Countdown to the Oscars: Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is probably this year's strangest nominee.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

The nominees are:

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Revenant

One really has to hand it to the makeup and hairstyling branch of the Academy. Last year, I listed a few of its more outré selections from past years. Allow me to name a few more: Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. That last one, by the way, was nominated alongside The Color Purple, and they both lost to Mask. Idiosyncratic is one word for it. Daffy might be another, but few among the nominees could be considered without merit.

To its eternal credit, the makeup and hairstyling branch just likes good work and will embrace films the rest of the Academy would not touch with a 10-foot pole. That is not to say prestige films never get nominated here. It happens all the time, and in fact, this year’s two nominations leaders are among the three selected films here. The third nominee is a different story altogether.

Now, about that 10-foot pole – the branch can nominate whatever it likes and usually does, but it is the Academy as a whole that votes for the winner. Films with high nominations totals tend to have a leg up here, especially those nominated for Best Picture. In fact, no Best Picture nominee has lost in this category since 2003, when Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World lost to eventual Best Picture winner The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The same dynamic is most likely to play out this year, unless the weirdest of this bunch surprises everyone.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared – If you could not tell just from that title, this is the outlier nominee. You may never have heard of it, but it is the highest grossing film in Swedish history. With $51 million in the bank, it actually has made more worldwide than three of this year’s Best Picture nominees. So, though we may find it strange, just know there are people in Sweden wondering how this film earned only one nomination.

“What is it?” you ask. It is about a 100-year-old man with an affinity for blowing things up who escapes his stifling nursing home and goes on a road trip through the Swedish countryside. Along the way, we learn about his insane life, which includes meeting various dictators and presidents, working on the Manhattan Project, and just generally raising hell and changing the course of modern history. It is kind of like Forrest Gump and The Bucket List wrapped into one darkly funny Swedish film.

Its inclusion in this category is owed entirely to the branch’s deep and abiding love for old-age makeup. They cannot get enough of watching younger actors transform into older people. Recent victories for The Grand Budapest Hotel, Les Miserables, and The Iron Lady, as well as nominations for films such as Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa and Il Divo, stand as testament to this. Lead actor Robert Gustafsson reportedly spent around three weeks’ worth of production time just having makeup applied and removed, and he does creditably play a man aging from about 30 years old to 100.

Makeup designer Love Larson previously worked on the original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and its American remake, while co-nominee makeup designer Eva Von Bahr also worked on the remake. Both are first-time nominees, and though the work is stellar, should their names be called out, they will constitute two of the most shocking first-time winners in recent memory.

Mad Max: Fury Road – Back to a film we should all be familiar with by now, Mad Max: Fury Road has a lot of showy makeup and prosthetics work, particularly in its sequences at the Citadel and in Immortan Joe’s lair, home to freaks a traveling sideshow would be loath to put on display. However, there is also a lot of subtle, world-building work in the bruised, battered, and dirty faces of the main characters who have traveled a long way through hell but still have a ways to go.

Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega, and Damian Martin are all first-time nominees. Makeup and hairstyle designer Vanderwalt has worked extensively in Australian cinema, having been part of several Baz Luhrman productions, as well as director George Miller’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and Happy Feet. Meanwhile, Vardega and Martin have experience primarily with big-budget fantasy-adventure films such as two of the Star Wars prequels (Martin) and The Chronicles of Narnia trilogy (Vardega).

The Revenant – That nominees Sian Grigg and Duncan Jarman are listed in the credits as “personal make-up artist and prosthetic make-up effects for Leonardo DiCaprio” tells you pretty much everything you need to know about what got this film nominated here. Through the course of the film, DiCaprio’s character is beat up, bloodied, and broken, and it falls to Grigg and Jarman to portray the trauma and transformation convincingly, primarily as it concerns the wounds Hugh Glass suffers in the bear attack.

Grigg has been DiCaprio’s makeup artist on every film the actor has done since 2000, while Jarman worked on The Beach, The Aviator, Body of Lies, and J. Edgar with DiCaprio. Hair stylist Robert Pandini, who is nominated with Grigg and Jarman, has spent most of his career working in television or science fiction or both, having contributed to most of season three of The X-Files. Pandini may just be along for the ride based on the makeup effects, but his work on The Revenant is subtle and layered in ways that enhance the film.

The final analysis

In some categories in which Mad Max: Fury Road and The Revenant are matched against each other, there is the possibility for a split vote that would allow a third contender to slip through to the win. That is not the case here. Those two may split the vote, but they will also garner about 98 percent of it, making the split something like 49-49-2. Hopefully, just from the nomination, more people will check out The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. It is streaming on Amazon Prime now, and I cannot recommend it highly enough for a daft, delightful experience. As for the winner here, Mad Max: Fury Road probably takes this both for having the most makeup and the makeup that best helps create the world of the story.

Will win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Should win: Mad Max: Fury Road

Should have been here: Crimson Peak

Tomorrow: Best Original Song

Year in Review: Best & Worst of 2015

It was just last year when I discussed in this same space how easy it was to see the bad in the previous year of cinema and how difficult it was to see the good. Well, things sure do have a way of turning around as this year featured a number of great developments just begging to be called out and nothing as egregious as the Sony and The Interview debacle last year.

Even the worst things about the year identified below are not so much irrevocably bad as they are trends in need of correcting. In that spirit, I would call 2015 a year of optimism, a year that pointed the way forward to a better cinema landscape overall. Nothing is perfect yet, and it never will be, but we seem to be on the right track, and that is worth celebrating.

Four best things

1. Women in film

Anne-Marie Duff, Carey Mulligan, and Helena Bonham Carter in Suffragette.

Here is one of those things that is not perfect yet, but it sure does seem to be moving in a positive direction. Women have been sorely underrepresented behind the camera in the history of film, and they have not been treated too well in front of it either. There have been small steps toward progress in the last decade – including Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director for 2009’s The Hurt Locker – but this year, it felt like we took a couple giant leaps.

A number of remarkable films in 2015 were written, directed, and produced by women, including Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang, Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother, and Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette. Director Isabel Coixet put women to work behind the scenes in every department of the Patricia Clarkson vehicle Learning to Drive. Director of photography Maryse Alberti has a fair shot at becoming the first woman nominated for the Oscar for cinematography for her stunning work on Creed.

More generally, great stories about women were everywhere this year from writer-director George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road to Pixar’s Inside Out. As Carey Mulligan identifies in Suffragette (in a quote we will discuss more tomorrow), women make up half the human race. Hollywood can no longer afford to ignore them, as it has done in the past, and any industry that excludes women from the process will not remain viable for long. There is a long way to go, but 2015 showed us a way forward.

2. Ensemble acting

Some of the best performances this year were delivered not by individual actors but by groups of actors. It was a bit of a strange year for acting as few films really offered the opportunity for huge star turns – though there were a number of stellar performances, which we will cover later this week. Instead, this felt more like the year of the ensemble.

Spotlight, The Big Short, Everest, Mustang, and a host of others were all defined by talented actors ignoring vanity and ego and giving themselves over to the story. Each of these films works like a finely tuned machine, and every performer is part of what makes the machine run. We all like to see great actors chew scenery – I would give anything if Daniel Day-Lewis were more prolific – but there is nothing like watching a wonderful ensemble share the workload in a totally selfless way.

3. Reinvigorated franchises

Paul Rudd in Ant-Man.

There is a sequel problem in Hollywood, and everybody knows it. Studios box out original stories in favor of proven products they know will sell. It is generally a low-risk, low-reward enterprise as these studios spend unimaginable amounts of money to make unimaginable amounts of money at a small profit, but we will get to that in a minute. This year felt like a banner year for sequels – or reboots or remakes or however you want to fit these films into the canon. More than ever, it seemed like we had intelligent filmmakers with great stories breathing new life into franchises thought long dead and into series seemingly sapped of creative energy.

