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by storm in a tsunami of Star Wars fever and box office records? We wouldn't presume. But a couple of days before the Force awoke the cast stopped by to talk to us.

“You need to do three Westerns to call yourself a Western director. Any less, you are just dabbling in the genre” two-time Golden Globe-winner Quentin Tarantino recently told the HFPA.

Golden Globe winner Alejandro Gonzalez Iñiarritu’s tour de force shoot for The Revenant can only be described as “extreme film making”. Seeking out remote locations in the Canadian North (and later in Argentina), utilizing only natural light and staging elaborate tracking shots with longtime collaborator, DP extraordinaire Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki, Iñiarritu has crafted a film that Leonardo DiCaprio described to the HFPA as “John Ford meets Tarkovsky”.

Adaptations of Michael Lewis's books (The Blind Side; Moneyball) have proven to be box office gold in the past. But even fans of the brilliant writer might have been hard pressed to imagine a film version of The Big Short, his riveting but intricate account of the collateralized debt crisis and how a group of analysts predicted the financial meltdown it caused in 2008.

Director Ron Howard had previously collaborated with Chris Hemsworth in Rush, which was nominated for two Golden Globes in 2014. When the actor brought him the script for In the Heart of the Sea, Howard loved the story and “saw the opportunity for a great filmmaking adventure”.

Todd Haynes was nominated for a Best Sreenplay Golden Globe for Far From Heaven (2002), which also garnered nominations for star Julianne Moore, supporting actor Dennis Quaid and composer Elmer Bernstein. That movie was a tribute to the films of Douglas Sirk; his new effort, Carol, is also set in the 1950s and as lusciously photographed.

45 Years, by British director and producer Andrew Haigh ,is a minimalist yet devastating portrait of a couple spinning out of emotional orbit. Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay) are retired to the English countryside and making plans for their forty-fifth anniversary celebration.