Tomorrow, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shall hold their 88th awards ceremony, and the eve of Hollywood's celebration of itself represents the last possible moment that you might compile and publish any kind of year in review, and still expect it to be in the slightest way relevant. If you waited any longer, you might as well keep waiting for another decade, till nostalgia kicked in and you could claim to be examining the past from the presumably superior perspective of the future. So, with that in mind—and realizing that I completely whiffed it back when anybody cared about 2014—I present my favorite films of 2015.
It is not as well-founded a list as I would have hoped; my original rule back when I started Kinemalogue was to have seen at least one hundred movies from any given year that I intended to cast judgment upon. As of today, having just seen San Andreas (a pleasant but strikingly mediocre disaster-filled diversion) and The Gift (an expertly-machined but somewhat pointless-seeming showcase for its writer, director, and star, Joel Edgerton), I've gotten my master list up to only 62. This means, further, that I've not seen a lot of important (or "important") movies. This is particularly the case when it comes to 2015's international films—to my discredit, I started watching Hard to Be a God yesterday, realized fifteen minutes in that I found the shooting style kind of obnoxious, reflected that it was three freaking hours long, and finally decided that my brief span on this Earth was better spent watching Jaws for the second time in a week. And, heck, I'll cop to not seeing fully three of the films that shall battle it out for Best Picture tomorrow night. But then again, considering that neither The Big Short nor Spotlight really provoked any special enthusiasm in me—and also considering that movies cost money that I don't have, whereas you'd have to pay me to watch Brooklyn—I hope that you'll forgive me.
Anyway, my point is that the following list of 2015's best films is imperfect, and that what I'm about to say is perhaps even a little irresponsible. But since I've surely said it a thousand times already on this very blog and elsewhere, it's not like I'm going to try to walk it back now. Inasmuch as 62 films can't not be called a significant and representative sample of last year's cinematic output, I'm gonna say it with some confidence, too: 2015 was by far the weakest year since I started paying attention to movies again. 2015 sucked, and it sucked raw, and it was disappointing as hell.
2015 was a year that produced many acclaimed films, yet whenever I stuck my neck out to try to enjoy a piece of high-falutin' art, I was punished for it, nearly every time, from the psychologically spurious
Phoenix to the horrifyingly transphobic
Tangerine to the dishwater-dull
Girlhood to the ultimate penalty
—the utter, soul-devouring void that was
The Assassin.
2015 was also a year that saw many of my very favorite directors releasing new films, and falling short of their legacies. On one hand, we had the likes of Michael Mann, Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg, and Quentin Tarantino, who made some good movies that merely didn't measure up to their own bodies of work. And then we had folks like Brad Bird, Sam Mendes, and the poor, poor Wachowski
s, who actually made
bad movies, sometimes even outright
terrible ones.
And, finally, 2015 was a year that promised the return of so many beloved film franchises, yet out of the eleven major franchise continuations that I saw, only
two of them managed to live up to so much as the general
idea of their vaunted predecessors (or even their not-so-vaunted predecessors!). Meanwhile, there were nine whole fictional universes
—the worlds inhabited by James Bond, the
Terminator, the
Fantastic Four, the
Avengers, the
Impossible Missions Force, the
hungry dinos of Jurassic Park, the
Kings of Tampa, and the
Jedis and the Sith, respectively
—that each wound up
worse in 2015. (Well, given that the Star Wars Universe is a very bimodal thing, perhaps it's too much to say that
The Force Awakens made anything "worse.") But, Star Wars aside, sometimes they were made much worse. Indeed, sometimes their failures had nothing at all to do with mere
expectations, because they were dire pieces of shit on a
completely objective level. (By the way, did I mention that Sam Mendes was one of the great directors who made a really bad movie in 2015? Let us be plain:
Spectre is the fucking
pits, the kind of movie that only even looks
okay if you stand it next to something truly
abysmal, like
Terminator: Genisys.)
But last year did have its upsides, and while I may, at some point in the near future, kick 2015 around a little bit more with a Worst Of list—gosh, I haven't even seen Pixels or The Cobbler yet—let's not dwell on the negative. Let us look instead to the diamonds in the rough: few and far between they may be, but they're here!
