50 Films You Will Want To See In 2015

Now that we’ve said goodbye to 2014 (and taken stock of 2014’s best films), it’s time to look ahead to 2015, and the abundant cinematic riches that lay in store. The year’ll be ruled by the twin monoliths of Star Wars and The Avengers, but, among the billion-dollar franchises, there’s plenty other movies to look forward to.

1. The Assassin

Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien

Cast: Shu Qi, Chang Chen, Satoshi Tsumabuki

If the 2014 arrival of Wong Kar-wai’s long-awaited The Grandmaster didn’t entirely sate your appetite for kung-fu films from the grand auteurs of Asian art cinema, then The Assassin may be your #1 most anticipated film of the year, alphabetical order or no. Hou's years-in-the-making wuxia epic should finally —finally!— hit screens in 2015; the Taiwanese minimalist getting genre-riffic with old muse Shu Qi playing the titular killer, and Yuen Wo-Ping handling fight choreography.

2. Avengers: Age Of Ultron

Director: Joss Whedon

Cast: Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Tom Hiddleston

I can’t remember what phase, exactly, of Marvel Global Domination we’re currently in, but cinema’s foremost multi-franchise branding-exercise has market-positioned their latest-installment of Whedonesque quips and endless explosions to make a billion-dollar dent in the 2015 box office.

3. Big Eyes

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Danny Huston, Krysten Ritter, Jason Schwartzman

Even in a career long on resurrected brands and gurning self-parody, when Burton dares work with a modest mudget and a troupe of non-hammin’ actors, promise still lingers. Big Eyes plays as quirky tragicomedy, with the presence of Adams and Waltz —and the absence of Johnny Depp— promising at least something from the guy who made the worst-ever Planet Of The Apes movie.

4. Birdman

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Zach Galifianakis

Fresh off landing atop endless Best Films of 2014 lists, Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) arrives on local screens in time for Oscar season. It’s much weirder and wittier than your regular Oscar-chaser, with the rapidfire smart-assery of the script a secret weapon lurking beneath the big-picture storylines: Iñárritu’s showstoppin’ strung-together-single-take direction, Keaton’s comeback (though if his scenes are forver stolen by Watts, Norton, and Stone, it’s interesting his performance has been so hailed), and the picture’s meta-commentary on the comic-bookisation of Hollywood movie-making.

5. Blackhat

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei, Leehom Wang

An international cyber-thriller with a Chinese angle sounds like a dreary prospect, but Mann has a long history of turning action-movies into pieces of high-art, and is one of the few directors to be interested in digital technological for its purely painting-with-light potential.

6. Carol

Director: Todd Haynes

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Kyle Chandler, Carrie Brownstein, Sarah Poulson

Todd Haynes follows up his Mildred Pierce mini-series by adapting Patricia Highsmith’s iconic lesbian text. With Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara. It’s going to be great.

7. Chappie

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver, Dev Patel, Yolandi Visser, Sharlto Copley

South African wunderkind Neill Blomkamp is still all of 35, and Chappie follows District 9 and Elysium as another ambitious piece of sci-fi parable, in which class division is again depicted in a dystopian near future. This time, with a lead character who’s a robot.

8. Clouds Of Sils Maria

Director: Olivier Assayas

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Johnny Flynn

Assayas’s latest film came into life when Juliette Binoche challenged him to write a script with great roles for actresses. He’s responded with a film about actresses, no less: Binoche playing the aging starlet remaking the play that made her famous, with Moretz filling her long-vacated ‘it-girl’ shoes.

9. Crimson Peak

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam, Jessica Chastain

Del Toro returns to the realm of dark horror after the mecha-kaiju hijinks of Pacific Rim. Crimson Peak promises a spooky house, shadows, copious blood, and the continuation of Mia Wasikowska’s fascinating career.

10. The Duke Of Burgundy

Director: Peter Strickland

Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Chiara D'Anna, Eugenia Caruso, Monica Swinn

Strickland’s ultra-impressive career thus far goes: Katalin Varga, Berberian Sound Studio, Björk: Biophilia Live. His latest feature, The Duke Of Burgundy, received the rapturous acclaim to which he’s accustomed on its tour of 2014 film festivals, and local cinephiles will be delighted when it lands on local screens.

11. The Early Years

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Cast: Michael Caine, Willem Dafoe, Rachel Weisz, Harvey Keitel, Jane Fonda, Paul Dano, Mark Kozelek

After winning an Oscar with The Great Beauty, Sorrentino returns with his second English-language feature, following 2011’s pleasingly daffy This Must Be The Place. It stars Caine as a retired conductor who’s lured from his idle life in the Swiss Alps to perform for the Queen. And, man, that cast sure promises something.

