Rory Doherty looks into his cinema crystal ball for the fairest British films of them all to look forward to this year.
What do Andrew Scott, Amy Winehouse, Paddington Bear and Cardinal Ralph Fiennes have in common? They all helped 2024 be a banner year for British cinema. Here’s 10 upcoming British releases that will hopefully blow last year out of the water.
Hard Truths
Another reminder of British filmmaking legend Mike Leigh’s ability to make barbed insights about the dysfunction of our modern day society, Hard Truths is a searing and affecting London drama that will resonate with a post-pandemic audience. The rudeness and distrust exhibited by Pansy (Secrets & Lies’ Marianne Jean-Baptiste) feels in tune with the neuroses that have sprung up in many families over the last decade, and over the course of the brief family drama, Leigh inches closer to the source of the older woman’s deepest anxieties.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Since the last Bridget Jones sequel, 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, star Renée Zellweger won an Oscar for her lead performance in Judy. She returns to her most famous role as Bridget mourns the loss of husband Mr Darcy (Colin Firth) and sets her up for post-widowed dating – with her suitors played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and One Day’s Leo Woodall. As Bridget Jones’s Baby turned out to be surprisingly good, it’s worth getting excited for this fourthquel – which features a special appearance by Hugh Grant.
Marching Powder
Danny Dyer has been building up to mainstream relevancy in recent years – his daughter won Love Island, he ranted against a former prime minister on live television, starred in soap Eastenders for eight years, and in 2024 he stole scenes in the runaway Disney+ hit Rivals. He’s back in a blokey comedy with Marching Powder (no prize for guessing what the title refers to) which reunites him with The Football Factory and The Business director Nick Love for a caper that’s hopefully a 2000s throwback in all the fun ways and not the deeply problematic ones.
On Falling
It wouldn’t be fair to just highlight the big expensive projects, so here’s a gem of an indie debut to watch out for. On Falling concerns a “picker”, who works for an Amazon-type warehouse in Scotland on a punishing, tech-oriented schedule, whose immigrant status only further complicates the invasive and oppressive ways her corporate superiors alienate her. This collaboration between director Laura Carreira and star Joana Santos makes for a timely, sensitive look at the economic dynamics behind our culture of convenience.
Mother’s Pride
From the screenwriter of St. Trinians and Fisherman’s Friends comes another contender for Most British Film of the Year – an independent comedy about the Great British Beer Awards. Nick Moorcroft assembles a fleet of friendly faces from British telly – James Buckley, Martin Clunes, Josie Lawrence – for a tale of a flailing pub finding their footing in a divided country. Hopefully it’s lighter fare than a film with a similar premise from last year, but Moorcroft has shown a talent for pleasing crowds too many times to skip this.
28 Years Later
It’s rare that one of the most anticipated films of the year hails from the UK, but when you bring Danny Boyle back together with Alex Garland, the hype sirens go off and they do not stop. The duo behind 28 Days Later and Sunshine (Garland also wrote the novel The Beach) return to the digitally-lensed zombie apocalypse, now with the depressing update that the Infected never truly went away. Cillian Murphy is back, but not as a zombified skeleton.
Hamnet
Chloé Zhao had quite a year in 2021 – she won two Oscars in the first half and her Marvel epic underperformed in the second. Nearly four quiet years later, we’ll be able to see new work from her – a stripped-back dramatization of the grief experienced by William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Anne Hathaway (Jessie Buckley – not Anne Hathaway, sadly) after the death of their young son. Hopefully we’ll see more of the extreme intimacy that Zhao demonstrated in her best film, The Rider.
Hamlet
Not to be confused with the other similarly-titled Shakespeare film in 2025, this adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy stars Riz Ahmed as the Dane and Rings of Power’s Morfyyd Clark as Ophelia. It’s scripted by playwright Michael Lesslie, who wrote the Michael Fassbender Macbeth in 2015, but fans of obscure Ben Whishaw film Surge will be happy to know that director Aneil Karia is helming the project – both Karia and Ahmed won the Best Live Action Short Oscar in 2022 for The Long Goodbye.
Steve
The second Cillian Murphy project we’re looking forward to in 2025, this time reuniting him with Small Things Like These director Tim Mielants. This will mark the second Murphy-Mielants collaboration in two years to focus on difficult and dubious institutions, as Murphy plays the headmaster of a reformatory school, based on an experimental novella by writer and screenwriter Max Porter. The film will launch on Netflix, and hopefully it’s another ambitious extension of Murphy’s talent after his titanic Oscar-winning Oppenheimer performance.
Animal Farm
Andy Serkis’ rendition of anti-Stalinist parable Animal Farm has been beset with production delays since the word first broke of it over 10 years ago, so we only hope that the mocap wizard – who most recently directed Venom: Let There Be Carnage – will finally be able to premiere his much-anticipated animation in 2025. We haven’t heard of a voice cast yet (or if they’ll even be one) but it’s great to see, after Mowgli and Venom, Serkis is keen on making movies about all creatures great and small.
