You’ll want to keep an eye out for a devastating stop-motion romance, a quirky horror Western, and the Studio Ghibli film it’s been impossible to see in the U.S. until now.
1. 45 Years
Sundance Selects
Filmmaker Andrew Haigh established his bona fides as a chronicler of delicate, deliciously smart stories about contemporary gay life with the romance Weekend and HBO series Looking, which he produced and helped direct. In Haigh's new film, 45 Years, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) and Kate (Charlotte Rampling) live sturdy, staid existences far removed from the city-centric dramas of the characters in those earlier works, but they're treated with the same unblinkingly keen gaze.
The movie is one of those in which nothing seems to happen on the surface — a couple prepares for their 45th wedding anniversary, the unround number because an earlier celebration had to be delayed for health reasons — but below that, emotions roil like warring leviathans. They're unsettled by the discovery of the body of Geoff's girlfriend, who died in the Alps and whose remains were never found. Half a century later, she manages to throw this seemingly stable relationship into quiet turmoil by spinning Geoff off to consider what could have been and forcing Kate to look at her marriage as someone's second choice — Rampling's tremendous in the role. It's a heartbreak in slow motion.
Where to see it: 45 Years is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with more cities to come.
2. Anomalisa
Paramount Pictures
One of 2015's most surprising, frank, and expressive sex scenes is in Anomalisa, and it's done entirely in stop-motion, with puppets. Would you expect anything less from Charlie Kaufman, who burst onto the film scene in 1999 with the screenplay for Being John Malkovich, in which a frustrated puppeteer learns that the ultimate use of his craft involves pulling the strings of a famous human? Anomalisa, which Kaufman wrote and directed with first-timer Duke Johnson, is a stunning combination of the artificial and the painfully human, offering a concentrated dose of the surreal humor and bittersweet empathy Kaufman became famous for in his screenplays for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation. But it also has the distance to acknowledge the awfulness of its main character, Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), alongside his pain.
Michael, who we follow on a business trip to Cincinnati, is convinced he's the only unique individual on Earth, a delusion that speaks to his own sense of isolation and disconnect, and one that the film cleverly visualizes. When he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who's there for the conference, he thinks he's met his soulmate, though everything we've seen suggests he's done this before and will do this again. Anomalisa chronicles Michael and Lisa's interlude while suggesting there's a world outside of its main character's warped reality in which life goes on without him, despite his convictions.
Where to see it: Anomalisa is now playing in limited release, with more cities to follow.
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