12. Eden

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

Cast: Félix de Givry, Pauline Etienne, Vincent Macaigne, Greta Gerwig

Following the great Father Of My Children and Goodbye, First Love, the fourth film for Hansen-Løve —one of France’s finest young auteurs— is a dreamt chronicle of the founding of the French touch/filter-house scene that gave the world Daft Punk, Cassius, Bob Sinclair et al.

13. The End Of The Tour

Director: James Ponsoldt

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Segel, Anna Chlumsky, Mickey Sumner, Mamie Gummer, Joan Cusack, Ron Livingston

In his three films thus far, Ponsoldt has chronicled the day-to-days of addiction and the familial fallout that comes with, most famously with his tender 2013 teen-movie The Spectacular Now. That makes him plenty qualified to paint a cinematic portrait of David Foster Wallace, the literary titan and Depressed Person who took his own life in 2008. Here, he’s played by Jason Segel(!), with Jessie Eisenberg as the magazine scribe tailing along with (does it trouble you) DFW on Infinite Jest’s book tour. The family of Wallace has distanced themselves from the adaptation, which always makes a picture seem more intriguing.

14. Entertainment

Director: Rick Alverson

Cast: Gregg Turkington, Tim Heidecker, John C. Reilly, Amy Seimetz, Tye Sheridan, Michael Cera, Dean Stockwell

Alverson, fresh off The Comedy’s misanthropic act of cinematic trolling, reunites with Heidecker for another film harbouring a grimly-ironic title. It’s a loose to-screen translation of the shtick of Turkington’s cult character Neil Hamburger, that aims to present the stand-up comedy circuit as dark and depressing.

15. Ex Machina

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander

Garland, the novellist who broke into the movie-biz with The Beach, makes his directorial debut with this piece of prescient speculative-fiction ripe with AI pop-philosophisin’. It marks a rare piece of commercial thrillerdom that doesn’t feel pre-branded, its original premise, debut director, and nascent star (Isaac) bringing little baggage to screen.

16. Foxcatcher

Director: Bennett Miller

Cast: Steve Carell, Mark Ruffalo, Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Michael Hall

Miller’s long-awaited Moneyball follow-up brings the bonkers story of John du Pont to screen in an Oscar-ready portrait of obsession and madness that boasts a host of high-profile turns from Carell, Ruffalo, and Tatum.

17. Green Room

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Cast: Patrick Stewart, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Anton Yelchin, Mark Webber, Joe Cole

Following up his awesome Blue Ruin, Saulnier quickly turns around a film in which a punk band are taken hostage by a crew of neo-Nazis at a rural venue. The fact that Captain Picard himself is the lead skinhead has stolen all the headlines, but the cast runs plenty deep; including the ascendent, amazing Poots and delightful Shawkat (who’s also in Sebastián Silva’s next film, the Kristen Wiig-starring Nasty Baby).

18. The Hateful Eight

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Cast: Channing Tatum, Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, Demian Bichir, Walton Goggins

Quentin Tarantino’s eighth film is Quentin Tarantino’s second successive Western, with the ultra-violent auteur following Django Unchained with another bloodsoaked portrait of distant American history. Its script was famously leaked in advance of production, but with Tarantino the rat-a-tat words are only half the delight.

19. in The Heart Of The Sea

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson, Benjamin Walker, Charlotte Riley

In a certain corner of the internet, “Ben Whishaw as a young Herman Melville” reads like slash-fic (insert Moby-Dick pun at your leisure). Drawn from a tale from Melville’s life —a based-on-a-true-story story-behind-the-story— in which a whaling ship and a sperm-whale have a 90-day stand-off, it scans as a thinking-man’s multiplex adventure, set on the high seas. It also finds Howard and Hemsworth working together, again, after 2013’s Rush.

20. High-Rise

Director: Ben Wheatley

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss

Cult British director Ben Wheatley follows his bugfuck psychedelic ’shroom-out A Field In England with an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s decay-of-urban-civilisation novel, which peeps have been wanting to adapt since its 1975 publication. The cast shows Wheatley’s upward ascent, and his burgeoning fanboys’ll be giddy he’s already at work on his next film, Free Fall, a hard-boiled crime caper starring Evans, Olivia Wilde, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, and Michael Smiley.

