8 Upcoming Movies That It's Actually Worth Getting Excited About

4. It's The Best Holocaust Movie In Decades - Son Of Saul

OK, I'm cheating a little with this one as it's a movie I've actually already seen (and thus know is great), but as its release date is still a way off, it definitely deserves to be talked about. Especially as it's hitting US cinemas (there still isn't a set UK release date, although it will be playing the London Film Festival) on December 18th, putting it in direct competition with Star Wars: The Force Awakens and ensuring it will be greatly overlooked. Son Of Saul was one of the biggest surprises of Cannes 2015, an experimental film from a first time director that used long takes, incredibly shallow focus and painfully confined locations to create a suffocating, personal account of life in a late-war Holocaust camp. It never quite matches it's incredible opening (we're talking Schlinder's List level greatness there), but the drive and singular vision make it an overwhelming experience, making it no surprise when it went on to win the Grand Prix (the festival's second biggest award). There's been a tendency in recent years for films looking at the Holocaust to simply lean on the sheer horror of the event to conjure knee-jerk emotion, rather than really exploring it cinematically. Son Of Saul is not one of those films, taking a look at something relatively untouched on screen (Sonderkommandos, Jews who aided in the operation of the gas chambers - as harrowing a life as it sounds) in a totally unique way. It's also available on 35mm, which is always nice.