Wow, and I thought that 2014 had been pretty great. It's been another fantastic year for cinema in 2015, a fairly consistent quality (bar a few stinkers) interrupted by soaring highs at frequent intervals, from films that have showcased new talent in-front and behind the camera to films that prove there is still life in long-running or dormant franchises. Box office be damned, we're talking pure quality here, and it's worth being able to know which films you should have seen in 2015.
As such, below is a list of films that I would consider the "Must See" films released in the UK in 2015. These aren't necessarily the best films of the year, the most artistic or the most "worthy" - these are just great films that I can see having a certain amount of longevity to them, films that impress in a variety of different ways by doing something or multiple things so well that it would a crying shame to have missed out on them.
Bearing in mind that I haven't seen every film released this year, in release date order...
Whiplash
A film about both the risks and rewards of extreme ambition, Whiplash follows aspiring jazz drummer Andrew Neiman as he is tutored by esteemed conductor Terence Fletcher at the prestigious Shaffer Conservatory. With brilliant performances from both Miles Teller and J K Simmons, a great jazz soundtrack and a director who manages to make an extended drum solo one of the most captivating sequences of 2015, Whiplash was an early addition to this list and has firmly remained here ever since.
You can read my full review of Whiplash here.
The only things I knew about Ex Machina going in to it was that it's a British made science fiction film, written and directed by Alex Garland (writer of 28 Days Later and Dredd) and that the plot revolved around the idea of an artificial intelligence. I was sold on it instantly.
Ex Machina is the story of Ava, an artificial intelligence created by wealthy business man and technological genius Nathan, told through the eyes of Caleb. Caleb is a computer programmer in Nathan's company who wins a competition to go and visit Nathan in his home/research laboratory for a week, and ends up with the opportunity to perform a variant of the Turing Test on Ava in order to determine if she qualifies as a true artificial intelligence - that is, if she can be classed as a true consciousness.
