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The 20 best films of 2015
By Mike D'Angelo, A.A. Dowd, Jesse Hassenger, Noel Murray, Adam Nayman, Katie Rife, Nick Schager, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Dec 17, 2015 12:00 AM
Every year is a good year for movies, provided you’re willing to wander a little off the beaten path. But in 2015, it was hard to go more than a few steps without hitting something major, something essential. More even than usual, the year’s best films took different shapes, sizes, and routes to eyeballs. Multiplexes were unusually rich with adventurous big-budget movies, as Hollywood handed the keys to the castle to real artists. At the same time, fine smaller films from all over the globe made their way from festivals to theaters and on to streaming platforms, where any viewer with a working web connection could get a taste of something different. What the 20 films below have in common, beyond the strong impression they made on our ballot-filing critics, is a general habit of saying something significant about the here and now, even when transporting audiences to a subatomic there; a fantastically reproduced then; and a lawless, post-apocalyptic later.
20. James White
Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon are equally riveting as a son and mother attempting to cope with both the death of their father/husband and an increasingly dire cancer prognosis in Josh Mond’s piercingly intimate indie debut. With his handheld camerawork creating persistent close-up proximity to his characters, Mond roots his film in the frightened anger of James, a young man who’d be spiraling out of control if not for his profound connection to his mom. The impending end to their co-dependent relationship heralds a terrifying future for the young man, whose inner turmoil manifests itself in a series of violent outbursts. Highlighted by a wrenching bathroom scene involving fantasies of things that will never come to pass, James White is a spellbinding saga of someone forced, through loss, to face his true self. [Nick Schager]
19. Mustang
One by one, the five sisters in Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang see the conservative guardians of their rural Turkish village try to crush their spirits, by controlling what they wear, limiting where they can go, and marrying them off as soon as possible. Yet the girls keep rebelling in whatever way they can for as long as they can—by sneaking out, defying punishments, and covering for each other. The intimacy of Mustang’s framing and the casual realism of its young actresses creates a feeling of connection that keeps the film from becoming some dour drama about patriarchal cruelty. Although the situation’s grounded in a specific setting and a handful of memorable characters, like nearly all films about confinement, it can also be read as pure metaphor: a paean to indomitable, untamable adolescence. [Noel Murray]
18. The Martian
The Martian is not a difficult film. It’s a crowd pleaser, full of popular comedic actors; upbeat disco hits; patriotic-but-not-jingoistic optimism; and peans to the popular religion of people who consider themselves too smart for religion: science. It comes by its snappy sensibilities honestly, with a script by Buffy The Vampire Slayer alum (and, therefore, witty repartee specialist) Drew Goddard and direction by Ridley Scott, who has already proven many times over that he can direct the hell out of a sci-fi adventure. Scott’s finesse with the genre is most evident in the action scenes, where humor momentarily gives way to edge-of-your-seat tension in the endless blackness of space. It’s not quite a comedy—no matter what the Golden Globes say—but it is the funniest movie about facing certain death alone on an alien planet you’ll see this year. [Katie Rife]
17. Approaching The Elephant
Every democracy has its growing pains, but wish special luck to one that puts voting rights in the hands of those barely old enough to tie their own shoes. Exhibiting an observational objectivity that might make Frederick Wiseman proud, first-time filmmaker Amanda Rose Wilder documents the first (and, as it turned out, second to last) academic year of the Teddy McArdle Free School, where classes were voluntary and the rules were decided upon by teachers and preteen pupils alike. There’s both drama and a good deal of savage comedy in the faculty’s weary attempts to stay true to their educational experiment, especially once the rowdy grade-schoolers they’ve empowered begin abusing their liberties. Beyond the car-crash fascination of it all, Approaching The Elephant has a lot to say about squaring big theories against harsh realities; plenty of ideals get tested, even if the students never do. [A.A. Dowd]
16. The Forbidden Room
A hilarious and edifying intervention against “slow cinema,” The Forbidden Room is filled to the brim with stories, which keep rudely tumbling over top of each other like monkeys in a barrel. In compiling a tribute to lost films of the silent era, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson simultaneously satirize and sanctify their source material: Their pitch-perfect pastiches of early 20th century melodramas are exactly as ridiculous, grandiloquent, and perverse as any cinephile could hope (or dream). A gallery of louche art-house movie stars, from Geraldine Chaplin to Mathieu Amalric, helps put the whole thing over the top, where it stays, hovering, for two hours—more than enough time to get from the bowels of a stranded submarine to the peak of a sweltering volcano and all points in between. [Adam Nayman]
15. Crimson Peak