First let's kick out the honorable mentions, films that were great, if not quite great enough: Rick Famuyiwa's coarse yet riveting coming-of-age adventure
Dope; Matthew Vaughn's deliriously tasteless
Kingsman: The Secret Service; Marjane Satrapi's edgy psychological horror-comedy
The Voices; Robert Zemeckis' groovy Philippe Petit biopic
The Walk; and Ryan Coogler's swell repositioning of the Rocky franchise
Creed. They're certainly all worth a poke.
And now, with all the bloviating out of the way, the top ten of 2015!
***
10. ROOM (8/10)
In [the] room, a young woman has been imprisoned by a predator, and there she has remained for a long and degrading seven years. Five years ago, she gave birth to a son, and in that room she has raised him, trying her best to show him that he is loved, while making a home for both of them out of the worst place in the world. Presently, she learns that her captor has been laid off—that he will soon not be able to afford the house or this prison, and she retains quite enough sanity to know what that means. Her efforts to escape, which have never truly ceased, now take on the urgency of pure survival.
Okay, it just can't be profitably argued that Lenny Abrahamson's Room does not break down badly around the hour mark—nor that it does not bottom out completely, with a truly abysmal scene that drags an inexplicable William H. Macy completely down into the muck along with it. Up until that point, however, it is as fantastic a thriller as 2015 had to offer. More importantly, it returns to form quickly afterward, and with tremendous grace.
Obviously, Room is typically a thing of abject misery; but it earns its miserablism. It may never entirely earn what must have been the absolute central conceit of its source material, the vaguely magical world that Ma has created for her son Jack—but, then again, that's not really what the motion picture adaptation of Room is concerned with, anyway. If Brie Larson wins Best Actress for her complex portrayal of this victim of unimaginable torments, then the Academy will have done some justice this year. Sure, there's a fair argument to be made that anybody could play Ma, because after seven years in a shed, virtually anything would go, and practically no choice would seem "wrong." I wouldn't make that argument myself (even if we have seen the role played on SVU at least a dozen times without any noticeable falsity). But there's a shot of Larson's face late in Room, as the camera interrogates her own motivations, and it's perhaps the most heartbreaking two seconds of the year. Larson deserves her gold.
When John Fitzgerald kills Hugh Glass' son, and then leaves him to die in a shallow grave, the grievously injured Glass crawls out and across North America to find him in this 19th century revenge thriller, inspired, as the kids say, by true events.
I'm always open to a good tale of survival and a good tale of revenge, and
The Revenant offers both in a gorgeously well-crafted package. Between Emmanuel Lubezki's ever-brilliant cinematography and Jack Fisk and Jaqueline West's deeply-immersive production and costume design, it's easily the most real-feeling period piece of the year
—and Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy's performances push it right over the top into unambiguous greatness. The ending could use some work, but then, so could
Birdman's; and so, if Alejandro Inarritu wins Best Director again, or if he earns a second Best Picture Oscar for his producers, then I can't be angry, even if I disagree. However, if DiCaprio and Hardy don't get
their statues, I'll honestly be a little bummed.
Two women living in a bizarre half-hallucinated universe experience a breakdown of their relationship, brought on by one's increasingly-bent sexual demands.
The best "pure" romance of the year—there are perhaps two more that are better, although they are not chiefly what you would call "romances"—The Duke of Burgundy is everything director Peter Strickland's previous, terrible film, Berberian Sound Studio, was not. Sound Studio actually made the very bottom of my Worst of 2013 list; so it's nice to see a man completely redeem himself and put out a movie that makes my Best. Despite a lot of dangerous tangents into hallucinatory nonsense, Burgundy makes its psychedelic style work for its story, which at its heart may be the most human—and humane—of 2015. I loved it, and it makes me happy, also, that I could put at least one art film on my top ten list; no mean feat in a year where so many other art films were so terrifyingly, mystifyingly bad.
When callow idiot Zach Cooper moves next door to famed author and dire oneiromancer R.L. Stine, it's only a matter of time before he stumbles into the man's house, knocks over his bookcase, and unleashes all the monsters that the novelist had confined within the pages of his Goosebumps manuscripts. (Also starring a girl.)
