Love & Mercy (2015)

By focusing on two distinct periods in the troubled life of Beach Boy Brian Wilson, this biopic avoids the dramatic intertia that plagues most films about famous musicians. There are two Brian Wilsons in this movie, and their stories are told concurrently.

Inside Out (2015)

The Pixar films have always demonstrated a pronounced reverence for the expanding mind inside every child, and that reverence finds a perfect storytelling outlet in the fifteenth movie released by the studio.

It’s as if they took the sentiment evoked by the ‘Production Babies’ list that appears in the credits of every Pixar film, and spun an entire movie out of it. 

Marshland (2014)

This dark serial killer drama swept the most recent Goya Awards (the Spanish Oscars) and has been generating comparisons to the first season of True Detective. It’s set in Spain in 1980, soon after the restoration of the democracy following the death of dictator Francisco Franco.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Writer/director George Miller returns to the insanely influential world of Mad Max thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome and schools all the imitators by delivering one of the most ridiculously entertaining blockbusters ever made — a metal-grinding, gut-crunching, petrol-guzzling powerhouse of an action movie that pulsates with tangible, weighty theatrics.

It Follows (2015)

Since dazzling film festival audiences the world over last year, this superlatively creepy American indie has gone on to become a sleeper box office hit and the most acclaimed horror film in decades.

The Ground We Won (2015)

Director Christopher Pryor and producer Miriam Smith’s follow-up to their stellar 2012 documentary How Far Is Heaven is one of the most powerfully cinematic New Zealand movies ever made. Although the stunning black and white visuals alone make this new documentary a must-see, it’s also ridiculously entertaining, repeatedly insightful and consistently hilarious.

Interstellar (2014)

This post-Kubrick sci-fi epic from writer/director Christopher Nolan (Inception, The Dark Knight trilogy) is his most ambitious film yet, and in my opinion, also his best. It’s unbridled awesomeness of the highest order, and a new precedent for scale.