Hosts Kate McKinnon (Saturday Night Live) and Kumail Nanjiani (Portlandia, Silicon Valley) began their opening monologue with some awkward moments, but the duo quickly warmed up and landed some pretty good zingers, like making up a new category for Worst Editing; poking fun of the title of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.

The Spirit Awards began with a nice surprise with its first winner, revealing (a very deserving) Idris Elba winning for Best Supporting Male (beating out Paul Dano and others) in Beasts of No Nation. Which is interesting considering how much time the hosts spent discussing Elba in their opening bit, given him more attention than most other acting nominees. Following that coincidence was another, the second award of the night was given to Emma Donoghue for Best First Screenplay for her work in Room, which just happen to be presented by the adorable co-star of that film, Jacob Tremblay.

The big winner of this year’s Spirit Awards was Spotlight, winning four categories (Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, the Robert Altman Award). Other significant winners were Beasts of No Nation for winning two acting awards (Best Male and Supporting Male), Carol earning Best Cinematography, and Mya Taylor (Tangerine) becoming the first transgender talent to win a Spirit Award.

See the full list of Spirit Award winners down below.

2016 Independent Spirit Award Winners

(Winners are highlighted in red bolded font)

Best Feature:

Anomalisa
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
Spotlight
Tangerine

Best Director:

Sean Baker – Tangerine
Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Todd Haynes – Carol
Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson – Anomalisa
Tom McCarthy – Spotlight
David Robert Mitchell – It Follows

Best Male Lead:

Christopher Abbott – James White
Abraham Attah – Beasts of No Nation
Ben Mendelsohn – Mississippi Grind
Jason Segel – The End of the Tour
Koudous Seihon – Mediterranea

Best Female Lead:

Cate Blanchett – Carol
Brie Larson – Room
Rooney Mara – Carol
Bel Powley – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez- Tangerine

Best Supporting Male:

Kevin Corrigan – Results
Paul Dano – Love & Mercy
Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation
Richard Jenkins – Bone Tomahawk
Michael Shannon – 99 Homes

Best Supporting Female:

Robin Bartlett – H.
Marin Ireland – Glass Chin
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Anomalisa
Cynthia Nixon – James White
Mya Taylor – Tangerine

Best Screenplay:

Charlie Kaufman – Anomalisa
Donald Margulies – The End of the Tour
Phyllis Nagy – Carol
Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – Spotlight
S. Craig Zahler – Bone Tomahawk

Best First Feature:

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
James White
Manos Sucia
Mediterranea
Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Best First Screenplay:

Jesse Andrews – Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jonas Carpignano – Mediterranea
Emma Donoghue – Room
Marielle Heller – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
John Magary, Russell Harbaugh, Myna Josep – The Mend

Best Cinematography:

Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Ed Lachman – Carol
Joshua James Richards – Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Michael Gioulakis – It Follows
Reed Morano – Meadowland

Best International Film: (Award given to the director)

Embrace of the Serpent
Girlhood
Mustang
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Son of Saul

Best Documentary:

Best of Enemies
Heart of a Dog
The Look of Silence
Meru
The Russian Woodpecker
(T)ERROR

Best Editing:

Beasts of No Nation
Heaven Knows What
It Follows
Room
Spotlight

John Cassavetes Award: (Given to the best feature made for under $500,000)

Advantageous
Christmas, Again
Heaven Knows What
Krisha
Out of My Hand

This year, instead of filling out that annual Oscar ballot for your office pool—which, lets face it, is always won by the person who never watches any of the movies—you should convince your co-workers to fill out an Independent Spirit Awards ballot. Your office will be the hippest on the block, and with my guide of winner predictions, you’ll finally be able to beat Henry from accounting. Plus, watching the Spirit Awards is infinitely more entertaining than the Academy Awards due to its layed back atmosphere and unstuffy attitude. In addition to my predictions below, I detail my reasoning for each category winner and also who to watch out for as a potential sleeper.

You can catch the Independent Spirit Awards live on IFC on Saturday, February 27, 2016 at 2:00 PM PT and see how accurate these predictions hold up.

2016 Independent Spirit Award Predictions

(Predicted winners are highlighted in red bolded font)

Anomalisa
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
Spotlight
Tangerine

Sean Baker – Tangerine
Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Todd Haynes – Carol
Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson – Anomalisa
Tom McCarthy – Spotlight
David Robert Mitchell – It Follows

Charlie Kaufman – Anomalisa
Donald Margulies – The End of the Tour
Phyllis Nagy – Carol
Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – Spotlight
S. Craig Zahler – Bone Tomahawk

Christopher Abbott – James White
Abraham Attah – Beasts of No Nation
Ben Mendelsohn – Mississippi Grind
Jason Segel – The End of the Tour
Koudous Seihon – Mediterranea

Cate Blanchett – Carol
Brie Larson – Room
Rooney Mara – Carol
Bel Powley – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez- Tangerine

Kevin Corrigan – Results
Paul Dano – Love & Mercy
Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation
Richard Jenkins – Bone Tomahawk
Michael Shannon – 99 Homes

Robin Bartlett – H.
Marin Ireland – Glass Chin
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Anomalisa
Cynthia Nixon – James White
Mya Taylor – Tangerine

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
James White
Manos Sucia
Mediterranea
Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Jesse Andrews – Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jonas Carpignano – Mediterranea
Emma Donoghue – Room
Marielle Heller – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
John Magary, Russell Harbaugh, Myna Josep – The Mend

Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Ed Lachman – Carol
Joshua James Richards – Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Michael Gioulakis – It Follows
Reed Morano – Meadowland

Embrace of the Serpent
Girlhood
Mustang
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Son of Saul

Best of Enemies
Heart of a Dog
The Look of Silence
Meru
The Russian Woodpecker
(T)ERROR

Beasts of No Nation
Heaven Knows What
It Follows
Room
Spotlight

Advantageous
Christmas, Again
Heaven Knows What
Krisha
Out of My Hand

It’s easy to look back over the past 12 months and try to find a common thread, a trend or recurring idea that can make sense of the mass of films unloaded for public viewing. Everyone loves a good narrative, and in a world where chaos reigns, it’s nice to see some order. Indeed, look at the list of our 20 films below and you can see similarities pop up all over: stories of struggles both internal and external, whether it’s fighting the patriarchy of the past, present and postapocalyptic future, facing down the most powerful institutions in the world or the narrative of history itself, escaping captors, making it through wars both sensical and nonsensical, trying to just pay the bills or unshackling oneself from the past. They all share a common bond of people trying their damnedest to succeed, overcome and survive.

But this theme doesn’t apply to every film here, nor does it apply to everything that came out in 2015. Our list also has films that melted our minds, dragged us through the mud, awed us with their grace, and entertained us with their pure, visceral delights. Summing up the year through a neatly packaged narrative is nice, but it’s also far from a true representation of what cinema brings. It’s a messy, chaotic world of movies, and when we put together a list like this the real unifying aspect is their high quality.

From the big, daunting universe of cinema in 2015, Way Too Indie is proud to present what we think are the 20 best films of the year.

Way Too Indie’s 20 Best Films of 2015

#20. Room

In Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, there are no limits to love. A film as simple as it is emotionally sweeping, there are few films released this year that evoked such a visceral emotional response from its audience. The film is an exhilarating thriller portraying a modern nightmare of captivity—a scenario that never ceases to grip the public’s attention when it pops up in the news—but is entirely focused on the will of the human spirit, and the ways we not only survive in such heinous situations but thrive. In the story of Ma (Brie Larson, a career-best performance), and the world she builds for her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay, also mesmerizing) within the walls of a tiny room, we are given an example of the purest sort of love. One of sacrifice, fierceness, and audacity. By seeing the universe through the eyes of a small child—a universe at first only four walls wide and then suddenly much, much larger—it’s impossible not to form a renewed appreciation for the simple things in life. But more than that, it’s impossible to walk away from Room and not find oneself profoundly introspective about what it means to actively live and actively love. [Ananda]

#19. Steve Jobs

Somehow, Steve Jobs became persona non grata this fall. Between the box office performance, the fatigue surrounding the subject matter and the behind the scenes issues exposed by the Sony leak, nothing seemed to go quite right for the film. Do not be mistaken, though: Steve Jobs should not be missed. It’s a biopic with an utterly unique structure and breakneck pace. Aaron Sorkin’s script commands the spotlight even more than Michael Fassbender’s stirring performance. The three-day approach proves effective as Sorkin intelligently navigates the inherent limitations, managing to capture the essence and scope of one highly influential man’s life. His conversations are verbally balletic, never ceasing to surprise in their wit, but never stooping to overly showy, self-serving writerly panache. Steve Jobs is a whirlwind of a film, exploding with thunderous brio and making its piercing impact with the ink-dipped arrowhead of a skilled writer’s pen. Its imperfections don’t change the fact that it’s a landmark in biographical filmmaking. [Byron]

#18. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem

In Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Ronit Elkabetz stars as the title character, a woman seeking a divorce from her husband. It sounds simple enough, but the Amsalems are Israeli, and in Israel there is no such thing as a civil marriage; all marriages are granted by Orthodox rabbis in a religious ceremony. Ergo, all marriages must be dissolved the same way. That means the husband give his full consent for a marriage to be dissolved. If he doesn’t want it, she doesn’t get it, and Viviane’s husband doesn’t want a divorce. This turns the film into a fascinating courtroom drama, but not in the traditional sense; rather, it becomes a drama that takes place almost entirely in a courtroom, with the occasional scene occurring in an adjacent waiting room. This gives the film contrasting feelings of intimacy and claustrophobia. Elkabetz is superb as Amsalem, conveying the frustration of a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and finds herself trapped again, this time in a system that stacks the deck against women and all but ignores them in the process. [Michael]

#17. Hard to Be a God

Rarely have I seen a film’s atmosphere so gorgeously and meticulously realized to the extent of Aleksei German’s final masterwork. Hard to Be a God follows a civilization of men and their out-of-sorts, peculiarly human god. They represent man as a whole, embodying his struggle through the early stages of primality. When do we leave behind beasts and garner the right to call ourselves men? More pressingly, do we ever, or have we been kidding ourselves for the last few thousand years? Hard to Be a God works so well chiefly because it cements itself into a primal world, one dominated by sludge, blood, and shit, so unbelievably well. Furthermore, in lieu of the film’s obvious rejection of sentiment, it is intriguing how it integrates the idea of God into its narrative. It doesn’t suggest that he doesn’t exist or has neglected us, but that he is struggling alongside us and, even more frightening, that he’s just as helpless. German’s magnum opus is a rattling, maddening three-hour journey into the depths of man’s darkest sensibilities. [Cameron]

#16. The Assassin

The moving image is rarely as entrancing as it is in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, the Taiwanese master’s first film in over seven years. Expensive in its design, methodical in its every graceful move, the film penetrates the mind as swiftly and silently as Shu Qi’s Nie Yinniang disposes of her first target in the picture’s opening moments. Shot on film by Ping Bin Lee and designed by Huang Wen-Yin, Hou’s regular collaborators, The Assassin has a mise-en-scene that’s second to none this year. The subtle phenomenons of nature play a vital supporting role, one in which animals and flora are treated as sharing the same atmosphere with humans. More than any other film of the year, The Assassin shines the brightest light on the unique and boundless nature of its artform. It is spellbinding in every sense of the word. [Nik]

#15. Son of Saul

Son of Saul is a wonderful debut film of filmmaker Laszlo Nemes, which tells the story of Saul (Geza Rohrig), a prisoner and Sonderkommando member at Auschwitz who his searching for a rabbi so he can give his son’s body a proper burial. The film is incredible, from Rohrig’s outstanding performance to Nemes’ fantastic direction (all the more impressive considering it’s his first feature film). But I want to pay special attention to the work of cinematographer Matyas Erdely and the team behind the sound design of the film. Erdely beautifully shoots the film in a tight 4:3 frame, often putting Saul at the center and keeping the eye focused on his actions with most of the settings around him hard to fully take in visually. This is where the sound design is key, as it forces us to imagine the horrors around Saul. Together these elements create a truly unique experience adding up to one of the most powerful films to be released this year. [Ryan]

#14. The Forbidden Room

Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson’s sensational hodgepodge of silent-movie storylines are maniacally cut up into dozens of threads, then re-assembled by two drunk, blindfolded men with a brilliant sense of humor. The Forbidden Room is unlike anything you’ll ever see. Ever, not just in 2015. Studded with stars from all over the world, from the well-known like Charlotte Rampling, Roy Dupuis, and Geraldine Chaplin, to more local faces like Louis Negin and Gregory Hlady, the film is full of greedy volcanos, aswang bananas, catchy musical numbers, delusional doctors, scorned lovers, men breathing oxygen through flapjacks, and mustaches with a life of their own. Relentless with its pacing and editing, it’s not something that’s easily recommended (it broke the record for walk-outs when it screened at Sundance earlier in the year). But, it’s on here for a reason: through the unique structure and absurdist tone lies one of the most heartfelt odes to the wonders of cinematic storytelling. [Nik]

#13. The Look of Silence

The Look of Silence is every bit the masterpiece its companion piece, The Act of Killing, was. Joshua Oppenheimer returns to the residual horror of the Indonesian genocide, this time through the eyes of a victim. An optometrist named Adi Rukun confronts his brother’s killers under the pretense of testing their failing vision, and through his careful questioning the remorseless thought process of a monster is slowly dismantled. If there is any surreal sensibility left over from Oppenheimer’s last film it is in the shadow of death that haunts an eerily quiet land teeming with ghosts crying out in vain. The “silence” of the title is all around, both in the insightfully observed environment and the empty murmurings of men submerged in denial. The capacity human beings have to rationalize and normalize wickedness is on full display, and it’s mesmerizing in a terribly morbid way. Powerful, sobering and absolutely essential. [Byron]

