If you’d told me at the start of this year that two of the big hopes for Oscars in 2015 would be Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, I’d have laughed you out of the room. But that was then, and here we are now. The reason? Boyhood: Richard Linklater’s latest opus. A remarkable twelve years in the making, Boyhood charts the simple tale of Mason Evans Junior, raised by a single mom with a largely absent father, as he grows from the age of six to the age of eighteen when he departs home for college. In this remarkable process, we see the actors literally grow and change in front of your eyes. It’s a bizarre, moving, engaging and even disturbing experience; the closest feeling I can relate to is the inexplicable loss of watching Benjamin Button. Gave me the same sense of sadness. Nothing really happens in the film, but – and perhaps because of it, because it’s a sense of a window into a single small life – it’s still one of the most remarkable cinema-going experiences of the year.