Not an art film, is this. In fact, Rob Letterman's
Goosebumps is safe corporate filmmaking at its most resolute: Sony dug up a brand name, hired a committee of writers to spin a narrative around it
—which they did mostly by ripping off
Gremlins,
Fright Night,
In the Mouth of Madness, and
New Nightmare wholesale
—and then handed it to a director of hacky CGI-filled comedies, who subsequently filled its most important role with Jack Black. There's nothing in that sentence, I'm sure, which compels you to believe me when I say
Goosebumps was actually great. And, hell, maybe it isn't
—but I had a
great time, far, far better than I ever could have expected or hoped, and that's what counts around here. Indeed, even its slavish adherence to trope works in this dumb movie's favor, turning it into a film that is a fairly excellent example of a 1980s-style kid's adventure while, at the exact same time, serving as a frankly hilarious parody of the genre. Anyway, I honestly loved it, and at this point in my life, I no longer foolishly expect anyone else to ever
really understand me. Fantastic poster, too.
Sleep paralysis is a terrifying condition. How terrifying is it? Watch The Nightmare and find out.
Rodney Ascher won fame for making Room 237, an awful documentary about the conspiracy theories floating around Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. But he's cemented his status as one of the most exploitative documentarians around with The Nightmare, which is vastly better while being in no sense classier. It does, at least, have the benefit of being more personal, since Ascher himself is a sufferer of sleep paralysis.
The real credit to be given The Nightmare, however, is how damned scary it winds up, despite how tremendously and deliberately hokey it is on every level of its construction: Ascher stages reenactments that might not have passed muster on Unsolved Mysteries, and then he throws in a ridiculous moment (infographic and all!), where he implies that sleep paralysis is exactly like a contagious disease, and all you need to contract it is to have the idea of it planted in your mind—perhaps, for example, by watching this very film. Still, let's not go too far: the sympathy shown to the sufferers of sleep paralysis here is tremendous, and what really gets you, long after you've watched it, is the knowledge that whether or not Ascher's recreations are a little threadbare, they nevertheless represent real experiences for people who have been ground right into the dust by a condition that is all but unimaginable for those of us not afflicted. The great strength—and the great horror—of The Nightmare is that it makes you imagine it. And I've lost more than a little sleep myself.
Edith Cushing is seduced by a dashing Englishman and goes to live with him and his sister in a rotting, haunted Gothic mansion. But it's not necessarily the ghosts that young Edith has to fear.
What can be said about Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak without just pointing at pictures of it and saying, "See?!" Well, its failure at the box office is certainly worth a little bit of pissing and moaning; I don't think I've been this disappointed in the American public in some little while. But the main thing is this: it's just gorgeous. It is gorgeously shot, and even more gorgeously designed—Tom Sanders is not just a fucking treasure, he might really be the single best production designer working in pictures today. Peak was my favorite movie of 2015 to just sit and look at. Oh, sure, it has a story too, and it's totally and perfectly fine.
Will Smith and Margot Robbie join forces and dance around their obvious attraction to one another as they embark on a series of globe-trotting cons.
Yes, their characters have names in the film—Nicky and Jess, respectively—but the fuel in the perfect entertainment machine that is Glenn Ficarra and John Requa's Focus is the sheer appeal of its movie star leads. A good version of Focus could still exist without Smith and Robbie; the amazing version of Focus that does exist would absolutely not. And so, in a better world, Focus would've made more money; in a truly correct world, Smith and Robbie would be excitedly hoping to get a pair of Oscars tomorrow, instead of at least half of them sitting the whole thing out because Hollywood as a whole is racist as fuck and the Academy is possibly worse. Anyway, there's an awful lot that could still go wrong with the upcoming Suicide Squad—the words "written and directed by David Ayer" topping that particular list—but the chance to see Smith and Robbie together again in another frothy fun caper means that I'll be there, butt-in-seat, on opening night, and I encourage you to do the same.
Not long after being released from prison, Scott Lang finds himself dragooned into a superheroic heist using his newfound shrinking powers, while he tries to reconnect with his family.
Speaking of "fun comic book movies," Peyton Reed's
Ant-Man is the
definition of that phrase, easily beating out the more beloved (yet demonstrably worse)
Guardians of the Galaxy as the best film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's otherwise lackluster Phase 2. Oh, sure, the ending is still hamstrung by the need to keep Scott Lang running around and available for future films; there is a version of
Ant-Man without its invidious connection to the MCU that I have no doubt would make my Best of the
Decade list. But the version we got is still really, really Goddamned good.