#12. Inside Out

Inside Out is a tearjerker, which comes as no surprise—Pixar has been making us cry like babies for two decades. That’s sort of their whole deal. What makes this particular movie so special is how impossibly elaborate it is, conceptually. To represent one cognitive experience, visually, is a feat in itself. What Pixar’s done here is visually represent dozens and dozens of cognitive experiences and made them work in concert. It’s a tender, inventive, entertaining study on human emotion that speaks to the heart despite being so brainy. It’s also unique in that someone can watch it at five years old and then again at forty and have two wildly different and yet equally profound experiences. Next year, Pixar’s engaging sequel mode again with Finding Dory, but they took a big risk with an out-there movie like Inside Out and proved that there’s no shortage of new ideas coming out of the trailblazing East Bay studio. [Bernard]

#11. Mommy

Young Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan came into filmic fruition when he was only nineteen with the release of I Killed My Mother. Almost seven years and five films later, one of the youngest directors in the industry has created one of the most moving films of the 21st century. Despite its 2014 premiere at Cannes, the film did not receive a proper US release until January of 2015, meaning most people didn’t get a chance to experience its profundity until this year. Mommy focuses its narrative on the widow Diane (or “Die,” for short) and her difficult son, newly discharged from a behavioral rehabilitation facility and potentially suffering from a number of psychological disorders that cause him to have angry, violent outbursts. It’s shot in the unique 1:1 aspect ratio, which at first may seem like a peculiar decision, but once you’ve fallen deep into the emotional abyss of this heartbreaking tale, you’ll understand how a stylistic choice can transform into an emotive choice within a matter of seconds. [Eli]

#10. Phoenix

Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is perhaps the best film since the post-war era that deals with the holocaust, even though it’s not as interested in dealing directly with the images and happenings of the holocaust as that statement suggests. Instead, it’s about the scars of tragedy, and how great tragedy has the terrifying power to rob individuals of their identity. The film follows Nelly, a Jew from Berlin, as she returns to her home and her husband after living through the concentration camps. We never see flashbacks of what she went through. She tells us all through the expression stained onto her reconstructed face. Floating through the frame like a ghost, Nelly attempts to piece together her past, and Phoenix is a harrowing testament to how emancipation from tragic circumstance doesn’t erase the psychological wounds said tragedy has inflicted. It also deals with the idea that friends of those affected have absolutely no idea how to respond. How does one respond to such an atrocity? Though not technically a ghost story, Phoenix registers as an emotionally draining portrait of a wandering soul knocking on the door of a world from which she’s been exiled. [Cameron]

#9. Buzzard

Accurately describing Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard is a difficult task. The film doesn’t really fit into a specific genre, and the loose storytelling structure only complicates things on that end. Still, there’s something undeniably captivating about the tale of a millennial burnout that decides to rebel against his routine life. It’s not that the film is particularly relatable—Marty, the protagonist, is the embodiment of the worst society has to offer—but Buzzard takes viewers on a journey that gets far too real at times. Marty’s frustrations with his dead-end job, the boring people around him, and his way of living have the ability to cut very, very deep. From the beginning, Potrykus views a mundane subject with a bizarre lens, and Buzzard only gets weirder and weirder as it progresses. By the conclusion, it’s apparent just how effective the film is, despite its relatively low-key nature. Unlike any film you’ve seen this year, Buzzard is strangely comedic, unexpectedly dark, and certainly worth checking out. [Blair]

#8. Beasts of No Nation

Beasts of No Nation is a special convergence of extra-textual information. Being the first major fiction feature release from streaming outfit Netflix is a big deal, especially since they clearly had aspirations for awards with its purchase. More fitting, it is the first feature film from writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga following his incredible breakout success with the first season of True Detective. Those already following Fukunaga’s career, however, know just how talented of a storyteller he is. Beasts of No Nation is his highest effort production, an absolutely beautiful film with often intense subject matter. The film studies the rise of young boy Agu (Abraham Attah) through a rebel group of fighters in an unnamed, nondescript African country. Through the eyes of Agu their war is truly unknowable—and the film purposefully makes no effort to help the audience understand what this group is really fighting for. This can be frustrating at times, but Fukunaga is persistent in his focus on tone and the specific actions of its main character. This creates a more ethereal movement, which is all the more frightening given the film’s horrendous nature. Along with Attah, who gives a fantastic and difficult performance for a young and inexperienced actor, Idris Elba’s towering role as the rebel group’s Commandant is among the most complex characters of the year. [Aaron]

#7. The Duke of Burgundy

Love is love, and few films express that statement as strongly as Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy. Starting out as a cutesy homage to the European erotica films of the ’70s (Jess Franco fans need to run, not walk, to this movie), Strickland explores the BDSM relationship between Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna), two women whose “roles” in the relationship don’t exactly match their true selves. With cinematography, production design, and a mood that feels lifted straight out of a dark fairy tale, Strickland’s dreamlike elements work together to heighten the universal truths at his film’s center. Here is a film that understands the work and compromise that comes with a relationship, the constant push and pull between selfishness and selflessness that can threaten to tear people apart, and it’s all shown through a hazy realm that leans more on the side of fantasy than reality. Yet Strickland puts emotions at the forefront, and by doing so lets the strength of Cynthia and Evelyn’s undeniable feelings for each other overshadow the luscious world they reside in. Love stories this original and beautifully realized are so rare, we should feel lucky we even have the chance to see them. [C.J.]

#6. Sicario

After directing a slew of extraordinary films who would have thought cinematic genius Denis Villeneuve’s latest effort would be his strongest and most politically resonant film to date? Well, maybe some, but it’s going to be a daunting task for Villeneuve to keep his streak of brilliance up for much longer; if he does, he’ll be reaching the unspeakable heights of consistency only names like Kubrick and Kieslowski have attained. Sicario concentrates on an FBI agent (Emily Blunt, in a gorgeously realized performance) who pulls herself into quite the plight when she accompanies a government task force on an enigma of a mission along the United States/Mexico border. To say any more about the plot and the manner in which it unfolds would be a disservice to a film with such an airtight narrative structure and masterful pacing. It’s a socioculturally relevant thrill-ride that you’ll have to experience for yourself, but its shocking and increasingly tense nature may be too extreme for some viewers. [Eli]

#5. It Follows

What can be said about It Follows that hasn’t already been said a million times before? It’s one of the greatest horror films to come along in years and a movie that works on multiple levels, with a new discovery being made upon each new viewing. A sexually transmitted monster has all the potential in the world to come across as cheesy, tacky, and otherwise ineffective, but director David Robert Mitchell approaches the subject matter with such a level of genuineness that it’s impossible not to take seriously. Featuring excellent, naturalistic performances from its young, often inexperienced cast, there’s a subtle nature to almost everything about It Follows. From the romance to the horror and even the humor, it’s all downplayed, which makes it all the more effective in the end. Many horror movies fall apart because their characters aren’t relatable, but in the It Follows universe, teenagers behave like teenagers—not like horror movie characters—and the film is all the more impressive because of that. From top to bottom, it’s easy to see why It Follows has been so well-received by audiences and critics alike, and its theatrical success serves as a beacon of hope for the future of independent horror. [Blair]

#4. Carol

There are so many exquisitely composed elements to Todd Haynes’ achingly beautiful new movie Carol that it becomes difficult to single out the aspects that make it so great. There is Phyllis Nagy’s delicate script, adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, which allows the film’s central romantic plot to unfold in a patient and deliberate way. There are the wonderfully ornate period sets and costumes, with bold red accents that jump off the screen thanks to Edward Lachman’s stunning cinematography. And, of course, there are the performances—not just from the always-excellent Cate Blanchett or Audrey Hepburn-esque Rooney Mara—but an earnest Sarah Paulson, a scorned Kyle Chandler, and a sleazy John Magaro, as well.

The first of Haynes’ six feature films in which he didn’t contribute to the script, Carol is the director’s most precise work to date—from its production details to the performances. While the filmmaker’s movies often focus on LGBT identity, the striking thing about the intimacy in Carol is its universality. Therese and Carol are more than women in a lesbian romance affected by the obstacles of a bygone era; they’re people stifled by the expectations placed on each of them.

As Blanchett stares across at Mara over a cocktail or a shop counter, you’ll want to lean in closer, too. The pair’s carefully chosen words tease out the affair. Watching them slowly go back-and-forth, with alluring smirks and guarded looks, is among the most entrancing pleasures in film this year, as is the sound of Cate Blanchett simply saying, “Therese.” [Zach]

#3. Ex Machina

The trio at the heart of filmmaker Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, represents an intricate blend of old and new. Invoking memories of past great fictional characters like Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau, Pinocchio’s creator Geppetto, and even Willie Wonka, is Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the inconceivably wealthy and immeasurably intelligent inventor of a fictional Google-like search engine. Representing the future is Ava (the spellbinding Alicia Vikander), an artificially intelligent robot created by Nathan. Caught between creator and creation is Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a whiz of a programmer whom Nathan recruits to test Ava’s believability as an AI, but a simple man nonetheless and the pivotal completing part of this most bizarre of love triangles. As Caleb studies Ava and gradually becomes taken by her, so too does Ava study, and fall for, Caleb. Watching them both is Nathan, whose motives for recruiting Caleb become cloudier as the days pass. What first presents itself as a futuristic drama laced with themes of morality and anchored by a peculiar alpha-male (Isaac is terrific as the genius recluse), gradually becomes a riveting psychological thriller that keeps the viewer captivated and drives to a bold ending. Sci-fi noir is alive and well and is not to be missed with Ex Machina. [Michael]

#2. Spotlight

Tom McCarthy has done the unthinkable. Just one year after directing the horrific flop The Cobbler, McCarthy turns in a film that not just rinses the bad taste out of our mouths from his previous effort, it puts him in the conversation for one of the best films of the year. Spotlight is a gripping newsroom drama based on the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal uncovered by the Boston Globe. Though despite the grim subject matter, watching Spotlight unfold is utterly entertaining. That’s because the film keeps its foot on the acceleration for the whole ride, providing plenty of energy and tension without wasting a single moment.

Spotlight is a well-oiled machine firing on all cylinders. Not only does the electrifying pace carry the neatly arranged script, but the ensemble cast puts on a clinic on how to act as a team. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is comprised of A-listers like Stanley Tucci, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, and Rachel McAdams, each performing at the top of their game. Any one of them could have stolen the show by flexing their acting muscles; instead, they show discipline by working together, creating incredible chemistry and making the entire film better in the process. Without being exploitative (which would have been easy given the subject), Spotlight exceeds by focusing on the teamwork of its investigative journalism case. The film doesn’t just do a few things right, it does everything right, which is why Spotlight is one of the best procedurals in years. [Dustin]

#1. Mad Max: Fury Road

There are many things I expected from George Miller’s long-awaited next installment/reboot of his Mad Max series. I knew there would be explosions. I knew there would be cars embellished with crazy apocalyptic garnishments. I knew there would be a lot of sand. And I figured there would be a fair amount of zooming vehicles flipping and being walked on as though the laws of physics don’t apply in this futuristic world. I did not expect there to be larger themes than your garden variety hero tale. And I certainly did not expect the hero to not be Mad Max. Waiting 30 years to create the next vision of his gasoline-fueled future, Miller proves he has ungodly amounts of patience. Patience to ensure that technology would catch up with his vision, and patience to ensure that when he told his next story it would be to an audience who could fathom that even in a world of chaos, the significance of equality is fundamental to our humanity and worth fighting like hell for. Not everyone has embraced the surprising themes of Fury Road, but those tickled by just how exciting, fun, and road raging this action film is can’t help but admit that what raises it to perfection are the kick ass ladies leading the charge and the deeper issues they face. Mad Max: Fury Road closes with a quote from the future: “Where must we go…we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?” Miller pushes us to consider our place and responsibility, no matter the wasteland we call home. And like his War Boys, his mouth shiny and chrome, Miller presents his film as though to say “Witness me!” Turns out an action film can be a visual extravaganza and hold itself up with a stiff backbone of ethics and morality. Witness the bar being raised. [Ananda]

As everyone at Way Too Indie scrambles together to watch and rank as many films as they can before the end of the year, we decided to spend some time knocking down and propping up some of what 2015 had to offer. The fun part about having writers with such diverse tastes is that it’s hard to find a consensus, leading to many (friendly) disagreements and arguments between people. After doing our first overrated/underrated feature last year, we had such a fun time we decided to make it a yearly tradition here on Way Too Indie.

All of our writers were tasked to pick one overrated and one underrated film, along with an explanation for their choices. Read on below, and if you happen to disagree with any of our sentiments, we’ve included a link to most of our staff’s Twitter handles where you are invited to express your outrage or agreement or let us know what we’ve overlooked.

Way Too Indie’s Most Overrated And Underrated Films Of 2015

Aaron Pinkston

Inside Out is overrated

Pixar’s first offering of 2015 has become one of the studio’s most successful films—only behind Toy Story 3 in terms of box office and with a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I’m not going to argue that Inside Out isn’t a good film, but it simply didn’t connect with me on a personal level as it has for the public and critical audiences. Many of the film’s relative problems come with the broad nature that allows it to connect with so many. This is mostly true of its humor, which often plays for easy stereotypes even as its emotional complexity is strong. The characters inside of Riley’s head are of course broad by design, but the core relationship between Joy and Sadness aside, this isn’t the height of Pixar. Some have forecasted a heated battle against Anomalisa for animated film of the year (and that even excludes When Marnie Was There, a fantastic film that’s also in this feature), but it seems like a relative shoo-in for Inside Out, especially with the film garnering Best Picture nomination predictions for the Oscars—the new model nod for cultural transcendence in animated film.

