Annual Top Films Lists

Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #117. Roman Polanski’s The Palace

Published on January 11, 2023

The Palace

Understandably this next item on our list comes with a lot of heat. An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse) won a trio of 45th César awards and just prior won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice film festival in 2019. Moving towards a template from Jerzy Skolimowski and Ewa Piaskowska, The Palace is about a hotel in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve 1999, blending stories of guests and staff with the likes of Mickey Rourke, Joaquim de Almeida and John Cleese. Roman Polanski shot for four months in Gstaad, Switzerland. Rai Cinema backed this project.

Gist: A drama set on New Year’s Eve 1999 in a luxurious Swiss hotel where the lives of hotel workers and various guests get intertwined.

Release Date/Prediction: Polanski will likely go back to Venice especially with a film that has Italian coin.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).