Highlights of 2009: Film

Lily Allen's second album, Jude Law as Hamlet, Michael Sheen as Brian Clough, Martin Amis on feminism – 2009 promises a variety of treats in the arts. Our critics predict what will make waves in the coming months

By Geoffrey Macnab

Friday, 2 January 2009

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Fans of Robert Aldrich and spaghetti westerns will be hoping that Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds (which may even be ready in time for Cannes, where the director has traditionally done well, in May) lives up to its billing as a Dirty Dozen for our times.

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Fans of Robert Aldrich and spaghetti westerns will be hoping that Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds (which may even be ready in time for Cannes, where the director, right, has traditionally done well, in May) lives up to its billing as a Dirty Dozen for our times. Elsewhere, former "man with no name" Clint Eastwood is back on screen for the first time since Million Dollar Baby in Gran Torino, apparently playing an Alf Garnett-like old racist.

Michael Haneke hit a brick wall with his ill-fated remake of his own Funny Games last year but hopes are high for his epic new period yarn, The White Ribbon, set in northern Germany just before the First World War.

Swedish wunderkind Lukas Moodysson was once the darling of the arthouse world thanks to Together and Show Me Love. He lost his audiences with experimental fare like Container and Hole in My Heart, but his new feature Mammoth, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams, is his first in English. Already selected for Berlin, it looks set to win back his old fans.

Helen Mirren watchers will be intrigued to see how she acquits herself as Tolstoy's wife in The Last Station. In another historical film, creationists and Richard Dawkins followers will no doubt lock horns over Jon Amiel's biopic of Charles Darwin, Creation.

Having watched Michael Sheen play Tony Blair and David Frost, it will be intriguing to see how British cinema's resident chameleon acquits himself as football manager Brian Clough in The Damned United. Also on the football theme, Ken Loach's Looking For Eric, about a woebegone postman obsessed by Eric Cantona, promises to be fun. Cantona not only appears in the movie but shares some of that Gallic wisdom that sports journalists used to appreciate so much. ("When the seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.")

Richard Curtis is the closest the British film industry has to its own Midas, even if he does make most of his films for the American-owned Working Title. His latest, The Boat That Rocked, about British pirate radio in the 1960s, will no doubt spark renewed interest in the careers of Tony Blackburn and Dave Lee Travis – so be warned.

As ever, the summer tentpole movies, Harry Potter Half-Blood Prince, Prince of Persia and the like, are bound to dominate the box-office charts. Perhaps the most intriguing film, though, at least in sensory terms, is Piranha 3D, which may well give audiences the sensation that they are indeed being eaten alive by lots of little fish.