Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

This is a satirical story directed by Ang Lee, starring Joe Alwyn and Kristen Stewart, about war and jingoism on the home front. It could be inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers. Billy Lynn is a US soldier whose company survives a brutal battle in Iraq to find the TV news media has turned them into stars. They are taken on an official promo tour of the US that includes a halftime show at a Dallas football game, which triggers agonising flashbacks.
• 10 January.

La La Land

American director Damien Chazelle has followed his fierce drama Whiplash with this glorious musical romance – an homage to classic movie musicals. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone make a tremendous couple, as the tough, sardonic guy hoping to open a jazz club and the smart, vulnerable acting wannabe with whom he falls deeply in love. Pure pleasure.
• 13 January.

Live By Night

Ben Affleck directs and stars in this crime thriller based on the Dennis Lehane novel. He plays Joe Coughlin, the son of a police captain in the prohibition era of bootlegging and gang warfare; he becomes a rum-runner in Florida and then an unscrupulous gangster whose gangland adventures and political machinations lead to violence and disaster.
• 13 January.

Manchester by the Sea

Casey Affleck gives the performance of his career in this deeply affecting drama by Kenneth Lonergan. He plays Lee, an angry and messed-up guy who after his brother’s death returns to his Massachusetts hometown (the one in the title) to find that he has been made legal guardian to the dead man’s son – his nephew. The past rises up to confront him and the result is an extraordinarily involving movie, with strains of tragedy and comedy.
• 13 January.

Jackie

The new movie from Chilean director Pablo Larraín is a fascinating prospect: a study of one of the most enigmatic figures in American public life: Jackie Kennedy. This is a closeup psychodrama, at once intimate and yet mysterious. Jackie is played by Natalie Portman, in what is being seen as a career highlight. After the assassination, she battles to master her fear and control the narrative.
• 20 January. See our feature on JFK’s Camelot in the movies

Lion

They say that mobile phones and digital technology are ruining narrative. Not here they’re not. Dev Patel gives a powerful, mature performance as a former Indian street kid who fell asleep in a train carriage and woke up in Calcutta, thousands of miles from home. Adopted by a New Zealand couple, he discovers that Google Maps could give him the chance to locate his home village and find his lost family.
• 20 January.

Denial

This courtroom drama is the true story – never more relevant than in our creepy “post-truth” era – of historian Deborah E Lipstadt and her battle to defend the facts. After she published her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust, she found herself being sued by the notorious denier-in-chief himself, David Irving. The English courts became a new battleground for revisionism. Timothy Spall plays Irving and Rachel Weisz is Lipstadt.
• 27 January.

Hacksaw Ridge

The title refers to a jagged cliff face that American soldiers had to scale at the battle of Okinawa in the second world war. It was here that Desmond Doss, a medic and conscientious objector – once reviled by his comrades as a coward – heroically saved more than 70 men. Doss is played by Andrew Garfield in this widely admired movie directed by Mel Gibson.
• 27 January.

Rules Don’t Apply

At 79, Warren Beatty makes his first screen appearance since the infidelity comedy Town and Country in 2001. He writes, directs and acts in this original drama, which imagines a young would-be star (Lily Collins) in 50s LA falling in love with her driver (Alden Ehrenreich). But their romance is hampered by the fact that they work for the same man: control freak Howard Hughes (played by Beatty) who forbade any relations between employees.
• 27 January.

Sing

An animated movie with a familiar plot – familiar from The Muppets, for example. Matthew McConaughey voices Buster, a koala who is horrified by the fact that his local theatre might get closed down, and organises a singing competition to prevent it. He is joined by Reese Witherspoon’s pig, John C Reilly’s sheep and Scarlett Johansson’s porcupine.
• 27 January.

T2 Trainspotting

The most hotly anticipated sequel of the year, and the biggest reunion since Take That. T2 is based on Irvine Welsh’s novel Porno, and reunites the characters from his novel Trainspotting, which became Danny Boyle’s 1996 movie – an icon of the Cool Britannia era. Ewan McGregor returns as Mark Renton, Ewen Bremner is Spud, Jonny Lee Miller is Sick Boy, and Robert Carlyle is the reliably scary Begbie. Older, but probably no wiser.
• 27 January.

