Blue Jasmine

Life for Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) is comfortable; she has a rich husband (Alec Baldwin); expensive house and maids to pamper on her every need. Jasmine’s life is simple and relaxing that is until her husband is arrested by the FBI and loses the entire contents of the house. This means that Jasmine has to move down the socioeconomic ladder to live with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), in San Francisco. Struggling to cope without the riches she married into, Jasmine always looks as though she is on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Captain Phillips (correct spelling this time....)

The East coast of Africa is dangerous place for shipping vessels to sail through as the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans are home to a number of African pirates who hijack ships and demand huge sums of money from the businesses or governments of the respective ships. Hijackings are frequent enough to be a concern and the ship MV Maersk Alabama, captained by Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks), is unlucky enough to fall victim to an act of piracy whilst travelling from the Port of Salalah in Oman to Mombassa in Kenya.

The Call

Set in a Los Angeles 911 emergency call centre, The Call stars Halle Berry as a 911 operative who receives a terrified call from a teenage girl about a man braking into her house. The call is cut off and Jordan (Berry) makes the terrible mistake of redialling, alerting the killer of the girl’s location in the process. She quits the desk job, but a call (via an untraceable phone) from another teenage girl in peril places Jordan back into the hot seat.

Inside Llewyn Davis

Having just embarked on a solo career, Llewyn Davis finds his career not going in the direction he had wished. Regularly found performing at small venues in Greenwich Village in 1960s New York, Llewyn Davis’ life takes a turn for the worse when his best friend’s girlfriend announces that she is pregnant and he might be the father. Homeless Llewyn Davis attempts to balance this with his desperate attempts to make himself noticeable within the music industry.

Prisoners

Incendies was one of the best films of 2010, it was hard-hitting, brutally emotional and contained a twist that was like something from – I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you.  Denis Villeneuve’s first English language film is set in a small town in Pennsylvania in which two young girls are kidnapped. The police investigation, led by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads to the arrest of a mentally handicapped Alex Jones (Paul Dano), but when there is not enough evidence to charge him of the crime, he is released. This enrages Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), one of the fathers of the missing girls, who then proceeds to kidnap Alex and torture him in an attempt to extract information about the whereabouts of the two missing girls.

In a World...

In a world where men dominate the positions for voiceover artist in trailers, just like the one we live in now, one woman (Lake Bell) decides to follow her dream and auditions for the role as voiceover artist for a trailer for a romantic comedy, and after a successful audition she gets the gig. Carol Solomon impresses producers so much that she has a chance to provide a voiceover for the upcoming trailers for the Amazon Games, one of the biggest literacy phenomenons in memory. Up against her is the next Don LaFontaine and her own father (Fred Melamed).

12 Years a Slave

Directed by Steve McQueen 12 Years a Slave is based on the memoir by Solomon Northup, of the same name, which tells the story of his twelve years as a slave. Solomon is lured to Washington where he is drugged, kidnapped and eventually sold to William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch). After a fight with John Tibeats (Paul Dano), Solomon Northup’s life is no longer safe at Ford’s plantation thus he is sold to the violent plantation owner, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender).