Looking Ahead: 2011 Contender Forecast

“Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” — Chance the Gardener

Yesterday’s arrival of the achingly radiant new trailer for The Tree of Life has me thinking ahead already to first promising buds of the 2011 movie season we’ll begin to see bloom as early as March. Oscar hopes spring eternal, so in the pre-dawn hush before the SAG nominations rain down upon us, I thought I’d compile a list of two dozen highly anticipated films of next year.

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg)
Cars 2 (John Lasseter)
Contagion (Steven Soderbergh)
The Conspirator (Robert Redford)
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)
Farragut North (George Clooney)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher)
Hanna (Joe Wright)
Hoover (Clint Eastwood)
The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Martin Scorsese)
Moneyball (Bennett Miller)
Moon Rise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
On The Road (Walter Salles)
The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson)
Source Code (Duncan Jones
Super 8 (J.J. Abrams)
Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder)
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
War Horse (Steven Spielberg)
We Bought a Zoo (Cameron Crowe)
Young Adult (Jason Reitman)

What am I leaving off?¬† Aside from Super 8 there’s a lack of outstanding hard-core sci-fi for the second year running. That’s a let-down after the banner year we had in 2009. Fantasy and comic-heroes will help fill the void with 10 or 12 blockbuster money shots of popcorn porn, after the cut.