6. Slow West
There are several points during Slow West, first time writer-director John M. Maclean's impressive exploration of the Western starring Michael Fassbender, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ben Mendelsohn, where the imagery recalls the Coen Brothers. It's a bold claim, and what impresses the most about Slow West is not just this remarkably assured visual palette, with compositions which make the most of the stunning locations, but also the authentic sense of time and place the characters inhabit. Smit-McPhee's naive young man, desperately hunting down the woman he loves, is an outsider much like the viewer, while Fassbender's hardened outlaw is a guide for the audience much as he is for his young companion. Slow West is as much a road trip movie as it is a Western and Maclean handles the shifting moods - wryly amusing, moving, tragic - with the assured confidence of a veteran filmmaker.