The Favourite

Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

Olivia Colman excels as an emotionally wounded Queen Anne in a bizarre black comedy of the English Restoration court, directed by the Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. It is based on the true story of two noblewomen creating a horribly dysfunctional love triangle by competing for the queen’s favours: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and Abigail, Baroness Basham – played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone.

UK release date: 1 January

RBG / On the Basis of Sex

Dirs: Julie Cohen, Betsy West / Mimi Leder

These films count as one choice! It feels like an especially fraught moment to contemplate the career of US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose forthright liberal judgments have made her a pop culture legend. RBG is a documentary directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West; On the Basis of Sex is a feature starring Felicity Jones as RBG.

RBG: 4 January; On the Basis of Sex: 8 February

An Impossible Love

Dir: Catherine Corsini

The fierce and passionate direction of Catherine Corsini is applied to this French melodrama of love and sexism, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Christine Angot. In the 1950s, a young secretary (Virginie Efira) has a passionate affair with a wealthy young man (Niels Schneider); she bears a child whom he refuses to acknowledge, so she must bring up their daughter alone.

4 January

Smooth running … Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart in The Front Runner. Photograph: Courtesy of Sony Pictures/Allstar/Sony Pictures Releasing

The Front Runner

Dir: Jason Reitman

It sounds so quaint in the brazen era of Donald Trump: the story of how, in 1988, the smoothly plausible Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart had all his hopes sunk by accusations of an extramarital affair. Hugh Jackman plays the presentable Hart, the estimable Vera Farmiga is his wife Oletha, and Sara Paxton is the other woman, Donna Rice, who endured the full misogynistic force of the press coverage.

11 January

Colette

Dir: Wash Westmoreland

Keira Knightley plays the great French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who as a young woman in belle époque Paris was married to the notorious womaniser and rackety journalist Henry Gauthier-Villars (played here by Dominic West), who insisted on putting his name on the novels she wrote at first – and getting all the money. The director is Wash Westmoreland, who directed Still Alice; he co-wrote the screenplay with his partner, the late Richard Glatzer.

11 January

Stan & Ollie

Dir: Jon S Baird

Steve Coogan and John C Reilly give wonderfully observed performances as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in this sad, sweet, true-life movie about the British tour they undertook after the second world war, in dire need of money. They endure miserable digs, second-rate theatres, terrible weather and the fact that their local promoter seems more excited about a new young comic called Norman Wisdom.

11 January

Beautiful Boy

Dir: Felix Van Groeningen

There can hardly be anyone hotter right now than Timothée Chalamet; here he plays a teenage meth abuser, Nic, whose addiction causes agony to his dad David, played by Steve Carell. The film is based on parallel father-and-son memoirs of this same experience.

18 January

Mary Queen of Scots

Dir: Josie Rourke

Screenwriter Beau Willimon, an old hand at American political thrillers, transfers his skills to scripting English and Scottish history with this tale of Mary, Queen of Scots, played by Saoirse Ronan. Margot Robbie plays her nemesis, Queen Elizabeth I, and David Tennant is the gloweringly suspicious churchman John Knox. Read our interview with the film’s director, Josie Rourke.

18 January

The Mule

Dir: Clint Eastwood

At 88 years of age, Clint Eastwood is showing no signs of slowing down. He directs this film based on a startling true-life story, and also stars as Earl, a second world war veteran who, in 2011, was discovered by astonished law enforcement officials to be the oldest drug mule in America, smuggling substances over the border into the US. Bradley Cooper plays the cop on his case.

25 January

Deep cover … Nicole Kidman in Destroyer. Photograph: Sabrina Lantos/AP

Destroyer

Dir: Karyn Kusama

Nicole Kidman’s self-transformation in this brutally tough crime thriller has been much acclaimed on the festival circuit. She plays Erin Bell, an FBI agent who has lost it, psychologically and physically, after going deep undercover with mobsters, and cuts a tortured figure as her life falls apart. Now she gets the chance to reckon with the people who damaged her.

25 January

Vice

Dir: Adam McKay

The former US vice-president, big oil nabob and waterboarding enthusiast Dick Cheney squats like a latex-inflated toad at the ear of power in this flashy political comedy from Adam McKay about the power behind the throne of George W Bush. It’s a scarily plausible impersonation from Christian Bale, whose bald-capped head has been enlarged to the size of a pale pink, bespectacled beachball. Amy Adams is on great form as Cheney’s formidable wife Lynne, with Sam Rockwell as Dubya and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld..

25 January

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Dir: Marielle Heller

With a screenplay by that great and underrated film-maker Nicole Holofcener, this tragicomic true-life story of fakery looks mouthwatering. Melissa McCarthy plays Lee Israel, a once bestselling biographer who fell on hard times and turned to counterfeiting literary manuscripts.

1 February

Burning

Dir: Lee Chang-dong

This superbly subtle mystery thriller from Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong is for many people the film of the year. It is a love triangle which turns into a fear triangle and a hate triangle, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami. A young man falls in love with a beautiful young woman who dumps him in favour of a rich smoothie who has a creepy obsession with setting things on fire. Then she disappears. What has happened?

1 February

The Kindergarten Teacher

Dir: Sara Colangelo

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays an unhappy woman in this American indie drama, remade from a 2014 film by Israeli director Nadav Lapid. She is naggingly unfulfilled in her family life and professional career as a teacher and then becomes obsessed with the idea that one of her kids is a genius.

8 February

If Beale Street Could Talk

Dir: Barry Jenkins

Barry Jenkins, whose Moonlight won the best picture Oscar two years ago, returns with this impassioned adaptation of the 1974 James Baldwin novel. It is a story of love and injustice in 1970s Harlem, when a young man is falsely accused of rape and his pregnant girlfriend has to prove his innocence.

8 February

Border

Dir: Ali Abbasi

This bizarre Swedish film, adapted from a story by horror-fiction author John Ajvide Lindqvist, has comprehensively weirded out all who have seen it. A young customs officer has what amounts to a professional superpower: she can smell fear. But when she applies that skill to a guilty-looking person who resembles her, a strange story unfolds.

8 February

Fighting With My Family

Dir: Stephen Merchant

Stephen Merchant directs this British comedy about wrestling, effectively remade from a documentary about a WWE wrestler in the US. Florence Pugh and Jack Lowden play Saraya and Zak, a brother and sister who are both talented wrestlers, but have a terrible sibling rivalry when they audition for WWE.

1 March

Superpowers … Brie Larson as Captain Marvel. Photograph: Allstar/Marvel Studios

Captain Marvel

Dirs: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

This is Marvel Studios’ first female-led superhero film and its first with a female director: Anna Boden. Brie Larson plays Carol Danvers, a former US air force fighter pilot whose DNA becomes fused with that of a Kree – a militaristic alien being – giving her superpowers.

8 March

Happy as Lazzaro

Dir: Alice Rohrwacher

One of the most gorgeous and beguiling films on the festival circuit now gets a release. It is a lovely magic-realist fable set among an exploited peasant community who appear to be living in the 19th century – yet this is misleading. Among them is the happy idiot boy Lazzaro, who, like his namesake, is destined to be mysteriously reborn.

15 March

Beguiling … Happy as Lazzaro. Photograph: Allstar/Netflix

Us

Dir: Jordan Peele

Jordan Peele’s satirical horror movie about racism, Get Out, made him a hot property, and now we have a movie about which little is known, other than that the director is calling it a “social-horror thriller”. It stars Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke and Elisabeth Moss.

15 March

Girl

Dir: Lukas Dhont

This is a much admired Belgian movie about trans issues – though it has been criticised for using a cisgender actor in the lead. Lara, played by Victor Polster, is a 15-year-old transitioning to female, yearning to be a ballerina, and facing incomprehension and transphobia along with all the other hurdles a dancer must endure.

15 March

Out of Blue

Dir: Carol Morley

Here is a movie straight out of left field: a metaphysical noir starring Patricia Clarkson as a tough New Orleans cop investigating the mysterious death of an astrophysicist – based on the Martin Amis novel Night Train. Director Carol Morley is such a restlessly creative film-maker.

22 March

The White Crow

Dir: Ralph Fiennes

David Hare scripts this handsomely appointed drama starring Oleg Ivenko as the young Rudolf Nureyev as he prepares to defect to the west in the early 60s, while remaining enigmatic about his exact motives. Real-life dance star Sergei Polunin plays his Kirov roommate, Yuri Soloviev.

22 March

Nureyev steps out … The White Crow.

What Men Want

Dir: Adam Shankman

A cheeky gender-inverting remake of Nancy Meyers’s 2000 comedy What Women Want, which starred Mel Gibson as an adman who suddenly finds he can read women’s minds. Now it’s Taraji P Henson as a sports agent who gets the edge when she gains telepathic access to guys’ thought processes.

22 March

Dumbo

Dir: Tim Burton

Just when you’d recovered from the tearful trauma of the 1941 Disney animated classic, there comes a new live-action version. Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito star.

29 March

Tearful … Tim Burton’s Dumbo. Photograph: Allstar/Walt Disney Productions

Pet Sematary

Dirs: Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmeyer

Stephen King’s brand identity in the horror world is as strong as ever, and here is the second movie version of his 1983 novel. It is the exquisitely horrible and obscene story of a doctor whose son is killed in an accident and who takes the corpse to the supernatural burial ground nearby – with grotesque results.

5 April

The Sisters Brothers

Dir: Jacques Audiard

French director Jacques Audiard has mastered the western with terrific elan. It is 1850s Oregon, and John C Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play quarrelsome brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters, who are on a mission to assassinate a certain individual in San Francisco, and have to work with a prissy private detective, played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

5 April

Loro

Dir: Paolo Sorrentino

It was only a matter of time before Paolo Sorrentino made a film about Silvio Berlusconi. Sorrentino’s longtime star Toni Servillo plays the Italian politician and media magnate, and the film is about Loro (that is: them), the group of hideously complicit businessmen and hangers-on who enabled his rule.

12 April

Toni Servillo as Berlusconi in Loro.

Red Joan

Dir: Trevor Nunn

Theatrical heavyweight Trevor Nunn makes a rare sortie into the movies for this period drama inspired by the life and times of the KGB’s veteran British spy Melita Norwood. Here she is transformed into “Red” Joan Stanley, and played as a young woman by Sophie Cookson and in later years by Judi Dench.

19 April

Eighth Grade

Dir: Bo Burnham

A hyper-contemporary comedy-drama from first-time writer-director Bo Burnham (and veteran producer Scott Rudin) that has been much admired. It is about an eighth-grader (ie around 13 years old) who is obsessed with social media and keeps making self-help and self-esteem videos on YouTube which, by getting hardly any views, undermine her self-esteem.

26 April