Fences

Denzel Washington returns to directing with this movie based on the prize-winning stage play by August Wilson, in which he also stars as Troy, a middle-aged garbage collector who was once a star of the now defunct world of Negro league baseball. He looks back on the struggles of his life; Viola Davis plays his wife Rose.
• 3 February.

Gold

Matthew McConaughey gives another of his big character turns, inspired by the true story of John Felderhof, the eccentric, fast-talking mining engineer who in 1995 claimed to have found gold, deep in the jungles of Borneo. With his partner Michael de Guzman (played by Edgar Ramirez) he appeared to own a gigantic gold mine, and caused a stock market frenzy. But all that glisters …
• 3 February.

Loving

Ruth Negga gives a wonderful and surely Oscar-worthy performance in this true-life story of Mildred Jeter, a black woman who married Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton), a white man, in Virginia in the late 50s, where there were race laws invoking the ugly word “miscegenation”. With the help of Bobby Kennedy and the ACLU they take their case to the supreme court.
• 3 February.

Toni Erdmann

Maren Ade’s disturbing daddy-daughter comedy is a German comedy that is genuinely funny. Austrian actor Peter Simonischek plays Winfried, an ageing man with a fondness for wacky humour, increasingly estranged from his grownup daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller). When she was a little kid, she used to love his clowning around; so now, in a bizarre attempt to bond, he shows up at her workplace to play japes and stunts in his zany character “Toni Erdmann”. Is he having a breakdown? Is it worse than that?
• 3 February.

Fifty Shades Darker

The saucy BDSM-lite franchise is back for its second whack, starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson but now with a new director (veteran James Foley) and a new screenwriter Niall Leonard, who is married to creator EL James. There’s more furious and possibly erotic tension as Anastasia must confront her envious female rivals. Will we now discover what it is that Christian Grey’s business actually does? Apart from provide corporate locations for smut.
• 10 February.

The Founder

If McDonald’s was a superhero, this would be its origins pic. Michael Keaton plays Ray Kroc, the salesman who turned Mac and Dick McDonald’s burger restaurant into a massively successful franchise after taking control of it in the early 1960s.
• 10 February.

20th Century Women

Here is what promises to be a genial, sunny, ensemble comedy set in southern California of the late 1970s, written and directed by Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners). Annette Bening plays a single mom – inspired by Mills’s own mother – who sets out to teach her teen son Jamie about love, life and freedom. In this, she finds herself helped or hindered by two other women, Jamie’s sexy but platonic friend played by Elle Fanning and his mother’s tenant, a hip photographer played by Greta Gerwig.
• 10 February.

The Lego Batman Movie

More from the Lego Movie team, here putting their signature crackerjack postmodern comedy stylings and blocky animation technique to work on the breakout character from the 2014 hit. Will Arnett is set to return as the Caped Crusader, and Michael Cera steps in as Robin.
• 10 February.

The Great Wall

A landmark China-Hollywood co-production, with Zhang Yimou directing Matt Damon and Jin Tian in an epic period action film in which humankind must resist a horde of giant monsters attempting to get over China’s ancient fortifications.
• 17 February.

Hidden Figures

Taraji P Henson and Octavia Spencer star in a heartfelt historical drama about African American female mathematicians who, despite working in a segregated research environment, made a crucial contribution to America’s space effort in the early 1960s.
• 17 February.

Moonlight trailer: Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-tipped drama – video

Moonlight

An awards-friendly, beautifully shot drama chronicling an African American boy’s struggle with his homosexuality, told in three chapters – when he is a young kid, a high school student and a tough petty criminal.
• 24 February.

Miss Sloane

A thriller directed by John “Best Exotic” Madden, with Jessica Chastain starring as a fearsome political lobbyist who ends up taking on the gun lobby after overtures from an anti-gun control group.
• 24 February.

