Hello, dear readers! 2015 was a superb year for film, and my top 11 list (10 plus one to grow on) include a wide range of genres. From subversive action films to tender love stories, from extreme violence to gentle lovemaking, it's all here!
With one exception: I have yet to see The Revenant. I wanted to wait to make this list until I saw Leo get mauled by a bear, but now that I'm buried under a ton of snow along with everyone else east of the Mississippi River, who the fuck knows when I'll be able to see it. Plus, it's practically tradition for me to miss one big Oscar bait movie before making my Best Of list--last year it was Birdman and the year before it was Zero Dark Thirty. I promise I will watch and review The Revenant, but sadly it will not be on this list.
Two of the films on this list are a bit sneaky, since they were *initially* released in 2014, but did not receive a release in the United States until 2015. But both of them are so good they clawed their way onto this list...and into my heart.
So please enjoy, The Best (and the Rest) of 2015!
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11) The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Based on the graphic novel/memoir by Phoebe Gloeckner, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is an uncomfortable, very brave film that showcases the sexual awakening of 15 year old Minnie Goetze (played with wide-eyed beauty and a fuck you attitude by Bel Powley). Minnie is a creative, extremely smart young lady who begins to sleep with her mom's boyfriend, the 30 year old Monroe (Alexander Skarsgaard, perfectly cast as a handsome man with VERY flexible morals).
The film walks a razor thin line between honoring Minnie's self-determination while never celebrating what is obviously an unequal relationship between her and Monroe. So, Minnie is not raped or forced by Monroe--but it is never suggested that their relationship is OK.
What I liked most about The Diary of a Teenage Girl is that it focuses on Minnie's point of view. She is the main character and her choices, wise and unwise, are what this movie is about. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Minnie is not a victim, but the fact that she's sleeping with an older man is not eroticized either. The experience is not about HIM or any male viewers, it's about HER and the collective experiences of young women who struggle and gasp their way into womanhood on their own terms.
10) Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I had zero intention of seeing this movie when it first came out. I'm just not a Star Wars person. Never have been. But I ended up going and having a fucking great time. The Force Awakens may not be as emotionally complicated as the films I usually enjoy, but it's very fun and entertaining.
And I'm not going to lie: a mega blockbuster in a very old skool genre featuring a woman and a black man as the leads just makes me want to lick up some tasty tasty misogynist and racist tears. I'm sitting here like Mr. Burns going excellent, excellent at the dismay of racist and sexist dick weasels everywhere. And yes, people were actually mad about the diverse casting choices, although they are small minority of fools.
But I also really dug Han Solo's trademark snark, Adam Driver as emo Kylo Ren, and cute lil BB8. The Force Awakens is just a fun, pleasurable time at the movies.
9) Spotlight
This intellectual drama has an ensemble cast where no one actor tries to upstage any of the others. Like the actual journalists on the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe who investigated and broke the story of rampant sexual abuse among Boston priests, the actors work together for the greater good.
Spotlight has emotional depth without being cloying. It also doesn't play into easy stereotypes about heroes and villains, pointing out that otherwise good people can and do ignore evil that is right under their nose. Think of Joe Paterno of Penn State. *He* didn't rape kids, but he knew it was going on and didn't do enough to stop it. Likewise, Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston, knew of allegations of child abuse within the Catholic priesthood in his town. But instead of addressing the issue head-on, he simply shuffled the abusive priests around, thus affirming their criminal behavior.
It's ironic that in a country that is sometimes exceedingly protective of children (arresting parents for letting their kids play in the park alone, for example), so many people for the sake of maintaining a snow white faith in their church allowed the most devastating thing that could happen to a child occur again and again. My (perhaps biased?) beliefs--that people will allow unimaginable depravity in the name of religion/conformity/maintaining of a hierarchy--certainly were confirmed by the story behind this film. But my faith that human compassion and goodness ultimately wins out was also confirmed. Spotlight is an excellent film that shows how average people just doing their job can make all the difference in the world.
