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8) The Revenant

There's an astonishing hour-long experimental film in The Revenant, and an entertaining 90 minute Western. Unfortunately, the way in which it cuts between the two halves of its nature fatally undo both. The first, which focuses on Leonardo DiCaprio's desperate quest for troph, er, revenge is a harrowing and bold attempt to take people inside the mind of a man who has been pushed to the edge and just kept going. But every time that it leaves that film and shows whatever Tom Hardy is mumbling about, it reminds us that we're watching a pretty cliched story that is being dressed up to look more significant, and it's hard not to come away thinking that the whole thing is an exceptionally well-executed shell game.

7) The Big Short

There's a palpable tension at the heart of The Big Short between its need to educate and its desire to entertain. That tension breaks through in its many fourth wall-breaking moments, and it gives the story an energy that is pretty much unique in director Adam McKay's filmography, but the film never completely resolves it, making for an experience which is both consistently funny and invigorating, yet deeply unsatisfying. It's an admirable attempt to try to explain the complexities of the 2007-08 economic collapse in a way which is broadly entertaining, but its jokes and its anger never quite gel.

6) Bridge of Spies

Re-teaming director Steven Spielberg with Tom Hanks for the first time in more than a decade, Bridge of Spies is at its best when it deals with the relationship between Hanks' lawyer and a Soviet spy, played brilliantly by Mark Rylance. Their scenes together are funny, charming, yet underpinned by an intense interest in how two men from different ideological points can find common ground. It loses a lot of its charm once it moves to Berlin and gets into the weeds of international espionage, and that will probably lead to it being remembered as one of Spielberg's more minor works. Still, minor Spielberg is better than a lot of directors' major works.

5) The Martian

Ridley Scott's work has become increasingly bleak and pessimistic in recent years, culminating in the one-two punch of Prometheus and The Counselor, two films that displayed relatively little faith in humanity. That makes The Martian one of the most startling about-faces in recent memory. It's a big, open-hearted celebration of science and the possibility of mankind to do great things if we set aside our differences. It also manages to retain most of the heavy-duty science of the book without becoming impenetrable, and maintains a light, breezy and funny tone without dumbing everything down. Is it a great work of cinema? Probably not. But it's an immensely enjoyable and genuinely uplifting slice of populist entertainment that doesn't feel like a Best Picture winner, which may be the greatest thing about its nomination.

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