Focus is underrated

One of the great film trends of 2015 was the many great throw-back entertainments. While Focus may be a little flashier than Bridge of Spies and Spotlight, it too shows the pleasures of how solid a ’90s-era flick can be. The biggest appeal of the film is Will Smith, who again shows that he is a bonafide movie star in case you forgot. The actor’s natural charm is incredibly fun to watch, in full effect with terrific chemistry with co-star Margot Robbie—they are good enough together that it’s easy to forget the wide age gap between them. As for the film’s plot: the con man hijinks don’t do anything new, and some of the film’s twists aren’t too hard to see coming, but the pace is quick and there are a few excellent scenes. The anchor scene of the film, where Smith gets into a heated double-or-nothing battle with the great B.D. Wong at the Super Bowl, builds dynamically and stands on its own as one of the best scenes of the year. Like many of the ’90s films that it reminds me of, Focus will be a welcome addition to the cable movie cycle for years to come.

Ananda Dillon

Jurassic World is overrated

Immediately after viewing Jurassic World I turned to my viewing partner, a look of disgust forming on my face, to discover that she and almost everyone else in the theater were high on some sort of flashy, merchandised, nostalgia-pandered fairy dust. And apparently the rest of America (and the world) fell victim as well, as this film is the highest grossing of 2015. I admit I had hopes, not even high ones, of the film playing just the right amount on my love of the first film, on their being bigger and badder dinos, of Chris Pratt being the dinosaur-whisperer who’d steal my heart and Bryce Dallas Howard the badass chick who’d save the day. What I got was more Starbucks and Mercedes logos than my brain could even process, a chick inexplicably running through a tropical island in heels, and (the biggest offense in my mind) the sudden introduction of vindictive dinosaurs. The entire premise of the first film can be boiled down into man vs. nature (umm, life finds a way, duh) and now we’re supposed to swallow the notion of 22-years of fraternization with humans suddenly allowing for cognitive decision making on the part of these “animals”? It’s one thing for a raptor to hunt kids in a kitchen instinctually, another for them to follow Chris Pratt and crew around the park on some sort of mission. The other plot holes are so numerous I have no room to elaborate but I continue to be bewildered at how many people were so dazzled by the special effects and novelty of a new Jurassic Park film that they not only dismissed the absurdity happening in front of them but praised a film that pretty much spits on its source material. I guess Dr. Malcolm would call this the truest example of chaos theory.

Slow West is underrated

So it’s not going to make the top of anyone’s Best Westerns of 2015 list as this is surprisingly a heated year for the genre. Bone Tomahawk has gotten more buzz, The Hateful Eight is primed and ready to blow us all away (in 70 mm!), and The Revenant has star power and artistry out the wazoo. But as much as I know what to expect from those films, Slow West has to be the most surprising western of the year. Maybe it was a marketing problem or a release date mismatch but the film came and went with not nearly enough hullabaloo. Big-namer Fassbender just wasn’t enough to counter a relatively nobody director, John Maclean, and I for one had no idea just how charming the film would be or how much it would ooze eclectic humor. Watching it evoked a similar smugness as watching a Wes Anderson film with all the darkly surprising gristle of a Coen brothers film. It’s oddly romantic for a western, lost love being the driver of the action, and incredibly well performed, especially breakout Caren Pistorious who I genuinely hope to see in more films soon. It may not make Top 20 of 2015 lists, but I hope it has a sort of second coming for those who realize they shouldn’t have glossed over this one.

Cameron Morewood

Beasts of No Nation is overrated

With Beasts of No Nation, Cary Fukunaga is often more concerned with demonstrating his ability to showcase flashy visuals than he is with staying true to the heart of his story and characters. The film’s mise en scène consistently feels detached from the human beings on screen. Raids and chase sequences are depicted in crude slow motion and accompanied by awkward synth music. Idris Elba is certainly a saving grace. Many of the children in the film, including the lead (Abraham Attah), also proved to be surprisingly talented actors. With a different director who possessed a better understanding of how to respond to the material and stylized his film accordingly, Beasts of No Nation could have been something that wasn’t so easily forgotten.

Beloved Sisters is underrated

Beloved Sisters had the unfortunate fate of being intended as a December 2014 release, but being dumped off in January instead. As a result, it was either overlooked or forgotten about by many. But what filmmaker Dominik Graf gives audiences is a rich and epic melodrama, bolstered by a trio of exceptional performances and cinematography which is often classical, but occasionally off-base, deviating into territory more commonly associated with other genres. It’s also lavishly produced and wonderfully scored—its locations feel genuine and lived in, absent of CGI in its rendering of a baroque atmosphere.

Byron Bixler

Straight Outta Compton is overrated

As a big fan of old school hip-hop, Straight Outta Compton was one of my most anticipated films of the year. The genre and the artists who work within it has rarely been addressed by Hollywood, and the few times it was represented, the results were shaky at best (I’m looking at you, Notorious). But with an exciting marketing campaign and the active involvement of Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E’s widow, I had confidence that this might be different.

I want to make it clear that Straight Outta Compton is not a bad film—it’s just alright. F. Gary Gray’s direction is fluid, the concert and party scenes have an infectious energy, Jason Mitchell gives a breakthrough performance in an ensemble of solid turns and the needle drop moments are on point. However, the script is where I begin to scratch my head at the universal praise. It’s an ambitious sprawl of a story, but all the character relationships, ambitions and internal issues are painted out in broad strokes. The dialogue is frustratingly on the nose and low on nuance, with several moments playing out with the simplistic instincts of a TV movie of the week. I’m thrilled that Straight Outta Compton has sparked a resurgence of interest in late ’80s/early ’90s hip hop, but it could have been so much better. I can’t help but think we’re settling for less due to the film’s weak field of competitors.

When Marnie Was There is underrated

While most Studio Ghibli films open to a rapturous response, When Marnie Was There seemingly came and went without a word this summer. The only substantial discussion revolved around its status as Ghibli’s last film before taking an extended break. Perhaps this was because it lacked the overtly imaginative fantasy of Spirited Away or My Neighbor Totoro. Or maybe it’s because it wasn’t quite as distinctive in its animation or storytelling as last year’s sensation, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. Whatever the reason, When Marnie Was There is an emotionally charged gem that soars on its sensitivity to themes of depression, abandonment and alienation. Heavy stuff for sure, but when filtered through the prism of a mysterious spectral tale, it becomes amazingly accessible to both young and old viewers. It’s a ghost story that’s tender rather than frightening and a family film that levels with its audience, refusing to pander and getting to the heart of very real childhood issues. There’s a lot to dig into here, and while it might not be top tier Ghibli, it stays true to the studio’s tradition of beautiful, smart, and universally relatable filmmaking.

Bernard Boo

Carol is overrated

Todd Haynes’ Carol is one of the most overwhelmingly beloved films of the year; on this issue, I stand a lonely outsider. Perhaps there’s some deeper beauty that’s lost on me, but I found the film to be emotionally cold and half-awake. Lifeless, even. It’s ironic for a movie so visually colorful and sublime, but that’s what makes it so irreconcilable in my head. The production and costume design are unbelievably good, and the performances by leads Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett are solid. But I could never shake the feeling that the whole movie felt like an overly studied Examination on the laws of attraction (capital “E” intended). The warmth of the production and Haynes’ directorial style too often doesn’t gel with the cerebral, structured material, an issue that consistently kept me at arms length from the story and its characters. There are a lot of amazing things going on in this movie, but I feel as if the movie needs a big hug, both to heat it up and to bring its terriffic-but-disconnected elements to a tighter state of cohesion.

The Visit is underrated

The first movies M. Night Shyamalan’s made will haunt him forever. I won’t name them here—we all know what they were and, more importantly, how goddamn good they were. Audiences have been watching his movies with arms folded and a skeptical smirk ever since, waiting for him to capture his former glory. He hasn’t, which is unfortunate, but with The Visit it feels like Shyamalan’s finally dropped that weight he’s had on his shoulders for all those years and is starting to have fun again. This selfie-generation take on Hansel and Gretel is wild, mischievous, scary, wickedly funny, and most importantly doesn’t take itself so seriously. It’s not a film that will resurrect Shyamalan’s credibility completely, but I think I’m through with using his early films as the ultimate measuring stick for his career. The Visit is one of the most entertaining horror movies of 2015, though I think the context of its filmmaker’s larger career has stifled its success.

Blair Hoyle

Avengers: Age of Ultron is overrated

It truly speaks to the generic, predictable nature of most current superhero movies that Avengers: Age of Ultron wasn’t even particularly well received. And yet it’s still overrated. Another by-the-numbers comic book adaptation that tries (and fails) to convince the audience that the indestructible characters are actually in danger, the film rarely—if ever—provides any emotional stakes. When the most entertaining moment of a high-octane superhero movie is when the characters are just kind of hanging out at a cabin, you know something has gone horribly wrong.

Project Almanac is underrated

At a time when a vast majority of found footage films follow a formulaic blueprint and execution, Dean Israelite’s Project Almanac brings something new to the table. A time travel film that doesn’t find its protagonists saving the world from a government conspiracy, Project Almanac instead focuses on high school kids doing high school things. They use their time machine to attend past music festivals, to win the lottery, and impress love interests. It’s an insanely charming film, filled with excellent performances that showcase its young cast’s comedic and dramatic acting skills. It’s energetic, exciting, and sure to elicit equal amounts of cheers and laughs.

C.J. Prince

Goodnight Mommy is overrated

Did critics get collectively hit on the head by a brick when they praised Goodnight Mommy? A torture porn dressed up in Euro arthouse clothing, Goodnight Mommy is an exercise in austere agony that uses violence as a distraction from the fact that it has nothing to say. It starts off as an intriguing story about twin brothers who think their mother—whose face is bandaged up after getting surgery—is a sinister impostor, but that’s about as interesting as things get. Eventually writers/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala decide to let the boys tie their mom up and torture her to see if she’s really their mother. Franz/Fiala try to be ambiguous about whether the boys’ suspicions are justified, but in this case it’s irrelevant. If their mother turned out to be an alien/ghost/demon/<insert evil thing here>, does that make watching her lips get sliced open any less gruesome to watch? And it’s not like showing this sort of gore is an achievement in horror either; wincing at a woman screaming while someone flosses her gums until they tear apart is a natural reaction, not evidence that the people putting it on screen have any talent. Goodnight Mommy is just a vacuous torture chamber, and shouldn’t be looked at as anything more than an Eli Roth movie with a better cinematographer.

Saint Laurent is underrated

Saint Laurent is a strange case for me, since it’s a film I feel passionate about yet it’s one I can’t really defend. It’s definitely a flawed film, one that overstays its welcome and gets lost in itself plenty of times, but out of the countless movies I’ve seen this year this one still rattles in my mind from time to time. Bertrand Bonello has made what I’d be more comfortable calling a far masterpiece rather than a near masterpiece, a film that comes to life in sublime flashes while being surrounded by more plodding and mediocre parts. Besides having a terrific cast and a killer soundtrack (Bonello is flawless in this department), Saint Laurent takes a more intriguing approach to a biopic; it’s more concerned with nailing down the moods and emotions of what being Yves Saint Laurent would be like, a sort of boundless opulence that comes with holding so much talent and wealth. And when Bonello nails that aspect, Saint Laurent hits a seductive, giddy high that no other film this year comes close to matching. It’s understandable why Saint Laurent can prove to be a frustrating experience given its flaws, but that doesn’t mean it should be tossed off or derided. It’s a film that has the courage to try and (more importantly) fail, a quality that should be embraced rather than opposed.

Dustin Jansick

Mommy is overrated

I’m not sure if there were more obnoxious characters than the mother-son duo in Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. Somehow the film walked away with the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and caused even more people to praise the ground beneath Dolan. These characters are irritating by design: the boy (played by a hyperactive Antoine-Olivier Pilon) suffers from ADHD, causing violent outbursts like setting a fire in a school cafeteria and screaming on the top of his lungs for no apparent reason, and the mother (Anne Dorval) is equally unpleasant with her nonchalant attitude on life. Eventually, all the child-like screaming and hitting just becomes exasperating and downright insufferable. Then there’s the frustrating 1:1 aspect ratio. Dolan devotees will tell you this was an essential part of the film which leads to a some sort of epiphany. But I’m here to tell you it’s more of a gimmicky stylistic choice, paired hilariously with Oasis’ overplayed song “Wonderwall”. So while I respect Dolan as a filmmaker—I think some day he may be considered one of the greats—most of his films end up feeling like exercises in self-indulgence, and Mommy is no exception.

Wild Tales is underrated

The only logical explanation as to why more people aren’t talking about Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales this year is that they didn’t realize it counts as a 2015 release (in the U.S.) after generating so much buzz last year from its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film. Szifron’s wild anthology film consists of six short tales, each with the same theme of revenge along with plenty of absurd humor. With perhaps the best opening scene of 2015, Wild Tales starts things off with the shortest of its tales: passengers on a plane quickly discover inconceivable connections with each other, realizing it’s more than just a coincidence just before the story comes to abrupt end. With each new story, Szifron finds inventive ways to up the stakes. Most involve well-mannered characters methodically planning schemes to take down the person that wronged them. Of course, their plans don’t always work out perfectly. The final chapter concludes with an outrageous scuffle when a bride finds out her husband cheated on her with one of their guests, resulting in the most ridiculous and awkward wedding reception of all time. Given its anthological nature, there’s never a dull moment in Wild Tales. What’s better than a well-told revenge tale? Six of them.

