My 2015 Films

My picks for 2015:

• 25 April (Leanne Pooley, New Zealand): a stunningly animated look at the landings at Gallipoli during the First World War.
• The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, United Kingdom): from director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech), this film based on David Ebershoff's novel stars Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) as a man who discovers new feelings and eventually becomes one of the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Also stars Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina).
• Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, France): winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2015, the latest from Jacques Audiard (I previously saw his Rust and Bone at TIFF) follows a Tamil family that flees from Sri Lanka to France.
• Endorphine (André Turpin, Canada): I've seen Turpin's work as a DoP on Incendies and Maelstrom. His latest directorial effort intertwines the stories of three women all named Simone.
• The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson, USA): a kind of send-up and homage to horror films, with Taissa Farmiga as the daughter of a famous horror movie star who is transported with her friends into one of her mother's films.
• Francophonia (Alexander Sokurov, Germany/France/The Netherlands): Sokurov's latest film that sounds reminiscent of one of his previous works, Russian Ark.
• Hardcore (Ilya Naishuller, Russia/USA): shot from a first-person point-of-view, this film follows a resurrected cyborg super solider on a mission to rescue his wife from a psychotic supervillain.
• High-Rise (Ben Wheatley, United Kingdom): based on J.G. Ballard's novel of the same name, with Tom Hiddleston as a new resident who must navigate the social politics and class structure of a monolithic apartment tower.
• Horizon (Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, Bergur Bernburg, Iceland/Denmark): an examination of the work of Icelandic landscape painter Georg Gudni Hauksson).
• Lace Crater (Harrison Atkins, USA): a woman attends a house party in the country, ends up sleeping with a burlap-wrapped ghost, and strange things start happening to her body.
• Mr. Right (Paco Cabezas, USA): Anna Kendrick meets Sam Rockwell and they fall for one another, only it turns out Rockwell is a hitman, and the body count starts to pile up. Saw Kendrick last year in The Last Five Years and Rockwell in Laggies.
• Love (Gaspar Noé, France): probably will be the most interesting use of 3D I'll see at the festival this year.
• Office (Johnnie To, China/Hong Kong): To's first musical, about backroom corporate politics.
• Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan): Kore-eda's latest to hit TIFF finds three sisters in a seaside town who learn their estranged father had another daughter who comes to live with her stepsisters are her father's death.
• Schneider vs. Bax (Alex van Warmerdam, Netherlands/Belgium): a black comedy about a hitman trying to kill novelist, although the novelist may be more than he seems.
• Veteran (Ryoo Seung-wan, South Korea): Ryoo's latest (I've previously seen his The Berlin File) follows a maverick detective that takes on a huge corporation that flaunts the law.
• Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore, USA): Moore's latest film asks the question about what would happen if the US were better at invading other countries, and launches off from there.
• Yakuza Apocalypse (Takashi Miike, Japan): a mish-mash of everything from monsters to gangsters and everything in between.
• Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy/France/United Kingdom/Switzerland): Sorrentino's follow up to The Great Beauty finds Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel reflecting on life and the world while relaxing at a spa in the Swiss Alps.

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