Clint Eastwood's American Sniper, featuring Bradley Cooper as US marksman Chris Kyle, and Jean-Marc Vallée's Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon as contemporary explorer Cheryl Strayed, offer old-school true stories of solid stripe (both January 16th), but, released the same day, Damien Chazelle's Whiplash – in which music teacher J K Simmons bellows frantically at jazz drummer Miles Teller – properly hammers the viewer into submission. Just as fine, though very different in colour, J C Chandor's A Most Violent Year (January 23rd) stars Oscar Isaac and the unavoidable Jessica Chastain in a crime drama set during New York's early-1980s social meltdown.
Never mind all that. What about the melding of minds between Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon that has had higher-browed cineastes slavering for the last year? Mr Anderson's adaptation of Mr Pynchon's Inherent Vice seems a bit recherché for the Oscars, but the 1970s comic noir, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a chemically confused PI, is the stuff of future cults.
If any film is capable of beating Boyhood to the best picture gong it is, surely, Ava DuVernay's Selma (February 6th): the story of the 1966 Civil Rights march from Selma, Alabama. Bizarrely, the cast is full of Brits: Oxford's David Oyelowo is Martin Luther King, Leeds' Tom Wilkinson plays Lyndon Johnson and south Londoner Tim Roth is George Wallace. Go figure.
The indestructible Jennifer Aniston looks to have a decent chance of an best actress nomination for Cake (February 20th), an indie drama set in a chronic-pain group, but nobody will be prising the award itself from the fingers of an overdue Julianne Moore. The gifted ginger plays a professor suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's Disease in well-received drama Still Alice (March 6th). Given that scenario and Moore's standing, the high-street bookies' 1/6 on a win (at time of writing) is not so mean as it at first sounds.
Likely to figure in the Oscars race for best animated picture is Disney's Big Hero Six (January 30th), a charming tribute to Japanese cartoons that should divert parents as much as their offspring. The best chance of a domestic place in the more high-profile Oscar showdowns is in the same competition. Tomm Moore's Song of the Sea (sometime in March), follow up to the Irish director's Oscar-nominated Secret of Kells, features the voices of Lisa Hannigan and Brendan Gleeson in another gorgeous film soaked in Celtic mythology.
Two strong contenders for best foreign language picture are also coming our way in early spring: Damián Szifrón's Wild Tales (March 27th) is an unashamedly mainstream portmanteau of dark revenge tales; Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure (April 10th) begins with a spectacular avalanche and goes on to tell a slippery tale of survivor's guilt.
Oh forget about the bleeding Oscars. Just because Hollywood is obsessed with the things that doesn’t mean we have to drink the Kool Aid. There is an abundance of fine, more intellectually meaty releases coming our way before the Avengers officially launch the summer.
Cheekily released a week after the spank-heavy 50 Shades of Grey (surely no coincidence), Peter Strickland's magnificently transgressive The Duke of Burgundy (February 20th ), which goes among two women carrying on a Sadomasochistic affair in an unspecified European nowhere, finds the director of Berberian Sound Studio again exercising his passion for the less-respectable corners of 1970s Italian cinema.
Kornél Mundruczó's White God (February 27th), deserved winner of Un Certain Regard at Cannes, sees the dog population taking over contemporary Budapest. The many fans of Swedish Marxist absurdism will be eager to catch Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (April 24th) after its triumph at the Venice Film Festival.
No person with brains between his or her ears should miss Xavier Dolan's startlingly original, deeply funny Mommy (March 20th). Still just 25, Monsieur Dolan, feisty Québécois protégé, shoots his tale of a troubled young man and his long-suffering mother in a narrow ratio that consciously mirrors the screen of a mobile phone.
All these films are worth seeing. All will do something to ease the march towards the warm months. But we still may end up enjoying an animation about a crude aquatic life form as much as any of the Swedish, French-Canadian or Argentinean masterpieces. Yes, SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water (March 27th) is on its way and this time the damp fool is in 3-D. We can't wait.