Michael Nazarewycz

It Follows is overrated

What David Robert Mitchell did with It Follows—this year’s darling of the indie horror scene—is pretty neat. The film’s conceit alone is clever enough: a shape-shifting (though frequently unseen) entity hunts a person—in slow walking, ’80s slasher style—until it catches and kills that person. But if that person sleeps with someone, the person with whom the hunted slept with becomes the new target. Complementing that is a score by Disasterpeace that invokes memories of the great John Carpenter scores of the 1980s. And Mike Gioulakis’s cinematography? To die for. And yet. For as visually great as It Follows is, the other two key points the film’s devotees cling to—the conceit and the score—are flawed and highly overvalued. The score, while wonderful on its own, is as oppressive as it is random in its application. It’s as if Mitchell isn’t sure when to use it, so he uses it when he thinks he should, which is too often. The greater sin, though, is how fast and loose the film plays with its own rules. I’m usually not one to nitpick such things, particularly in the horror genre, but the film’s premise—hell, its entire marketing campaign—is all about “The Rules”. But once the film gets deeper into the second act, Mitchell, who also wrote the screenplay, needs to cheat those rules to keep the film going. That simply doesn’t fly. It Follows is a good film, but it’s too imperfect to be as revered as it is.

Ant-Man is underrated

A pair of things have hampered a full appreciation for Ant-Man. The first is the foolish melodrama that preceded the film’s release—melodrama created by the internet when the film’s original director, Edgar Wright, left the project. The second is the film having been released after Avengers: Age of Ultron. Because The Avengers brought the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Phase One to a close, it only seemed fitting that Ultron close Phase II and leave the fans waiting for the next major all-out Avenger-fest, Captain America: Civil War. But along comes Ant-Man, closing out Phase II and wedging itself between two event pictures. But what a wedge it is. Not only does Marvel (again) take another familiar film style—this time the ’50s sci-fi flick, cross-bred with a heist film—it makes it so much more than just another man-in-tights entry on a list. Besides the very effective scenes where Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is miniaturized, there is a depth of character and a structure of relationship that is surprisingly impressive, and makes Lang something of a contemporary of (and dare I speculate, heir apparent to) Tony “Iron Man” Stark. Both are technically savvy, both have father/father-figure issues, and both are, in their own ways, tied to the MCU canon at a high and critical level, namely, the early days of S.H.I.E.L.D. (both also have strong women beside them). But while Tony is the “Genius Billionaire Playboy Philanthropist,” Scott is the “Resourceful, Blue-Collar, Father-of-One Convict.” Sure, those are opposite sides of a coin, but it’s the same coin, and because of this clever and deep connection, I look forward more to the future of Ant-Man than any other MCU hero.

Nik Grozdanovic

Amy is overrated

Fame is evil. Something that most of us who’ve seen enough fiction and non-fiction films on the subject have no doubt gathered by now. Director Asif Kapadia doesn’t seem to think so, however, because that’s the just about the only message his doc Amy is sending out. Amy Whinehouse had an incredible voice; she was a naturally gifted jazz singer whose songwriting was basically diary entries broken down into poetic verses. Depending on individual closeness and knowledge of her personal demons, backstage abuses, and unfortunate circle of people, Amy will be hitting all kinds of chords. But, looked at objectively (or, as objectively as possible when judging any piece of artistic expression) we’re looking at a completely average, by-the-books, documentary that reveals very little real insight, and keeps hitting the same point over and over ad nauseam. At the time of writing this, Amy has won Best Documentary with both the LA Film Critics and New York Online Film Critics associations, making it that much more overrated. Wanna see a great documentary about a celebrity? Choose Listen To Me Marlon instead.

Crimson Peak is underrated

Guillermo del Toro might have directed his best film to date (time will tell if Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone will be surpassed overall, but they certainly are on a technical level) and yet, no one’s really talking about Crimson Peak. Featuring a triplet of outstanding performances by Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, and Jessica Chastain—the latter slipping into uncharted villainous territory like she’s been playing baddies her whole career—the film also drips volumes of atmosphere and boasts a production design to die for. With del Toro’s classic mesh of romance, horror, and seeking the beautiful in the monstrous, Crimson Peak manages to even add new layers to the director’s signature trademarks. Painted in thick Gothic brushstrokes and flowing more like a first edition Victorian novel than a 21st-century motion picture, it’s a fantastic ghost story made all the more compelling by being told mostly through resplendently old-fashioned imagery (costumes, set designs, etc.) A truly spellbinding experience that I implore everyone to seek out and get lost in.

Zachary Shevich

The Wolfpack is overrated

Coming off of The Wolfpack’s premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there was a lot of excitement around Crystal Moselle’s debut documentary as well as the lanky, longhaired clan of film geek Angulo brothers. The film took Sundance’s Best Documentary Feature award, the Angulos partnered with Vice Films to produce an experimental arts & crafts short film, and The Wolfpack received an overly positive review from me during the glow of the Tribeca Film Festival. At the time, Moselle’s discovery of a group of eccentric lo-fi filmmakers confined to a Lower East Side apartment by an abusive father was simply too compelling to ignore. Yet, their story remains an enigma—even months later. Moselle’s film raises twice as many questions and it answers. Her decisions to keep elements of the documentary and the Angulos’s timeline vague makes the liberation arch fall flat. I noted the filmmaker’s hesitation to dive deeply into her subjects in my April review of the film, but in retrospect that treatment is severely limiting. The approach denies curious viewers a fuller experience. The Wolfpack is a prime example of film’s subject matter exceeding the quality of the filmmaking around it.

Unfriended is underrated

Perhaps Unfriended wasn’t best suited for big screens. Watching it on the intimacy of a laptop monitor—the same way the film’s final girl Blaire (Shelley Hennig) experiences the action—creates an immensely chilling effect. Unfriended is a lot more than a riff about young people living their lives through technology. It’s a smart and effective thriller about a ghost that exploits the comforts of private, digital spaces that we create for ourselves online. Director Leo Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves ambitiously contain the entire story to a continuous shot of a glitchy computer monitor where the main character clicks through her iTunes library, her deceased friend’s Facebook photos and a group Skype chat infiltrated by the “hacker ghost.” Unfriended has the potential to rely on computer-generated gimmickry and “teen speak” but doesn’t. Gabriadze and Greaves gives each member of this friends group their own skeleton-filled closets, which allows the tension to stem from their increasingly tense dynamic. As the friends turn on one another, it shifts the attention away from an all-powerful digital demon and back to the computer users themselves. Sporadic use of some laptop-related gags (such as the diagetic soundtrack moments) punctuate an enjoyable, slightly campy horror with amusing comedic relief; however, Unfriended wastes no moment of its 83-minute runtime. Gabriadze & Greaves exhibit their mastery of elevating and deflating the stakes.

Moments ago, actors John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) and Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) announced the official list (which leaked on their site earlier for the second year in a row) of nominees for the 2016 Independent Spirit Awards. Todd Haynes‘ Carol hauled in the most nominations with a total of six, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, and two Best Female Lead nominations. Close behind were Beasts of No Nation (which debuted on Netflix) and Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight each with five nods in major categories.

The most surprising snubs this year were Rick Famuyiwa‘s Sundance hit Dope, Grandma which got rave reviews due to Lily Tomlin’s performance, and Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America, all which failed to earn a single nomination. Distributor Fox Searchlight had to feel the most disappointed, seeing just one nomination for their recording-breaking Sundance pickup Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and even more shocking, coming up empty-handed for Brooklyn, Mistress America, and Youth.

On the flip side, we were happy to see Sean Baker’s Tangerine so well represented, grabbing four nominations including one for Best Feature. Other pleasant inclusions in this year’s list were the indie horror film It Follows, the foreign coming-of-age drama Mustang, and Benny and Joshua Safdie’s Heaven Knows What.

As with last year’s show, the 2016 Film Independent Spirit Awards will be broadcast live exclusively on February 27, 2016 on IFC at 2:00 pm PT / 5:00 pm ET.

Coming Soon: Our 2016 Spirit Award predictions.

2016 Independent Spirit Award Nominations:

Anomalisa
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
Spotlight
Tangerine

Sean Baker – Tangerine
Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Todd Haynes – Carol
Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson – Anomalisa
Tom McCarthy – Spotlight
David Robert Mitchell – It Follows

Charlie Kaufman – Anomalisa
Donald Margulies – The End of the Tour
Phyllis Nagy – Carol
Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – Spotlight
S. Craig Zahler – Bone Tomahawk

Christopher Abbott – James White
Abraham Attah – Beasts of No Nation
Ben Mendelsohn – Mississippi Grind
Jason Segel – The End of the Tour
Koudous Seihon – Mediterranea

Cate Blanchett – Carol
Brie Larson – Room
Rooney Mara – Carol
Bel Powley – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez – Tangerine

Kevin Corrigan – Results
Paul Dano – Love & Mercy
Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation
Richard Jenkins – Bone Tomahawk
Michael Shannon – 99 Homes

Robin Bartlett – H.
Marin Ireland – Glass Chin
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Anomalisa
Cynthia Nixon – James White
Mya Taylor – Tangerine

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
James White
Manos Sucias
Mediterranea
Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Jesse Andrews – Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jonas Carpignano – Mediterranea
Emma Donoghue – Room
Marielle Heller – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
John Magary, Russell Harbaugh, Myna Joseph – The Mend

Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Ed Lachman – Carol
Joshua James Richards – Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Michael Gioulakis – It Follows
Reed Morano – Meadowland

Embrace of the Serpent
Girlhood
Mustang
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Son of Saul

Best of Enemies
Heart of a Dog
The Look of Silence
Meru
The Russian Woodpecker
(T)ERROR

Beasts of No Nation
Heaven Knows What
It Follows
Room
Spotlight

Advantageous – Jacqueline Kim and Jennifer Phang
Christmas, Again – Charles Poekel
Heaven Knows What – Ronald Bronstein, Arielle Holmes, and Joshua Safdie
Krisha – Trey Edward Shults
Out of My Hand – Takeshi Fukunaga and Donari Braxton

Spotlight

Mohammed Ali & Hemal Trivedi – Among The Believers
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi – Incorruptible
Elizabeth Giamatti & Alex Sichel – A Woman Like Me

Darren Dean
Mel Eslyn
Rebecca Green & Laura D. Smith

Robert Machoian & Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck – God Bless The Child
Felix Thompson – King Jack
Chloe Zhoa – Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Bernard is joined by Zach this week, who brings with him an interview with Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva about his new film Nasty Baby, starring Tunde Adebimpe and Kristen Wiig and the director himself. Also, with the release of Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation, the boys try to predict what the future of digital distribution will look like and how streaming sites like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the like will impact the movie theater industry. PLUS, (you guessed it) our Indie Picks of the Week!

Topics

• Indie Picks (1:21)
• Digital Distribution (11:24)
• Sebastian Silva (24:21)

Articles Referenced

Beasts of No Nation Review
Cary Joji Fukunaga Interview
Junun Review
Nasty Baby Review
Sebastian Silva Interview

Subscribe to the Way Too Indiecast

• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Subscribe on Stitcher

Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s Beasts of No Nation is easily available to millions right now via its juggernaut distributor, Netflix, and that’s a wonderful thing. The streaming platform can only, by its nature, provide a second-rate version of Fukunaga’s intended cinematic experience, however. Beasts is a stunningly presented film destined for not only big screens but for big, booming, very expensive speakers. Through the eyes of a child soldier named Agu (Abraham Attah), the film takes in all the sights and sounds of West Africa, its lush jungle foliage and teeming wildlife and the violent civil war that bloodies it.

We meet Agu in a happy place, wreaking innocent havoc across his little village with his friends and spending his nights bonding with his loving older brother. His world gets obliterated in a flash when militants ravage the village, separating him from his family for good. Before he has time to grieve a rebel leader called Commandant (Idris Elba) scoops him up and trains him to kill, Agu’s gradual, traumatic indoctrination by his new father figure informing the rest of the film. From child to killer, his innocence dies a slow death.

Sections of the film are hard to watch for their explicit, unflinching depictions of violence, particularly when Agu’s the one inflicting harm. We see death in front of our eyes, plain and simple, and it’s nauseating. War is an unfortunate reality for many in West Africa and Fukunaga’s truthful representation of its horrors is done out of respect for the real lives lost. The film isn’t merciless, though. Surrealist imagery comes into play when the violence ratchets up, softening the blow of the unspeakable acts Agu and the soldiers commit. During a brutal village raid scene Agu enters a state of half-hallucination, the greenery around him turning a bright crimson as gunfire rains.

The film is based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala and examines the lives of child soldiers in grisly detail. The hardest-to-watch moment comes when Commandant demands Agu kill a man who claims to be an innocent bystander. The tragedy of Agu’s transformation is heartbreaking, but his internal struggle to retain some measure of morality gives us hope that goodness may endure. Voiceover work helps us keep track of Agu’s state of mind á la Terrence Malick, but his words never distance us from onscreen events.

Commandant doesn’t transform over the course of the story in the same way Agu does, but our perception of him does, his arc taking a similar shape to Agu’s only curved in the other direction. His thirsty obsession with power and dominance is ostensibly the hulking leader’s greatest strength, but when the tide goes out and fortunes are no longer in his favor, his true colors come into plain view.

Commandant’s seductive hold over Agu is shocking and unsettling, and yet it makes sense because Elba’s got the same hold on us. Elba’s a force of nature, imposing his will with his massive frame and booming voice. A back-heavy hairpiece makes him look like a silverback gorilla, his wide, wild eyes accentuating his animalistic appearance. The only thing more powerful than Elba’s performance is the energy he shares with Attah: their relationship, which drives the film, says more about the nature of manhood in one scene than other movies do in 90 minutes.

What’s most surprising about Beasts is how serene it can be despite the chaotic nature of its story. During his time with the rebels, Agu makes a friend, another boy named Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye). Caught in the middle of a firefight, the rebels flee into the jungle. Looking back, Agu notices Strika huddled in front of a tree. He begs Strika to move his feet, but without a word, the cowering boy simply shakes his head slowly in solemn defeat. The moment struck me in an odd way that I can’t put my finger on, but I do know that it hit me deep; I’ve thought about it every day since I saw the film. Also, if you listen closely, you’ll notice the low hum of the teeming wildlife permeating almost every scene. The sound design is phenomenal, fully immersing you in Agu’s world without you even knowing it.

The film doesn’t depict a specific conflict (Agu’s village is fictional as are all of the characters), which liberates the story, creatively. Fukunaga clearly had no intentions of making Beasts political at all, instead fully concerning it with the psychological developments and complexities of its characters. It’s a one-hundred-percent humanistic, visceral story that transcends any issue or conflict you could read about in the news. Fukunaga’s found major success so far in his career—Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and True Detective are uniformly excellent—but Beasts of No Nation is his finest work yet.

The 38th annual Mill Valley Film Festival was a memorable 10-day celebration indeed. A few excellent films emerged as sure-fire Oscar contenders, like Tom McCarthy’s newsroom slow-burner Spotlight, Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s Netflix powerhouse Beasts of No Nation, László Nemes’ heartstopping Son of Saul, and Kent Jones’ incisive documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Actors further cemented their cases for awards consideration as well: Michael Keaton again went toe-to-toe with last year’s Best Actor Oscar-winner, Eddie Redmayne, as their two films, Spotlight and The Danish Girl, took center stage on opening night; Brie Larson gives the best performance of her career in Lenny Abrahamson’s Room; and Sir Ian McKellen charmed festival-goers for two days, reminding us of his heartfelt, unforgettable turn as the aging Mr. Holmes.

Some under-the-radar films made lasting impressions as well, like Mitchell Lichtenstein’s gothic ghost story Angelica and Gunnar Vikene’s Nordic dark comedy Here Is Harold (my personal favorite of the festival).

My MVFF experience ended off as strong as it started, with two very different but equally spellbinding foreign features and yet another film that may be picking up a few golden statues come February.

Fight (And Burn Stuff) For the Right

With feminism becoming less and less of a dirty word as women and feminist allies become more and more galvanized around the fight for gender equality, Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette looks back to the early feminists who sacrificed home and health to demand their right to vote in early 20th-century England. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a working-class wife and mother who gets swept up by the British suffragette movement, participating in explosive acts of protest alongside her fellow footsoldiers (played by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, and Meryl Streep). The cost of Maud’s actions are steep, however; her husband (Ben Wishaw) refuses to abide her newfound passion for activism, kicking Maud out of their home, away from their son. Screenwriter Abi Morgan’s story is as rousing as you’d expect for such inherently inspirational subject matter, but the film’s real strength is in its humility and dignity; it’s a period piece brimming with stunning locations (it was the first production allowed to be shot in the British Houses of Parliament since the ’50s) and elaborate costumes, but never lets the production design take precedence over the characters’ plight unlike other, showier period pieces. Mulligan is typically wonderful though she doesn’t reach the emotional depth of some of her greater performances. Still, it’s a fine film all involved are surely proud to have been a part of.

Amazon Enlightenment

The most sublime, heart-achingly beautiful thing I saw at MVFF was an Amazonian upriver tale called Embrace of the Serpent, by Colombian director Ciro Guerra. It’s a magical, almost religious experience when a film breaks free completely from modern cinema norms and puts you in a state of mind you’ve never known, and that’s what Guerra does here. Shot on Super 35 black and white, the film follows two white scientists (Jan Bijvoet and Brionne Davis) as they scour the Amazon for a rare healing plant, their journeys separated by decades (one’s set in the early 1900s, the other 40 years later). The foreigners share a common guide, Amazonian shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar). The story is a dirge-like lament on the soul-sucking effect colonization has had on the once pure Amazonian culture. Otherworldly and yet bound to the earth and all her natural glory, Embrace of the Serpent is as can’t-miss as they come.

Sin and Splendor

Inside a cozy little house lives a family fractured by sexual awakening, paranoia, and depravity in Tali Shalom-Ezer‘s bone-chilling Princess. A most unsettling topic—child molestation—is explored delicately and artfully by the Israeli writer-director, whose story gently unfolds in a series of quietly intoxicating, increasingly unsettling glimpses of domestic implosion. The protagonist is Adar (Shira Haas), a bright 12-year-old who lives with her mom, Alma (Keren Mor), and her mom’s boyfriend, Michael (Ori Pfeffer). Adar and Michael have fun horsing around at home while mom goes off to work, but Michael’s playing grows inappropriate before long (he starts calling her “little prince”). Adar’s new friend, a boy named Alan (Adar Zohar-Hanetz), bears a staggering resemblance to her, and when he’s invited to stay with the family for a while, he becomes the new object of Michael’s affections. Sumptuously-lit and fluidly edited, the film’s presentation is lovely, which is a nice counter-balance to the difficult subject matter. Like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Princess creates a beautiful sense of dreamlike disorientation and mirror-image poetry that arthouse lovers will treasure.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has been steadily building an amazing body of work in his young career. His films Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre earned him the admiration of film critics across the world, and True Detective (a series of which he directed every episode) earned him a rabid fanbase of binge-watchers.

With all eyes now on the Oakland-bred filmmaker, he brings us Beasts of No Nation, a stirring story about a child soldier in West Africa named Agu (Abraham Attah) who’s ushered into manhood by Commandant (Idris Elba), a charismatic rebel leader, after his family is killed in a military raid on his village. The film is stunningly presented with lush jungle imagery and brutally realistic scenes violence that rattle the soul. The observations made on the lives of child soldiers are shocking, but Fukunaga approaches the subject matter with respect and empathy.

I spoke to Fukunaga recently during his visit to San Francisco for the Mill Valley Film Festival. Beasts of No Nation is out in theaters and on Netflix today.

People are very excited about your work and are now following your career very closely. You’ve set the bar pretty high for yourself—your work’s been excellent so far. Is there a lot of pressure now that so many eyes are on you?

Cary: There’s definitely pressure in the sense that expectation is always a pressure. It’d be nice if for every film you made no one knew who you were, took your work at face value and didn’t compare it to Sin Nombre or Jane Eyre. But comparison is also nice in terms of the body of work and seeing how a film fits into it. I’m pretty critical of my own work anyway. No matter what a critic says, I have my own feelings on my work. As much as I want people to like the film, I also know for myself what I’m striving for.

So when people are talking about your movies and shows and you’re all over the Internet all the time, are you so preoccupied with your own critiques of your work that you almost don’t think about external opinion so much?

Cary: No one likes a bad review. Me and all my friends who make movies like to pretend like we don’t read reviews, but we know when people write bad things about our work. It doesn’t matter how many nice things people say about your stuff—as soon as you read something bad, that’s the thing you want to hone in on. You take it personally. It’s also the nature of making something for public consumption. You put yourself out there for critique and evaluation and you have to grow a thick skin, I suppose.

I think you’re improving as a filmmaker with every project. Beasts of No Nation has been gestating for several years now. Was there a point when you almost held off on making the film because you knew working on other things first would benefit the final product?

Cary: Had I made Beasts of No Nation in 2009 or 2010 when I was planning on making it originally, it certainly would have been a different film. There probably would have been aspects of it that would have been better or different depending on my development at the time. Had I made the film ten years from now, it’d probably be different as well. When you make a movie, for better or for worse, that’s what it is. It’s a reflection of your craft, your voice, whatever it is you’re interested in at the time. When you’re writing, you’re so sensitive to your environment. Any little thing can inspire you. Your radar is up and you’re more receptive to things, and that affects what you’re making.

I think Beasts‘ sound design is terrific.

Cary: The sound design was a challenge because we lost our production sound designer about a couple of weeks before we started to mix. We had to start over from square one. Glen [Payne], our sound editor, went to work day and night, trying to put together the sound design. I had a lot of ideas I wanted to try out. For me, sound design is almost if not more important than visuals. It’s part of my fear that when people don’t watch this film at the cinema they won’t experience the film as it was intended to be on an auditory level. If you watch it on your laptop or iPhone, you’re definitely not going to get the sound. The sound was designed to be completely immersive and bring people into that experience of a war itself. To hear those bullets whizzing by, to hear those call-outs, to hear the jungle and the animals—it all gets weaved into it.

I like how surreal the film gets. You seem pretty comfortable going surreal.

Cary: I think True Detective was the first time I ever used slow motion. We did a lot of slow motion, and I was concerned that we were maybe doing too much. There’s objective and inflective camerawork, observational versus when style is implemented for an effect. I’ve always stayed back from doing too much inflective camerawork in my earlier films. Because of the nature of the subject in Beasts, I think you have to be surreal at times, otherwise it’s too brutal. Surreality helps you to not only take in and observe reality, but also not turn off your receptibility to it.

I love the way Idris moves and leans into people and sticks his finger into Agu’s forehead. He’s very imposing.

Cary: A lot of that came from his hairpiece. We tried to figure out a look for him that he’d never done before so that he could really start to disappear into the character. We weren’t going to use prosthetics or anything like that, though Idris even considered something like that. I think the heat of the jungle turned us off from skin prosthetics.

Prosthetics for his face?

Cary: Yeah. We ended up just going with a hairpiece on the back that accentuates the crown of his head. It made him look more like a silverback gorilla. We liked that. The gorilla is a very evolved animal in the jungle. There’s something sympathetic about a gorilla but also something menacing. You want to befriend the gorilla, but there’s not doubt that he’s the king of his domain. I think Idris liked that as well, using a gorilla as a spirit animal.

I like that Commandant and Agu’s internal journeys go in almost opposite directions, with Agu gaining more agency and Commandant losing control.

Cary: That was by design. For me, it was like the death of a father. Agu sees Commandant as he really is. As the influence of drugs and the manipulation of power over Agu becomes less imprisoning, he’s able to find his own voice again. If it helps bring us to his character’s full circle, we need Commandant to fall somehow. Agu needs to see him for who he is. It is a sort of trading of places, isn’t it? But as long as Commandant is out there he has a chance of resurgence.

What was the most challenging day of shooting?

Cary: Every day. [laughs] Every day was so hard. It was a challenge, definitely. It felt like we were compromising ourselves and what we do. It was pretty hard to keep the morale up. For as many unlucky things that happened, there would always be something that’d happen after that that would just bring us right out of the muck. It was very much an up-and-down experience.

You’ve said that you actually enjoy working with children.

Cary: Yeah, I love working with kids. I’ve worked with kids on all my movies, pretty much. There’s something so special about getting a performance out of a kid that’s so unaffected. Abraham in particular is of an age group I’ve only worked with once, in Sin Nombre. It’s a really interesting moment in their time, which is between innocence and awareness. There’s a crossover there where the awareness will continue to grow and the innocence will diminish. If you can catch an actor who has the abilities Abraham has in that moment of time, you get interesting performances.

What’s special about Abraham? What did you see in him?

Cary: It was the observer in him. You could tell that he was a quick learner and that he was always watching. It’s those wheels turning on the inside that you’re looking for. So often you look at somebody and it seems like nothing is going on inside their brain. If you can find an actor with that has that internal life, you can leave that camera on them as long as you want and it’s going to be interesting.

You could probably make this case every week anymore, but this might be the most important week in the history of online streaming. Not only did we see Paul Thomas Anderson‘s newest film Junun released on its exclusive home MUBI, but Netflix’s first original feature film hits the streaming service today. Though the critical overjoy that Beasts of No Nation first received on the festival circuit has substantially cooled, the film is still Netflix’s first big awards contender. We’ve seen the company receive massive critical and awards success on the television side of things with multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and wins for Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards and even two Oscar nominations for documentaries, but an original film with the profile and star cred (Idris Elba and director Cary Joji Fukunaga) has been a bit of a white whale. Even if Beasts of No Nation isn’t represented at the next Academy Awards, there are major stakes in the success of its release—simultaneously in theaters and on the streaming platform. If it can be a profitable model for Netflix, we could easily see their presence increase. And as it did in the world of television, this could happen quickly.

Netflix

Beasts of No Nation (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2015)

As mentioned above, Beasts of No Nation is a landmark release for Netflix. The film stars Abraham Attah as a child from a small village in Africa who is forced to become a child soldier commanded by a terrifying leader (Idris Elba). Writer-director Fukunaga garnered incredible acclaim for his latest work, the first season of HBO’s True Detective, but has shown the ability to tell harrowing stories from the perspective of a young person with his previous films Jane Eyre and Sin Nombre. Beasts of No Nation is “surreal, powerful, and visually breathtaking and “showcases [Fukunaga]’s skills as both a writer and visual storyteller.” For more coverage of the film, check out our interview with Fukunaga, coming later today.