21. The Homesman

Director: Tommy Lee Jones

Cast: Tommy Lee Jones, Hilary Swank, Hailee Steinfeld, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep, John Lithgow, James Spader, William Fichtner

Jones’s directorial efforts are few and far between; The Homesman a long-time-later follow-up to 2005’s The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada. It’s a dirtied frontier Western that’s won Jones and Swank plentiful plaudits for their lead performances.

22. Inherent Vice

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Jena Malone, Reese Witherspoon, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Benicio del Toro, Hong Chau

After the vertiginous peaks of There Will Be Blood and The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson had to come down somehow. His existential stoner bro-down Inherent Vice is PTA’s most outright-comic work since Punch-Drunk Love, and has already scored comparisons to The Big Lebowski.

23. Inside Out

Director: Pete Docter & Ronaldo Del Carmen

Cast: (voices of) Diane Lane, Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Mindy Kaling, Kyle MacLachlan

Pixar used to be as good of a quality-guarantee as Hollywood had to offer, but after a disappointing run of Cars 2, Brave, and Monsters University, 2014 didn’t even offer a new Pixar pic. Inside Out promises the possibility of the animation masters recapturing some of that old magic, even if its cutesy inside-the-mind premise summons ’90s-sitcom flashbacks of Herman’s Head.

24. Joy

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Édgar Ramírez, Bradley Cooper, Robert de Niro

It’s David O. Russell’s adaptation of the life of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano. Starring Jennifer Lawrence. Due out Christmas 2015, in the meat of awards season. You’ll be hearing from it.

25. Jurassic World

Director: Colin Trevorrow

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Ty Simkins, Nick Robinson, Irrfan Khan, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jake Johnson, Omar Sy, Judy Greer

All these years on, and there’s still a buck to be made in CGI dinosaurs.

26. Knight of Cups

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Christian Bale, Natalie Portman, Cate Blanchett, Isabel Lucas, Antonio Banderas, Wes Bentley, Imogen Poots, Freida Pinto

No longer the mysterious auteur of the American cinema wilderness, spending years on hiatus, Malick is currently at work on a fistful of projects; including the amazing-sounding Untitled Terrence Malick Project, a vast-ensemble-cast drama set in and amongst Austin’s music scene. Speaking of vast-ensemble-cast dramas, Knight Of Cups is a pirouetting portrait of a dual-love-triangle due to be told in glowing magic-hour photography, loving close-ups of celebrity actors, and tender voice-overs.

27. Life

Director: Anton Corbijn

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Dane DeHaan, Ben Kingsley, Joel Edgerton

Life scans as sure prestige picture: it's based-on-a-true-story tale chronicling the budding friendship between a Life magazine photographer (Pattinson) sent on an assignment to shoot James Dean (DeHaan). There’s an extra wrinkle of interest given how close-to-home it is for Corbijn, the legendary rock-photographer now four films (Control, The American, A Most Wanted Man) into his directorial career.

28. The Lobster

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, John C. Reilly, Olivia Colman

Were this list a countdown, mounting in expectation and anticipation towards #1, then The Lobster would sit atop it. The Godfather of the Greek weird-wave follows Dogtooth and Alps with his English-language debut, in which the amazing cast give life to the following Lanthimosian premise: in a dystopian future, single people are rounded up and given 45 days to find a mate, or else they’ll be turned into an animal and released into the wild.

29. Louder Than Bombs

Director: Joachim Trier

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jesse Eisenberg, Rachel Brosnahan, Amy Ryan, Gabriel Byrne, David Strathairn

If you haven’t seen Trier’s amazing Norwegian films Reprise and Oslo, 31. August., then your life is utterly empty and without meaning (but I still love you). Trier’s third feature marks his English-language debut, and, to be honest, I don’t even care what the synopsis is with Trier penning the script and Isabelle Huppert atop the cast list.

30. Love

Director: Gaspar Noé

Making his first film since 2009’s bad-trip epic Into The Void, French provocateur Noé has kept his latest production kept thus-far mysterious, revealing only that Love is about an adolescent love-triangle reported to ‘celebrate sex in a positive way’; which is quite the claim from the dude who made I Stand Alone and Irréversible. Whilst the mystery-keeping means we don’t even have a cast announcement yet, we do have, however, amazing poster art. 

31. Mad Max: Fury Road

Director: George Miller

Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoë Kravitz

Miller’s long, long-awaited return to Australia’s greatest franchise export finally hits the ground, 30 years after 1985’s Tina Turnified Beyond Thunderdome. Reports are that the film is light on exposition and big on action, achieving something like dystopian minimalism as it hits the post-apocalyptic ground running.

