REVIEW OF 2015 - BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

1. Lee Ping Bin (The Assassin)

2. Stuart Dryburgh (Blackhat)

3. Emmanuel Lubezki (Knight of Cups)

4. Edward Lachman (Carol)

5. John Seale (Mad Max: Fury Road)

6. Josee Deshaies (Saint Laurent)

7. Christophe Beaucarne (The Blue Room)

8. Martin Gschlacht (Goodnight Mommy)

9. Peter Suschitzky (Tale of Tales)

10. Roger Deakins (Sicario)

REVIEW OF 2015 - BEST SOUND

1. The Walk

2. Knight of Cups

3. Goodnight Mommy

4. The Assassin

5. The Witch

6. The Revenant

7. Sicario

8. Mad Max: Fury Road

9. Star Wars: The Force Awakens

10. The Nightmare

REVIEW OF 2015 - BEST EDITING

1. Huang Chih Chia and Liao Ching Song (The Assassin)

2. Margaret Sixel (Mad Max: Fury Road)

3. John Gurdebeke (The Forbidden Room)

4. Elmer Leupen (Eisenstein in Guanajuato)
5. Jonathan Alberts (45 Years)

6. Francois Gedigier (The Blue Room)

7. Kevin Jerome Everson (Park Lanes)

8. A. J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman and Mark Yoshikawa (Knight of Cups)

9. Affonso Goncalves (Carol)

10. Jerry Chater (Innocence of Memories)

REVIEW OF 2015 - BEST MUSIC

1. Galen Johnson, Guy Maddin and Jason Staczek (The Forbidden Room)

2. Lauren Marie Mikus and Hanan Townshend (Knight of Cups)

3. Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood and The Rajasthan Express (Junun)

4. Tom Holkenborg (Mad Max: Fury Road)

5. Michael Giacchino and Tom MacDougall (Inside Out)

6. Matthew Smith (Tangerine)

7. Lim Giong (The Assassin)

8. Alexandre Desplat and Milena Fessmann (Every Thing Will Be Fine)

9. Johann Johannsson and Jonathan Watkins (Sicario)

10. Michael Drayton and Terence Blanchard (Chi-Raq)

REVIEW - KNIGHT OF CUPS (TERRENCE MALICK)

Terrence Malick has apparently run out of new ideas. Fine. Nobody else makes movies like this. Nobody else works like he does. Why should he need new ideas? In Knight of Cups, the master repurposes his technical schematics in service of a story of spiritual dissatisfaction, a desolate disconnect with the real world that Malick treats with embittered apathy. What need for new ideas here, in an artificial town filled with artifice, not isolated by desert and sea but in brutish ignorance of them? Malick the recluse paints Los Angeles as a soulless space, the functional architecture more in tune with the money that made it than the materials, and everything dwarfed by the sky. There's little inspiration up there, or so these people seem to feel. Promise doesn't pay off in Knight of Cups - perversely, this hotbed of talent is where talent goes to wither away into gaucherie and irrelevance. Malick turns away from what is real, and from what is really worthwhile, and wallows in the lavish worthlessness of what he finds. Naturally, it's a technical masterclass - again, what need for new ideas, when the old ones are still so fresh, so idiosyncratic, so brilliantly employed - yet one senses an effort to mitigate the film's innate excellence with the sheer weight of its weightlessness. Knight of Cups is an intentionally difficult film, even necessarily difficult. It's thoroughly admirable, but questionably enjoyable. Does Malick regard his techniques as valid here as ever before, or does he see what we see: a genius suppressing his own genius, willfully assigning his latest film into obscurity? It'd be a fitting, and wholly believable, idea - a new idea, indeed.