Other titles new to Netflix this week:
Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers (Stand-Up Special, 2015)
Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno Live! (Jody Shapiro, 2015)
Jane the Virgin (Season 1)
Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me (James Keach, 2014)
The Lazarus Effect (David Gelb, 2015)

Fandor

The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925)

Halloween is only two weeks away and Fandor is in the spirit with this classic silent horror masterpiece. Though it is taken from a popular French novel, it is safe to say that the dozens of adaptations we’ve seen since have a great deal to owe to Lon Chaney’s (The Man of a Thousand Faces) beautiful performance as the title villain. The final reveal of the Phantom’s ghoulish face is one of the landmark moments horror cinema history, but it is otherwise a quite touching tale of love and terror. Also available on Fandor this week is a series of the best from Russia, including films from Tarkovsky, Eisenstein and Shepitko. As with many of Fandor’s Criterion Picks, they are only available for a short time. If you are interested in any of the films listed below, you have to catch them before October 25.

Other titles new to Fandor this week:
The Cranes Are Flying (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Ivan the Terrible: Part I & II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1945 & 1958)
Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)
Wings (Larisa Shepitko, 1966)

MUBI

Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2003)

One of the new South Korean cinema’s most popular and crazy entries, Oldboy is a twisty tale of revenge. For those who haven’t seen it (or the Spike Lee remake, for that matter), Oldboy unfolds over the five days that Oh Dae-su has to figure out who imprisoned him for 15 years—and, perhaps more disturbingly, why they did it. It may be known as having one of the craziest twists in modern cinema, but Oldboy is so much more, with incredible action beats and a strange melancholy tone that pierces deeply into the psyche of its characters. You can check out Oldboy and the other new films listed below for a short time on MUBI.

Other titles new to MUBI this week:
Almayer’s Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)
Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1963)
Blank City (Celine Danhier, 2010)

Video On-Demand

Tales of Halloween (Various, 2015)

Featuring ten spooky shorts over 90-minutes, Tales of Halloween is the latest of the newly popular but traditional horror anthology film. The film includes segments directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, Repo! The Genetic Opera), Neil Marshall (The Descent), Lucky McKee (May, The Woman), and Andrew Kasch (Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy). An interesting twist to the anthology film is that all ten stories take place in the same suburban town, giving a real connection to each of the films that is sometimes lost in the genre. Tales of Halloween has been playing to rave reviews during its limited theatrical release and is now available to rent or own on VOD.

Other titles new to VOD this week:
Dope (Rick Famuyiwa, 2015)
Experimenter (Michael Almereyda, 2015)
Mississippi Grind (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2015)
Tomorrowland (Brad Bird, 2015)

A week has passed and I’m still right in the thick of the Mill Valley Film Festival, which so far has been the best I’ve attended to yet. The films have been mostly great and the vibe in Marin has stayed energetic (but not chaotic) since day one. I spent day seven, however, not in one of the festival’s designated theaters, but on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where I spoke to two directors whose films are wowing crowds at MVFF and are destined to be on myriad best-of-the-year lists for 2015.

Breaking Out

First up was a conversation with Room director Lenny Abrahamson, who the night before was presenting his film at MVFF with Brie Larson, who was receiving a Mill Valley Award. But he was a hair away from not making it to the event at all, he told me. “I was supposed to do the red carpet, present Brie with the award…everything,” the Irish filmmaker recalled. “There was an accident on the Golden Gate Bridge and we were stuck in traffic! I ran onstage in the middle of the Q&A.” Close call notwithstanding, the night went beautifully, with the typically receptive, inquisitive crowd of festivalgoers embracing the film fully, as have audiences across the country.

Based on Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel of the same name (Donoghue adapted the story to screen herself), the movie follows the journey of a mother (Larson) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who plan to escape from Room, the only world Jack’s ever known and the tiny prison Ma’s been trapped in for years. Knowing nothing of the film going in, I had a fantastic experience as the story unfolded and surprised me several times before the end credits with thought-provoking revelations and unexpected narrative wrinkles. Larson gives perhaps her strongest performance yet (that’s saying something) and Tremblay’s no slouch, to put it lightly.

Abrahamson was tickled by the fact that I didn’t know anything about the film going in. “In an ideal world,” he said, “everybody would walk into the theater without knowing anything about the movie they’re going to see.” Our conversation (which you’ll find right here on WTI in its entirety next week) enrichened my viewpoints on the film and has me now eagerly waiting to watch it again, the filmmaker’s fresh insights in tow.

Bay Area Son Returns

Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s career is blossoming at a startling rate. After directing just a handful of projects, he’s become one of the most talked-about young directors in the game right now. The quality of his work speaks for itself and explains all the excitement: his first feature, Sin Nombre, won heaps of awards and praise on the awards circuit and with critics in 2009; his second, 2011’s Jane Eyre, again garnered him critical praise; and in 2014 he directed every episode of the gigantic hit series True Detective (Fukunaga declined a return to the series for season 2).

I met with Cary to talk about the film, which was a true pleasure (come back to Way Too Indie tomorrow to read our full conversation). Cary’s from Oakland, CA (an East Bay boy like me!). It’s always heartening to see someone from your neck of the woods make an impact in the film industry, and I predict we’ll be talking about Cary’s work for years to come. It was clear from talking to him that he’s a thinking man’s director.

Set in an unnamed West African country, the film charts the journey of Agu, a young boy who loses his family in a military raid on his village. Lost and grieving, he’s recruited by a roaming group of rebels led by Commandant (Idris Elba), a charismatic leader who turns Agu into an indoctrination pet project. Surreal, powerful, and visually breathtaking, Beasts is one of the best things I’ve seen all year and showcases Cary’s skills as both a writer and visual storyteller (for the film he acted as cinematographer for the first time in addition to his writer-director roles). Better yet, it’s available on Netflix tomorrow, October 16th. As I type this, Cary is heading to Mill Valley to present the film to lucky festivalgoers who are in for a soul-stirring treat.

Is it even possible to whittle down TIFF’s line-up to 15? This year TIFF has 399 shorts and features playing the festival, an insane number that has us asking questions like “Why are there so many movies?” and “Why couldn’t the 400th movie be Carol?” among many others.

Every year at TIFF is an embarrassment of riches, and this year is no different, so we had a tough time narrowing our choices down to what we consider the essentials (even crueler: it’s unlikely we’ll catch all of these at the festival, meaning we’re praying some of these get released soon or get some sort of distribution deal). But we did manage to come up with a list, and it’s a varied one. There are some films we missed at festivals earlier this year, some brand spanking new ones by directors we love, a return from a master of the cinema, and one film from a newbie that looks like it could be one of the most unforgettable experiences of this year’s festival.

Read on to see our picks below, and be sure to keep reading the site for our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival for the rest of the month.

Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman. A name that, for those familiar with the man’s work, justifies the length of a paragraph to be all but two words on this list. Kaufman’s screenplays—Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–-burst people’s notions of original comedy, with plots, settings, characters, and dialogue that turned the ordinary into the fascinatingly unique. It’s easy to get lost in Kaufman’s eccentricities, but there’s profound stuff underneath his squiggly surface (especially evident with his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York). His latest effort is a stop-motion animation feature, co-directed by Duke Johnson, with Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Thewlis, and Kaufman regular Tom Noonan providing the voice talent, about a misanthrope travelling to Cincinnati to give a keynote speech about his bestselling book on customer service. From the purportedly fantastic look of the film, to the much welcomed return of Kaufman’s sui generis imagination, everything about Anomalisa so far (including early raves from Telluride) fills this film to the gills with promise. [Nik]

Arabian Nights

Miguel Gomes has been popping his head out from the subterranean levels of arthouse since 2008’s Our Beloved Month of August, but it was his sensational and half-silent 2012 film Tabu that wrote him on the proverbial map with permanent ink. Now he’s back with what is his most ambitious effort to date, a sprawling 6-hour epic split into three volumes based on the infamous Middle Eastern and Asian stories, 1001 Nights. Going by the popular English title of the collection, Arabian Nights pushes the boundaries of narrative with its three volumes—titled The Restless One, The Desolate One, The Enchanted One respectively—and sets events in Portugal, elucidating on the country’s socioeconomic issues through allegory and Gomes’ signature vigor for cinematic storytelling. Using a mesh of satire and fantasy, fiction and non-fiction, the film has been hailed as a genuinely stirring cinematic experience in all respects since it premiered in Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight, and we are beyond excited to see it at TIFF. [Nik]

The Assassin

Gestating in development for over ten years, and scaling a mountain of budgetary hurdles all while learning to adjust to the ever-changing climate of film production, Hou Hisao-Hisen’s latest film is finally here. For a film that’s been anticipated this long, directed by a beloved legend of Taiwanese arthouse cinema, the hype for The Assassin was strained with a mix of excitement and slight trepidation before it premiered at Cannes. The film turned out to be a critical hit, and Hou was commemorated with a Best Director prize (many believed it would walk away with the Palme). This wuxia tale follows a trained killer (Shu Qi) who is forced to choose between her heart and her profession when she gets her latest assignment. Yeah, it’s a synopsis bland enough to fit the description of the worst kind of Steven Segal movie, but its plot is not why The Assassin has already been hailed as a masterpiece by many. With a master filmmaker at the helm, the film’s qualities are found in its aesthetics, mood, composition, and a refined kind of slow-burning mystery that seems to cast a spell on all who see it. Yummy. [Nik]

Baskin

After discovering Baskin’s inclusion in the Midnight Madness programme, I contacted director Can Evrenol to get a glimpse at his 2013 short film (which this film is based on). Evrenol was gracious enough to let me see his short, and the moment it ended I knew I had to catch his feature-length adaptation at TIFF. Both the short and the film have the same synopsis: a group of cops responding to a call for backup arrive at an abandoned building that turns out to be the home of some sort of horrifying dark arts ritual. By the time the cops realise they’ve stumbled into some seriously freaky, occult type stuff, all hell literally breaks loose. The short is a brief and twisted slice of fun, and Baskin looks like it’s expanding in all the right ways: gorier, nastier, and with plenty more horrifying surprises in store. Midnight Madness programmer Colin Geddes has gone on record saying that Baskin might rival the legendary premiere of Martyrs at TIFF in 2008, and based on what I’ve seen of Baskin, I’m inclined to believe he might turn out to be right. [C.J.]

Beasts of No Nation

Fresh off the enormous success of True Detective, Cary Fukunaga returns to the big screen with more critical clout than ever before. Beasts of No Nation marks the writer/director’s third feature, and it looks to be a work of greater intensity and visceral impact than either of his previous films. From a Mexican immigration drama (Sin Nombre) to a classic bildungsroman adaptation set in Victorian England (Jane Eyre), Fukunaga now takes us to an unnamed country in Africa where a young boy struck by tragedy is forced to become a child soldier in a ferocious civil war. Fukunaga’s versatility is truly impressive, and with this film carrying the added plus of Idris Elba (in what could potentially be his greatest role yet), I’d say it’s shaping up to be yet another feather in the cap of an exciting and steadily rising filmmaker. [Byron]

Black Mass

Scott Cooper is someone who hasn’t quite broken out yet as a “name director.” Crazy Heart was acknowledged for its performances and music despite being a solid character study with real directorial sensitivity, and while Out of the Furnace proved to be somewhat bland and predictable, it still contained glimmers of a filmmaker with a distinct vision. With his third film, Black Mass, Cooper is tackling something of significant scale. It’s the story of the notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, and the project boasts a killer cast. Johnny Depp arrives in heavy makeup once again, this time in a different context, and he appears to be in rare form, exuding charisma that is terrifyingly deceptive rather than merely quirky. With such a weighty subject, there’s a lot that could go wrong, but hopefully Cooper rises to the occasion and finally takes the spotlight, delivering something more like The Departed than Killing Them Softly. [Byron]

Cemetery of Splendour

Arguably the greatest arthouse filmmaker of the 21st century, Apichatpong Weerasethakul is more beloved than the spelling of his full name is hard to memorize. Every feature he’s directed—most especially Tropical Malady, Syndromes of a Century, and Palme D’Or-winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—has been studied by cinephiles for their hypnotic power and spiritual sensations. His latest is titled Cemetery of Splendor, and if that’s not enticing enough (it should be), its Cannes premiere was met with the kind of plaudits worthy of Weerasethakul’s venerated oeuvre. The film follows a housewife who volunteers at a clinic where she befriends a soldier with a mysterious sleeping sickness and meets a medium who helps family members communicate with their comatose relatives. In typical Weerasethakul fashion, dreams, memory, and romance are weaved together to create a mystical viewing experience. We couldn’t be more ready for this. [Nik]

Evolution

Way back in January of this year, I picked Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution as one of my most anticipated films of 2015. I figured it would premiere at Cannes, given it went into production last year, but Cannes came and went without her film appearing. I forgot about the film (partially to not disappoint myself again), so once it got announced at part of TIFF’s Vanguard programme this year I was ecstatic. Little was known about Evolution back when I first wrote about it, but now there’s a better idea of what to expect. The film centres on a ten-year-old boy living on an island with no adult males, only women and young boys like himself. The boys undergo various medical experiments, and Nicholas decides to investigate what’s going on. Rather than explain why Evolution is on my radar again, I’ll just quote its programmer Colin Geddes who told me it’s “a sublime, body horror, fairy tale mystery.” I don’t think it’s possible to hear a description like that and not get intrigued. [C.J.]

High-Rise

I won’t lie: I’ve been deliberately avoiding learning much about Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, which is having its world premiere this year in TIFF’s competitive Platform programme. I know it has a killer cast (Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Elisabeth Moss and Luke Evans, to name a few). I know it’s an adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novel, it involves different people living in an apartment building, and that Clint Mansell is doing the score. That’s about it. So why am I putting this down as one of my most anticipated titles of TIFF? Because Ben Wheatley is one of the more exciting names in international cinema right now, hopping between genres with ease and delivering films that are truly distinct. This looks like a return to the moodier, intense fare of Kill List along with the chamber piece quality of his terrific debut Down Terrace (which largely took place in a house). High-Rise sounds like a literal expansion for Wheatley compared to his low-budget first feature: a bigger cast, a bigger budget, a bigger location and a bigger scale. Here’s hoping Wheatley makes the most of it. [C.J.]