Unsuccessfully marketed as a horror movie, this lush, florid Gothic romance represents the high-water mark for director Guillermo Del Toro’s gifts as a pure stylist. A simple Bluebeard fable expressed through extravagant set and costume designs, ingenious effects, insect imagery, and boldly deployed colors, Crimson Peak lets its subtexts and metaphors grow wild, until they overwhelm the movie like creeping vine. Mia Wasikowska, whose Pre-Raphaelite features have made the go-to star for 19th century literary adaptations and Gothic pastiches, plays an American writer who marries a dissolute English aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) who shares the decrepit family estate with his creepy sister (Jessica Chastain). While Del Toro’s tendency to place sweeping visual imagination over narrative originality may not be for everyone (our own Katie Rife wasn’t too hot on the film when she reviewed it), it’s still hard to deny that few films released this year took over the space of the screen with as much confidence as Crimson Peak. Like fine licorice, this is an exquisite experience for those who might already have a taste for it. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
14. 45 Years
Can you ever really know another person, even one you’ve shared a life with for four and a half decades? Writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) turns the run-up to a wedding anniversary into an awful awakening, as one half of a seemingly content couple comes to recognize the third party—the ghost of an old romance—that’s haunted their marriage from the start. 45 Years shatters the comfy fantasy of happily growing old together, even as stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, in two of the year’s most quietly devastating performances, sketch a whole lifetime of cohabitation in their scenes together. “Drama” is the word most will use to describe this wounding work, but for a certain portion of the audience, it will provoke more dread, more horror than anything in, say, It Follows. [A.A. Dowd]
13. Hard To Be A God
One of the filthiest-looking films ever made, this staggeringly realized, nearly three-hour Russian sci-fi nightmare plunges viewers into the day-to-day life of a backwater planet stuck in the Middle Ages. Earth scientist Anton (Leonard Yarmolnik), who has lived for years among the locals as a nobleman named Don Rumata, becomes involved in a power struggle against the forces conspiring to keep the people ignorant and superstitious, but viewers would be excused for mentally checking out of the plot early on, given how it’s overwhelmed by director Aleksei German’s grotesque, deranged, Hieronymus Bosch-like vision of a world of cruelty, suffering, and shit. “This isn’t Earth,” declares a narrator at the start of the movie, but of course the point is that it is Earth, or perhaps just one particular country with a long history of purges, repressions, and political strongmen. A unique, immersive, unsettling experience, Hard To Be A God was the career-long passion project of the late German, who died when it was in the late stages of post-production. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
12. Bridge Of Spies
Can all historical procedurals be directed by Steven Spielberg? He can apply his talent any number of places, and should, but with Lincoln and now Bridge Of Spies, he’s made the transformation of potentially dust-dry grandfather-ready material into crackling, beautifully made entertainment something of a late-career hallmark. Though it’s anchored with a few instant-classic suspense sequences, much of this film about the exchange of a Soviet spy for some American soldiers, brokered by non-spy lawyer Tom Hanks, is quietly talky. It’s helped enormously in this regard by the hired hands of the Coen brothers, who lend the film’s dialogue the deadpan, sometimes accidental wit of impenetrable bureaucracy. But as with Lincoln, the director assembles each scene with such verve that the ebb and flow of negotiation becomes as compelling as the more cloak-and-dagger material. Add this to the increasingly crowded field of Spielberg’s best. [Jesse Hassenger]
11. Inside Out
Top-tier Pixar films nearly always take simple, hooky ideas in unexpected directions, but rarely has the studio pulled a bait-and-switch quite as sublime as the one in Inside Out. Thanks in large part to Amy Poehler’s ingratiating, trustworthy voice, it takes a while for audiences to catch on that her character “Joy”—the movie’s designated tour guide through one pre-teen girl’s anthropomorphic emotions—may not be as savvy as she seems about what her human host Riley actually needs. Want to know why watching Inside Out devastates so many parents? It has a lot to do with the idea that children’s “core” memories and personality traits are no more permanent than their baby teeth. Take that rather sophisticated theme, add in the magnificent candy-colored design of Riley’s headscape and some assured visual storytelling—rendering white-knuckle action sequences as melancholy poetry—and the result is another Pixar masterpiece. [Noel Murray]
By Mike D'Angelo, A.A. Dowd, Jesse Hassenger, Noel Murray, Adam Nayman, Katie Rife, Nick Schager, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Dec 17, 2015 12:00 AM
Every year is a good year for movies, provided you’re willing to wander a little off the beaten path. But in 2015, it was hard to go more than a few steps without hitting something major, something essential. More even than usual, the year’s best films took different shapes, sizes, and routes to eyeballs. Multiplexes were unusually rich with adventurous big-budget movies, as Hollywood handed the keys to the castle to real artists. At the same time, fine smaller films from all over the globe made their way from festivals to theaters and on to streaming platforms, where any viewer with a working web connection could get a taste of something different. What the 20 films below have in common, beyond the strong impression they made on our ballot-filing critics, is a general habit of saying something significant about the here and now, even when transporting audiences to a subatomic there; a fantastically reproduced then; and a lawless, post-apocalyptic later.