Imperator Furiosa and Max Rockatansky become uneasy allies in their running battle against the warlord of the wasteland, the Immortan Joe. Then cars explode, for two truly wonderful hours.
I feel bad for initially giving
Fury Road only a 9/10. I had to sit with it a while (and rewatch it three times) to realize that, yes, it is pretty much a perfect cinematic object. I still believe that the biggest overt problem is what I said back in May: it's the glimpsing inclusion of the Doof Warrior, which promises more than it actually delivers in terms of the film's otherwise-awesome metal soundscape. But now that I've had time to reflect, I can tell you, almost a year later, why the film felt (very, very, very slightly) disappointing the first time I saw it: it is structured so that its action scenes actually descend in quality from the first one to the last.
And yet, when every action scene is obviously a 10/10, and each one is still better than
every other action scene of 2015, I was plainly wrong not to give George Miller's masterpiece the highest possible score I could. Now, don't get me wrong. It's still not as good as
Gravity, and maybe that was a big part of my previous annoyance too: the fact that
Fury Road, which is certainly incredible in its own right, has unfairly eclipsed the greatest piece of experiential cinema ever made, to the point that when action movies are made in the future, they'll be compared to
Fury Road instead of the truer benchmark represented by Alfonso Cuaron and Sandra Bullock's misadventures in space. But, anyway, that's terribly unfair to
Fury Road itself. Therefore, let it be known that I reject my previous crabbiness with my whole heart.
A billionaire inventor invites a code nerd to his polar fortress for the purposes of making sexy smalltalk with his fembot. And that's when things get weird.
Well, Fury Road might the most visceral entertainment of 2015, but Ex Machina, which is plenty visceral in its own right, is also the smartest. And it's not just that it's so incredibly current. Oh, sure: it's nice to see the best two films of last year tackling overtly feminist themes with such gusto—and Ex Machina digs far more deeply into things than Fury Road ever thinks about doing, because (when you get down it) Miller's film is really just one more story about barbarous sex slavers, no matter how cleverly it builds its tale and action sequences around its core ideas. Meanwhile, Ex Machina is just as fantastic a sci-fi allegory as Fury Road, but one that also has room for a lot more nuance than what you're likely to get with a powder-white warlord who has giant tumors and direly-mutated sperm. Anyway, nuance is certainly not nothing.
Its intelligence goes much further than that, however. In this regard, it's very much like Fury Road, in that it combines its fantastic allegory with a story that is also completely and totally literal, a thing which can be enjoyed on a purely narrative level as one more technologically-advanced spin on the oldest Gothic horror story in the big Gothic horror book. Throw in some hard sci-fi thoughtfulness that has nothing to do with allegory, then, and you've already got yourself a novella of some substantial genius. But, of course, Ex Machina is not a novella; it's a film. Therefore it would be nothing at all without the things that make it a film.
But I don't know if I could use all ten of my fingers if I tried to count the number of debut films more assured in their direction than this one—indeed, if Alex Garland wants to keep going, we might be looking at the birth of one of the all-time greats (or maybe not; his screenwriting, after all, swings wildly up and down in its quality). Regardless, as shockingly refined as Garland's sensibilities already are, this doesn't give nearly enough credit where it's due. Ex Machina, being almost purely conversational, depends crucially upon its actors, and they give everything they've got—above all Alicia Vikander, who was nominated for an Oscar this year, only for the wrong movie. Let's hope she wins it anyway. Meanwhile, Ex Machina itself was nominated for Best Original Screenplay (which, in 2015, it quite obviously is) and for Best Special Effects. The Special Effects award is less clear-cut, but I hope it wins, because it deserves it, even beyond Fury Road. This is not because Ex Machina's CGI creation of Eva—her inner workings almost always exposed to view—is seamless. It is seamless, in technical terms, yet it draws all your attention nonetheless: it is a quiet spectacle, constantly unfolding, where you find yourself convinced utterly of Eva's robotic nature, but keep staring because it is so convincing and alien and weird and absolutely amazing. I only go on about it because I think it's the one element I didn't get to expound upon in my original review; when everything about a movie is so perfect, you tend to run out of space. Ex Machina is so good that it goes a long way to redeeming a not-so-great year, all by itself.
***
And that's the show, folks. Hey, maybe 2016 will be a year where my Best Of list won't consist mostly of 8/10s!