Mountains May Depart

To be honest, I don’t know much about Mountains May Depart, but what I do know is that Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin was one of the best movies to emerge from 2013. Brutal and depressing in equal measures, the film is an anthology that presented the deeply troubled nature of modern China through powerful allegory. Jia’s follow-up seems to cover similarly ambitious ground, spanning two generations and confronting the effects of a rapidly changing societal landscape. No matter what the story details are, Mountains May Depart is a must-see purely because it places the audience in the secure hands of a great cinematic social commentator. [Byron]

Office

Want to know how much I love Johnnie To? Whenever I see the word “musical” I tend to run in the other direction, yet I’m clearing my TIFF schedule to fit in the musical Office because he’s helming it. The film marks two firsts for To, a director who’s been working for decades with an insanely prolific and consistent output; it’s his first musical, and his first film in 3D. Seeing To tackle new areas only gets me more excited, because he’s shown multiple times that he has no problem adapting any genre to his economic and quick-paced style. Based on the hit play by Sylvia Chang (who also stars in Mountains May Depart), Office sounds like a continuation of To’s recent fixation on the corporate class and the 2008 financial crisis seen in films like Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Life Without Principle. But this time, To has recruited big names like Chang and Chow Yun-Fat, along with (what sounds like) full-blown song and dance numbers. Early word on Office has been great, and I can’t wait to see what will surely be To’s unique take on the musical. [C.J.]

Sunset Song

Suffused with rich feeling and evocative melancholia, Terence Davies’ movies are like a vintage wine that sentimentality has rendered priceless; only to be uncorked for a momentous occasion. Which is exactly what the world premiere of his latest picture, Sunset Song, already feels like. Coming off the heels of The Deep Blue Sea, probably the most underrated and misunderstood film of its year, Sunset Song is a period piece set in the cinegenic Scottish countryside of the 1930s, and based on a book by Lewis Grassic Gibon that’s been called the most important Scottish novel of the 20th century. Other than a few gorgeous-looking stills, and the announcement of the cast which includes the brilliant Peter Mullan, mum’s been the word on the details behind Davies’ adaptation. But if he sticks close to Gibbon’s story, we’ll be following the hard life of young Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), a woman growing up in a dysfunctional household, on a farm in Scotland. We expect nothing less than the same refined and lyrical cinematic precision we’ve been getting from one of Britain’s most celebrated auteurs. [Nik]

Where to Invade Next?

America’s most divisive filmmaker returns with a new documentary sure to inspire an avalanche of critical blog posts, angry tweets and bitter Fox News segments. It’s been six years since Michael Moore released Capitalism: A Love Story, and little is known about his new project outside of the vague notion that it will concern the United States’ unending condition of being at war in some capacity. I’ve always been fond of Moore’s work, despite the loudness of his mouth and the dubiousness of his specific claims. For sheer entertainment value, his films are about as hilariously satirical as documentaries get, but beneath the unabashed agenda and supposed methods of misdirection lies a sobering reality demanding our immediate attention. For this reason, I can’t wait to see Where to Invade Next? and revel in the controversy it will inevitably stir up. [Byron]

The Witch

If the reactions out of Sundance earlier this year are any indication, The Witch is the latest installment in a recent string of thoughtful indie horror pictures (such as It Follows and The Babadook) vying for “instant classic” status. The film is a period piece—something far too uncommon in the genre these days—and tells the tale of 17^th century New England settlers encountering evil forces in a nearby forest while perhaps confronting their own inner demons as well. I like my horror cinema grim and ambiguous, and the film’s brilliant trailer seems to promise a gloomy tone and ominous atmosphere, along with what might be the most malevolent on-screen goat since Drag Me to Hell (although likely not as humorous). A 2016 release date pretty much guarantees a series of sold-out shows at this year’s fest, so don’t hesitate to check it out if you get the chance. [Byron]

Yakuza Apocalypse

Back in May when Yakuza Apocalypse premiered at Cannes, it sounded like Takashi Miike was back in full-force. But then again, considering his insanely prolific output (I’ve lost track of his films, there are too many), “full-force” seems to be status quo for Miike. The image above should give you an idea of what Yakuza Apocalypse might be like: insane, bonkers, all over the place, nonsensical and yet completely entertaining to watch. The film starts out with a Yakuza boss revealed to be a vampire, and soon the entire town he rules over gets converted into vampires as they try to remove threats to their way of life. And also there’s something about a fighting alien toad, the apocalypse, and whatever else Miike could think of apparently. When it comes to Miike, I don’t ask questions anymore. He’s proven himself to be an amazing director, so when I get the chance to see one of his latest films I’ll go on blind faith. Sometimes his films don’t work out for me, but other times they work spectacularly. Yakuza Apocalypse looks like it’s going to fall more into the “spectacular” category. [C.J.]

The 59th BFI Film Festival today unveiled its selection of 238 feature films and 182 shorts set to screen during the 12-day festival. While it was already known that the Sarah Gavron feminist drama Suffragette would open the festival, Danny Boyle‘s Steve Jobs biopic would close it, and the Cate Blanchett / Rooney Mara film Carol would feature in a Headline Gala, several other high-profile additions were part of today’s announcement.

The European premieres of Trumbo, Brooklyn, as well as The Lady In The Van highlight the Gala selections, while other anticipated movies like Black Mass, High-Rise, and The Lobster occupy other slots.

Thirteen features make up the Official Competition line-up, including Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix-bound Beasts of No Nation, the Cannes-awarded Son of Saul, and Sean Baker‘s iPhone shot Tangerine (which has already been released in the U.S.). The First Feature Competition highlights twelve other films from debut filmmakers, with Krisha, Partisan, and The Witch set to take part.

Tickets go on sale to the public September 17th, 20 days before BFI kicks off on October 7th. Check out the full lineup on BFI’s website.

The first round of titles for the 40th Toronto International Film Festival were announced this morning by Piers Handling, CEO and Director of TIFF and artistic director Cameron Bailey. 15 Galas and 34 Special Presentations were announced and, as usual, represent a diverse range of directors and countries.

Among the standouts are the opening night film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Naomi Watts, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Demolition, a film about a man struggling with his wife’s tragic death through an unlikely communication with the customer service department of a vending machine company. Other titles to get excited for: Ridley Scott’s hotly anticipated The Martian, a new comedy from Julie Delpy, Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, and Cary Fukunaga’s much buzzed about Beasts of No Nation, and a new documentary from Michael Moore. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl starring Eddie Redmayne is sure to garner great interest as well.

Previous festival favorites, such as Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth and John Crowley’s Brooklyn, will also make their North American and Canadian premieres, as well as Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria.

One thing’s for sure, TIFF continues to lead the Fall festival pack, and although Telluride’s lineup won’t be revealed until Labor Day weekend, TIFF continues to be the launching platform for awards season, and this year looks as promising as any.

The 40th Toronto International Film Festival runs from September 10 to 20, 2015.

GALAS

Beeba Boys
Deepa Mehta, Canada, World Premiere
An adrenaline-charged violent Indo-Canadian gang war mixes guns, bhangra beats, bespoke suits, cocaine, and betrayal. Gang boss Jeet Johar and his loyal, young crew are audaciously taking over the Vancouver drug and arms scene from an old-style crime syndicate. Hearts are broken and family bonds shattered when the Beeba Boys (known as the “nice boys”) do anything “to be seen and to be feared” — in a white world.

Demolition
Jean-Marc Vallée, USA, World Premiere (Opening Night Film)
In Demolition, a successful investment banker, Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal), struggles after losing his wife in a tragic car crash. Despite pressure from his father-in-law (Chris Cooper) to pull it together, Davis continues to unravel. What starts as a complaint letter to a vending machine company turns into a series of letters revealing startling personal admissions. Davis’ letters catch the attention of customer service rep Karen (Naomi Watts) and, amidst emotional and financial burdens of her own, the two strangers form an unlikely connection. With the help of Karen and her son (Judah Lewis), Davis starts to rebuild, beginning with the demolition of the life he once knew.

The Dressmaker
Jocelyn Moorhouse, Australia, World Premiere
Based on the best-selling novel by Rosalie Ham, The Dressmaker is a bittersweet, comedy-drama set in early 1950s Australia. After many years working as a dressmaker in exclusive Parisian fashion houses, Tilly Dunnage, a beautiful and talented misfit, returns home to the tiny middle-of-nowhere town of Dungatar to right the wrongs of the past. Not only does she reconcile with her ailing, eccentric mother Molly, and unexpectedly falls in love with the pure-hearted Teddy, but armed with her sewing machine and incredible sense of style, Tilly sets out to right the wrongs of the past and transforms the women of the town but encounters unexpected romance along the way. Starring Kate Winslet, Liam Hemsworth, Judy Davis and Hugo Weaving.

Eye in the Sky
Gavin Hood, United Kingdom, World Premiere
London-based military intelligence officer Colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) is remotely commanding a top secret drone operation to capture a group of dangerous terrorists at their safe-house in Nairobi, Kenya. The mission suddenly escalates from a capture to a kill operation, when Powell realizes that the terrorists are about to embark on a deadly suicide mission. American drone pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul) is poised to destroy the safe-house when a nine-year-old-girl enters the kill zone just outside the walls of the house. With unforeseen collateral damage now entering the equation, the impossible decision of when to strike gets passed up the kill chain of politicians and lawyers as the seconds tick down. Also stars Alan Rickman, Barkhad Abdi and Iain Glen.

Forsaken
Jon Cassar, Canada, World Premiere
Tormented by a dark secret, an aging gunfighter abandons a life of killing and returns home, only to discover his mother has died. He’s forced to confront his estranged father and the life he left behind. Starring Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland and Demi Moore.

Freeheld
Peter Sollett, USA, World Premiere
Based on the Oscar-winning documentary and adapted by the writer of Philadelphia, Freeheld is the true love story of Laurel Hester and Stacie Andree and their fight for justice. A decorated New Jersey police detective, Laurel is diagnosed with cancer and wants to leave her hard-earned pension to her domestic partner, Stacie. However the county officials — the Freeholders — conspire to prevent Laurel from doing so. Hard-nosed detective Dane Wells and activist Steven Goldstein come together in Laurel and Stacie’s defense, rallying police officers and ordinary citizens to support their struggle for equality. Starring Julianne Moore, Ellen Page, Michael Shannon and Steve Carell.

Hyena Road (Hyena Road: Le Chemin du Combat)
Paul Gross, Canada, World Premiere
A sniper who has never allowed himself to think of his targets as humans becomes implicated in the life of one such target. An intelligence officer who has never contemplated killing becomes the engine of a plot to kill. And a legendary Mujahideen warrior who had put war behind him is now the centre of the battle zone. Three men, three worlds, three conflicts — all stand at the intersection of modern warfare, a murky world of fluid morality in which all is not as it seems.

LEGEND
Brian Helgeland, United Kingdom, International Premiere
The true story of the rise and fall of London’s most notorious gangsters, brothers Reggie and Ron Kray, both portrayed by Tom Hardy in an amazing double performance. LEGEND is a classic crime thriller that takes audiences into the secret history of the 1960s and the extraordinary events that secured the infamy of the Kray twins.

Lolo
Julie Delpy, France, North American Premiere
While on holiday in the south of France, Parisian sophisticate Violette falls in love with carefree geek Jean-René. As their relationship blossoms, Jean-René heads to Paris to spend more time with Violette but finds himself up against her possessive teenage son Lolo who is determined to sabotage their relationship by any means necessary. A razor-sharp comedy from Julie Delpy.

The Man Who Knew Infinity
Matthew Brown, United Kingdom, World Premiere
A true story of friendship that forever changed mathematics. In 1913, Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematics genius from India, travelled to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he forged a bond with his mentor, the eccentric professor GH Hardy, and fought to show the world the magic of his mind. Starring Dev Patel and Academy Award winner Jeremy Irons.

The Martian
Ridley Scott, USA, World Premiere
During a manned mission to Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive. Millions of miles away, NASA and a team of international scientists work tirelessly to bring “the Martian” home, while his crewmates concurrently plot a daring, if not impossible rescue mission. Based on a best-selling novel, and helmed by master director Ridley Scott, The Martian features a star-studded cast that includes Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Donald
Glover.

The Program
Stephen Frears, United Kingdom, World Premiere
From Academy Award-nominated director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Philomena) and producers Working Title (The Theory of Everything), comes the true story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the most celebrated and controversial men in recent history, Lance Armstrong. Starring Ben Foster, Dustin Hoffman, Chris O’Dowd and Guillaume Canet.

Remember
Atom Egoyan, Canada, North American Premiere
Remember is the contemporary story of Zev, who discovers that the Nazi guard who murdered his family some 70 years ago is living in America under an assumed identity. Despite the obvious challenges, Zev sets out on a mission to deliver long-delayed justice with his own trembling hand. What follows is a remarkable cross-continent road-trip with surprising consequences. Starring Academy Award winners Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau.

Septembers of Shiraz
Wayne Blair, USA, World Premiere
A thriller based on the New York Times bestseller, this is the true story of a secular Jewish family caught in the 1979 Iranian revolution and their heroic journey to overcome and ultimately escape from the deadly tyranny that swept their country and threatened to extinguish their lives at every turn. Starring Salma Hayek and Adrien Brody.