20. James White
Christopher Abbott and Cynthia Nixon are equally riveting as a son and mother attempting to cope with both the death of their father/husband and an increasingly dire cancer prognosis in Josh Mond’s piercingly intimate indie debut. With his handheld camerawork creating persistent close-up proximity to his characters, Mond roots his film in the frightened anger of James, a young man who’d be spiraling out of control if not for his profound connection to his mom. The impending end to their co-dependent relationship heralds a terrifying future for the young man, whose inner turmoil manifests itself in a series of violent outbursts. Highlighted by a wrenching bathroom scene involving fantasies of things that will never come to pass, James White is a spellbinding saga of someone forced, through loss, to face his true self. [Nick Schager]
19. Mustang
One by one, the five sisters in Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang see the conservative guardians of their rural Turkish village try to crush their spirits, by controlling what they wear, limiting where they can go, and marrying them off as soon as possible. Yet the girls keep rebelling in whatever way they can for as long as they can—by sneaking out, defying punishments, and covering for each other. The intimacy of Mustang’s framing and the casual realism of its young actresses creates a feeling of connection that keeps the film from becoming some dour drama about patriarchal cruelty. Although the situation’s grounded in a specific setting and a handful of memorable characters, like nearly all films about confinement, it can also be read as pure metaphor: a paean to indomitable, untamable adolescence. [Noel Murray]
18. The Martian
The Martian is not a difficult film. It’s a crowd pleaser, full of popular comedic actors; upbeat disco hits; patriotic-but-not-jingoistic optimism; and peans to the popular religion of people who consider themselves too smart for religion: science. It comes by its snappy sensibilities honestly, with a script by Buffy The Vampire Slayer alum (and, therefore, witty repartee specialist) Drew Goddard and direction by Ridley Scott, who has already proven many times over that he can direct the hell out of a sci-fi adventure. Scott’s finesse with the genre is most evident in the action scenes, where humor momentarily gives way to edge-of-your-seat tension in the endless blackness of space. It’s not quite a comedy—no matter what the Golden Globes say—but it is the funniest movie about facing certain death alone on an alien planet you’ll see this year. [Katie Rife]
17. Approaching The Elephant
Every democracy has its growing pains, but wish special luck to one that puts voting rights in the hands of those barely old enough to tie their own shoes. Exhibiting an observational objectivity that might make Frederick Wiseman proud, first-time filmmaker Amanda Rose Wilder documents the first (and, as it turned out, second to last) academic year of the Teddy McArdle Free School, where classes were voluntary and the rules were decided upon by teachers and preteen pupils alike. There’s both drama and a good deal of savage comedy in the faculty’s weary attempts to stay true to their educational experiment, especially once the rowdy grade-schoolers they’ve empowered begin abusing their liberties. Beyond the car-crash fascination of it all, Approaching The Elephant has a lot to say about squaring big theories against harsh realities; plenty of ideals get tested, even if the students never do. [A.A. Dowd]
16. The Forbidden Room
A hilarious and edifying intervention against “slow cinema,” The Forbidden Room is filled to the brim with stories, which keep rudely tumbling over top of each other like monkeys in a barrel. In compiling a tribute to lost films of the silent era, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson simultaneously satirize and sanctify their source material: Their pitch-perfect pastiches of early 20th century melodramas are exactly as ridiculous, grandiloquent, and perverse as any cinephile could hope (or dream). A gallery of louche art-house movie stars, from Geraldine Chaplin to Mathieu Amalric, helps put the whole thing over the top, where it stays, hovering, for two hours—more than enough time to get from the bowels of a stranded submarine to the peak of a sweltering volcano and all points in between. [Adam Nayman]
15. Crimson Peak