8) Room
I'm seeing a pattern among the films I enjoyed in 2015: sad and/or devastating, yet hopeful. Even some of the most depressing or violent movies I saw this year had flickers of hope and redemption. And this is especially true for Room. Based on the heartbreaking novel by Emma Donoghue (who also wrote the screenplay), Room is about a woman, Joy, who was kidnapped when she was about 17 and kept in a locked shed for 7 years. She has a 5 year old son, Jack, the product of near nightly rapes by her captor, "Old Nick". Joy has allowed Jack to believe that the entire universe is their little room, but he's getting to an age where cracks begin to form in this innocence-preserving fantasy. And that's when Joy decides to figure out a way to escape.
Room rests heavily on the shoulders of Brie Larson, who allows the character of Joy to be depressed and angry--not a "perfect victim"--and Jacob Tremblay, an amazing child actor. Room is as far away as one can get from the stereotypical "Lifetime movies" which cram complex and difficult subject matter into a clean narrative. Since half of Room takes place outside the titular room, once Joy and Jack make it out alive, the part where there should be a "happy ending" is actually the beginning of another struggle for Joy and Jack (Joy especially) as they reintegrate back into society.
Room is a tough movie, and I can only imagine it's tougher for people with children. But it also celebrates to bonds between mother and child and the life-affirming love one can bring the other.
7) What We Do in the Shadows
This is one of the "sneaky" movies I mentioned above that was released in 2014, but not in the US until 2015. But goddamn, this movie is so hilarious it had to make it onto my list. It was hands down the funniest movie I saw this year.
What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary that follows the day to day life of four vampires who are roommates in modern day New Zealand. They have to deal with issues such as divvying up household chores, picking up dinner (i.e. people they meet at clubs), and avoiding vampire hunters.
Directed by Jermaine Clement (from Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi, the film is very quick-witted and sharp. It pokes generous fun at the tropes of vampire movies and books, such as when Viago (played by Waititi) says "I think we like to drink virgin's blood because it sounds cool", or the flamboyant Deacon (Jonny Brugh) explains, "When you becomes a vampire, you become very sexy."
What We Do in the Shadows is the perfect film for those who absolutely hated Twilight and its ilk, as well as for those who miss Flight of the Conchords.
6) The Hateful Eight
As a Quentin Tarantino fan, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I saw The Hateful Eight. Another one of Tarantino's homages to western films, The Hateful Eight is nearly three hours long and takes place primarily in one room. It features a cast of characters so...well...hateful, I'm pretty sure the devil wouldn't allow them into hell. It features grandiose speeches and turns of phrase, as well as violence and cruelty out the wazoo. And damn if it wasn't a whole lot of fun!
Lead by Kurt Russell in an over the top performance as John "The Hangman" Ruth, on his way to Red Rock, Wyoming, to bring a lady criminal (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice, The Hateful Eight is very character and dialogue driven. The plot is pretty simple: eight strangers are forced by a blizzard to hunker down in Minnie's Haberdashery. Mistrust and tension run rampant, and it's not long before the violence begins.
Many people will find The Hateful Eight a little too hateful, and I don't blame them. But to me, Tarantino, for all his personal foibles, has always been a master storyteller who has a way of making you laugh in the face of humanity's darkest impulses.
5) It Follows
Perhaps the most original horror film I've seen in years, It Follows is infused with a sense of dread. The film takes place in the suburbs of Detroit in a decade that doesn't exist. What I mean by this is that there are CRT televisions and polaroid cameras that suggest the mid-1980's, as well as strange mobile devices that suggest post-2015. But the time period is irrelevant.
Jay, a young woman in her late teens, has sex with Hugh, a slightly older guy from out of town. After they fuck in his car, Hugh reveals a terrible secret to her: he has passed along a curse. A supernatural being, which can take the form of anybody, from a close friend to an old lady, will follow Jay at a walking pace until it catches and kills her. In a literal sense, she can run but can't hide. And the only way to get rid of the curse is to sleep with someone else. BUT if that someone else is caught and killed by the thing, the curse reverts back to Jay, and then to Hugh, all the way back to the very beginning.