Stonewall
Roland Emmerich, USA, World Premiere
This fictional drama inspired by true events follows a young man caught up during the 1969 Stonewall Riots. Danny Winters (Jeremy Irvine) finds himself alone in Greenwich Village, homeless and destitute, until he befriends a group of street kids who introduce him to the local watering hole, The Stonewall Inn — however, this shady, mafia-run club is far from a safe haven. As Danny and his friends experience discrimination, endure atrocities and are repeatedly harassed by the police, the entire community of young gays, lesbians and drag queens who populate Stonewall erupts in a storm of anger. With the toss of a single brick, a riot ensues and a crusade for equality is born. Starring Jeremy Irvine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ron Perlman and Joey King.

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Anomalisa
Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, USA, Canadian Premiere
A man struggles with his inability to connect with other people. Starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan and David Thewlis.

Beasts of No Nation
Cary Fukunaga, USA/Ghana, Canadian Premiere
Based on the highly acclaimed novel, director Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation brings to life the gripping tale of Agu (newcomer Abraham Attah), a child soldier torn from his family to fight in the civil war of an African country. Idris Elba dominates the screen in the role of Commandant, a warlord who takes in Agu and instructs him in the ways of war.

Black Mass
Scott Cooper, USA, Canadian Premiere
In 1970s South Boston, FBI Agent John Connolly persuades Irish-American gangster Jimmy Bulger to act as an informant for the FBI in order to eliminate their common enemy: the Italian mob. The drama tells the story of this unholy alliance, which spiraled out of control, allowing Whitey to evade law enforcement while becoming one of the most ruthless and dangerous gangsters in Boston history. Starring Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rory Cochrane, Jesse Plemons, Kevin Bacon, Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, Corey Stoll and Peter Sarsgaard.

Brooklyn
John Crowley, United Kingdom/Ireland/Canada, Canadian Premiere
Set on opposite sides of the Atlantic, this drama tells the profoundly moving story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irish immigrant navigating her way through 1950s Brooklyn. Lured by the promise of America, Eilis departs Ireland and the comfort of her mother’s home for the shores of New York City. The initial shackles of homesickness quickly diminish as a fresh romance sweeps Eilis into the intoxicating charm of love. But soon, her new vivacity is disrupted by her past, and Eilis must choose between two countries and the lives that exist within. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters.

The Club
Pablo Larraín, Chile, North American Premiere
Four men live in a secluded house in a seaside town. Sent to purge sins of the past, they live under a strict regime and the watchful eye of a caretaker. Their fragile stability is disrupted by the arrival of a fifth man who brings with him their darkest secrets.

Colonia
Florian Gallenberger, Germany/Luxembourg/France, World Premiere
Colonia tells the story of Lena and Daniel, a young couple who become entangled in the Chilean military coup of 1973. Daniel is abducted by Pinochet’s secret police and Lena tracks him to a sealed off area in the south of the country called Colonia Dignidad. The Colonia presents itself as a charitable mission run by lay preacher Paul Schäfer but, in fact, is a place nobody ever escapes from. Lena decides to join the cult in order to find Daniel. Starring Emma Watson, Daniel Brühl and Michael Nyqvist.

The Danish Girl
Tom Hooper, United Kingdom, North American Premiere
The Danish Girl is the remarkable love story inspired by the lives of artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener (portrayed by Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander), directed by Academy Award winner Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, Les Misérables). Lili and Gerda’s marriage and work evolve as they navigate Lili’s groundbreaking journey as a transgender pioneer.

The Daughter
Simon Stone, Australia, North American Premiere
A man returns to his hometown and unearths a long-buried family secret. As he tries to right the wrongs of the past, his actions threaten to shatter the lives of those he left behind years before. Starring Geoffrey Rush, Paul Schneider, Miranda Otto and Sam Neill.

Desierto
Jonás Cuarón, Mexico, World Premiere
Moises is traveling by foot with a group of undocumented workers across a desolate strip of the border between Mexico and the United States, seeking a new life in the north. They are discovered by a lone American vigilante, Sam, and a frantic chase begins. Set against the stunningly brutal landscape, Moises and Sam engage in a lethal match of wits, each desperate to survive and escape the desert that threatens to consume them. Starring Gael García Bernal and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Dheepan
Jacques Audiard, France, North American Premiere
To escape the civil war in Sri Lanka, a former Tamil Tiger soldier, a young woman and a little girl pose as a family. These strangers try to build a life together in a Parisian suburb.

Families (Belles Familles)
Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France, World Premiere
When Shanghai-based businessman Jérome Varenne learns that his childhood home in the village of Ambray is at the centre of a local conflict, he heads there to straighten things out and finds himself at the centre of familial and romantic complications. Starring Mathieu Amalric.

The Family Fang
Jason Bateman, USA, World Premiere
Annie and Baxter Fang have spent most of their adult lives trying to distance themselves from their famous artist parents. But when both siblings find themselves stalled in life, they return home for the first time in a decade where they become entangled in a dark mystery surrounding their parents’ disappearance. Jason Bateman directs and stars, along with co-stars Nicole Kidman and
Christopher Walken, in this film based on the New York Times bestseller.

Guilty (Talvar)
Meghna Gulzar, India, World Premiere
Based on true events that set off a media frenzy all over the world, Guilty follows the 2008 Noida Double Murder Case of an investigation into the deaths of 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar and 45-year-old Hemraj Banjade, a domestic employed by Aarushi’s family, in Noida, India. The controversial case lives on in the mind of the public, despite a guilty verdict that sentenced the parents of
the murdered girl to life in prison. Starring Irrfan Khan.

I Smile Back
Adam Salky, USA, Canadian Premiere
Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Amy Koppelman, I Smile Back explores the life of Laney (Sarah Silverman), a devoted wife and mother who seems to have it all — a perfect husband, pristine house and shiny SUV. However, beneath the façade lies depression and disillusionment that catapult her into a secret world of reckless compulsion. Only very real danger will force her to face the painful root of her destructiveness and its effect on those she loves.

The Idol (Ya Tayr El Tayer)
Hany Abu-Assad, United Kingdom/Palestine/Qatar, World Premiere
A young boy in Gaza, Mohammad Assaf, dreams of one day singing in the Cairo Opera House with his sister and best friend, Nour. One day, Nour collapses and is rushed to the hospital where it is discovered that she needs a kidney transplant. Nour leaves Mohammad with a dying wish that someday, he will become a famous singer in Cairo. Escaping from Gaza to Egypt against
unbelievable odds, Mohammad makes the journey of a lifetime. From two-time Academy Award nominee Hany Abu-Assad comes this inspirational drama inspired by the incredibly true story of Mohammed Assaf, winner of Arab Idol 2013.

The Lady in the Van
Nicholas Hytner, USA/United Kingdom, World Premiere
Based on the true story of Miss Shepherd, a woman of uncertain origins who “temporarily” parked her van in writer Alan Bennett’s London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years. What begins as a begrudged favour becomes a relationship that will change both their lives. Filmed on the street and in the house where Bennett and Miss Shepherd lived all those years, acclaimed director Nicholas Hytner reunites with iconic writer Alan Bennett (The Madness of King George, The History Boys) to bring this rare and touching portrait to the screen. Starring Maggie Smith, Dominic Cooper and James Corden.

Len and Company
Tim Godsall, USA, North American Premiere
A successful music producer (Rhys Ifans) quits the industry and exiles himself in upstate New York, but the solitude he seeks is shattered when both his estranged son (Jack Kilmer) and the pop-star (Juno Temple) he’s created come looking for answers.

The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos, Ireland/United Kingdom/Greece/France/Netherlands, North American Premiere
In a dystopian near future, single people are obliged to find a matching mate in 45 days or are transformed into animals and released into the woods. Starring Colin Farrell, Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, John C. Reilly, Léa Seydoux and Ben Whishaw.

Louder than Bombs
Joachim Trier, Norway/France/Denmark, North American Premiere
An upcoming exhibition celebrating photographer Isabelle Reed three years after her untimely death brings her eldest son Jonah back to the family house, forcing him to spend more time with his father Gene and withdrawn younger brother Conrad than he has in years. With the three men under the same roof, Gene tries desperately to connect with his two sons, but they struggle to reconcile their feelings about the woman they remember so differently. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Gabriel Byrne and Jesse Eisenberg.

Maggie’s Plan
Rebecca Miller, USA, World Premiere
Maggie’s plan to have a baby on her own is derailed when she falls in love with John, a married man, destroying his volatile marriage to the brilliant Georgette. But one daughter and three years later, Maggie is out of love and in a quandary: what do you do when you suspect your man and his ex-wife are actually perfect for each other? Starring Julianne Moore, Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph.

Mountains May Depart (Shan He Gu Ren)
Jia Zhang-ke, China/France/Japan, North American Premiere
The new film from master filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke (A Touch of Sin) jumps from the recent past to the speculative near-future as it examines how China’s economic boom has affected the bonds of family, tradition, and love.

Office
Johnnie To, China/Hong Kong, International Premiere
Billion-dollar company Jones & Sunn is going public. Chairman Ho Chung-ping has promised CEO Chang, who has been his mistress for more than 20 years, to become a major shareholder of the company. As the IPO team enters the company to audit its accounts, a series of inside stories start to be revealed. Starring Chow Yun Fat, Sylvia Chang, Tang Wei and Wang Ziyi.

Parched
Leena Yadav, India/USA, World Premiere
Three ordinary women dare to break free from the century old patriarchal ways of their village in the desert heartland of rural India. Starring Tannishtha Chaterjee, Radhika Apte and Surveen Chawla, this unforgettable tale of friendship and triumph is called Parched.

Room
Lenny Abrahamson, Ireland/Canada, Canadian Premiere
Told through the eyes of five-year-old-Jack, Room is a thrilling and emotional tale that celebrates the resilience and power of the human spirit. To Jack, the Room is the world… it’s where he was born, where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. But while it’s home to Jack, to Ma it’s a prison. Through her fierce love for her son, Ma has managed to create a childhood for him in their 10-by-10-foot space. But as Jack’s curiosity is building alongside Ma’s own desperation — she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely. Starring Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, Sean Bridgers and William H. Macy.

Sicario
Denis Villeneuve, USA, North American Premiere
In the lawless border area stretching between the U.S. and Mexico, an idealistic FBI agent (Emily Blunt) is enlisted by an elite government task force official (Josh Brolin) to aid in the escalating war against drugs. Led by an enigmatic consultant with a questionable past (Benicio Del Toro), the team sets out on a clandestine journey that forces Kate to question everything that she
believes.

Son of Saul (Saul Fia)
László Nemes, Hungary, Canadian Premiere
October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial.

Spotlight
Tom McCarthy, USA, International Premiere
Spotlight tells the true story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation that would rock the city and cause a crisis in one of the world’s oldest and most trusted institutions. When the newspaper’s tenacious “Spotlight” team of reporters delves into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, their year-long investigation uncovers a decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of
Boston’s religious, legal, and government establishment, touching off a wave of revelations around the world. Starring Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, Brian d’Arcy James and Billy Crudup.

Summertime (La Belle Saison)
Catherine Corsini, France, North American Premiere
Delphine, the daughter of farmers, moves to Paris in 1971 to break free from the shackles of her family and to gain her financial independence. Carole is a Parisian, living with Manuel, actively involved in the stirrings of the feminist movement. The meeting of the two women changes their lives forever. Starring Cécile De France, Izia Higelin, Noémie Lvovsky and Kévin Azaïs.

Sunset Song
Terence Davies, United Kingdom/Luxembourg, World Premiere
Terence Davies’ epic of hope, tragedy and love at the dawning of the Great War follows a young woman’s tale of endurance against the hardships of rural Scottish life. Based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon and told with gritty poetic realism by Britain’s greatest living auteur, Sunset Song stars Peter Mullan and Agyness Deyn.

Trumbo
Jay Roach, USA, World Premiere
The successful career of 1940s screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) comes to a crushing end when he and other Hollywood figures are blacklisted for their political beliefs. Trumbo tells the story of his fight against the U.S. government and studio bosses in a war over words and freedom, which entangled everyone in Hollywood from Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) and John Wayne to Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger.

Un plus une
Claude Lelouch, France, World Premiere
Charming, successful, Antoine (Jean Dujardin) could be the hero of one of those films he composes the music for. When he leaves for a job in India, he meets Anna (Elsa Zylberstein), a woman who isn’t like him at all, but who attracts him more than anything. Together, they are going to experience an incredible journey.

Victoria
Sebastian Schipper, Germany, Canadian Premiere
On a night out in Berlin, Victoria meets four young local guys. After joining their group, she becomes their driver when they rob a bank. Finally, as dawn breaks, everyone meets their destiny.

Where to Invade Next
Michael Moore, USA, World Premiere
Oscar-winning director Michael Moore returns with what may be his most provocative and hilarious movie yet. Moore tells the Pentagon to “stand down”— he will do the invading for America from now on. Discretely shot in several countries and under the radar of the global media, Moore has made a searing cinematic work that is both up-to-the-minute and timeless.

Youth
Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/United Kingdom/Switzerland, North American Premiere
Youth explores the lifelong bond between two friends vacationing in a luxury Swiss Alps lodge as they ponder retirement. While Fred (Michael Caine) has no plans to resume his musical career despite the urging of his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), Mick (Harvey Keitel) is intent on finishing the screenplay for what may be his last film for his muse Brenda (Jane Fonda). And where will inspiration lead their younger friend Jimmy (Paul Dano), an actor grasping to make sense of his next performance? From Italy’s Oscar-winning foreign language film writer and director Paolo Sorrentino, Youth asks if our most important and life-changing experiences can come at any time — even late — in life.