None were more invigorating than Miller’s wildly inventive and just plain wild Mad Max: Fury Road and Ryan Coogler’s impeccably crafted, fiercely independent Creed. Add to that Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man, which gave a much-needed jolt of energy and fun to the flagging Marvel Cinematic Universe. These movies had a lot to live up to because of their forebears, and they exceeded those expectations in every way. If only more franchise films could be like these, the movie-going world might be a better place.

4. Spectacle at the movies

Studios and theater chains are always trying to come up with the next big thing to get audiences to come out to the movies – 3D, IMAX (and its bastard cousin lieMAX), smell-o-vision, and all sorts of other gimmicks that tended to come and go with the wind. I usually try to avoid these sorts of tricks because they rarely add anything to the films they accompany, but this year, some of the best directors we have tried on some spectacle for size and delivered a few special experiences.

With the help of IMAX 3D, Robert Zemeckis brought the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center back to life in his virtuosic Philippe Petit biopic The Walk. Maser of gothic horror Guillermo Del Toro used the IMAX format to build one of the most haunting and lush visual extravaganzas of his distinguished career in Crimson Peak. Baltasar Kormákur put viewers on top of a mountain, then made them look down in his exquisite and underrated Everest.

Perhaps no one tried to return spectacle to the cinema universe this year more than Quentin Tarantino with his The Hateful Eight roadshow. I may have been lukewarm on the movie, but the passion Tarantino showed – and has always shown – for making sure his film was seen in the right way, the best possible way, should inspire more filmmakers to take such risks. An overture, intermission, super-widescreen presentation, and even a program made for one spectacular night at the movies.

Four worst things

1. Movie-going experience

Now, for the flipside of that coin, I will present something of an “Old man yells at cloud” scenario. I love going to the movie theater. It is why this site exists and is so named, but this year, more than ever, I felt the difficulty in enjoying the cinematic experience. One could point out the fact that I live in noisy, busy, crowded New York City, but I would counter that two of the best cinemas in the country are located here – the IFC Center and the Lincoln Center – and suggest that if you really think about it, no matter where you live, you have probably found movie-going at least a somewhat daunting and annoying prospect.

It starts before you even walk in the theater as average ticket prices in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 2015, topping $8.60 – although, fair warning, if you visit me in New York City, you are looking at $15.50 for a regular ticket; and if you want to see one of those spectacles I mentioned at the only real IMAX theater in the city, it’s $22.50. Already, this is clearly cost prohibitive for a family of three or four. Snacks? Well, we all know those are expensive, but it is a price I am willing to pay because almost all of that money goes directly to the theater, as opposed to ticket sales, of which studios get the lion’s share.

Anyway, now you have your expensive ticket and expensive food, and you get to sit in an old, uncomfortable seat with terrible sight lines to see the badly projected digital image while sitting behind the guy in the hat and his girlfriend using her phone while the teenagers behind you talk about whatever the hell they talk about. I am not sure how to fix all of this, but I think we can all agree it is a problem. Maybe that is the solution. If we all agree this is a problem, we can all agree to be a little kinder and a little more courteous to each other at the movies.

2. Specialty box office

Still, none of that seemed to stop the cash registers from filling up across the country as box office records seemed to fall every week – a little movie called Star Wars: The Force Awakens might be helping that cause right now. Of course, those higher prices are certainly a factor in all those records as actual movie attendance continues to dip. If 10,000 fewer people see a blockbuster, though, no one is going to cry, but if even 1,000 fewer people see an independent movie, the whole industry suffers.