This is all the information we get in It Follows, but it's plenty. Because this thing walks at a steady pace, the film plays with our sense of what and who is safe. We constantly scan the screen for the thing (and, trust me, the first time someone in real life walks steadily in your direction after you see this movie, you will be unnerved). Just like Paranormal Activity used camera work to create a tense and paranoid atmosphere, so does It Follows, using tricks, such as rotating the camera 365 degrees multiple times to allow us a glimpse of what might or might not be this thing, slowly getting closer and closer.
By taking some cliched horror tropes (people who have sex in horror movies die) and turning them on their head, director David Robert Mitchell's crafts a fresh and distinctly unique tale of teens in peril.
4) Brooklyn
Unlike many of the films on this list, Brooklyn is nearly 100% sweetness and light, but in a genuine and comforting way. Based on the novel by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn is about a young, Irish girl, Eilis (played by the luminous Saoirse Ronan) who travels to America to get a job and an education in the early 1950's. She falls in love with a young, Italian man, Tony (Emory Cohen) who woos her with a gentle, blue-collar, masculine sweetness. But when Eilis receives bad news from home, she has to travel back to Ireland, and the pressure to stay there is overwhelming.
While Brooklyn features a love triangle (Eilis is wooed by a wealthy, handsome Irish man when she returns home), it's less about which boy she will choose and more about which version of "home" she will choose: the comfort and familiarity of the Emerald Isle, or the excitement and freedom of the Big Apple. Eilis finds herself at a fork in the road of her life: which future will she choose?
There are a lot of great movies on this list, and obviously I didn't rank Brooklyn as my pick for "the best"; but it really stuck with me in a way that many of the other films didn't. It's so rare to find a gentle film that's not also saccharin. As much as I love violent, depraved films (see The Hateful Eight), I also love movies that tap into the kind, calm, loving side of humanity. Brooklyn is old-fashioned, but not in a prudish way. It's a period piece that taps into the timeless struggles about love, growing up, and finding independence that people faced both back then and today.
3) Carol
Directed by Todd Haynes, Carol is nothing less than a masterpiece. Haynes has built his career on making films that are queer-friendly and also gorgeous. Check out Velvet Goldmine or Far From Heaven for proof.
But Carol might be his most deliberate, controlled, and emotionally intricate film yet. Gone is the flashiness of Velvet Goldmine and the melodrama of Far From Heaven, and what is left is a cinematically beautiful love story of two women in the early 1950's.
I care a lot about gay rights, although I'm not gay myself. Carol is a film that speaks to me because it makes every effort to humanize gay women during a time when being gay was seen as a mental illness and a crime. I wrote in my review of the movie of the tendency for anti-gay rights people to find ways, large and small, to ignore the humanity of gay people and to see love between gay people as somehow fundamentally different than love between straight people. It simply is not different, and Carol reveals this through the many small gestures and intimate moments shared by the two leads.
2) Mad Max: Fury Road
More than any movie this year, Mad Max upended my expectations. In fact, it sent my expectations tits over ass if you will. At this point, fucking everyone from your grandma to your 10 year old nephew knows about Mad Max: Fury Road and how its mix of kinetic energy, apocalyptic-steampunk costuming, and feminist subtext (or maybe just text, period) exploded our ideas of what an "action movie" could be. Mad Max is proof that action movies don't have to be tedious macho dick-swinging contests! Praise the risen Lord!
Although the title is "Mad Max", the film should really be titled "Furious Furiosa and Mad Max" since the two share main character status (with Furiosa probably edging out Max by a smidgen). Max, played with a low growl by Tom Hardy, spends the first third of the film tied to the front of a car as a "blood bag" for Nux (Nicolas Holt), a war boy of the Citadel. The war boys are chasing Furiosa (Charlize Theron) though the desert, as she has gone rogue and smuggled five of Immortan Joe's (the despot of the Citadel) prized wives out of the Citadel.
