See the contenders for best picture at the 87th Academy Awards.
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The film is a biopic of Chris Kyle, a Texan rodeo rider who became a Navy SEAL sniper, credited with 160 kills while on duty in Iraq. When Kyle was discharged from service in 2009, he wrote a book about his exploits,American Sniper, much of which is the source of Jason Hall's screenplay. With Bradley Cooper playing Kyle and Sienna Miller his wife, Taya, Eastwood opens the story with a young Kyle picking up some traditional values about guns and the nature of manhood from his father.
Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, a has-been movie star known for his superhero role Birdman in a blockbuster movie franchise about 15 years earlier. Now separated from his wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan) and struggling to connect with his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), he's mounting a stage production of a Raymond Carver story on Broadway.
Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette
Richard Linklater’s remarkable film, shot sporadically over 12 years, has little drama to speak of and a “hero” who’s decidedly passive, but it works because of the scope of its true subject: life itself. The boy is Mason (Ellar Coltrane), whose journey from six-year-old innocent to 18-year-old on his first day at college we follow, but the film is just as much about the grown-ups who attempt to deliver him safely into adulthood.
Director: Wes Anderson
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori
Set in 1930s Zubrowka, a fictional, snowy state about to plunge into a war, the rich and the lavish flock to The Grand Budapest Hotel, overseen by the very camp and very attentive concierge, Gustave M (Ralph Fiennes).
Skipping back and forth between three time periods, the story examines Alan Turing's formative school years, his work cracking the Nazi's Enigma code during WWII, and his later persecution for being a homosexual in an era when such a thing was still illegal in the UK.
Stars: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth, Oprah Winfrey
Director: Ava DuVernay
Selma begins with the Rev Dr Martin Luther King jnr (David Oyelowo), the Baptist minister who became the leader of the fight for civil rights, speaking aloud, but his rhythm is off and one of the great orators of the 20th century sounds uncertain. He's in a hotel room, struggling with his tie, and his audience consists solely of his wife, Coretta (Carmen Ejogo). Dr King may be about to receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, but his public triumph is matched to personal doubts.
Director: James Marsh.
Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox, Harry Lloyd, Simon McBurney, David Thewlis, Maxine Peake, Emily Watson.
Eddie Redmayne stars as celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking in this part-biopic, part-love story, which tracks one of the world's most brilliant minds from his university days, where he met and fell for Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), through to his heartbreaking motor neurone disease diagnosis at 21, their struggle with the degenerative disease and his ground-breaking scientific work.
Stars: Miles Teller, J.K.Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
Director: Damien Chazelle
In this black gem of a film, set in an elite music school, the atmosphere is conditioned not by joy but by fear. Music-making means sweat, tears and quite a lot of blood. Young drummer Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller) often drives himself to the point where his hands bleed.