Patriots Day

Mark Wahlberg reunites with his Deepwater Horizon director Peter Berg for another true-life drama: an account of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, based on Boston Strong by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge.
• 24 February.

Certain Women

Much admired American auteur Kelly Reichardt adapts a series of intersecting stories by Maile Meloy that chronicle life in smalltown Montana . Featuring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart.
• 3 March.

Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart reunites with French director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) for a bizarre, uncategorisable film. She plays a fashion PA who is attempting to contact her dead twin through ESP, all the while burrowing into the identity of her fashion-model employer.
• 3 March.

Elle

Isabelle Huppert has been accruing more accolades for her performance as a rape victim who sets out to ensnare her attacker in the latest dubious-taste thriller from Paul Verhoeven.
• 10 March.

Kong: Skull Island

This giant-ape reboot, starring Tom Hiddleston and Samuel L Jackson, is only distantly related to the 2005 Peter Jackson Kong remake. Instead, it’s part of a planned Godzilla/Kong “shared universe” series, in which the two beasties will eventually confront each other.
• 10 March.

Neruda

An unconventional biopic of the Chilean poet/activist Pablo Neruda by director-of-the-moment Pablo Larrain, featuring Gael García Bernal as a fictional detective investigating Neruda, after the poet accuses the government of abandoning socialism.
• 10 March.

Beauty and the Beast

The latest live-action reworking of a classic Disney cartoon, following Cinderella and The Jungle Book. Here it’s Emma Watson as Belle in a fairytale treatment that preserves much of the Disney template including, of course, the song Be My Guest.
• 17 March.

The Salesman

Iranian Oscar winner (for A Separation) Asghar Farhardi offers another intense relationship drama, about a married couple who are cast in the lead roles of a staging of the Arthur Miller classic Death of a Salesman, an experience that exposes the faultlines in their relationship.
• 17 March.

Aquarius

A politically charged Brazilian drama directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, with Sonia Braga as a woman who refuses to sell her flat to developers so that they can put up another building.
• 24 March.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Guy Ritchie’s take on the Arthurian legend, with Charlie Hunnam as a rowdy young king-to-be coming to grips with his royal lineage and taking on evil warlord Vortigern (Jude Law).
• 24 March.

Free Fire

Ben Wheatley’s follow-up to High-Rise: a putatively commercial action thriller in which an arms deal in a Massachusetts warehouse goes bad, resulting in a bloody standoff. Brie Larson, Sharlto Copley and Armie Hammer star.
• 31 March.

Ghost in the Shell: trailer for Scarlett Johansson anime adaptation

Ghost in the Shell

Much discussed remake of the celebrated Japanese anime, with Scarlett Johansson as the cyborg “major” battling cyber-criminals, in what may well turn into an intense disquisition on identity in the digital age.
• 31 March.

The Boss Baby

Alec Baldwin progresses from Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live to a fast-talking newborn in this 3D DreamWorks animation. Our briefcase-carrying tot is the target of nefarious Steve Buscemi, CEO of Puppy Co, who wants to harness his powers. Fingers crossed baby can outwit him.
• 7 April

Fast and Furious 8

All the crew save Paul Walker return for this eighth instalment of the motoring soap. But it’s the new additions we’re really excited about: Charlize Theron as an arch-baddie, and Helen Mirren in an as-yet-unspecified role.
• 14 April

The Handmaiden

Park Chan-wook, of Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr Vengeance renown, returns with a sumptuous melodrama adapted from Sarah Waters’ lesbian-pickpocket novel Fingersmith, with the action transferred to 1930s Korea.
• 14 April.

Baywatch

Dwayne Johnson’s pecs lead the way in this reboot of the 90s TV show about LA lifeguards keen on snug swimwear and running in slo-mo. Zac Efron’s biceps lend valuable support.
• 12 May

Alien: Covenant

Ridley Scott is back for this sequel to 2012’s Prometheus and prequel to the original Alien film. Expect more airtime for Michael Fassbender’s buttery replicant, David.
• 19 May

Contributors

Peter Bradshaw and Andrew Pulver

The GuardianTramp

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