From much-anticipated sequels to music mockumentaries to auteur returns, the next 12 months offers up a wide variety of intriguing new movies

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I doubt very much that 2026 will see anything in the Marty Supreme league, but here’s hoping one of the most bizarre side-steps of the decade turns out as interesting as it hopes. Short of Christopher Nolan signing on to the new Mr Men movie, I didn’t think much would throw the industry a loop as when Greta Gerwig decided to follow up bubblegum blockbuster Barbie with …… a Narnia movie. More specifically, Gerwig – previously a skilled purveyor of achingly hip alt-indie comedy with Lady Bird, Frances Ha and Damsels in Distress – is restarting the Narnia series, which had got through three of CS Lewis’s series before Netflix took over the rights. To my mind, though, The Magician’s Nephew, Lewis’s origins/prequel to the Wardrobe/Caspian/Dawn Treader narrative, is the most interesting of the entire Narnia canon, with its Edenic fall, “deplorable word” and mystical apple. We know some of the cast: Emma Mackey is the future White Witch, Carey Mulligan the terminally ill mother of one of the main kids, and Daniel Craig might be Aslan or mad inventor Uncle Andrew – or both, or neither. All eyes will be naturally be on Gerwig, but I have confidence she will pull it off in style. Andrew Pulver

Star Wars alum gives an impressively modest performance in this slightly smarter-than-average survival tale

Unlike some other less resilient horror subgenres, the zombie movie is, fittingly, never going to really die. Neither will film-makers attempting to add their own twist, understandable given how repetitive the die, wake up, lumber, bite and repeat formula has become. Australian director Zak Hilditch’s attempt, the rather buried We Bury the Dead, is therefore not quite as striking as it might have seemed a decade and change ago. Using words such as “contemplative” and “mournful” to describe a film that includes its fair share of gnarly head-smashing has become something of a cliche, so much so that last month’s meta-comedy Anaconda reboot had its characters joke that these days, even a film about a giant snake needs “intergenerational trauma” to work.

But Hilditch mercifully avoids drowning his film in drab self-seriousness. Yes, it’s a zombie survival thriller that’s also about grief – but it’s also just a zombie survival thriller, albeit one with less carnage than some might expect. Those gearing up for gore would be forgiven for expecting such given the film’s cursed 2 January release date, typically handed over to the silliest of studio horror, from One Missed Call to Texas Chainsaw 3D to Season of the Witch (they’ll likely be satiated by next week’s killer chimp schlocker Primate instead). We Bury the Dead, which was partly funded by the Adelaide film festival before premiering at SXSW, is less focused on death toll and more on the toll left on those who’ve lost someone, in this iteration as the result of a US government blunder.