a Zootopia-like world of talking animals. The trouble is that when Will joins a team, he is half the size of his team-mates: a panther, a rhino, a giraffe and an ostrich. The film is co-produced by NBA superstar Stephen Curry, who, at 6ft 2in (1.88m), is pretty small for a basketball player himself. “We look forward to uplifting audiences with diverse characters and heartwarming storylines that will have you rooting for the underdog,” said Curry. But wait – can a goat be an underdog?
Released on 11, 12 and 13 February in cinemas internationally
(Credit: Briarcliff Entertainment)
6. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
The director of the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, Gore Verbinski used to be Hollywood’s go-to guy for elaborate blockbuster action with a hint of anarchic weirdness. But his last two films, The Lone Ranger and A Cure for Wellness, both flopped, and he hasn’t had a new release in cinemas since 2016. Now at last Verbinski has returned with a gonzo science-fiction comedy thriller scripted by Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying). Sam Rockwell stars as a man who zips to the present day from the near future to save humanity from a rogue AI. He materialises in a Los Angeles diner and attempts to recruit the customers (Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz and Juno Temple). But his plan has failed hundreds of times already, so he keeps having to time-travel back and try again. “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a great movie,” says Alan Ng at Film Threat. “It offers laughs, thrills, and it’s a thinker; you will not be disappointed.”
Released on 13 February in the US and on 20 February in the UK and Ireland
7. How to Make a Killing
How to Make a Killing is inspired by a classic British comedy from 1949, Kind Hearts and Coronets. In the original film, a poor young man named Louis (Dennis Price) is bitter that his mother was disowned by her aristocratic family. After she dies, Louis realises that he can still inherit a fortune if he assassinates his rich relatives (who are all played by Alec Guinness). The updated version, written and directed by John Patton Ford (Emily the Criminal), stars Glen Powell as Becket Redfellow. He’s in the same situation as Louis, so he decides to “prune a few branches from the family tree”, as he says in the trailer – although this time his relatives aren’t British toffs but American Succession types, played by Ed Harris and Topher Grace among others. Margaret Qualley co-stars as an old friend of Becket’s who could be persuaded that crime does pay – especially if it pays $28 billion.
Released on 20 February in the US and Canada, and on 27 February in the UK and Ireland
(Credit: Paramount Pictures)
8. Scream 7
Neve Campbell dropped out of 2023’s Scream VI because of a salary dispute, but she’s back as the series’ regular heroine, Sidney Prescott, in Scream 7. Also returning to the slasher franchise after a long break is its creator, Kevin Williamson, who has co-written and directed its latest instalment. Scream 7 could be a kind of reset, then. After the last film’s New York-set bloodshed, this one is set in an all-American small town, where Sidney is living quietly with her husband (Joel McHale) and daughter (Isabel May)… until, that is, a masked serial killer turns up. “The company pitched it to me because they said, ‘This is going to be about Sidney Prescott.’ That’s why I would want to do it,” Williamson said at the ATX TV Festival. “Working with Neve, we did it together. She was with me every step of the way, and she was so supportive and so helpful. We had a blast.”
Released on 27 February in the US, the UK and Canada
(Credit: Universal Pictures)
9. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
When Baz Luhrmann was researching his Elvis biopic, he unearthed dozens of boxes of unseen documentary footage. Much of it concerned Presley’s residencies in Las Vegas following his 1968 comeback special: there were interviews, rehearsals, and hours of outtakes from his two 1970s concert films. Now Luhrmann has restored and edited this footage to make a brand new concert film – and it could lead us to reassess Presley’s later career. Watching EPiC will match going to “the greatest concert you ever saw”, promises Owen Gleiberman in Variety. “The movie is a revelation, because for 96 minutes it shows you just how intoxicating Elvis Presley was when he began to perform live in Las Vegas in 1969 and the early ’70s… The power of Elvis’s voice remained undiminished – it soared, it quavered, it caressed, it boomed, it rocked, it hit every note with singular beauty.”
Released on 27 February in the US and the UK
10. Dreams
Michel Franco’s dark romantic drama stars Jessica Chastain as a wealthy San Francisco socialite who runs a charitable arts foundation in Mexico. The last time she visited Mexico City, she had a passionate affair with a dancer, played by Isaac Hernández (a real-life ballet star), so when he sneaks into the US in the back of a lorry, he assumes that she will be pleased to see him. But he soon learns that philanthropy has strict limits. For her, supporting the arts in another country is a far cry from being seen in your own hometown with someone of a different nationality and social class. “Gripping, chilling, and startlingly bleak, [Dreams has] a thrillingly scabrous socio-political dimension that will leave audiences gasping,” says Matthew Turner at Next Best Picture. “Terrific performances, pulse-pounding eroticism, and a devastating critique of the ultra-rich combine to make this a must-see.”
Released on 27 February in the US and Canada
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