It was a bad year at the specialty box office as independent movies struggled to find an audience. Some survived long enough to pick up viewers from on-demand services, but you and I both know that is not the same thing. I mentioned the IFC Center and the Lincoln Center. Depending on where you live, there is probably a little independent movie theater within driving distance. Most of these are great places, where they really care about the programming and the experience they offer. Visit these places. Help keep their doors open, and help keep little gems from disappearing from theaters altogether.

3. Sagging franchises

Jake Johnson in a Jurassic Park T-shirt in Jurassic World.

So, we saw the good this year with those reinvigorated franchises I mentioned above, but we also saw the bad. Judging from the wild success these movies had at the box office, I may be in the minority opinion on this one. In fact, I am out about to call out the Nos. 4, 6, and 7 highest grossing movies of all time (without adjusting for inflation or higher ticket prices because we do not need to get into that right now).

Okay: Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Furious 7. The numbers say a vast majority of you saw these and saw them in theaters, but were these movies actually good, or was it just some blend of nostalgia and brand loyalty driving ticket sales? From where I am sitting, it seems very much like the latter.

Jurassic World plays like a meta-commentary on itself, constantly alluding to how much better the original film is, then largely failing to offer anything new or interesting. Avengers: Age of Ultron represented the total reverse of Ant-Man. It drags, it is convoluted, and worst of all, it just is no fun. Meanwhile, Furious 7, the seventh entry in a franchise that was never that good to begin with, is the reason for the term “diminishing returns.” Of course, I could be wrong about all of this, and the billion or so other people who saw these movies could be right. That would be fine, too.

4. Missed opportunities

Finally, as much distaste as I have for franchise films, particularly bad ones, there is something much worse – a missed opportunity. There are some stories just crying out to be told well, and there are talented filmmakers who seem on the verge of making memorable art. When these elements come together and the resulting film is less than it could be, it is frustrating, to say the least.

Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack takes an interesting subject – a family that has been locked in its home for years by a dictatorial father – and makes the least interesting movie she could. Moselle has a wonderful filmmaker’s eye, but she has missed the story, choosing instead to focus on the teenage and adult sons’ obsession with films and filmmaking. I wrote recently about David O. Russell’s Joy, another intriguing story but simply told by the wrong person. Russell can be a good director, but Joy was not his story to tell.

The biggest missed opportunity of the year, though – and therefore, the biggest disappointment of the year – was writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth. Starring Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston, the film explores jealousy, hate, pain, and female relationships in a unique way with a clear filmmaking vision, and it features great performances from two great actresses. Yet, it fails on every level.

I attended a Q-and-A with Perry and Moss for this film, and they were a fun, intelligent, informative pair who clearly had an idea for what they wanted to do with this film. I wanted so badly to like it. Knowing how smart and skilled they both are just made the experience of watching the film that much more frustrating. I cannot wait to see what Perry does next, and whatever it is, I will be first in line. For now, Queen of Earth is 2015’s biggest missed opportunity.

Check back tomorrow for more of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review as we count down the Top 10 Quotes of 2015, and check back each day this week for continued Year in Review coverage.

New movie review: Crimson Peak

Mia Wasikowska stars in director Guillermo del Toro's excellent Gothic romance Crimson Peak.

Most great directors are students of film history, and their movies are littered with references to cinema of the past. Others take it a step further and create whole-film homages to a style or genre. These are the movies really made for cinephiles and obsessives, for people with a deep knowledge of film history and a passion for the medium. They are films such as Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, or Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist.

These are all rich, textured works with a deep understanding and abiding love of their forebears, and viewers with that same understanding and love will get much more from these films than the average movie-goer. This is not to say you must be intimately familiar with the melodramas of Douglas Sirk to enjoy Far From Heaven or immersed in the cinematic language of 1940s film noir to get The Good German, but it helps.

I thought about this a lot while watching writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s lush, moody gothic romance Crimson Peak. Both in story and style, it is a film steeped in the past and reverential toward the foundation on which its creepy, haunted-house tale is figuratively built. The movie is riddled with nods to the work of Italian horror masters Mario Bava and Dario Argento, as well as to classic films such as The Haunting (1963) and The Innocents.

