We have arrived in a new year, and with that comes change and renewal. Soon we will all be gym gods who eat well and go to sleep before 10PM and call our loved ones more often. And we will also have a lot of new movies to see, so we never have to talk about Wicked 2: Boq in the Habit again. Isn’t that exciting? I’m so eager for these fresh visions to be delivered to me that I’ve gone ahead and made a list of 16 movies I can’t wait to see this year. There are some obvious omissions like The Devil Wears Prada sequel (I am quite worried it will be bad and sad) and, like, Dune 3 or whatever—plus a host of international and independent films that may or may not play even be coming out this year—but these are the titles that most jumped out at me as I perused the release calendar over the holiday. 

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Rachel McAdams doing a Sam Raimi survival thriller is such a fun idea! And it’s even more fun that she’s been paired up with Dylan O’Brien, who was so good in Twinless last year and now gets to revisit his Teen Wolf-style horror-comedy. Only, I’m sure in this movie he won’t be playing the funny-man sidekick to a bunch of abs-ed out twunks with glowing eyes. At least I don’t think so. I think he plays McAdams’s mean boss who must rely on her to keep him alive when their plane crashes and they wash ashore on a desert isle. I suppose there might be a host of brunet twunks lurking in the jungle, but that’s not usually the kind of movie that Sam Raimi makes. Look, I just don’t know what will happen vis-a-vis twunks named, like, Dylan Sprayberry in this movie, but I do know the first trailer is great and what a lark to see McAdams doing something like this, which is only her fourth movie in six years. (January 30)

Wuthering Heights

I don’t love Promising Young Woman or Saltburn, but I think they’re stylishly made and the performances are mostly good, so I am cautiously curious about writer-director Emerald Fennell’s take on this classic text. Jacob Elordi plays brooding moor hunk (well, he’s hunky in this one anyway) Heathcliff, who spends most of his time rooting around in trash cans and pulling whole fish skeletons out of his mouth. I think this is that Heathcliff. Margot Robbie will play Catherine Earnshaw, who is the HR manager at your mom’s work. Fennell has reimagined Emily Brontë’s novel of propriety and property as “the greatest love story of all time,” which is . . . interesting. There appears to be a great deal of sexual content, but maybe those flashes are trailer misdirects, or are just fantasy sequences? But even the possibility that we will get to see these two actors wuthering their brains out is enough to have a lot of folks all worked up. Me, I just want something nice to look at and, y’know, definitely worth writing about. (February 13)

The Bride!

Might this be Jessie Buckley’s Norbit? Meaning, a movie so bad that it ruins her Oscar chances when it is released right before the ceremony? No, I do not think so. I think Buckley has her Hamnet trophy pretty well sewn up; so this is her All About Steve, which was a Sandra Bullock/Bradley Cooper movie that came out right before Bullock won her Oscar for the legendary masterpiece The Blind Side. Still, I am really wondering what the hell Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on Bride of Frankenstein is going to be, and if it is indeed so awful that its studio is tryin to bury it in the wintry doldrums of early March. I mean, I don’t see how a movie starring Christian Bale as a 1930s Chicago Frankenstein directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal could be a total mess, but that’s what I’m hearing. Even though Annette Bening is playing a character named Dr. Euphronius, people are saying this movie is not going to be good. I think we all ought to assess that for ourselves. Because don’t you want to see Penélope Cruz play a woman named Myrna? (March 6)