Retrospective 2015 – A Year in Film

December

Festive Season Frolics

Image sources: Sony Pictures, Lionsgate, 20th Century Fox & Warner Bros.

As usual the final month of the year featured several “limited” releases in the US, strategically placed for the awards season, but that most people in the world won’t see until the start of 2016. As a result we had to make due with several Christmas movies and a few blockbusters to boot.

We got the traditional seasonal comedies in the form of Seth Rogen’s irreverent ‘The Night Before’ and the generational comedy ‘Love the Coopers’, as well as the 21st century re-imagining of a classic story in ‘Victor Frankenstein’ and Ron Howard’s biographical Whale-battling epic ‘In the Heart of the Sea’.

But December of 2016 will likely only be remembered for one gargantuan elephant in the room.

The Force Devours

Image sources: Lucasfilm/Disney

December… and perhaps 2016 in general is only going to be remembered for one thing really, the resurrection of the ‘Star Wars’ universe by its new overlord Disney and their high priest J.J. Abrams, with perhaps the most anticipated film release of all time and 7th movie in the franchise, ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’.

After an extended marketing campaign of over 18 months which featured multiple, and way too many spoilers, the first Disney-owned Lucasfilm production was unleashed to entertain the globe with an epic adventure that breathes new life into one of the biggest movie franchises ever. We can all now look forward to a future of multiple sequels, prequels and spin-offs for years to come, not to mention Christmas gift ideas for the next several generations of your family.

Those We Lost

Image source: Universal, MGM & 20th Century Fox

The final month of the year meant the loss of veteran versatile actor Robert Loggia (85) (Scarface, Big) and Italian actor Gabriele Ferzetti (90) (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Once Upon a Time in the West), as well as Oscar-winning cinematographer and documentarian Haskell Wexler (93) (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and TV star Wayne Rogers (82) (M*A*S*H, Cool Hand Luke).

Here’s hoping for an even more varied and stronger movie year in 2016, when we can look forward to everything from early year award contenders like Alejandro González Iñárritu and Leonardo DiCaprio’s frontier survival drama ‘The Revenant’ and Quentin Tarantino’s latest film ‘The Hateful Eight’, as well as huge blockbusters like ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’ and the latest in the “X-Men” franchise ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’, and of course everything in between.

Hope you had a good 2015 and see y’all in 2016.

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