The horror genre is clearly a part of del Toro’s DNA, and Crimson Peak will appeal to similarly engaged terror aficionados. I wonder, however, how this faithful tribute to the high-style horror of the 1960s will play for the uninitiated. The numbers so far suggest it is not playing well. It will make back its money worldwide, but no one is going to be happy about $22 million domestic in nearly three weeks of release. If I were to guess, it is not succeeding because most people do not know what it is.

This is a film made for another time. It seems modern horror franchises – and they are all franchises now – are about scary dolls or scary kids or some combination of the two. Consider the Insidious movies, The Conjuring and its spinoff Annabelle, and the Paranormal Activity series. Much as these are enjoyable movies in their own right, they are also cheap, shock-fests. They are about the jump scares and the promise of mayhem.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with thrills-first moviemaking if the movies are good. This is simply the current state of horror. Audiences want the adrenaline rush of fear and the nausea of disgust, and why not? It can be a hell of a lot of fun, but it is not the environment into which a studio can launch a throwback like Crimson Peak.

I saw the movie on opening night in a three-quarters-full IMAX theater, and I can say firsthand the vast majority of the audience could make neither heads nor tales of the film. It is not a story issue but a tone issue. Modern viewers are primed for sarcasm and meta-humor and for the kind of movies that wink at the camera and say, “Hey, isn’t this silly but also a lot of fun?” There may not be a market for a somber, serious romance that prefers to make you shiver rather than shriek.

It is a shame, too, because Crimson Peak is a stunning film. It is absolutely gorgeous to look at, the acting is magnificent, and del Toro strikes a perfect balance between florid direction and straightforward writing. The premise concocted by del Toro and co-writer Matthew Robbins is simple and classical, which leaves plenty of room for del Toro to explore the world of the story.

Jessica Chastain in Crimson Peak.

Edith (Mia Wasikowska) is the daughter of a wealthy American businessman. Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) comes to the U.S. with his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), in search of investors in his clay mining operation. Thomas woos Edith, and after her father dies under mysterious circumstances, she is whisked away to England to live with Thomas and Lucille in their family’s decrepit estate, nicknamed Crimson Peak for the red clay soil on which it sits. The mansion is haunted, and the siblings clearly have some nefarious plot they are playing out, so Edith must survive threats from both the living and the dead.

The film opens with Edith speaking in voiceover: “Ghosts are real. That much I know. I’ve seen them all my life.” The first scene is of a young Edith being visited by the spirit of her dead mother, who tells her, “Beware of Crimson Peak.” The effects work on the ghosts is gorgeous in as much as the ghosts are convincingly ghoulish and frightening, but this is just their appearance. Their function in the story is less clear-cut. They are tormented souls, no doubt, but they are not malevolent. Ultimately, they seem to want what Edith wants: release from the pain caused to them by Crimson Peak.

Wasikowska continues to show tremendous range as an actress, and as Edith, she projects the perfect mix of strength and naïveté. Throughout the film, Lucille speaks of Edith’s fragility and youth, which Wasikowska easily taps into, but what makes Edith a great heroine is that her tormentors underestimate the fierceness of her will. Wasikowska is expert at channeling this determination and showing us Edith’s fight, even when she is confined to bed by illness or hobbled by a broken leg.

Chastain and Hiddleston play off each other beautifully as two people at different points on the same path. They are scam artists, of a sort, but Lucille is older and more embittered, while Thomas is slightly younger and more open to other possibilities in life. This is what makes Edith so threatening to Lucille – her youth. Chastain sulks and glowers and spits and injects a degree of humanity into a villain role that would be over the top in less sure hands.