Unsuccessfully marketed as a horror movie, this lush, florid Gothic romance represents the high-water mark for director Guillermo Del Toro’s gifts as a pure stylist. A simple Bluebeard fable expressed through extravagant set and costume designs, ingenious effects, insect imagery, and boldly deployed colors, Crimson Peak lets its subtexts and metaphors grow wild, until they overwhelm the movie like creeping vine. Mia Wasikowska, whose Pre-Raphaelite features have made the go-to star for 19th century literary adaptations and Gothic pastiches, plays an American writer who marries a dissolute English aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) who shares the decrepit family estate with his creepy sister (Jessica Chastain). While Del Toro’s tendency to place sweeping visual imagination over narrative originality may not be for everyone (our own Katie Rife wasn’t too hot on the film when she reviewed it), it’s still hard to deny that few films released this year took over the space of the screen with as much confidence as Crimson Peak. Like fine licorice, this is an exquisite experience for those who might already have a taste for it. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
14. 45 Years
Can you ever really know another person, even one you’ve shared a life with for four and a half decades? Writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend) turns the run-up to a wedding anniversary into an awful awakening, as one half of a seemingly content couple comes to recognize the third party—the ghost of an old romance—that’s haunted their marriage from the start. 45 Years shatters the comfy fantasy of happily growing old together, even as stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, in two of the year’s most quietly devastating performances, sketch a whole lifetime of cohabitation in their scenes together. “Drama” is the word most will use to describe this wounding work, but for a certain portion of the audience, it will provoke more dread, more horror than anything in, say, It Follows. [A.A. Dowd]
13. Hard To Be A God
One of the filthiest-looking films ever made, this staggeringly realized, nearly three-hour Russian sci-fi nightmare plunges viewers into the day-to-day life of a backwater planet stuck in the Middle Ages. Earth scientist Anton (Leonard Yarmolnik), who has lived for years among the locals as a nobleman named Don Rumata, becomes involved in a power struggle against the forces conspiring to keep the people ignorant and superstitious, but viewers would be excused for mentally checking out of the plot early on, given how it’s overwhelmed by director Aleksei German’s grotesque, deranged, Hieronymus Bosch-like vision of a world of cruelty, suffering, and shit. “This isn’t Earth,” declares a narrator at the start of the movie, but of course the point is that it is Earth, or perhaps just one particular country with a long history of purges, repressions, and political strongmen. A unique, immersive, unsettling experience, Hard To Be A God was the career-long passion project of the late German, who died when it was in the late stages of post-production. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
12. Bridge Of Spies
Can all historical procedurals be directed by Steven Spielberg? He can apply his talent any number of places, and should, but with Lincoln and now Bridge Of Spies, he’s made the transformation of potentially dust-dry grandfather-ready material into crackling, beautifully made entertainment something of a late-career hallmark. Though it’s anchored with a few instant-classic suspense sequences, much of this film about the exchange of a Soviet spy for some American soldiers, brokered by non-spy lawyer Tom Hanks, is quietly talky. It’s helped enormously in this regard by the hired hands of the Coen brothers, who lend the film’s dialogue the deadpan, sometimes accidental wit of impenetrable bureaucracy. But as with Lincoln, the director assembles each scene with such verve that the ebb and flow of negotiation becomes as compelling as the more cloak-and-dagger material. Add this to the increasingly crowded field of Spielberg’s best. [Jesse Hassenger]
11. Inside Out
Top-tier Pixar films nearly always take simple, hooky ideas in unexpected directions, but rarely has the studio pulled a bait-and-switch quite as sublime as the one in Inside Out. Thanks in large part to Amy Poehler’s ingratiating, trustworthy voice, it takes a while for audiences to catch on that her character “Joy”—the movie’s designated tour guide through one pre-teen girl’s anthropomorphic emotions—may not be as savvy as she seems about what her human host Riley actually needs. Want to know why watching Inside Out devastates so many parents? It has a lot to do with the idea that children’s “core” memories and personality traits are no more permanent than their baby teeth. Take that rather sophisticated theme, add in the magnificent candy-colored design of Riley’s headscape and some assured visual storytelling—rendering white-knuckle action sequences as melancholy poetry—and the result is another Pixar masterpiece. [Noel Murray]