32. The Martian

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kate Mara, Kristen Wiig, Sebastian Stan, Chiwetel Ejiofor

Following along with Scott’s ever-diminishing career sometimes feels like a form of abuse. His last two films are literally The Counselor and Exodus, which is quite the cinematic shit-sandwich. But if there’s still one place Scott can head to engender hope in oft-broken hearts, it’s space. And, so, ‘Matt Damon as astronaut stranded on Mars, from the director of Alien and Blade Runner’ still sounds like something worth watching, even if recent Scott history suggests it won’t be.

33. Midnight Special

Director: Jeff Nichols

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Michael Shannon

Nichols’ latest film —after the so-so Mud— stars Edgerton as a father who takes his son on the run, in the rural South, after discovering he has ‘special’ (super?) powers. Though that amazing ending of Take Shelter hinted at it, Midnight Special marks Nichols’ first true turn towards the fantastical, and the combination of Driver and Shannon in the one film should send the weird-anxious-and-intense-dude readings through the roof.

34. A Most Violent Year

Director: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, Alessandro Nivola, David Oyelowo, Albert Brooks, Catalina Sandino Moreno

Following his impressive first-up back-to-back of Margin Call and All Is Lost, Chandor’s latest heady drama is set amidst the decay, violence, and lawlessness of 1981 New York, with Isaac an immigrant clinging desperately to the American dream.

35. Queen Of The Desert

Director: Werner Herzog

Cast: Nicole Kidman, James Franco, Damian Lewis, Robert Pattinson

Ahhh, Werner. He’s the greatest. His latest fiction film (his first since 2009’s oddball procedural My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?) is a biopic portrait of early-20th-century adventurer Gertrude Bell, who explored and mapped the Middle East for the British empire. It was originally intended to star Naomi Watts, but when she dropped out she was replaced by Nicole Kidman, because the pair are interchangeable.

36. Queen Of Earth

Director: Alex Ross Perry

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Michelle Dockery, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit, Kate Lyn Sheil

After staging a quasi-break-out with his awesome, acidic, artfully-episodic Listen Up Philip, Perry keeps on trucking, working again with Moss and mumblecore pin-up Sheil, and roping in Downton Abbey’s Dockery whilst at it. Like The Color Wheel and Listen Up Philip, it’s out to chronicle human behaviour at its worst, but with Perry working from a largely-female perspective, and dabbling with genre elements, the film billed as a ‘thriller’.

37. Results

Director: Andrew Bujalski

Cast: Guy Pearce, Cobie Smulders, Kevin Corrigan, Giovanni Ribisi, Brooklyn Decker, Anthony Michael Hall

The mumblecore OG’s MO has long been to avoid any established actors in his movies; his magnum opus Computer Chess found him casting actual computer programmers rather than trained thesps. He’s swerved hard the other way for Results, a dark comedy set in the world of personal trainers, which glitters with a name-brand cast. Entertaining herself between Marvel episodes, Smulders appears, here, as well as taking the lead in Kris Swanberg’s Unexpected, making her an unlikely indie-movie heroine for 2015.

38. The Revenant

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter

Riding high on Birdman’s good, good vibes, Iñárritu has signed up to director this long-brewin’ frontier Western, with DiCaprio on a trail of bloody vengeance, tracking down the men who done him wrong.

39. The Sea Of Trees

Director: Gus Van Sant

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe, Naomi Watts, Katie Aselton

Van Sant’s first film since his telemovie-worthy, entirely-forgettable fracking-flick Promised Land, The Sea Of Trees has a two-men-lost-in-the-woods, quasi-mystical quality that suggests the more artful, interpretive approach of Van Sant at his best.

40. Sicario

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jon Bernthal, Daniel Kaluuya

Blunt had a great 2014, capped off by her sublime, film-seizing performance in the wry Disney musical Into The Woods. But it was her next-great-action-hero turn in the year’s best popcorn movie, Doug Liman’s Edge Of Tomorrow, that showed her on-screen power. She’s getting actiony again in Sicario, an FBI/cartel thriller on the New Mexico/México border, that earns extra attention for being helmed by Québécois auteur Villeneuve. His first Hollywood genre movie, Prisoners, was a little on-the-nose, but, holy shit, did you see Enemy?

41. Silence

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver

Scorsese’s Wolf Of Wall Street follow-up finds Neeson, Garfield, and Driver as Portuguese priests on a mission —which is markedly different to Neeson as man-on-a-mission— roarin’ the Gospel in 17th century Japan. With its release-date locked in for November, it seems safe to pencil this in for the 2016 Oscars.