The same could be said for the film as a whole. In less sure hands than del Toro’s or those of his incredible cast, Crimson Peak could be a Grand Guignol exercise in extravagance and eccentricity. It is not because everyone plays it straight with love of the craft and devotion to del Toro’s vision. Most audiences will not share that vision, but for those of us who do, we can be thankful there is a director like del Toro to put it on screen.

See it? Yes.

10 most anticipated movies (no, Star Wars is not one)

Michael Fassbender stars in Macbeth, one of Last Cinema Standing's 10 most anticipated movies of the fall.

We did it last year. We’ll do it this year. If we do it next year, that will make it a tradition. Last Cinema Standing’s 10 most anticipated movies of the fall actually falls in line with another annual tradition: the end of summer blockbuster season. It’s that time of year when Hollywood studios put away their superhero spandex and bust out their prestige pictures. That’s right – it’s Oscar-chasing time, which is just fine by me.

Before we get to the 10, a couple notes: First, merry Christmas to me as my two most anticipated movies both come out Dec. 25, so if you do not hear from me on Christmas Day, it is because I am at the movies. Second, if it seems these selections skew toward name recognition, they do. I love a good story, but what gets me excited about going to the theater is the idea of talented directors, actors, and craftspeople taking on interesting projects.

Last year, my most anticipated films provided an interesting dichotomy. That list included three films that wound up on my end-of-the-year top 10 list, including my No. 1 film of the year, Leviathan. However, it also included Interstellar and Unbroken, which I would call two of the worst films of last year. Hopefully, this year’s list will trend toward the former.

Finally, Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (and may need a nap again after saying that whole title) will not appear below. The new Star Wars film will probably top many of your lists and may be the most anticipated movie since The Phantom Menace in 1999. My anticipation level hovers somewhere between curiosity and dread. If it floats your boat, more power to you, but it does nothing for me. Here are 10 movies that do:

10. The Walk, directed by Robert Zemeckis

Release date: Oct. 9

Zemeckis is a great stylist, but he has a tendency to use visual flair for its own sake. However, when he has a compelling story to tie his more whimsical flights of technical fancy to, few can compare (see: the plane crash in Flight). If you have seen the Academy Award-winning documentary this film shares its story with, Man on Wire, you know what to expect. The true story of a tightrope walker (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) attempting to walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center should be a perfect vehicle for Zemeckis’ particular gifts.

9. Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach

Release date: Nov. 6

As a film fan, I am also a nerd when it comes to old Hollywood. The history of film often reflects the history of America, and this is doubly true in one of this country’s darkest chapters – the era of McCarthyism and communist witch hunts. Trumbo is the story of writer Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), who as a result of government pressure, was blacklisted by Hollywood for socialist leanings and fought back the best way he knew how: by writing. This is one of the most interesting and troubling periods in our shared cultural experience, and I cannot wait to see it brought to life on screen.

8. Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle

Release date: Oct. 9

Counting Steve Jobs, Oscar-winning director Boyle has made just 11 feature films. None is less than interesting, and several (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) are unimpeachably brilliant. Add to that Michael Fassbender – whom I consider the most exciting actor working today – and my favorite actress, Kate Winslet, and I will be there on day 1. I cannot say I am terribly intrigued by a biopic of the late Apple founder, but with Boyle, this cast, which also includes Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, and Michael Stuhlbarg, and an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, I think we have every right to expect something extraordinary.

7. Suffragette, directed by Sarah Gavron

Release date: Oct. 23

Led by a cast including Carey Mulligan, Meryl Streep, and Helena Bonham Carter, Suffragette details the rise of the feminist movement and the push for women to gain the right to vote in the U.S. I will admit to being unfamiliar with Gavron’s previous work, though screenwriter Abi Morgan co-wrote one of my favorite films of the last few years, Steve McQueen’s excellent Shame, which also starred the fearless Mulligan. The story is timely and relevant, and it will be exciting to see one of the most important struggles of American democracy dramatized.

6. Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo Del Toro

Release date: Oct. 16

Del Toro has a weird place in the Hollywood machine. He is the director of movies such as Blade II, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim, as well as a number of B-level horror films He also wrote the three Hobbit movies. There is nothing necessarily wrong with any of this work, uneven as some of it may be, but right in the middle of it all sits Pan’s Labyrinth, an absolute gem of a film. Crimson Peak, starring Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska, looks like a return to the gothic fairytale horror of that masterpiece, and if so, we are in for one hell of a ride.

5. The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Release date: To be determined

Greek writer-director Lanthimos is incapable of making a boring film, and there is nothing about the romantic sci-fi comedy The Lobster that suggests it will be his first. It is, however, his first feature in the English language, and it stars an enticing, eclectic international cast, including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, and John C. Reilly. About a futuristic society in which those who do not mate are turned into animals, Lanthimos does not appear to be dialing back the weirdness to appease the larger audience The Lobster seems likely to attract. For that, we should all be thankful.

4. Bridge of Spies, directed by Steven Spielberg

Release date: Oct. 16

Could anything feel more classic than a Spielberg-Tom Hanks war movie? Any Spielberg film is reason to be excited, and this one seems right up his alley, following an American lawyer (Hanks) who helps the CIA rescue an American pilot in the Soviet Union. The script is co-written by Joel and Ethan Coen, as well as by Matt Charman, and while the Coens have not had much luck handing over their writing to other directors (Unbroken; Gambit), this is Spielberg. For good, old-fashioned moviemaking, there simply is no one better.

3. Macbeth, directed by Justin Kurzel

Release date: December

Remember how I said Fassbender is the most exciting actor working in Hollywood today? Well, as neat as it will be to see his imitation of Steve Jobs, the idea of him playing one of William Shakespeare’s greatest creations is enough to make me shake in my seat. On top of that, Marion Cotillard is Lady Macbeth. If you cannot get excited about seeing two of the best actors of their generation play two of the best characters ever written, there is something wrong with you. Kurzel is a relatively untested director, but if he can balance the epic canvas of the story with the intimate drama of the characters, this has the chance to be something special.

2. The Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino

Release date: Dec. 25

Yeah, I grew up in the ’90s, and yeah, Taratino is one of the main reasons I love film. Django Unchained was neither the best nor my favorite of his films (I humbly submit Inglourious Basterds and Reservoir Dogs for those respective titles), but any new film from Tarantino is more exciting and more interesting than almost any new film by almost any other director (see one spot below on this list for the exception to this rule).

The Hateful Eight finds Tarantino back in the Western mode he explored with Django Unchained, and for this one, he brings along a similarly star-studded cast, including Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern, Zoë Bell, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, and many more. If you love movies, this is the kind of movie that is made for you.

1. The Revenant, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Release date: Dec. 25

Fresh off winning three Oscars as the director, producer, and co-writer of last year’s Birdman, Iñárritu returns with something wholly different. If you check out last year’s list of Last Cinema Standing’s most anticipated films, you will find Birdman in the No. 1 spot. That is not a coincidence. No director chooses more thrilling or intriguing stories to tell than Iñárritu.

He also brings along a crew of unrivaled skill: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (back-to-back Oscars for Birdman and Gravity); editor Stephen Mirrione (Oscar winner for Traffic, nominee for Iñárritu’s Babel); production designer Jack Fisk (Oscar nominated for There Will Be Blood); and costume designer Jacqueline West (twice Oscar nominated for Quills and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). What I am saying is the movie has one hell of a pedigree.

That alone would be enough – and frankly is enough – to land at the top of this list, but there is more. The film stars my favorite actor, Leonardo Dicaprio, in what looks like the most physically demanding role of his life. There is a lot of talk about Dicaprio possibly finally winning an Academy Award for this part. That would be great, but in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter. What matters is that Dicaprio is nearly certain to turn in the performance of his career. All of these factors combined, I cannot imagine another film more deserving of the title “most anticipated.”