The Coen Brothers are back with Hail, Caesar!—a 1950s Hollywood goose chase, with Clooney, of course.

Please hold all judgy Affleck judgments until judgment day in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Also, hello Wonder Woman!

It’s Fassy v McAvoy again, as a disheartened Magneto aligns himself with Apocalypse, the first and most powerful mutant, in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Rusty and Ryan team up in The Nice Guys, Shane Black’s 70s throwback action-comedy.

And from the team behind Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls comes the epic and gorgeous Kubo and the Two Strings.

Iñárritu is a[n] unabashedly simplistic filmmaker, and he knows that to be true so he covers up his inability to say anything of profundity with showmanship. Emmanuel Lubezki is his perfect partner, because like Iñárritu his images over-compensate, and at two and a half hours their abilities begin to wear thin, and what you have is two filmmakers grasping at how to reign in a film that has fallen completely out of their control. In a way it is fitting that their intentions to make The Revenant as realistic as possible left both men lost in the woods of their own ideas. —Willow Catelyn

Beautiful. Terrifying. Visceral. Thrilling. Epic. Spiritual. Alejandro González Iñárritu's uncompromising, visionary masterpiece is a cinematic tour de force and reminds us that there are still auteurs out there that are unafraid to explore the untapped possibilities of the medium. Easily the greatest western of this era and probably the best since Eastwood's Unforgiven. Unmissable. —Broe_Dameron

“This is a tightly-plotted mystery-thriller starring the ‘wicked lady’ herself, Margaret Lockwood, here playing the nice girl who gets involved in intrigue on a train when she meets the respectable Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty, in a perfect piece of casting).

“When the old lady vanishes without trace, she enlists Michael Redgrave to assist and they are up against silence and denial from all the other passengers (characters beautifully drawn as usual from Hitchcock).

“With plenty of atmosphere, this film is incredibly British, benefiting from a perceptive screenplay from Gilliat and Launder, the cinematography of Jack E Cox and the editing of RE Dearing. It is one of Hitch’s finest films, and despite having a period charm, never seems to date.” —loureviews

“It shouldn’t be so surprising that he would be able to make his death the last piece of the puzzle—he’d been rehearsing it for decades. [In Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars] he goes so far as to perform a retrospectively chilling version of ‘My Death’, and also getting murdered on stage by Mick Ronson’s guitar (as ways to go, that’s not bad).

“This whole thing, though, has an almost funereal vibe—as rock lore goes, the audience had no idea what Bowie meant when he said this would be their last show ever, whether he was retiring, or getting a new band, or going back to his home planet, or what, and it’s hard not to think of the circumstances behind his real-life (?) death 40+ years later—might there still be another incarnation left? One of the reasons his death is hitting us all so hard is probably because we know in some part of our brains it might take years for us to accept it fully, if we ever do.” —Joe

2015 saw cinema attendance smash box office records, topping $38 billion globally. Take that, pirates! (Just jokes. Piracy is up, too. Way up. This industry still desperately needs a bold new solution to that problem.)

A totally worthwhile read this month: Sally Jane Black’s review/essay on problematic, cisgender perspectives in The Danish Girl. Pro tip: don’t tl;dr this one. The comments are lively, and it is officially the most-liked review in Letterboxd history. Ever.

Do you follow Kathy’s Korner? Letterboxd member Joe Zappulla has been watching films with his Mom and getting her to review them. The results are often controversial, always hilarious; Kathy awarded just two stars for Carol. Well, not stars exactly: “I kept on thinking what my rating was gonna be, whether it would be vaginas, or cameras. So let me give you my rating: 2 vaginas”). Kathy also watched the Rocky movies before tackling Creed. Her prediction? “There’s gonna be a sequel. I told ya guys with Taken 3, there’s gonna be a sequel. And I’ll be there. It got me. I’m a Creed fan.”

Check out this growing list of #52FilmsByWomen pledgers (people pledging to join Women in Film’s challenge to watch at least one movie a week in 2016 directed and/or written by a woman). If you want to get really specific with your challenge, here’s a list of 1980s-era films directed by women, a list of 2016 films to come, and this list from our community manager Gemma—a selection of writer-directors from “down under” (Australia, New Zealand and their Pacific Island neighbors).

Congrats to Reuben Pereira, who scored the Sphero app-enabled BB-8 droid in our pre-Christmas Star Wars: The Force Awakens competition. Nice work.

Mmmm. A list of movies featuring significant scenes involving pizza. To be followed, naturally, with a selection of crap films.

Farewell (for now) to long-time Letterboxd member Dirk, but welcome back—briefly—to Adam Cook! And welcome back heartily to Gustav.