42. Spectre

Director: Sam Mendes

Cast: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux, Monica Bellucci, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw

The Daniel Craig era has been all about bringing Bond into the 21st century, in turning the super-spy cartoon into a wounded human struggling to remain relevant in a globalised world. But after Skyfall went for total Bond-breakdown, you’d figure Spectre must mark a bounce-back for the franchise playboy. The fact that its title and villain —Mendes reviving Spectre, Waltz reviving Blofeld— both harken back to kitschy ’70s Bond suggest that this will be the film in which 007 gets his groove back.

43. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Director: J.J. Abrams

Cast: Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Lupita Niyong'o, John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, Mark Hamill

Maybe you’ve heard about this. Episode VII will arrive as one of the most highly-anticipated films in the history of humankind, with Abrams taking the reins of George Lucas’s moichandising machine and delivering the latest film in a series that’s spawned a religion. And surely no one’s going to be disappointed by what he delivers! I mean, The Phantom Menace lived up to all the hype, right?

44. Suffragette

Director: Sarah Gavron

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Meryl Streep, Ben Whishaw, Brendan Gleeson, Anne-Marie Duff, Romola Garai

Where most prestige pictures have premises that causes instant eye-rolling, sign me up for a film from the director of Brick Lane chronicling the travails of nascent feminist foot-soldiers in early-20th-century England And, (wo)man, what a cast! Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst = see you at next year’s Oscars.

45. That’s What I'm Talking About

Director: Richard Linklater

Cast: Blake Jenner, Ryan Guzman, Zoey Deutch, Wyatt Russell, Tyler Hoechlin

Linklater’s latest film manages to both pick up where Boyhood left off and function as a self-confessed “spiritual sequel” to 1994’s awesome Dazed & Confused. It’s set in the first week of college, when the kids’ve arrived but classes haven’t started, and new surroundings are adjusted to by way of an endless procession of parties. It comes roughly based on Linklater’s own experiences attending university on a baseball scholarship, and sounds fucking awesome.

46. Tomorrowland

Director: Brad Bird

Cast: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McGraw, Judy Greer, Kathryn Hahn

Brad Bird’s last film was a Mission: Impossible movie that I can barely remember. But after that great Iron Giant/Incredibles/Ratatouille run he started with, there’s still hope to be held for Bird’s live-action career. Tomorrowland may be a to-screen translation of a Disneyland ride, but that just means that Bird’s got some serious cash to work with to author visions of the far-flung future, with Lost/etc scribe Damon Lindelof having co-written the script.

47. Trainwreck

Director: Judd Apatow

Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Brie Larson, Tilda Swinton, Daniel Radcliffe, Randall Park, Marisa Tomei

Apatow’s star has been tarnished by his past couple of directorial efforts —2009’s Funny People, 2012’s This Is 40— but Trainwreck doesn’t scan as another work big on Apatovian bro-ism or the director’s vanity. Instead, it’s his collaboration with the ascendent Amy Schumer, priming her for a big-screen breakout. The premise has thus far been kept under wraps, but let’s hope it involves precious few self-indulgent celebrity cameos.

48. Untitled Cold War Spy Thriller

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tom Hanks, Amy Ryan, Billy Magnussen, Eve Hewson, Mark Rylance

Spielberg’s fourth film to star Tom Hanks —following Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, and, ewwwwwww, The Terminal— is a Cold War spy-thriller set in ’60s Soviet Russia. If that doesn’t sound so exciting, there’s this: the script was written by the Coen Brothers.

49. While We're Young

Director: Noah Baumbach

Cast: Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver, Amanda Seyfried

Baumbach’s latest comedy of anxious-New-Yorker manners stars Stiller and Watts as married aesthetes who befriend a hipster couple. It comes following Frances Ha, and the presence of Driver —who is amazing in everything he’s ever done, ever— is its own guarantee of interest. If that’s not enough Noah B for ye, Baumbach's thus-far-mysterious Mistress America is about to premiere at Sundance, and stars squeeze Greta Gerwig and Girls' Lola Kirk.

50. Wild

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Gaby Hoffmann

Though its premise —Reese plays an ex-junkie who hikes 2,500 miles across picturesque America following the death of her mother— reeks of the Inspirational Prestige Picture, Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club follow-up is the unexpected delight of the awards season; an impressionist portrait of memory and temporality that trascends its Oscarbait existence, becoming something singular and sublime.