The entire movie is one long car chase. But it is the most amazing car chase you will ever see in your life. Like A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max: Fury Road is filmed in English, but has a unique dialect and turns of phrase. Things aren't "good", they're "shiny". There's a Shakespearean element to this film and its unique world-building.
And, also, just like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Mad Max: Fury Road made misogynists cry because there was a strong female lead character in a film within a very masculine genre. And y'all know how I love my films served with a side of schadenfreude from my enemies. The tears of the "Men's Rights Activists" are shiny! And Chrome!
1) The Duke of Burgundy
And here's the other sneaky film, that was released in January 2015 and thus made it onto this list by a hair. But The Duke of Burgundy is...how do I put it? Transcendent. Beautiful. Different. It is everything I've wanted in a movie: beauty, sex, visuals, music. It's a work of fucking art. And for all the films I saw this year and loved (and there were many of them), The Duke of Burgundy is a film I will not forget.
Directed by Peter Strickland, The Duke of Burgundy takes place somewhere at sometime in a world that doesn't really exist. It looks vaguely European and vaguely 1960's-ish, but it's world that doesn't have men or children in it, only women mid 20's and older. I think Stickland's goal in setting this film in such a world was to purposefully strip away the idea of gender so that the audience could focus on the relationship between two women, Evelyn and Cynthia, with no stereotypes or frames of reference to get in the way.
Evelyn and Cynthia have a BDSM relationship, in which Evelyn is the submissive and Cynthia the dominant. Cynthia wears an expression of harsh dismissiveness as she coldly commands Evelyn to scrub her floors and wash her underwear, only to inevitably find a small error and punish Evelyn in humiliating ways. But, as we get deeper into the plot, we realize that Evelyn is designing the scripts for Cynthia to follow and it is Cynthia who feels out of place in her role as tough mistress.
Not unlike Carol, or, for that matter, Room, The Duke of Burgundy is a film about a relationship between two people, and the sacrifices one makes for love. Interestingly, The Duke of Burgundy is not salacious at all, despite being about a sadomasochistic relationship. There's no nudity and very little sex. It's not all that different from Secretary, another BDSM love story, in that rituals play a huge role in the characters' lives. But it delves more deeply and, in my opinion, realistically into what it could mean to meet your partner in the middle.
Not to mention to mind-explodingly beautiful soundtrack, visuals, and costumes.
The Duke of Burgundy feels so personal to me. Like falling in love, it's not about finding hundreds of lovers, it's about finding one that fits. In this way, I'm glad that not many people will seek out and watch this movie, because on some level I feel like it belongs to me.
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Worst movie I saw this year:
It's a tie! Fifty Shades of Grey and Trumbo were both tedious and boring. Fifty Shades had the added bonus of being offensive and rape-y, but it was also sexier than Trumbo. Both films also win an award for shittiest performance: Jamie Dornan in a dead-eyed, wooden performance as Christian Grey in Fifty Shades and Louis C.K. in a "what the fuck is Louis C.K. doing in this movie" performance as Arlen Hird in Trumbo.
I think I gave Fifty Shades an even "C" and Trumbo a "C+" in my original reviews, though I'd probably downgrade Trumbo to a "C". My grading scale is a bit skewed in that anything under a "B" essentially means I didn't care for it, since my reviews skew positive. I did see some "D" movies this year on Netflix, but I'll stick with the stuff I actually paid to see in the theater as the worst.
Other notable films and my brief opinions on them:
Magic Mike XXL: Not as good as the first one, but still weirdly feminist; Joe Manganiello's dance number involving a bondage swing = best scene of the year.
The Martian: Not as good as everyone thought it was; great soundtrack tho.
Trainwreck: Movie I watched most often while drunk this year.
The Danish Girl: So-so movie; Eddie Redmayne is fucking hot even though he looks, as a friend pointed out, like Kermit the Frog.
Love and Mercy: John Cusack was weird in this movie; great soundtrack; Beach Boys forever!
That's all, folks! Join me in 2016 for more movies!
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