Isabelle Huppert | Ep4records Music

In the latest in our 10-part series, the films we are most looking forward to next year by the worlds most singular directors

Based on a True Story

Now 83, Roman Polanski remains firmly in the public eye, despite not having shot a film since 2013s ropy Venus in Fur. But Carnage, released a couple of years before that, suggested there was life and fire in the old genius yet, and this one has the great advantage of being scripted by Olivier Assayas. Another meta-fictional thriller in the mould of The Ghost Writer, this one stars Eva Green as a writer who becomes involved with an obsessive admirer.

Call Me By Your Name

Maybe the most intriguing among a strikingly tasty-looking bunch of Sundance titles, Luca Guadagninos latest may not feature Tilda Swinton, but it does look of a brilliant, shimmering kind with the likes of A Bigger Splash. Armie Hammer stars as an American academic who starts a summer love affair with an adolescent boy (Timothe Chalamet) while staying at his parents house on the Italian Riviera. Michael Stuhlbarg is the possibly spluttering papa.

The Death and Life of John F Donovan

Dont expect it to show up at Cannes no way, no how, not after what happened last time but still were reserving space for the latest by enfant terrible Xavier Dolan. Another English-language debut, this one stars Kit Harington as a rising US actor accused by gossip mag editor Jessica Chastain of being a paedophile. The supporting cast is as wow-y as that premise: Natalie Portman, Kathy Bates, Susan Sarandon, Michael Gambon.

Downsizing

Heres one that should make someone who, say, might be on maternity leave from March, feel really sore to miss: Alexander Paynes follow-up to the masterful Nebraska. And its his most ambitious to date: a sci-fi comedy drama starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig (subbing at the last minute for Reese Witherspoon) as a couple who voluntarily decide to be shrunk. But then she backs out at the last minute. Margo Martindale (star of Paynes fantastic Paris short), Jason Sudeikis, Alec Baldwin and Christoph Waltz co-star.

The Handmaiden

Ancient texts have a cosmic way of speaking to people in our time: for instance, a New York woman who killed her two children, and my mother, who killed herself

Pascale, my daughters school director, first told me about Lisette Bamengas case one morning during pre-school drop-off in Brooklyn. Lisette was Pascales own daughters third-grade teacher at Public School 58, and she was facing lifetime imprisonment for killing her two children, who were four months and four years old, in July 2012.

Many parents of Lisettes students, Pascale among them, testified in her favor and helped raise money for her defense. Pascale told me about the trial, and the progress she and her fellow supporters made in getting Lisettes undiagnosed postpartum psychosis acknowledged in the sentencing process. Pascale insisted on telling me, I thought, until I realized I was one of the few able to listen, and definitely the only mom to take interest in the case as I regularly asked for updates. After a while I had to tell Pascale I could have been Lisettes child.

My mother took her own life in July 2009. She struggled since adolescence with what she called manic depression, and what I remembered the medical establishment describing as I asked around, desperate to understand as close to schizophrenia. She suffered from severe postpartum depression bordering on psychosis after my birth and, before me, my sisters. She almost killed herself many times before her final attempt: which wasnt an attempt or a call for help, it was irrevocable and deliberate. Unwillingly, very much involuntarily, she had nearly killed me and my sister more than once.

In Euripidess tragedy Medea, maddened by grief, the eponymous character murders her children in revenge for her husbands adultery. Ive worked at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the last seven years programming what we call here humanities, meaning events that provide context around our season, literary events and more unusual things. I had seen Medea at BAM before working here, and Fiona Shaw in Deborah Warners production reminded me so brutally of my mother, I couldnt even weep.