Five Films, Five Directors: My Upcoming Watchlist

Hmmmm, What to Watch.....

When it comes to films, I can't help feeling slightly Nietzschean, insofar as I've come to believe that cinema is dead, and we're all responsible for killing it. Now, in the age of streaming services, titles crash down on us and leave us desperately clawing for breath like John Snow in the Battle of the Bastards, and so there is a particular kind of pleasure and safety in working backwards from a film you love. Not just watching more films, but following a filmmaker and trusting that whatever drew you to one piece of their work is likely alive in the rest of it. That is the logic behind this watchlist. My five favourite films, their directors, and the next film from each of them that I want to see.

1. Monsters University — Dan Scanlon (2013)

Pixar's prequel to Monsters, Inc. takes audiences back to the university days of Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan, charting how two wildly mismatched personalities went from rivals to best friends. The film crafts a delightfully related story about failure, self-knowledge, and learning. Teaching that the version of success you dreamed of may not be the one you actually need. It is warmer and more emotionally honest than its premise has any right to be, and certainly provided more inspiration than most university professors ever could.

When I went to look up what else Dan Scanlon had directed, I was fully expecting a modest but respectable filmography. While I did certainly find an impressive resume of important contributions to some of the best animated films, I was surprised that post Monster's University, he had only directed one other film in the twelve years since. Just one. Scanlon directed Onward in 2020, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The film is inspired by the death of Scanlon's own father when he and his brother were young, and that personal grief is what shapes the present offering. Set in a suburban fantasy world, Onward follows two elf brothers named Ian and Barley Lightfoot who set out on a quest to find an artefact that will temporarily bring their deceased father back for twenty-four hours. A slightly predictable offering that will no doubt communicate that the journey that brings two brothers together is bigger than the temporary resurrection of a father long past, but I also feel that a road trip, with a clock counting down, will still bring the feels.

1. Clerks — Kevin Smith (1994)

Shot in black and white on a budget famously funded by maxed-out credit cards and sold blood, Clerks is one of American independent cinema's great accidental masterpieces. Dante Hicks is not even supposed to be working today. What follows is a single day behind the counter of a New Jersey convenience store — all stalled ambitions, failed relationships, and monologues about the moral implications of the Death Star contractors. It launched Kevin Smith's entire universe, and it remains one of the sharpest, most quotable films ever made for almost nothing.

Returning to this world comes with its complications. Smith himself admitted all of them are in their late 40s if not 50s, and the progression shows. No Hollywood treatment here; just warts and all, which is partly what I feel has always given the Clerks films their charm. The Jay and Silent Bob of my memory are not men of a certain age, and the absence of the kind of wall-to-wall 80s rock soundtrack that framed the originals is something I am already bracing for. But then there is the other part of me, the part that wants to see familiar faces again, to be back in the Quick Stop one more time. Following a massive heart attack, Randal enlists the old gang to make a film immortalising his life at the convenience store that started it all. Smith has said the project is about how a decades-spanning friendship finally confronts the future, and how you are never too old to completely change your life.

1. The Fly — David Cronenberg (1986)

A scientist accidentally merges his DNA with a housefly during a teleportation experiment and begins an irreversible transformation that is equal parts tragedy and body horror. What makes The Fly genuinely great rather than merely grotesque is that it is, underneath all the biological nightmare, a love story, albeit a tragic one. It's a film about watching someone you love change into something you no longer recognise, and staying anyway. Cronenberg has never made a film that is not in some way about the body's betrayal, and The Fly is his most devastating expression of that theme.

Long fascinated by the ways technology transforms our bodies and minds, Cronenberg returns with one of his most profoundly personal films — an audacious, elegiac exploration of grief, mortality, and love wrapped in the guise of a corporate-espionage thriller. The film was made in response to the death of his wife of 43 years. Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel, is the enigmatic entrepreneur behind a new technology that allows bereaved relatives to view their loved ones' decomposing remains. When his futuristic cemetery is vandalised, he suspects a conspiracy and is forced to confront the trauma surrounding the death of his beloved wife, played by Diane Kruger. Only Cronenberg. Absolutely only Cronenberg.

1. Training Day — Antoine Fuqua (2001)

A rookie LAPD narcotics officer spends a single day with his new partner — a decorated, charismatic, and utterly corrupt detective — and watches his understanding of justice, survival, and his own moral limits dissolve in real time. Denzel Washington won the Oscar for Best Actor, and it remains one of the most commanding screen performances of the past thirty years. Fuqua directed it with a propulsive, menacing energy that never lets up. It is the kind of film that makes you feel slightly unsafe for its entire running time, which is exactly the point.

Biopics of famous musicians appear to all the rage right now, and I'm pretty sure that one dedicated to Mr. Ozzy Ozzborne lies somewhere on the horizon. I was quite surprised to see that Antoine Fuqua was the director of this particular offering, turning it into a respected curiosity into a full-blown must-watch by this cinephile. The film traces Michael Jackson's journey from his discovery as the lead of the Jackson 5 to his rise as the biggest entertainer in the world. Michael Jackson is played by his nephew Jaafar Jackson, and the film has already generated Oscar buzz for several members of its ensemble cast following its April 24, 2026 release, which became the biggest opening of all time for a music biopic. Fuqua himself said of Jackson: "Michael was a big part of my life growing up, a big influence on my career, an incredible artist — but he was a human being, and we're exploring that."

1. Moneyball — Bennett Miller (2011)

The Oakland Athletics cannot afford the players other teams can. So their general manager, Billy Beane, decides to stop playing the same game as everyone else. What follows is not really a baseball film — it is a film about the courage it takes to think differently in a system built to punish you for it.

Next watch: Foxcatcher (2014) —
Bennett Miller has directed six actors to Oscar nominations across his four features, and has himself been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Director. Foxcatcher follows the greatest Olympic wrestling champion brother team as they join a squad led by multimillionaire John E. du Pont to train for the 1988 Games in Seoul — a union that leads to unlikely circumstances. Those "unlikely circumstances" are a true story of wealth, obsession, and murder, told with the cold, meticulous restraint that is Miller's signature. Three films into his career, Miller seemed incapable of making anything less than a meticulously crafted character study. Foxcatcher was his last feature. It has now been over a decade since anything new. Whatever he is working on next, I am already waiting for it.