7

Where Is Anne Frank: A Time Traveling Stop-Motion Film About The Holocaust

Release Date: N/A

Director Ari Folman is not a man you want to measure dicks with. Born to Auschwitz survivors, his adolescence was spent as a teenage soldier during the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon -- an experience he later turned into the animated documentary Waltz With Bashir. After an Oscar nomination, he went onto make The Congress -- a film about Claire Underwood going all Cool World for disease money.

So if there were anyone who could get away with making an animated Anne Frank movie, it sure sounds like it would be this guy. Especially when you see what it looks like ...

Forward.com

6

How To Talk To Girls At Parties: Punk Rock Nicole Kidman Fights Aliens

Release Date: Late 2017

The studio A24 has been vomiting gold for quite some time. Along with funding Oscar contenders like Room and Moonlight, the company is behind some of the best and most brain-fucking horror/sci-fi like Under The Skin, Ex Machina, and the gore-punk scream fantasia that is Green Room (a film I totally warned you about).

One year later and this studio is bringing us yet another harrowing tale of mohawked shenanigans being hampered by sudden violence and a surprise celebrity appearance.

Delgado Rico/YouTube

Delgado Rico/YouTube

5

Annihilation: The Director Of Ex Machina Takes On Alternate Realities

Release Date: Late 2017

If you're like me -- you experienced a profound existential crisis from Ex Machina. Specifically, the Oscar Isaac dance number turtling your masculinity in the blinding face of Apollo-like rhythmic dominance. Oh, his beard! His beard like the thorny maw of the great serpent -- devourer of lust!

Universal Pictures

Anyhoo ... if you enjoyed that film, there's a very real chance you also enjoyed such gloomy sci-fi as Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, 28 Days Later, and Dredd. Why? Because director Alex Garland wrote all of those films -- as well as the original novel for The Beach. He is the person to thank for every niche sci-fi hit and then some, and now he's back with Annihilation -- an adapted film about lady biologists bushwhacking otherworldly lands defiant of physics.

Without spoiling it for myself or others, the original novel follows a team of unnamed scientists crossing over into a mysterious and possibly alien "Area X" after the last expedition returned with zero memory and a cancer diagnosis. There they find an ever-changing ecosystem packed with enough grotesque wildlife to overcrowd hell's menagerie -- including a human-eyed dolphin species and Predator-like invisible animals. That's all I'm willing to learn about this film beyond the fact that it stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the aforementioned fuck-lord Oscar Isaac. And thanks to the cast and crew's Instagram accounts, we're getting a real-time tour of what this Area X is going to look like ...

Paramount Pictures

4

The Circle: Tom Hanks And Patton Oswalt Play Sinister Steve Jobses

Release Date: April 28, 2017

For a film starring Patton Oswalt, John Boyega, Bill Paxton, Emma Watson, and Tom "I'm fucking Tom Hanks" Hanks, The Circle has been getting very little attention and I have no idea why. Along with featuring a shit-ton of relevant actors (including the historical reunion of Hanks and Paxton in their first film together since Apollo 13), the film couldn't be more overtly topical if it starred an anthropomorphic "Make America Great Again" hat. The story follows a young lady getting hired at the largest and bestest tech company known as "The Circle" for it's large ... uh ... circular campus.

MacWorld

Oh wait, sorry. That's an artist's rendering of Apple's new campus that's totally unrelated to this film. Here's the fictional "Circle" featured in the movie's trailer:

STX Entertainment

Once hired, she meets the company's casually dressed, keynote-speaking bosses played by Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt who in no way represent Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

STX Entertainment

I'm not entirely sure why -- but seeing Tom Hanks and Patton Oswalt sit sinisterly in the same room together feels contrary to everything I base my reality on. It's an image I don't think humans were ever meant to witness, like the center of the sun or someone mowing a lawn at night. From there, her life goes from new-hire, to hotshot employee, to tech celebrity, to "oh my god I'm being chased by a drone."

STX Entertainment

3

Sleight: A Street Magician Turns Into A Real Superhero

Release Date: April 7, 2017

Every red-blooded movie buff has fantasized about sneaking into J.J. Abrams' office and stealing his glasses. And until recently, doing so would have inevitably forced you to commando crawl past a man named J.D. Dillard -- former receptionist for Bad Robot. While spending his days as a desk jockey, Dillard spent his free time pitching big-budget sci-fi concepts ... only to finally say "eff this noise, I'll just make something myself."

The result is Sleight, a low-budget mystery box filmed in just 17 days and written in even fewer. And while that sounds super shoddy, the film isn't doing half bad on Rotten Tomatoes.

RottenTomatoes

As outlined in the trailer -- the film is about South L.A. boy genius/street magician who is forced into a life of crime in order to make a better life for his little sister. But when she gets kidnapped by an evil drug dealer, it's up to him to use a combination of sweet magic skills and odd body modifications to get her back.

Universal Pictures

Universal Pictures

2

XX: An All-Female-Directed Horror Anthology Of Insanity

Release Date: February 17, 2017

Anyone who has grown up with an older sister knows the visceral horrors that women are capable of. While female directors are scarce in every genre -- to me the biggest shame is that there aren't more making horror. Personally, this isn't so much about equality (although that's nice too) as it's simply that some of the best and most brutal horror films have been helmed by women -- such as American Psycho, Ravenous, Pet Semetary, and The Babadook.

This is part of why XX looks to be such a killer anthology -- as the main draw is that all four vignettes are being directed by a super-talented lady.

Magnet Releasing

There's Jovanka Vuckovic, Annie Clark, The Invitation's Karyn Kusama, and finally Roxanne Benjamin -- who isn't shy to horror anthologies since she's worked on both the V/H/S films and directed a segment in Southbound. Together they form a terror Voltron you can only see glimpses of in the trailer -- which follows such tales as a little boy who wastes away from hunger after looking inside a mysterious box ...

Magnet Releasing

Magnet Releasing

1

The Love Witch: Feminism Disguised As '70s Camp

Blu-ray release: April 1st, 2017

Alright. Technically, The Love Witch isn't an "upcoming film". Technically it came out to a limited amount of theaters in 2016. In fact, you can absolutely rent the movie right now on Vimeo. But there was no damn way I could omit this kooky throwback masterpiece -- not when it has more boobed-violence and '70s camp than Russ Meyer's dream journal.

Oscilloscope Laboratories

Oscilloscope Laboratories

Oscilloscope Laboratories

As the trailer will explain -- the movie follows Elaine, a love-obsessed witch driven mad by the patriarchy. Using a combination of "love magic" and a butt-ton of drugs, we spend the next few hours watching as she indifferently burns through lovers like they were classroom hamsters.

Oscilloscope Laboratories

While looking like a bad sexploitation film, the film is actually sitting in the high-90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and has been hailed as a feminist masterpiece by many critics. The reason is clear when you watch it, and suddenly realize that what you thought was going to be some shallow Tarantino-esque Grindhouse tribute is actually about the cultural stigmas and expectations that come with a woman's sexuality. For while the face-value victims appear to just be her male companions, the more we learn about Elaine's past the more we realize that she's a victim as well, of the patriarchal society that made her a monster.

At least I'm pretty sure that's what it's about. Not to sound sexist, but as a man there were times where it felt like the message simply went over my head. And that's totally fine, because there was still a lot of nudity and pretty colors to keep me entertained between screaming "don't drink that, bro" at the TV.

Oscilloscope Laboratories

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